{"id":1210,"date":"2009-03-05T13:41:23","date_gmt":"2009-03-05T18:41:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=1210"},"modified":"2009-03-13T12:10:08","modified_gmt":"2009-03-13T17:10:08","slug":"seven-cities-of-gold-1984","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2009\/03\/05\/seven-cities-of-gold-1984\/","title":{"rendered":"Seven Cities of Gold (1984)"},"content":{"rendered":"

For an explanation of what this series is about, go here.<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s been 25 years since Dan Bunten and EA released Seven Cities of Gold<\/em> for the Atari 800, Commodore 64 and Apple II and it’s still the most influential strategy game ever made. I guess one of the Blizzard real time strategy games would be the only competition. It was one of the first open ended historical strategy games, giving you a setting but little else. It was about exploration more than it was about conquest, opening entirely new avenues for setting player goals.<\/p>\n

But the influence of Seven Cities of Gold<\/em> is best seen in how it integrated its map with the game’s goals. Bunten did one big thing that no one had done before, or at least not on this scale. Bunten used entirely random maps.<\/p>\n

We take this for granted today – so much so that a lot of game designers just don’t bother with it. They can, after all, design a map that is more accurate or more balanced or more challenging. Why let the computer muck it all up? One of the big problems with a random map is fairness. As anyone who has spent hours with Civilization III<\/em> knows, being stuck on a swampy continent with a single luxury resource and no saltpeter or iron can lead to an early exit.<\/p>\n

The unfairness in Seven Cities of Gold was entirely the point.<\/p>\n

The maps themselves were fairly simple. You would have an unexplored continent and the occasional native village. (You could play an historical map, but where’s the fun in that?) Mapping the world was one of the goals of the game, so you would land with men, food and trade goods all for the purpose of cartography. The maps tried to mirror actual geographic and cultural formations, with mountain ranges and varying levels of civilization. You could build forts and missions to make your life easier, but things were never easy.<\/p>\n

After all, Ponce de Leon and Hernando de Soto died while exploring. There is a constant tension in the game between moving forward and moving back. If you run out of food chasing down a rumored El Dorado, you will die and lose all progress you made since you last saved your game in Europe. But if you turn around, you waste time at sea in your limited life span. You consume food as you sail, too, so you can’t just carry it all with you while you wander the jungle.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/center><\/p>\n

The more you mapped (and the more gold you raked in) the better your evaluation would be. Like Microprose’s later Colonization<\/em>, it was usually better to be nice to the natives, especially if you were far from help. But gold has as great an attraction for the gamer as it did for the conquistador.<\/p>\n

If it looks like I am spending more time on the gameplay than the maps, bear in mind that the maps in Seven Cities of Gold<\/em> are the gameplay. There are no set goals beyond those you set for yourself, even if you do get rated by the king. Before Will Wright’s SimCity<\/em>, Bunten created an open world with “Succeed” as your only mission description.<\/p>\n

You can judge how much and quickly the world changed by the 1993 re-release Commemorative Edition. It had goals and missions, colonies to found, etc. It was as much a do-over as anything else. The core game mechanics were basically in place, but there were new options and new urgency to follow instructions. By most measures, it is a better “game”, but I’m not convinced it’s a better world.<\/p>\n

In a Revisionist History column in one of the final Computer Games Magazines, Bruce Geryk argued that Seven Cities of Gold<\/em> was one of the only games to really take the nature of exploration – not just the Age of Exploration – seriously. It understood geography, it understood danger, and it refused to make anything really easy for you. Though it certainly gave rise to the empire building genre, Seven Cities of Gold<\/em> is absolutely not about building an empire, or at least not an empire as we understand it from games today. You set up no true cities, expand no roads and your trade verges on exploitation – beads for gold – when it is not entirely exploitative – your money or your life.<\/p>\n

\"Sailing\"<\/center><\/p>\n

It’s cliche to say that an old game would never get made today, but I’ll say it anyway. Like many games of the day, you could only save your efforts at a safe place, and the safe place was nowhere near the danger. It is too unstructured a design for many modern strategy gamers, and I personally like a little bit of direction in my games. I’m also relatively cautious – I sometimes wait until January before I declare war in Europa Universalis<\/em> because I know that the autosave will bail me out if I underestimated Poland.<\/p>\n

But there is still a lot to be learned from Seven Cities<\/em> in how it dealt with maps and discovery. In Sid Meier’s Colonization, the Inca have rich cities. In Seven Cities, there are circles of civilization – you move through tiny villages to outskirt towns and then you hit the urban centers, where piles of gold await your greedy paws, made that much sweeter because of how far you’ve walked to get there.<\/p>\n

It’s probably not coincidental that I have two other Age of Exploration themed games in this series (Imperialism II<\/em> and the EU series). Pushing back the black and mapping new zones is the biggest and best X in the 4X genre. And it started with Bunten’s second masterpiece.<\/p>\n

The influence of Bunten’s Seven Cities<\/em> is everywhere in the Civilization<\/em> series, but my next topic will be Sid Meier’s other great map game, Railroad Tycoon<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

(Images taken from The Video Game Museum<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For an explanation of what this series is about, go here. It’s been 25 years since Dan Bunten and EA released Seven Cities of Gold for the Atari 800, Commodore 64 and Apple II and it’s still the most influential strategy game ever made. I guess one of the Blizzard real time strategy games would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9,125,10],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-jw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1210"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1210"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1248,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1210\/revisions\/1248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}