Cultures

Presenting you Cultures, a game from 2000 that I love very much even if it's so complex. I don't know why it's so hard to find videos on Youtube, but I did find some gameplays in German You play as vikings and the campaign is about their journey to discover new land, make trade and war, of course. You can even marry people, decide where everyone goes, what job they do, how to make babies, how to make stuff that will improve the life of your little friends etc. Basically it's a game that lets and teaches you how to live from the land, use available resources that don't regenerate and most importantly pay attention to a ton of details... that's why the game is slow, but really fun.

The game can be purchased from GOG . I've only played Cultures 2 for a short while and never liked it. Too many unnecessary changes, it kind of looks the same, but it isn't.



 

Nice! Do you still have the original copy from back then?

Games used to come in their little boxes, with manuals, maps and little extra stuff.
Steam is very convenient and I use it all the time, but that part of buying games is long gone now.

I've lost the game when I had to format my HDD, when I had only one HDD - the 15.3 Gb Seagate Barracuda. I've played almost all my favorite games on that one. It was the ages when CDs/DVDs made sense. I remember I had few games on optical drives, but I didn't even keep them since I really don't play games. Even now I have 2 DVDs with H&D2 stuff and that's it.

I did recover Cultures and Anno 1602, which I didn't play very much, same as Anno 1503. They take a ton of time. I preferred to play WW2 games and FIFA before 2006. Starcraft I'll probably never play again, just enjoy the Korean pro scene.

Both games work on Linux, easily and yes, there are also manuals. It's nice to find these games on GOG.com

 

 

 

I played Caesar III a lot in those days, was one of my favourite games.
You had to deal with resources, build up trade routes, enemies, and most of all your task was please the emperor;).
It was sometimes tricky to bring the food to all the residential areas, the market lady had to pass by all the houses, maybe I made too many crossroads.
It even works under Win7 in these days. Those battles where Carthago attacked with elephants were just epic.  

Later they made Pharaoh where it was easier to deliver because you could place road blocks.






 

Speaking about food, in Cultures every entity needs food and can get hungry. They can eat food from the fisherman's tent, or the huntsman or even fruit from trees. Yes, you can also build a bakery to make bread. If you assign them to homes they sleep and eat better. You need to assign a woman to a home so she can also bring food there. What's more interesting is that they also need company, specially the women. I always tend to marry them with the most important vikings in my mind aka the baker, potter, carpenter, miller etc. The game has all you need. You can't go on a too large of a scope like you do in Caesar or Anno games because your focus must also be on individuals.

I remember playing Anno 1503 where on top of the usual marketplace building that covers a lot of area, you have also have to build individual stands for food and salt, spices etc. These stands cover a smaller space, only a handful of houses, so you have to calculate everything when you build space for your settlers. I didn't do that and it's not fun tearing down houses to make space for market stuff.

As in case of Cultures, Anno also had only 2 games from the original developers. No wonder I don't like the newer games. They look great, but no longer my style.