Understanding India for geeks

I had a sudden epiphany last night and realised the best way to explain India to 30-something computer-gaming geeks.

You know that massive empire you acquired by military conquest in Civilization 3? And then converted to democracy, thinking it’d become an economic powerhouse? But you couldn’t achieve anything useful because every city was mired in 90% corruption? And the only reason you weren’t facing all-out revolt was because you had temples everywhere, keeping the populace distracted enough to stay quiet?

That’s what India’s like in real life.

4 thoughts on “Understanding India for geeks

  1. Civ III? You crazy young’uns with your wacky new ideas. Actually I think it is probably helpful even to people whose knowledge stops at Civ I.

    • I specifically mentioned Civ III because it was that version in which corruption was set too high and was totally crippling to large civs. If you’ve only played Civ I, imagine you’re trying to run a huge, high-tech country with a despotism government, with practically no improvements to any of the cities.

      • Just FYI, it’s similar in Civ 5. The difference is that in 5 there’s a civilisation wide measure of “happiness” that can quickly spiral out of control in large empires. You can’t even fix it on a per city basis; if your civ is unhappy then you get inflicted with the a general malaise. It’s kind of annoying considering that in the vanilla game military conquest is pretty much the only viable victory. I think the expansions fix it, but it haven’t played them.

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