I did this for a few turns, and presto, I was on par with the other civilization in term of technology. I removed all my units from the city, let the other civilization retake it, reconquered it the next turn and got another new tech. What I did later was a bit of a cheat, but it worked. Countless units died, but in the end I was able to take over the city and gain one tech. So I sent loads of units on this civilization to take one city. One of the civilization was way ahead of me in term of tech.įortunatly I had a large empire, able to produce a lot of units, and this civilization was rater small. I was then able to produce tanks, and ended up modernizing myself by capturing more cities and stealing technology. I launched a surprise attack with all the forces I could muster and captured a few of their cities, getting technologies such as the automobile by doing so. I had musketeers and cannons, while they had tanks. I was playing in the Americas one time, and I was hopelessly behind the Chinese. The technology capturing feature was great too. I ended up winning because the new Egyptian civilization and the Zulu civilization were too busy fighting each other to send enough against my forces. I was unaware of the civil war feature when I did so (wasn't documented in the manual), and it really improved my opinion of the game. The entire Zulu empire immediately started a civil war, with half of it becoming the Egyptians. So I parked an aircraft carrier and a bunch of transports off of southern Africa and captured their capital city with a surprise attack by overwhelming forces. It looked like they were going to overwhelm me. There was one game where I was in the Americas and the Zulus (always crazily warlike and expansionist) had conquered the rest of the world.
I really enjoyed starting a civil war by capturing another civilization's capital city. I love reading the thick manual, strategy guide, and advances chart. I got Civilization really early on before it was obvious that it was going to be popular.