CivCrafter (Free) is quite the curious little clicker game, and it’s not quite the one that you expect. It’s a resource management game with raiding-strategy real-time multiplayer, all wrapped up in the veneer of a simplified clicker game. But it has countless things to track and upgrade on your way to becoming the greatest civilization known to humankind. This has to be the pinnacle of the clicker genre and its logical end, right? How do you further deconstruct gaming to its simplest form while also making something this deep?!
So, the first thing that you see when you play CivCrafter is the screen with the three different things to click: food, wood, and stone. Food feeds your population. Wood’s primary function is to construct buildings. Stone is the foundation of graves, and many military units. Some things you build will require that you have many types of materials, including the ore and skins that get found while mining for other materials. There’s a large number of resources to keep track of, and here’s where the game’s true nature comes into play:
It’s not really a clicker.
Oh, the game has plenty of clicking elements, that’s without any shadow of a doubt. But the secret of CivCrafter is that it’s a resource-management game, albeit one where you can generate more resources through the clicking action. For example, every person you summon to your civilization costs more food per second. So you have to make sure that you have plenty of farmers to ensure that you’re making more food than you’re consuming. You can’t build an empire if everyone’s dead from hunger. You will also need to build the things that allow you to have huge populations. Obtaining land is necessary to ensure you have room for all the homes for people. Your stocks will run low, so make sure you upgrade them as necessary; no sense having workers producing wood when you’re full up on it! There’s a huge amount of things that you have to track and manage, to the point that I barely played with the clicker aspect of the game at all, I was too busy managing everything!
It’s a game that has a real learning curve to it, or as much of a learning curve as a clicker can get. The best way to look at it is as a sort of simulation game, just not from an isometric perspective. All the resources aren’t new if you’ve played a Clash of Clans (Free) game. It’s simpler because it’s a clicker, but it’s apples to apples. If CivCrafter had an isometric town view, we could compare them one-to-one. The big difference is that you can just pound away on a +1 button for anything you need.
Things start to get clever with building and resource generation. You can batch-produce pretty much anything in increasing orders of magnitude. The problem is that anything above x1 production will produce a wait timer. So, it becomes a lot easier to wait a minute to produce a 100 of something than to tap 100 times. Or even 1000! You can skip wait timers by buying gold, which is rarely earned in-game, but is also only used for skipping wait timers. I’ve spent a few dollars on $0.99 packs that are worth more than the $1.99 base pack (~140 gold for $0.99 beats 200 gold for $1.99). What can I say, I’m impatient and like a good deal. There are many cases where I just waited out the timers. But situations will arise where you’ll want to skip them, such as if you get into a battle and need to throw some more troops at the enemy. Perhaps you’ll skip the wait timers by paying a few gold to suddenly get a hundred or a thousand unemployed souls that you’ll toss on the front line. Victories are quite lucrative, and necessary to get more land.
Yes, there’s a raiding system here. You can choose to raid one of two levels of civilizations, and you’ll attack other players with your armies. You aren’t stuck with the troops you enter with: there is the ability to add more soldiers mid-battle if you have the unemployed citizens to do so. Victories award trophies, skulls, a boatload of resources, and perhaps a rank increase. It’s possible to join clans of up to 20 people, which rank members on their total trophies, as well as skulls earned while in the clan. Clan membership, which does require you to unlock the feature, comes with a 1% bonus per clan member. Top clans in events can win huge amounts of gold, but good luck getting to the top 3 to win the lucrative prizes.
The coins system can be tempting, especially with all the act-now deals for $0.99 to buy gold at better rates. But it’s nice to know that they’re optional, that if you’re willing to tap your fingers off or to be patient, you can get everything you need. You’ll want to have a standing army in case you get raided, of course. But in battle, if you just make a bunch of unemployed folks to fortify your lines, you’ll be better off. The gold is there for when you’re impatient. Some of the wait timers to build certain things can be quite long, to the point that after unlocking the clans, I’d hit moments where I’d have to wait a day to unlock something I needed. The game kept me from making any sort of meaningful progress unless I used gold. I wonder if a larger publisher with monetization consultants got their hands on this game, how it would play out. It’d be a lot different, but maybe smoother of a progression.
I feel like CivCrafter might be the last clicker I or anyone else needs to play, at least until someone else revolutionizes the formula. Not that anyone should, these games’ purpose are to be dumb yet addictive. CivCrafter adapts the simulation formula in a new way, and manages to almost not be a clicker at all. There’s still that screen where you can click to get things, but it’s as minimal a factor as possible. This setup has the consequence of making the raiding strategy and simulation genres rather accessible. In other games, where I kind of fear joining clans, CivCrafter makes it trivial. Heck, there’s almost no interaction at all. By applying the clicker ethos of stupid simplicity to a complex game, CivCrafter is complex and deep while not giving up what makes clickers the dumb phenomenons that they are.
I think that this shouldn’t be the first clicker you play. Bitcoin Billionaire (Free) remains my favorite clicker, if only because it embraced the absurdity of the genre. I like the attempts to add complexity, but CivCrafter takes it to its logical extreme. It’s a stupid and clever idea, but perhaps this is where we should end the ride for the genre. This game is impressive in scope, but, what else can you do with the clicker genre after this?
Please don’t answer that question, game developers. Or, you know what? Do that. Blow my mind with more crazy clickers. But CivCrafter set a high bar for you.
