Civilization doesn’t actually demand that I totally understand what the hell I’m doing. It uses the a priori knowledge I take into the game to push me in the right direction. The wheel allows me to build roads. I may not really grasp that my city is surrounded by tiles producing different values, and that a road will generate trade or that it will reduce movement costs for units moving across them, but intuitively I understand that roads help move goods and people across terrain. And when the tooltip shows that the technology leads to “Pottery” with “Agriculture” or “Fishing”, that also makes sense. The wheel helps enable pottery, and food-production creates the need for devices to help with food preservation and transport.

So I look at “Fishing” and see that it will allow me to produce work boats to, well, go fish and bring in more food for my growing city. It also lets me research Sailing. Seems to make sense.

The game is full of those types of relationships. Without really grasping the mechanics, I can intuit my way through a fair amount of Civ. We got culture and religions? Temples produce culture and make people happy, but you need a religion to build them? Sounds about right to me. While I use these rudimentary understandings to play the game, I am continuing to learn the finer points as cause and effect become more apparent.

It’s not just that Civ uses familiar names to describe its elements. Those elements do a decent job of aping the real-world concepts to which they are referring, and so they give the novice an entry into the game.

And the game is wonderfully self-explanatory. You start in the Stone Age, you build a city, and then it asks you if you want to research The Wheel or Hunting. It doesn’t require a lot of insight to figure out what those technologies might let you do …

These aren’t self explanatory at all. In real life hunting and the wheel are ideas that we are all familiar with but within the context of civilization 4 they represent abstract in-game mechanics.
Or take religion, everyone knows what religion does but they can’t somehow convert that into any but the vaguest understanding of what the civ4 system is, never mind how to use it to their advantage without scouring the civipedia.

The difference between more and less hardcore games is, I think, the learning curve, and civilization does not have an easier learning curve for calling it’s systems and mechanics by familiar names. It is possible to pick up civ4 and start playing, but knowing what gold and an economy are wont help you guess when you should adopt a cottage heavy strategy, and when you should focus on pushing missionaries and building shrines…

But I think this approach already leads to trouble on two fronts. First, how easily can we slot RTSs onto a strategy continuum with PvZ and EU3? Strategy contains a lot of genres. Second, I’m wary of tacitly accepting the whole “this is for everyone / this for hardcore players” dichotomy. I think it’s a lot more fluid that than that. I think people occupy different spaces on that continuum at the same time. It’s not like they move from left to right and stop when things become “too hardcore.” That’s not what people are responding to in a design.