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A game of Civilization II that has run for ten years has offered a depressing prediction for humanity’s future.
Reddit user Lycerius has reached the year 3991 AD and describes the world that has resulted as a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation” ruled by the three remaining super nations who are competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands”.
Big cities are a thing of the distant past,” Lycerius writes. Roughly 90 per cent of the worlds population (at it’s peak 2000 years ago) has died either from nuclear annihilation or famine caused by the global warming that has left absolutely zero arable land to farm.
Engineers are always busy continuously building roads so that new armies can reach the front lines. Roads that are destroyed the very next turn when the enemy goes. So there isn’t any time to clear swamps or clean up the nuclear fallout.”
The world’s ice caps have apparently melted over 20 times leaving all land that isn’t mountainous swampy and useless for farming.
A 1,700 year long way has engulfed the planet, with cease fires and UN peace treaties unable to prevent surprise ambushes as each faction desperately fights for a narrow advantage.
Lycerius has been forced to govern under the conditions of communism as whenever the establishment of a democracy is attempted the Senate would always over-rule me when I wanted to declare war before the Vikings did”.
I was forced to do away with democracy roughly a thousand years ago because it was endangering my empire,” Lycerius adds. But of course the people hate me now and every few years since then, there are massive guerrilla (late game barbarians) uprisings in the heart of my empire that I have to deal with which saps resources from the war effort.
My goal for the next few years is to try and end the war and thus use the engineers to clear swamps and fallout so that farming may resume. I want to rebuild the world. But I’m not sure how.”
