The 11-year conflict has spawned a community that's united 12,000 players.
by Casey Johnston
by Casey Johnston
How a redditor conquered a futuristic America with a Celtic army.
Fifteen months ago, the Internet, and more specifically, reddit, gave us The Eternal War. Reddit user Lycerius had been playing the same game of Civ II for ten years, and he’d been fighting the same nuclear war for 1700 in-game years. But even after the puzzle was solved, Lycerius kept fighting.
When Lycerius originally posted about the game, it spawned its own subreddit, r/TheEternalWar, with an audience of thousands of redditors trying to solve Lycerius’ frustrating and seemingly impassable military conflict with their own approach. One redditor put together a solution only days after the original post, advising the construction of an army of Howitzers that would first take out the Vikings and then the Americans (once their alliance with the player dissolved).
Lycerius acknowledged the solution, but also decided to continue playing the game on his own time. As he played on, the subreddit spawned new pursuits: r/theeternalwarstories was an early venture where players wrote fiction in the universe of the war’s constant nuclear holocaust. Later, readers banded together to try to make an Eternal War RPG set in the same universe.
Once a year had passed, Lycerius checked in with his game’s progress. Having seen how other redditors were able to effect peace, he wanted to explore the opportunities of yet more war. Thus, after 11 years of on-and-off play (and 1900 years in the game), Lycerius’s Celts are still embroiled in war.
“Rather than destroy the Vikings, my largest operation of the 41st century was a massive naval and land offensive to capture the new Viking capital of Piza,” he wrote, hoping to instigate a Viking civil war. He keeps the war going to see if there's a case to be made for an Orwellian communist government; a regime that can survive in a perpetual state of war (True, Orwell's 1984 featured war with a made-up foe, but in the ironically reality-bound Civ II, there’s no option to construct imaginary enemies).
Instead of descending into civil war, though, the Vikings ended up rebelling against him. In fact, Lycerius’ attempt at putting up with more war for its own sake eventually resulted in his own culture staging a number of uprisings and rebellions.
Lycerius promises to check back into the subreddit, which just barely misses the cut for the top thousand subreddits (above r/HalfLife but below r/BeardPorn), by the end of the year. In the meantime, parties still interested in taking up the helm can fight on.
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