Rating: WARTY!
I was a big fan of playing Sid Meier's Civilization game when I first discovered it, but I only liked the 2D version. The "isomorphic" version was just confusing to me. It made it really hard to keep track of where your pieces actually were. I know of no battle strategy display that uses such a bizarre system. On top of that, the bizarre rules were heavily biased towards making it all but impossible to win, especially if you had the gall to trespass above level two or three. I reached a point where I lost patience with trying to get the rules to work or the game to work within them, so I refused to play by those ridiculous rules, and I developed methods for bypassing them, such as creating a large number of cities quickly, defending them well, making them close enough that cities co co-defend each other, and upgrading military units as soon as better ones became available.
In terms of economics, instead of building up large cities with all manner of amenities, I would have each city build one thing (typically city walls to begin with, and later cathedrals, for which the sale price was higher). I would keep selling and rebuilding the thing over and over again, to fill my coffers, and eventually I would have so much that I could conquer cities just by bribery, and then sell off their buildings and use that cash to bribe the next city. I tried to be at peace with all other civilizations, but this is not a game that promotes peace and harmony at all (which is why this graphic novel was such a joke to me!).
Once another civilization betrayed the peace, I would became ruthless in destroying them. My leadership was always despot so I never had to worry about my 'advisers' or 'government'. I always kept one token 'enemy' village alive, though so I could continue playing out the game and not have it end prematurely, but after a while I started quitting the game as soon as it looked like I was unbeatable, because it became boring then. It also annoyed me that a civilization never really got anything for exploring or for however many years of peace you maintained. Like I said, it was all about hostility and this really didn't interest me that much. It was the exploring and building up a civilization which I really enjoyed.
The supposed goal of the game was to build a rocket to take your civilization to a new world, but I rarely made it to that stage of the game, and I didn't care because it was boring and time-wasting to me, since you never could actually go to another planet - not until a later version came out, and that version didn't interest me. This story, then, is based on that idea, and on those later games which were produced which took Civilization to the next level - where you started the game by colonizing another planet.
This graphic novel, with amazing art work by Rafael Kayana, takes it from there. People are living on the laughably unoriginal planet named Gaia, and the female ruler of these people is at odds with another faction of humans led by a guy. She wants to live in harmony with the planet, and her opponent essentially wants to strip-mine it. The situation is literally black and white since she's white (or pale Asian at least) and he's black. She's the 'gentle passive female' and he's the 'aggressive, belligerent male'. It's so pathetic as to be a joke. There is no gray area here.
Her position is as sad as it is weak because the planet isn't in harmony with the people. How can it be? Humans did not evolve there, and evidently do not belong since they cannot even breathe the atmosphere. They're required to wear a mask outdoors in the same way the humans were so required on Pandora in the Avatar movie. There's no harmony here, although I'd take issue with the contention we read at one point which states that nitrogen is harmful to humans ("If the nitrogen in the air doesn't kill you, the mind worms will"!). Seriously? Eighty percent of our atmosphere here on Earth is nitrogen. It doesn't kill humans - unless, of course there's no oxygen with it and we therefore suffocate, but that's not due to the nitrogen. Any other gas would suffocate us in just the same way that water does. And water is made from oxygen! This poor science is inexcusable.
Of course, once she bonds with the psychic worms, then she can commune with them and use them to defeat the militaristic and superior forces opposing them. There is, of course no explanation whatsoever for the existence of the mind worms: no word on how they evolved so far and yet failed to evolve further, much less on how they're even able to commune with a completely alien species, or even why they would. Despite the beautiful art work, I can't recommend this because the story was quite simply too stupid to live.
