Why Gandhi Is Such An Asshole In Civilization [Update]

From the very first game in the Civilization series through to today, India’s supposedly-peaceful leader Gandhi has been famous for one thing: dropping nukes. And there’s a very good reason for it.

UPDATE: Series co-creator Sid Meier has now actually debunked this! You can read his explanation here. Original story follows:

It’s not your mind playing tricks on you, or a case of myth becoming accepted fact: he really does drop nukes more than other civs. Like any other leader in the series, Gandhi has pre-determined statistics that govern his behaviour, making him more likely to do certain things and behave in certain ways.

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His preference for nukes doesn’t just make the latter portions of a game messy, though, it’s a behaviour that stands in such stark contrast with his pacifist approach in the real world that it’s become Civilization’s defining joke.

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So why does he do it?

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In the original Civilization, it was because of a bug. Each leader in the game had an “aggression” rating, and Gandhi - to best reflect his real-world persona - was given the lowest score possible, a 1, so low that he’d rarely if ever go out of his way to declare war on someone.

Only, there was a problem. When a player adopted democracy in Civilization, their aggression would be automatically reduced by 2. Code being code, if Gandhi went democratic his aggression wouldn’t go to -1, it looped back around to the ludicrously high figure of 255, making him as aggressive as a civilization could possibly be.

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In later games this bug was obviously not an issue, but as a tribute/easter egg of sorts, parts of his white-hot rage have been kept around. In Civilization V, for example, while Gandhi’s regular diplomatic approach is more peaceful than other leaders, he’s also the most likely to go dropping a-bombs when pushed, with a nuke “rating” of 12 putting him well ahead of the competition (the next three most likely to go nuclear have a rating of 8, with most leaders around the 4-6 region).

So the next time you see the AI lay waste to an entire continent, and wonder if it’s just co-incidence or a quirk of the game that it’s Gandhi, know that it’s not. He’s meant to be an asshole, because he’s programmed that way.