I don't see Civilization as a political masterpiece.

It's certainly a great strategy game, but its underlying political message is a Machiavellian one. Unlike the real world where the governors and rulers are (at least on a superficial level) bounded by international duties, social & historical conditions, and the people under governance. In Civilization, the player is free to adopt any economic policies or political systems, as long as they give the maximum material benefits in the current situation. This can lead to some absurd strategies that don't make much sense. For example, abolishing republicanism in favor of absolute monarchy in the 21st century for a few turns before jumping back, without any regards of real-world consequences whatsoever, since the player is the eternal dictator of life. It's a simplistic system designed for game balance, not a realistic analogy of the real world.

Thus, while I think it's certainly one of the greatest strategy games, but I don't think the game is a political masterpiece (Nevertheless, I guess the political system in Civilization can be alternatively interpreted as a cautious tale similar to Universal Paperclip's warning - If you let an overlord to optimize the wrong goal function - to produce as many paperclips as possible, or to win the game at all costs, inevitably humanity will suffer).

This Civilization mentality can be best summarized by this HN comment under the submission "China’s Censors Ban Winnie the Pooh and the Letter ‘N’ After Xi’s Power Grab".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16493254

> If you played Civ5: no ideology is inherently wrong. As long as the "public opinion" is "content", people would be happy with it. Player would intentionally choose Order or Autocracy to gain some "Tenets". E.g. Order usually gets you better productivity and Autocracy usually gets you better military power.

> Right now people in China are mostly content with the current ideology.

> This design actually matches reality very well: while US apparently chose Freedom ideology, China chose Order ideology. China would finish impressive large project faster and more efficient, with the cost of dictatorship.

> (Civ5 got a lot of these right, including a technology called "the Great Firewall" to counter the cultural influence from other civilizations http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Great_Firewall_(Civ5) )

And another HN user provided a counterargument on how analogy breaks down in the real world,

> It doesn't match reality at all in fact. The exact opposite is true for nearly all cases (China being the sole exception).

> The major liberal economies are radically more productive than countries like China, much less the other 'order' type nations. The order economies, save partially for China (which is still extremely poor in the bottom 2/3), are on average impoverished, backwards, and with very low productivity. Even China is still shockingly backwards at a lot of common economic tasks, such as farming (they have ~1/40th the farming productivity of South Korea).

> The liberal economies have dozens of major success stories, from Germany to Canada to the US to Sweden. The 'order' group has one, and only insofar as China liberalized its economy and moved away from a rigid command & control economy.

> Autocratic doesn't get you a superior military. It typically gets you an economy that is bled and debased to feed the military, which ultimately is self-destroying. See: Russia, whose people are very poor ($8k GDP per capita; $4,000 median net worth). Meanwhile Putin diverts vast resources they can't afford at all, into military spending.

> Liberal economies produce superior militaries pound for pound, because they can afford to sustain them over time.