Massive Civilization Game Predicts That Canada Will Rule The World

They always seem like such a nice, peace-loving country but apparently, underneath it all, Canada is a country of serious warriors.

An enormous 61-player version of Civilization V is currently running, with 61 factions waging war against each other and the Canadians, closely followed by the Australians, have surged into an early lead.

The game has been dubbed Battle Royale Mk II and has just hit 1970 BC - over 150 turns. Unsurprisingly, the world is now a mass battlezone. The first version, which consisted of a mere 42 players, broke down under the weight of its own magnificence, when it took 20 minutes just to load up all the elements of the game and eventually stopped running.

The image below shows the size of each civilization at the end of the most recent turn of Battle Royale Mk II.

It's a version full of mods; official factions from the base game have been put together with user-created ones, including Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Hannibal and King David. It's also, crucially, a pure domination game: you can't win via science or diplomacy: Einstein and Gandhi can do one, you're no use to us this time. 

All factions are controlled by the computer's AI, so we are mere spectators to the bloodshed. The AI seems to be a fan of religion: many are spreading at a rapid pace - particularly Judaism and Catholicism - and all of the available slots have already been filled.

The game is going to continue to run indefinitely - take a look at the current leaderboard below to see who might dethrone those warmongering Canadians in the future. You can also see a full rundown of the latest update here and follow it on reddit here - people have been choosing sides to support and everything.

Related: Man Runs Football Manager For 1000 Years and Insane Things Happened

This new game calls to mind the famous 10-year-long sim of Civilization II, which popped up on reddit in 2012 and saw a user announce that they'd run the game through to the year 3991 A.D in their spare time. The world by that point was a "hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation", with three remaining super nations (The Celts, The Vikings and The Americans)... each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars [had] rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands", with the war between them having run for an astonishing 1700 years.

Quickly picked up by fellow redditors, 'The Eternal War', soon spawned a legion of gamers discussing what tactics could possibly end this dystopian nightmare (which they eventually did), before spawning its own subreddit and even resulted in fan-fiction about the terrifying world that the user had inadvertently created on their computer. If you've never seen it - you'll spend the rest of your day reading all about it here.