I’ve heard that play balance in Civ 3 is so poor, it is nearly unplayable.
True? False?
What features does it have that makes it better than Civ 2?
How about combat?
New Wonders?
Comments?
I think it’s an all right game. But the thing I hate about it is the fact that culture has a lot to do with the gameplay. Most city improvements and all wonders contribute to the city’s culture. When the culture points reach a certain level, the countries limits will grow. I rather enjoy that, but what I don’t enjoy is, during war, a city you have just captured can revert back to it’s original country.
How the hell do you “spoil” a game like Civ 3? It’d be like spoiling chess.
Anyway, I’d say the rumors you heard are false and slanderous. The Civilization series has consistently improved with each incarnation, to the point that going back to older versions is unthinkable. The addition of culture-based national borders and tradable strategic and luxury resources are brilliant additions to gameplay, and put a new emphasis on choosing the right terrain for your empire.
Some people have complained about unbalanced combat outcomes (spearmen defeating tanks, and so forth) but I don’t have a problem with it. However, I prefer to crush my enemies through diplomatic and economic means: to me, a perfect game of Civ3 means winning the game without ever going to war. I’ll let someone more interested in bloody conquest handle the combat system.
I really have only three complaints about the game. In descending order:
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On the biggest map with the maximum number of opponents, the game gets serious lag by the time you get to the industrial era. I’m talking as long as five minutes for the computer to finish its turn. I often load up a console game once I get this far, just so I have something to do in between turns.
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You can play on a map of Earth, but starting locations are always randomized. If you play as the French, you’re as likely to start off in South America as you are in Europe. In some ways, this bugs me more than the lag, because it’d be so easy to fix, and I can’t be the only person who wants this feature.
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I miss the movies they used to play whenever you finished a Wonder.
Those reservations aside, I recommend Civ3 wholeheartedly. I think I’ve spent more time playing this version than I did the previous two version combined, and just talking about it make me want to play it again.
Which I’m going to do right now.
See ya later.
(Oh, yeah. About what Rand McNally said: In the original release of the game, there was a bug that made it impossible to capture and hold enemy cities if they had too high a culture rating. This was fixed in the first patch. Although captured cities might still revolt, a sufficiently large garrison will prevent an uprising.)
I think the biggest complaint, for me, is that combat has been hugely deemphasized. Would you like to go invade a neighboring civ and wipe them out? Forget it. It’s not going to happen. It’s just not practical in the new game.
Corruption is another huge annoyance. It’s much more of a problem than in previous incarnations, and puts severe limits on how far your civ can expand.
The resource system is one of the biggest changes, and I’m still ambivalent about it. You often end up getting stuck having to trade for resources you need, and the AI often charges ridiculous prices for them, if you’re lucky enough that they’ll trade at all. OTOH, if you get lucky, you can get a stranglehold on some of the good stuff, which gives you a lot of control over the game.
I don’t know where you heard that play balance was poor, I have found it to be very good.
It is better than Civ II for several reasons. Culture and culture boundaries, helps define borders between countries and give you a non violent way to win the game. Resources and luxuries, they make controlling specific areas of land much more important than in Civ II. Great Leaders, they let you build armies and are the only way to rush a great wonder. It just plain looks better with more detailed and animated units and terrain.
Combat is similar to Civ II but is much more random. Lots of people complain about modern units getting beat my ancient units but I find that over the long run results equal out. One nice new feature is that if a fast unit is losing a battle to a slow unit the fast unit has a chance to retreat.
The Wonders are not that much different from Civ II but have slightly different effects in some cases. What I really like are the small wonders that each civilization can build. The big difference from Civ II is that in Civ III the only way to hurry any wonder is by using a Great Leader.
The biggest thing you need to do if you get the game is to download the latest patch it fixes many bugs and adds several new features.
In the newest patch for the Play The World add-on you can turn off culture conversions if you wish. And on all versions you could reduce the effects by using the games editor that comes with it.
I cant disagree here, but it allows me to do my two favorite things at one time, play Civ III and hangout on the SDMB at the same time. I use those long times between turns to surf the net and other stuff.
This has also been fixed with the Play The World add-on, you can now play historical earth with correct starting positions. Also there are numerous add-on maps that give you realistic starting positions.
I cant say a really miss them, once you saw them a couple of times it was no big deal, but this has been a complaint from the start.
Out of the box there were some problems but they have since released several patches and fixed most of them and added new features. IMHO if you liked Civ II you will like Civ III if you give yourself a chance to get used to the new aspects of gameplay like culture and resources.
I think it is very practical to wipe out your neighbors, that is the best way to avoid cities flipping back to them from culture.
Corruption is a problem but not a major one. You are just going to have a limited number of core productive cities and the rest of them will be useful mainly for controlling territory and the resources and luxuries that go with it.
Really? I’ve Play the World since it was released, and I still haven’t found this feature. How do you enable it?
I haven’t played Civ III, but I have a friend who was playing it the other day and complained about the pollution. I watched him play a few turns, and it seemed like he spent tons of time just cleaning stuff up. When I asked him about it he said he had all the tech, solar plants etc… and there is nothing you can do about it. Seems like a big minus, it was his biggest complaint about the game, though he likes everything else.
I’m stunned anyone has a problem with this game. It’s friggin’ awesome.
How is it better?
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STRATEGIC RESOURCES. Absolutely without question the #1 enhancement in the game. Want to build Cavalry? You have to build a road to a square with Horses in it. Battleships need oil and iron, some improvements need coal or what have you. And there aren;t many around, so you find that wars break out over critical resources. A real great addition to the game; I feel it adds a lot fo fun. They also added luxury resources; if you build a road to them, your people are happier.
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BORDERS. The addition of Borders adds more value to cultural improvements and solves a lot of Civ II’s issues with the integrity of national boundaries. No more camping 2 squares away at the diagonal from an enemy city. Countries have form now.
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ROADS. Roads are far more important now; you HAVE to link your cities with roads and get the roads out to those resources. It adds a lot of strategy.
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A LOT OF OTHER LITTLE THINGS. Minor Wonders. Settlers and Workers separate. Lots of cool crap. Diplomacy is hugely improved.
The game isn’t perfect; the bombardment function is useless, for instance. But IMHO it’s a huge upgrade on Civ II.
Miller, Play the World comes with scenarios for playing the real world. Start a scenario to find it.
There’s a command you can use to automatically assign your workers to clean up pollution. Just assign a half dozen or so, and you don’t have to worry about it any more. Especially if you’re railroaded all over.
Well, I guess he is an idiot then. 
I’ll pass along the tip! The game looked great, and the AI seemed to know what it was doing…
You have to choose load scenerio from the main menu, PTW included many different earth maps.
I guess it’s a question of varying mileage. I was seriously let down by the game. Maybe it’s gotten better, but I played though the first couple of patches and then just gave up. Additional cities past a certain point contributed nothing to a civ as it was all getting lost to corruption due to empire size. Having religious (IIRC) seemed to be mandatory in order to flip government types when going to war once an empire exceeded a certain size or you’d spend forever in anarchy. The delay between turns and watching workers auto clean mountains of pollution also got to annoy me past a certain point. Most of the features that Civ III has over Civ II were in Alpha Centauri. Overall, I had higher expectations from Civ III than it delivered to me. For the record I loved Civ II, it was one of the first games that I got so engrossed in playing that I lost track of time until I noticed the sun was coming up…
A personal favorite of mine is the fact that you can trade practically anything with the other civs. You can trade gold, advances, alliances, workers, etc.
In addition, they limited the advance trading. Now you can’t trade nuclear fission to a civ that hasn’t yet mastered writing.
Private to RickJay: Please send me an email
Zev Steinhardt
IMHO you have described how Civ III is different than Civ II. You have to change your playing tatics since it is a different game. Just because you were not able to adapt does not mean that those parts of the game are flawed, it just means you need new strategies to overcome the changes.
I’m a little disappointed that I can’t use my workers to alter the terrain like the engineers could in Civ II, but I guess that was a little unrealistic.
I heard the rampant corruption was toned down by one of the patch releases. Is it still a big problem?
The spontaneous switching (either captured cities reverting to their old nation or enemy cities defecting to join you) is a nice feature, IMO, and adds to the reality of the game (it’s how I do most of my conquest, actually), although I think accepting a defecting city should be closer to an act of war than it is (wouldn’t it be considered so in real life?)
PRO: Resources
CON: Resources typically so abundant that they’re a non-issue
PRO: A diplomatic model that is better than Civ 2
CON: For some reason, diplomatic model far inferior to Alpha Centauri
PRO: The military system is in fact better than Civ 2
CON: Civ 2 battling was so bad it’s not saying much
PRO: 3 times as many Civs can play on a map.
CON: Poorly executed foreign minister only gives extended diplomatic information on 7 civs!
PRO: Great scenario-modding opportunity
CON: Awful scenario-making tools
All in all the game strikes me as being very rushed and constructed with the idea that people will like it because it’s Civilization3 . And unlike more competent or less hateful companies like Paradox, we’re expected to shell out even more money for features that were obviously deliberately left out of the game just so they could include them in an expansion.
And what’s the deal with the way the diplomats speak? That’s negative-immersion, man.
So yes it’s a big disappointment.
If you, I think, shift-right click on a face, you can select another civ to put in that spot, so you can, in fact, diplomatize with everyone. Still, I agree that was a bonehead move.
Much of the interface is on the surface helpful but practically very poor. That you have to click on a square to see what the terrain is, and that you have to close that little box to do it again for another square… that’s so awful that it’s confounding how it made it to beta, let alone the final version. I also hate that you can’t quite make out the faces in the domestic advisor screen, meaning you have to go through each city to see ifyour citizens potential is moptimized.
The Espionage system is pretty lame too, but that’s supposed to be streamlined in Conquests, which I think I’ll buy.
RickJay, I disagree that bombardment is worthless, in fact I find that bombardment is essential especially in the WWI phase of the game where you have riflemen and infantrymen with huge defense strength but no armor units yet.
Culture flipping may be annoying, but why is it a bad feature? You have to occupy a city with units or it will just go back to it’s home country. Why is that a problem?
I agree that the high corruption makes distant cities pretty much worthless except as resource extraction tools or draft farms (food isn’t affected, so you maximize food production and population in distant cities, and draft a new defensive unit every time you grow). It sucks that a giant city only gets one shield every turn, even with maximized corruption fighting. That certainly makes no sense.
The one thing that I’m kind of glad didn’t make it is a unit design workshop ala SMAC. It would really make no sense to have seperate attack values for weapons and defense values for armor. The historical defensive units are defensive becuase they wear heavy armor, they are defensive because their weapons are strong on defense…spears, pikes, rifles. The defensive value is a characteristic of the weapon. It would make no sense to create defensive units armed with daggers but wearing plate mail armor. It only worked in SMAC because of the science fiction setting. A somewhat accurate design workshop would have to give an attack and defense rating for each weapon, and leave heavy armor as one of the “special ability” slot options. And then since each unit is defined by weapon anyway, the design workshop starts to be pretty useless.
I really like the elegant way they handled morale compared to SMAC.
But all said there are some UI issues, and it is really maddening that my 1.6 Ghtz machine takes 5 minutes to complete the AI turn during later years. That’s just unacceptable. And I agree that the game isn’t that much of an advance over SMAC. If Civ3 had come out 3 years ago instead of SMAC we’d be raving over it. But Brian Reynolds departure really hurt Firaxis, and many of the ideas in Civ3 aren’t that well thought out. But so much of the complaining was people who were shocked that you had to wait for the expansion pack for multiplayer. Really, why would you play Civ multiplayer? It makes no sense to me.
For more discussion, see apolyton.com’s Civ3 forums. Civ3 really is a good game, and is much better than Civ2. It’s just not much much much better, which is what everyone was hoping for.