Civ 3--Reviews, assessments & spoilers REQUESTED

Cafe Society
21

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Smeghead ***

[quote]
*Originally posted by Rhum Runner *
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.

Also, don’t build hospitals until all (or almost all) your cites are connected with one railroad. This will keep polluntion down until you are able to deal with it.

Sublight: corruption isn’t much of a problem on your home continent. Just be careful where you put that Forbidden Palace, it’s best to have your capitol near one coast and the Forbidden Palace near the opposite coast. Don’t be afraid to move your main Palace if you need to balance the corruption better, I’ve had to do this at least once.

Eternal: the higher resources seem to be the scarcest. The one time I achieved a space race victory, Germany had the only nearby deposit of Uranium. I formed an alliance with the Russians to distract the Germans, then captured the city I needed.

22

Civ III is almost perfect. For me the only downside is the combat. It’s Civ 1 combat again, which is just number crunching. I found it very aggravating to have my Tanks getting whipped by musket men. Civ 2’s solution was a little heavy handed but at least it was more realistic. Alpha Centauri though is still my personal favorite strategy/world building games.

Civ 3 is very good except for the combat, which is one of the things I enjoy about these games. Yes it’s quite fun and fulfilling to sneak and manipulate your way to power (or buy it like in AC), but there are times when only a crushing invasion will do, and in Civ 3 that time is never.

23

Oh why can’t they just make an updated version of Alpha Centauri? It was a game that was accessable and fun!

My major gripe with Civ3 is that’s it’s too easy to screw up. Sometimes you find that the only sources of steel and oil are in the hands of your mortal enemy you’ve been battling for the past 200 years and can’t kill. The combat could have been made a lot better by introducing more hit points so it’ll iron out stupid results of calvery vs tank battles.

Boarders and culture are nice additions though. And it’s still better than the Activision version of Civ2.

24

Civ 3 is a major step down compared to Civ II and SMAC.

The diplomacy stinks in every possible way. I’ve had empires on the other side of the world that I’ve just met initiate embargoes against me for no apparent reason, even on low difficulty levels. The new options for trading techs etc. look promising, but the AI makes virtually every deal ridiculously one-sided. Plus, the portraits are horrible (most of the leaders look stoned all of the time); SMAC’s drawn still pictures are much better looking.

The corruption level is game-breaking. Even in the latest version, even if go all-out to fight corruption, you simply can’t get your production or research beyond a certain rate. The game has no “major” and “minor” nations; the big nations are corrupted down to the industrial/research capacity of the small ones. You can’t get ahead technologically not only due to the corruption level, but also the minimum research time.

Borders are all well can good, but tying them to culture is illogical. You can build more libraries to grab territory from your neighbors. Meh? It’s not properly thought through. They should have either come up with a logical system or made them static like in SMAC.

Not only is the combat sytem unbalanced, but they don’t even tell you the mechanics behind it. The combat sytem in Civ II and SMAC is not only simple and balanced, it’s totally up-front; you can easily estimate or even precisely calculate your odds of winning any given battle (and SMAC actually shows you the exact odds). Why did they change the combat system so drastically? It’s apparently change for the sake of change, and not an improvement in any way.

Strategic resources sound cool, but they’re just a hassle. In Civ III you need a resource to build iron-weapon units but not bronze-weapon units. In real life, however, early iron weapons were inferior to bronze weapons; it’s just that it was much easier to get ahold of iron than it was to get ahold of both copper and tin (sources of copper and tin were often hundreds if not thousands of miles apart from one another, while iron was easier to find than either resource).

Everything they changed, they made worse. After playing Civ III a few times through, I played Civ II and enjoyed it much more.

25

No offence, but that trade imbalance is a direct result of you not being very good at the game. A cunning player can finance his entire empire off the proceeds of advanced technology sales. I’m talking 100% research and still bringing in a yearly income of 400+ gold. However, if you fall behind, they’ll put the exact same squeeze on you that you put on them when you’re ahead. Trading resources is actually very well balanced: you only get even trades if both sides have equal resources. If you have more resources than your trading partner, he’ll squeeze you. Conversely, if the other guy has more resources, you’ll get some sweet deals.

Even before the patch, I never found the corruption to be game breaking. And I like the idea that smaller nations can still be competitive. How many continent-spanning nations are there in real life? Just one: Australia. And it’s hardly the dominate power in the world. Meanwhile, itty-bitty England is bestriding the world all colossus-like. I’ve won games of Civ 3 where I never even got enough cities to build the Forbidden Palace. Besides, historically, huge empires aren’t financially feasible. That’s why, until the industrial era, they seldom lasted more than a generation or so. This change makes the game more realistic and better balanced.

Makes sense to me. Culture is the way of life in your empire. The more attractive your way of life is to your neighbors, the more likely they are to emigrate to your country, further increasing your reach and power.

I like that the mechanics are hidden. If you can precisely calculate the outcome of a battle, that says to me that combat is broken: no one can ever perfectly predict the outcome of a battle in real life. Hiding the mechanics in the game makes the game more realistic, and less focused on number-crunshing.

I’ll take your word on the relative rarity of iron to copper and tin. From a game balance perspective, this makes good sense.

26

I’m on this thread like Oprah on a poundcake! :smiley:

RandMcnally, yes you can lose a city, but I’ve also had rivals try to invade what was obviously my territory, and their cities swore loyalty to me! It works both ways.

I’ve found (thru Colonization, Civ II, Civ III) that war never helps your society. It’s best to be friendly and even pandering. When you’re at war, you lose two or three units per turn. So does your enemy. So you make three more, and he makes three more…TOO expensive!

Like Slartibartfastt said, it is cool that mobile units retreat, rather than commit Hari-Kari.

Personally I miss the movies of Civ II. The babe Foreign Advisor, especially Elvis! “You do well, Siah! And the people…live happly…in yo kingdom!”

Corruption is just something to be dealt with, build a Courthouse, or a strategically placed Forbidden Palace!

ALL that RickJay said!

Yeah! And you can use that for espionage too. You can find out what your rivals have by starting diplomacy, and if you don’t really have anything they would trade for, you can just trade territory maps. If they don’t have anything YOU want, you just make some ridiculous demand to make them look foolish.

All in all, I thought Colonization was the greatest game ever invented. I never played Civ I. I then thought CivII was the best ever, and now CivIII is the best ever.

27

I don’t have anything useful to add other than that I love Civ 3. I played 2 (not 1), and was never able to get into it. But with Civ 3 and the Play the World EP, it just clicked for me. Started playing it obsessively. And I’m not a fan of strategy games in general – I guess that could be good or bad depending on your viewpoint. (Either Civ 3 is so great that it converted a non-strategy fan, or I don’t know enough about strategy games to know what’s wrong with Civ 3.)

28

Civ III fanboy: Me love dis game! It best game! No 0ther game iz dis goot!

Civ III nonfan: Meh. It was OK. I didn’t like this feature, as it was very unrealistic and silly, this one was annoying and not fun at all, and these ideas are boneheaded to the core.

Civ III fanboy: You stoopid! You not like game cuz you SUCK AT IT! HAHAHAHAHAHA! You not have 133t skillz!

Frankly, I find your declarations that we didn’t like this game because we aren’t good at it condescending and insulting. Fact is, there are a lot of bad design flaws, it was rushed out the door banking on the name, they SHOULD have fixed a lot of the problems from Civ II and built a lot more on Alpha Centauri’s best characteristics, and avoided the simplified aspects. As it stands, the game is a time waster, but not nearly as good as Civ II. The addition of resources and culture is nice, but not nearly enough to overcome the new flaws.

You don’t have to agree with my opinion, but since this issue is based around opinion, I expect you to honor it. I’d rather have these graphics, resources, and culture parts with the Civ II game engine and tech tree and military.

29

Civ 3 is a brilliant work but not without flaws.

What I like:

Borders. This adds tremendously to the realism, no more camping out just outside the city radius.

Resources. Sometimes you have all the knowledge but not the resources to build something. Maybe not fair, but neither is life.

What I don’t like:

Railroads. All the need do is make a railroad worth 1/4 of a move as opposed to zero. Now, when you invade after RR are available, every single enemy unit will bear down on you at once.

Helicopters. So absolutely useless, I’ve never once seen the AI build one.

AI Strategy. The AI doesn’t try to win, they play to make the human lose. Particularly grating is that they trade technologies among themselves endlessly, but will not do so with you unless it is a one-sided deal.

Bombard. Great concept, but the failure rate is too high. I’ve had turns where 5+ straight battleship bombarments failed. Not too realistic.

30

Civ 3 has “all your base are belong to us” as one of the random quotes if you lose.

31

I haven’t really loved a Civilization game since the original. My father and I were addicted to it and we had to start up a computer schedule so we would both have a shot. Otherwise, one of us wouldn’t get to play that day. With Civ III I can’t maintain my interest in a given game. I’ll play for a few hours, then get bored and go do something else. Then I’ll start up a new game because I forgot what I was doing in the old game, then get bored and go do something else. That never happened to me with any of the other Civs.

I also like Civ II better than Civ III. I don’t like the AI in Civ III at all. As someone pointed out, it seems like the AI is just there to try and make you lose, not to actually win.

I’m not a big fan of the strategic resource idea. Actually, I like the idea, I don’t like how it has been implemented. Some of the resources are so ridiculously rare that it’s almost funny. I’ve played games where my entire continent, and the next one over, didn’t have any iron. Or one game where there was only 5 sources of saltpeter. That’s ridiculous. I could see if it was uranium or something, but iron and saltpeter to be that rare?

I’m not a big fan of the culture idea. I like the borders idea, but again, I think it was implemented badly.

Not a fan of the combat system.

The lag time is horrendous! Absolutely ridiculous. Another thing that I don’t like, and probably why I can’t stay focused past the beginning of the game.

All in all, it’s not a bad game, I just don’t think it is as much fun as the other two.

32

There is one odd bug in the unpatched version (I recently resinstalled from scratch). Your Cavalry units can move two squares into enemy territory and then attack, while your Tank units only move two squares into enemy territory and stop. I found it was best to keep cranking out Cavarly units until I got Mobile Armor, so long as your Cavarly was attacking non-armored units.

Usually I just send in the Cavs first to try to take an underdefended city, then when my territory expands after the capture, send the (surprisingly) slower tanks on through.

33

One other problems, touched upon:

Iron and Saltpeter are not uncommonly very rare. On tyhe other hand, Uranium is found everywhere on the earth. I have seen games with whole mounds of uranium.

This bloody annoys me. Oil is sometimes hard to find, but historically there has been plenty for the last 150 years. Coal is found all over the US, but not very often in other nations. These resources are messed up as well.

Rarity in game is all messed up.

Additionally, omeone has done some spreadsheets and determined that your basica horsmen is by far the best deal, and pound for pund a better deal than any other unit for attacking.

34

Loved Civ 3. The diplomacy, resources, and culture-defined boundaries make it a very different (and better) game.

My only real gripe is that the positioning of that first settler could be done more fairly. It’s bad to be stuck out on a tiny island, all by yourself at the beginning of the game - by the time you’re finally able to get across all that water (or somebody finds you) the rest of the world is covered and you can’t liberate it with a few bowmen. You also know you’re probably gonna fall behind forever if you start out in the middle of a lot of worthless jungle. Or if you’re right up against the sea on one side and there’s another settler who starts out really close to you (well, in that case, grind out the warriors and take him out, but it also sets you way back to start out the game with a war that you might very well lose).
You can probably tell quite often who will win by taking a look at everybody’s starting position. Realistic, I suppose (c.f. Guns, Germs, and Steel). But it does lead me to throw out a lot of games in the early period because I know I haven’t got a chance.

35

For the record, Civ3 is the only one I’ve played.

I’ve been playing it off and on for a little while…Damn you Yahoo Games on Demand.

Railroads…it’s just way too easy to kick ass with railroads. And if you lose just one of your rail connected towns, they can move all over your country with ease.

Corruption…at one point in my last game, I was losing 1100 gold on corruption and spending like 200 on Science (at 100%, of course).

The Computer…if you let the computer take care of building for you, you have to keep an eye out. I was well in to Infantry (playing as the Greeks) and the computer was still obsessively building Hoplites and Warriors to fill out my army. The computer will also insist on building Settlers long after any free land is occupied. The computer will repeatedly send your workers wandering through enemy territory, pissing them off. And for no reason! It kept sending my workers traipsing in to Egypt for no reason, I didn’t have any cities or towns on the other side of Egypt.

Opponents…Computer opponents always seem to work against me. I can never manage to get military alliances, though you bet there’s a model NATO between all the computer players.

36

Yeah, the computer makes bizarre production choices if you aren’t paying attention. (“Longbowman? WTF, it’s 2020AD!”) This is even if you “contact governor” and adjust build priorities. I tend to zoom to the city and queue up half a dozen or more things at a time to deal with it.

I agree. Lately, I’ve had good success by establishing as many cities as I possibly can as quickly as I can. My early priority is not to build improvements; it’s to spread myself out across the landscape as much as possible. This accomplishes two things: First, I secure monopolies on resources (or at least don’t get shut out by another civ’s monopoly), and second, I start building the Forbidden City in a distant location as soon as I can. This makes a huge difference in productivity later.

I agree the game has some flaws. The railroads are ridiculously powerful, but on the other hand the helicopters are totally useless (as someone above mentioned). The dialogue for the other leaders uses too much modern vernacular, too; it’s distracting when Julius Caesar says something like the equivalent of “blow me,” or whatever. Better writing would have helped a lot.

One other thing I don’t much like is how the civs are all focused on defeating me rather than each advancing itself, which means they sometimes behave collectively in ways that make no sense. It’s frustrating, for example, when other leaders jump down my throat for encroaching on their borders, and yet I see Roman units cheerfully traipsing through French territory without causing international incidents.

Oh, and the documentation is pretty iffy. They don’t tell you, for example, that once you’re finished building the final spaceship component, the game is over. You can’t choose to delay launching it for whatever reason; when you’re done, you’re done. (The victory movie here is pretty cool, though.) Similarly, once you finish the United Nations, you almost immediately go to an election for the Secretary General: If you win, you win the game, but if you lose, the game is over, period. You can’t suffer a diplomatic failure and then continue to pursue a military victory, or whatever. The documentation doesn’t warn you about this. And there are a lot of other little things in gameplay that I couldn’t find at all in the book or in the Civilopedia that I ended up having to work out through trial and error.

But I’m nitpicking, really. I loves me this game. I have to be careful about how much time I spend on it lest I annoy my wife with my absence. :smiley:

P.S. Did you know you can find the .WAV files for the various unit sounds in the program directory? If you’ve got a sound editor or even just a microphone, it’s pretty easy to make the Marines yell “Boo-yah, motherfucker!” when they win. :smiley:

37

You can go in and adjust the build priorities of the governor, I sometimes put outlying cities on the governor. You usually tell them to never make units, just buildings, since you can create defensive units via draft, and it would take forever to build a usefull offensive unit.

Yes, the documentation sucks. I’ve found that for just about every game in existance the manual sucks, usually because the manual was written a month before the the first release candidate build. The in-game help should be accurate, though, since it can be corrected via patch, and you always need the latest patch for every game. The days when you could just open the box and start playing have been gone for years.

38

I’m a Civ2 veteran, and have been playing Civ3 for a fair amount of time. I have yet to really decide if I like the game or not.

To those of you that like the game, could you talk about the difficulty levels that you most like and why? I find the game playably easy at “regent” but very challenging at “monarch”. The higher levels are impossible.

My biggest problem is usually staying competitive in the research/advance department. I put my science at 90% and build lots of roads, but if I can’t build the Great Library, or later, Theory of Evolution, I will invaribly fall way behind. Give me some hints, please.

In Civ2, you could use spies or agressive city capturing to ‘get even’ in technology. That just doesn’t seem to work. Espionage is so expensive that it doesn’t seem to make sense to use it as a strategy.

39

Well it doesn’t make any sense at all, so if it makes sense to you, that must mean you’re insane or perhaps just totally out of touch with the real world. If it was supposed to model emigration, they could model emigration through city size reduction, not just giving the goddam city away.

40

I never use the draft. What I do, is I set a couple of my core cities producing defensive units and then ship these to my farthest cities. One point that like also are the Civ specific units. I just love the legionnaries and the Babylonian archers.