This is, plain and simple, not true. I’m playing a game now (just ended for the night having obtained Liberalism first (yah!). I’ve had several wins at below 50%. I’d say your chance of winning at 65% is, oh, 65%. 
And no, they don’t seem to know what I’m building, since if they did, they would be able to “beat” me to all of them. Which they don’t.
If you are playing at higher difficulties, the AI gets to build at substantial discount. That’s been true of Civ from the beginning. And yes, the AI will whip units, but then, so do I.
Yeah, that’s why I don’t do it all that often. But it is fun to experiment with different combinations of leader/civ. Sometimes you get some funny match ups, likle Gandhi of the Vikings, Stalin of America, and Bismark of France.
Since no one else has mentioned them yet, Europa Universalis II & III are awesome grand strategy games. They absolutely require patching from the vanilla versions and at least the first two expansion packs are strongly recommended for the latter. Further they have a very steep learning curve.
But there are tons of superb mods available for them, support is generally very good and they are an excellent gateway drug to the other Paradox Interactive strategy games
I used it for a little while on my first attempt at a cultural victory. I just bent over backwards to make sure no one wanted to go to war with me. Gave into all their demands, gave them any spare resources I had, etc. It worked well enough, though I lost to a diplomatic victory a few dozen turns before winning my cultural victory.
What annoyed me about CivIII was that there was no option to play on Earth, with Civs starting in the correct places. Of course Lincoln and the US didn’t started in many centuries prior to 1AD, but it was nice to play the world as the world once in a while.
There was a map somewhere I found that did just that, but several PCs later I just can’t find it.
Heck, I remember going mad-dog nuclear in a game of Civ 1, destroying everything in sight. Then the whole world went swampy with global warming and my cities starved down to minimum. I had exactly one town that could support a settler unit (it was coastal and had a fish zone) and dadgumit, I had that settler spend 800 game-years cleaning up all the pollution so I could finally clean out the swaps and replenish the Earth.
Good times. Good, obsessive-compulsive times.
I must be the only one who founds his first city and saves it, selects to research Hinduism and gets beaten to it by Isabella. I restart with my one city and go for Buddhism and get beaten to it by Isabella.
They can beat you only to wonders they can out produce you too, that they know they can do it by one turn and do is whats cheap.
Again, I disagree. I regularly beat other civs to Hinduism, though beating a civ to Buddhism is harder (requires a good starting point). Your example is not definitive, since unless you have the “preserve random seed” setting on, any two games from turn 1 could go completely differently, and even if you do have it on, eventually the seed diverges and different choices get made. So you’d have to do it over and over.
Your last sentence makes no sense. Could you elaborate?
Civ3 is MISERABLE. It’s the only game in the series that is just not worth playing. It punishes you for even TRYING to play it. There’s no reason to downgrade from civ4 to play that game. Seriously, just write off the money spent on that game and save yourself the aggravation of finding out that the game will punish you mercilessly just for playing it.
The “random seed” option is set to keep the current random seed by default. You are incorrectly assuming this means that reloads will make the computer act randomly by default. The “random seed” is just the algorithm the computer uses to simulate randomness. If you’re preserving it, it means the simulated randomness is exactly the same when you reload as when you left off.
The option is set to preserve the random seed by default in order to discourage save/reload cheating for combat. With that option set to the default, saving and reloading will never offer a different result for the same combat played at the same time. If you want to save/reload cheat with that option set to default, you have to save/reload and play through a DIFFERENT battle to reset the random number generator, and then you might get a different result.
The computer absolutely does know what you’re researching and building, and absolutely does cheat with that knowledge to deprive you of wonders and founding religions.
Blinkie, turn based games that I enjoy include Heroes of Might and Magic V (HOMMV) and Kings Bounty: The Legend.
Civ 4 is the best though. Until Civ 5 is eventually made…
This again… :rolleyes:
Why not post a save (with random seed preserved) from a starting point where this happens? Then I can load it up and try twice, once researching meditation and the second time polytheism to see this for myself. I’ve been playing since it was released and have never seen this.
If you can’t upload files here then go to Apolyton and let me know so I can go and see there.
Read what I said again carefully. You’ll notice that nothing I said was different from what you are saying.
A lot of players uncheck the preserve random seed box very early on in their time with the game, precisely so they can do the reload for different results thing. If so, and you forget you’ve done that, it’s easy to end up with differing results from the same save and not realize exactly why that’s happening. Depending upon when the player is saving after city founding, since the player is #1 in the play queue, the AIs can reselect their starting research if the random seed is not preserved.
But even if it is preserved, the results of something down the road may be different (Sitnam didn’t say what speed he’s playing, so the time to complete the first tech can vary from a few turns to the 35 or so on Marathon). As each AI’s scouting unit (scout or warrior depending) wanders around, they do not always follow the same path, even starting from the same random seed. Eventually, as they run into different encounters, changing the number of battles with wolves, lions, bears (:eek:) and such, the results diverge. And depending upon what a hut might pop (free tech, anyone?), an AI might well change the intitial research strategy on turn 2 or 3 and beat you in a way they didn’t from the first time you tried the save.
Which is why I said you have to re-try a save SEVERAL times to know what is going on. If every single time you play from a given save, regardless of whether you choose to research Meditation or Polytheism, Isabella beats you to the religion, and she isn’t establishing both before you get there (remember, she has a head start, since she knows Mysticism), then you’d have room to believe she’s doing it on purpose to beat you there (her decisions are based upon knowing yours and frustrating your attempt). And since I play a LOT of Civ, and have beaten her to one or the other on a regular basis, I can say that it does not appear to be the case that she is “cheating” in that particular way.
This concept that the AI cheats in the tech race goes way, way back. I remember thinking that it was annoyingly often that the University would manage to research Secrets of the Human Brain JUST as I was about to get there. But after a while, having managed to win the race enough times, I realized that it was just happenstance, and the fact that they had a head start on me, and prioritized it.
And, as I’ve pointed out already, if the AI knew what you were doing when it can’t, and intentionally attempted to frustrate you, you’d never manage to complete any wonders unless they were a tech you knew it didn’t, and that wouldn’t ever happen since they’d always beat you to the tech in the first place, n’est-ce pas?
Really? I’ve enjoyed it well enough. Now, it’s possible that I’d enjoy IV even more, and I would buy it and try it out, except that for some reason they made the Mac version with system requirements better suited for a high-end FPS than for a turn-based game, so the net result of me trying to play it would be that I’d be $40 poorer with no game to play.
I second that Civ3’s not worth it - but it’s not as bad as Civ: Revolutions.
Civ 3’s AI makes the game far too linear. There’s no facility to slow it down and nationbuild. It’s just not “fun”.
I prefer Civ III Complete to Civ IV…and yes, I do have Warlords and Beyond the Sword.
I’ve sworn to never again buy the first available Civ game. That is, I’ll wait until Civ V Complete comes out, rather than spending money on Civ V, Civ V Expansion 1, Civ V Expansion 2, 3, etc.
That’s because somewhere along the way it was decided that every single game created must have a 3D engine, even games where it is totally unnecessary - such as Civ 4. :rolleyes:
Haven’t read the rest of the thread, but you must go here. The Civ Fanatics forums brought me from a crappy player to a consistent winner at Emperor level within a couple of months. It’s the best resource out there, bar none.
Joe
Unless you elaborate, that’s just ridiculous. Civ3 and Civ IV are completely different game mechanics. Many, many people, including myself, prefer 3. Many, many people prefer 4.
What don’t you like about Civ 3?
Joe
The fact that it’s so predictable and unforgiving. The race for territory at the start is well over-the-top, and whoever wins that race is on a pretty straight line to win the game, unless they have major resourcing issues or make an huge miscalculation and start a multi-front war.
It’s a challenge, sure, but it’s not really the Civ that players of the first two enjoyed.