I dunno about that; I’m typically in about 5th or 6th place (out of 8) on area controlled until sometime around the Industrial Revolution, and if I survive until then, I always win. I do, admittedly, usually have higher-quality territory: I preferentially settle bonus areas and avoid junk land like tundra and jungle until the good land is used up, and I’ll send a settler to grab tradeable resources anywhere in the world.
I never liked Civ III for a number of reasons. The corruption and waste system was severely broken in the first version and I personally don’t think they ever really fixed it. I got sick of cleaning up pollution all the time in the late game. The resources weren’t thought out all that well in my opinion. If I remember correctly, it was never possible to build railroads without coal, even if you controlled iron and oil.
The computer loves communism in civ3, and communism guarantees half your cities end up with 100% corruption if you have a decent sized empire.
You can’t rush build a forbidden palace. If you try to conquer anyone at any time ever, you must spend multiple centuries waiting for the goddamn palace to finish just so your cities have 92% corruption instead of 100%.
ETA: oh my god, the critical resources! AHHHH!!! totally forgot about that! In civ4, even if you never find a single resource, you can still protect yourself. In civ3 if you didn’t happen to land on the critical resources (I think saltpeter was one of them) you might as well quit if you’re playing on an appropriate difficulty level.
But for the corruption aspect, which is indeed a nuisance, I like Civ 3 better. Civ 4 is a tad overstuffed.
In Civ III it’s called “city spam”, and I hated it, since it soon devolves into Micromanagement Hell (among other undesireable things). Civ IV properly put a penalty on expansion which is too quick, and I thus can have quite a happy and productive empire if it’s only 8 cities or so in size.
Doesn’t the saltpeter requirement eventually phase out as you head up the tech tree so that you can eventually build gunpowder units without it? I still think I’m right about not being able to build railroads without coal, even when logically you should be able to power them with oil.
And the nature of the critical resources (especially late-game) required either a large civilization spanning a variety of land types, building colonies (pain in the butt in my opinion), or actually getting the computer to trade with you. Rubber tended to be a big pain in my experience. At least with Civ IV BTS you can generate oil and aluminum with corporations.
You don’t need saltpeter for anything from riflemen on up, and musketmen are frankly pretty poor value for the cost anyway, but it would in fact hurt pretty bad not to have cavalry, which don’t go completely obsolete until you get to Modern Armor.
The really weird thing about the resource system is that you only need resources to build things, never to use them. So you can’t build your rail network without coal, but if you finish your network and then the coal mine runs out, or somebody takes it away from you, your trains still all run on time. Or you can crank out a ton of tanks, ships, and planes while your oil lasts, and then use them indefinitely. It’s probably necessary to do it that way, to keep the game from getting too complex, but it’s still amusing.
In III, saltpeter is required to build Musketmen/Musketeers, Cavalry/Sipahi (UU for Ottomans), and Coastal Fortresses. If you don’t have saltpeter, you can’t build those items. However, it’s possible to upgrade Pikemen straight to Riflemen once you’ve researched Nationalism. I like my Cavalry/Sipahi, as they have better movement than other units until you get Tanks, but I can do without them if I like all the other factors in a particular game. Coastal Fortresses are also nice but not necessary.
It’s impossible to build railroads without coal, and I consider railroads to be essential to my industrial/modern era civs. I’ll start a war for coal, and I’m generally not a warmonger. I’ll start wars for other modern resources, too, because I think that the game can’t realistically be won without rubber or oil, for instance.
My husband occasionally pokes his head in my room, and asks me which country I’m eliminating THIS time. He’s learned what bombers sound like.
Pffft, I start wars for laughs.
I start wars because a civ demand a tribute from me. The mighty English Empire bows to no man!
A tip for anyone still playing III: It’s better for your people’s morale if the other guys declare war on you. It not only delays war weariness, it can actually give you war happiness, which makes it a lot easier to keep your cities content or even partying.
And I’ve never found it necessary to fight a war over oil, for two reasons: First, as the industrial age approaches, I start snatching up all the desert and tundra I can, since I know that’s where oil where eventually be found. Second, oil becomes available at least two techs before it’s usable, and in the meantime all the other civs regard it as literally valueless (they’ll be happy to trade you oil for a single gold piece, for instance). Even if I don’t have any of my own, I can usually buy some for long enough to build up a decent force of tanks and ships that way.
I think that’s the part of Civ4 that I most appreciate, the fact that cities cost maintenance instead of buildings. It emphasizes smart city placement and management, instead of the city spam that was the key to success in Civ3.
I burned out on Civ in Civ III for this reason I think. My continents inevitably became a honeycomb matrix of arbitrary cities because that was what was most effective. If Civ 4 recaptures the magic of Civ 1 & 2, I may have to try it.
I think it does. I wouldn’t bother playing vanilla or Warriors - Beyond the Sword is the place to start if you are new to it. It’s designed to be easy to mod too, and the mod community has done some outstanding stuff .
Actually, I found cavalry useful even in the time of Modern Armor. They were a little more mobile, being able to hop two zones into enemy territory and still attack. Armor would get slowed down by hills and such.
I just recently discovered Road to War after playing unmodded BTS exclusively. That mod fixes literally every combat problem I had with civ4 out of the box, although it introduced a new one with the invincible stacked artillery nonsense.
Bear in mind I still haven’t played Road to War but doesn’t artillery counter stacks of doom anymore ? At least, that was the original Civ 4 devs intention when they introduced the siege weapon mechanic (i.e. they damage every unit in a tile whenever they attack it, but only one defends).
Cavalry and modern armor have the exact same mobility. Both have 3 movement, and both use 2 moves for forest or hills, and 3 moves for mountains or jungles. In the expansions, armies get a bonus movement point, so a cavalry army can move further than an individual modern armor, but still no more than an MA army.
In Road to War though the artillery can bombard units in the field, so you can just blast the hell out of your enemies without risking losing any in an actual attack. I think this is what **Mosier ** is talking about.
Not sure I get what you mean, does arty have the Civ2/SMAC ability to “bombard” a tile, thus dealing mass damage without being retaliated against at all ? Or did I misunderstand ?
If so, and if the “bombard” ability doesn’t have an upper limit to the damage it can dish out (IIRC 40% in SMAC, that is to say you couldn’t bombard a unit to lower than 60% health), then yeah, that’s be grossly overpowered. Nothing one couldn’t tweak though.