I just got Windows XP last year, but even when I had Win 95 it was slow. On an older computer, from maybe '96, the game worked fine.
But should any of that make a difference? The game is played in DOS. I don’t go through the DOS prompt, though, I just double click the icon.
You’re still running the original Civ? Dude, I loved that game as well, but you know what, Civ II is better and it should run fine on your XP machine.
and as for Civ III…
Maybe it’s running in real time?
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?
Yes, I do have Civ II, and it works just fine. I was just wondering why the original civ wouldn’t work. I mean, why should it run any slower just because I have newer windows software, especially since it doesn’t run on Windows.
I wouldn’t say that it’s unplayable, but the effect of “culture” on the game play is pronounced. It’s not possible to simply capture and hold every enemy city in a blitz attack anymore, since they may easily revolt and return to their former owner. you have to leave a lot of units in the city to prevent it, and even then it doesn’t always work.
The biggest different is the concept of strategic resources and luxuries. Things like iron, horses and oil are needed to build certain units, and may only be available in a handful of spots. Same goes for luxery items like spices, silks and incense. I’ve actually gone to war in the game in order to secure iron and oil, because if you don’t you simply can’t win.
The corruption levels in the game are also extreamly high, even for Republic and Democatic civs, and the concept of “war weariness” makes it tough to play with those forms of governement because your cities fall into disorder fairly fast.
Some of the victory conditions can short circuit the game badly. I turn off a diplomatic victory because it tends to end the game only 2/3’s through. The space race victory can be too easily acheived even before the tech tree is done.
There are some new things I do like, like minor wonders that any civ can build after getting certain conditions met (like Wall Street, Pentegon, Heroic Epic). Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any wonders that are all that different than in the last game.
There are a lot of differences, really. It took me a while to warm up to Civ 3, and at first I felt it was unplayable. It wasn’t until I realized that you simply can’t use the same tactics as Civ one or two in order to win that I started holding my own in the game. But I’ve never managed to conqure the entiire world.
I never much liked Civ3; I found it very difficult to play and the interface was confusing. But then, perhaps like you, I just hadn’t learned the new way of playing it.
There are mods available that make corruption more in-line with the Civ II model. See here for this and other mods.
At first this bothered me as well. But I figured that I would have been even more upset if Civ III was esentially the same game as Civ’s I & II. Civ III got it right, at least in comparison to MoO III.
As to why Civ I would run slow on a modern XP system,… I’m not sure. Perhaps someone could come along and better explain this but right click on the Civ I desktop icon and select Properties / Compatibility and chose the run in Win95 mode. If that doesn’t help perhaps someone will explain the memory allocation tabs. Personally Civ I runs fine on my XP machine.
As to Civ III, I kinda think of it as methadone for civ addicts. The very early releasees had a bug which magnified the corruption effect to the point of unplayability but that has been long “fixed.” To me the saving grace is the Civ III editor, you can lower the over all rates of corruption and pollution if you wish, you can modify the attributes of the different buildings (and units) so you can say, add the corruption fighting ability of a courthouse to a temple so that while you ease unhappiness in a newly captured city you will also lower corruption. I saved a number of rule changes as a scenario file and can play the game much more to my liking.
Civ III is disappointing in many ways but relative ease in altering a great deal of gameplay factors (not to mention scenario construction) make the $40 I paid for the game well worth it to me. If you’re a die hard Civ II purist and are not sure if you like what you has heard about it, wait till the older versions of the game hit the bargain bin and give it a try for 15-20 bucks.
Absolutely - I went from deity level CivII player to bumbling idiot on Civ3. But I think it is a ultimately a slight improvement - just turn off space race (makes it virtually impossible to win by conquest on Emperor or Deity otherwise) and get used to seriously depopulating cities before you take them over.
I first learned the game using Civ III, and I couldn’t imagine playing it any other way. I like Civ III just fine.
My Windows 98 computer runs Civ III at a crawl; when I first played it on a Windows XP machine with bigger memory, I was pleasantly surprised to see it running much more quickly.