Locutus: Since this question focuses on the negatives of Civ3, I'd like to point out in advance that other games in the genre such as CtP2 aren't exactly perfect either. There's a reason we're still modding it after three years and why we're so happy to have the source code. I could write a book about the flaws of various Civ-games (which is of course easy for me to do as an outsider who never designed any games of his own -- though with CtP2 source code available that might change). Aside from that, there are a lot of things to like about Civ3 as well, as I've mentioned just now. But if you want to talk about the things that are wrong with Civ3, there's quite a few things to say. In this case, I'll focus on the factors I described earlier as important for a good/fun Civ-game. But there are basically two main problems that really ruin the game for me.

The first is the tedium. Once you're empire gets to certain size, the fun of playing becomes the chore of playing. Too many workers to manage (automation never quite works as you want it to), too many cities to control (managing build queues, specialists, city radius, etc), too many units to move (the stacking is very articificial, limited and 'hacked', not easy or intuitive to use at all). This is really the ultimate game-breaker in Civ3, what makes it impossible to enjoy playing the game. I don't play much Civ3, but from time to time I will start up a game and have fun in the first few thousand years, but once I've conquered my first sizeable opponent the game will start to lose its appeal. In other games that can happen as well sometimes, as usually you simply become too powerful for the other civs to be able to threaten you. In Civ3 this may or may not be true as well but it mainly goes wrong because it starts to take far too much time and effort to manage your empire. This has always been a problem in the Civ series, but you'd think that after twelve years Sid & Co would have found a solution for it. Instead, as the scale of the game increases with every sequel, the problem only worsens.

The other main problem I have with Civ3 is that it barely qualifies as a sequel. Firaxis, by the words of Jeff Morris, may be fond of the 'conservative sequel' principle but I most certainly am not. If I'm shelling out some $40 for a game (and another $80ish for two expansion packs), I want to get some real value for my money (actually, I want some real value regardless of how much I paid). With a few exceptions (resources, diplomacy, arguably culture), the core game mechanisms in Civ3 are still the same as those in Civ1 and Civ2, so they're more than twelve years old! Which is silly for a modern piece of IT technology: if I'm looking to buy a new PC, I'm looking for a PC which still has the more or less the same chipset and architecture as PCs of twelve years ago, I'm not buying one with a harddrive of 200 MB! It's definitely true that Civ3 is a somewhat better blending of concepts than say CtP2; the various components fit together better and interact more than they do in CtP2. But on the other hand, the concepts in Civ3 aren't dated, they're carbon-dated! Over the past few years, CtP2 and other TBS titles have added new and exciting features to these type of games and solved common problems of the past. The strategy gaming industry has advanced considerably since the days of Civ1 and old problems (overly simplistic combat and economic models, tiresome micromanagement, bad UI and graphics, etc) should no longer have to be an issue in Civ3. Also, a little more variation to a-decade-old gameplay shouldn't be too much to ask. I can understand wanting to preserve those elements of the game that made the previous versions so successful, but that doesn't mean you can't do something about theirs flaws and provide a little more variation...

Earlier I described five main elements that make for a fun Civ-game. I'll reiterate these points now and briefly sketch where in my opinion Civ3 fails them.

First there's the empire feeling: when playing the game, I want to feel like I'm in control of a large nation of people. As with previous Civ titles, Civ3 barely does this. Instead it chooses the alternative approach of contrasting my civ to my opponents and by giving it unique features such as CSAs and UUs. As I explained, I don't like this as it violates what I regard to be the Civ philosophy. If you accept this approach it's done fairly well, although you still feel like you're controlling a loose collection of cities rather than a unified empire, especially if you're low on culture and your borders don't even connect much of the time.

Secondly there is the feeling like you're replaying history, the historic accuracy. Civ3 does pretty well in terms of atmosphere, although it does miss some of the nice extras of previous incarnations of the game, like Wonder movies, the Civ2 Advisors, the Civ1 newspaper, etc. But overall it scores pretty well in this department. In terms of gameplay though, the performance is somewhat shabby. It wasn't until Conquests before random events were added, which is a really simple but essential way of adding realism and historic accuracy to the game. The game models are awfully simplistic, especially compared to other strategy games on the market -- not much realism there. Making ICS the standard strategy for the AI really takes much of the fun out of the game, as the human is now forced into that strategy as well if he wants to succeed. That's not a very historically accurate strategy, and any game should provide more options anyway. In short, from a history standpoint the gameplay could be much better.

Third is the micromanagement and control over the game. I think I've said enough about this: there are a lot of bad (and good!) things to be said about Civ3, but this is the real game-killer. Having to go from city to city every turn and moving dozens, if not hundreds, of units around on the map is a major pain in the butt. It's a problem that's getting worse with every new incarnation of Civ, so if Firaxis has any hope of selling Civ4 to me (like they'd care :)) they'll have to make solving this problem their number one priority. And to add insult to injury, the user interface of Civ3 is absolutely horrible as well. I couldn't bare to use the original release version of the UI ever again; they did a good trying to fix it as much as possible in the patches (and no doubt the expansion packs as well) but it's an abomination on which no honour can be (re)gained. It needs far more links between various sections, there should be a place to read messages at your leisure (I can't begin to count the number of messages I've missed because the game had already continued to other parts of the map before I had a chance to read them), there should be more screens and windows in general for pretty much everything and it needs ways to streamline tedious tasks and monitor/control several units/cities/etc at once -- to name but some of the shortcomings. I can see what they were trying to do with their approach -- prevent the gameflow from being interrupted for 'unimportant' things -- but it's really not working. I need to use both my hands and a considerable amount of time every turn to move all over the map and through numerous advisor, city and various other screens to control everything and to make sure I'm not missing anything important. I can't think of many worse ways to interrupt the gameflow.

Fourth up is the core gameplay. As I noted, it's too conservative for my taste. I like the resource/trade system and diplomacy, and although it's not the best possible implementation I hold culture in high regard as well, but other than that Civ3 plays pretty much like Civ2. The linear combat system (no stacked combat, no combined arms, terrible spearman vs tank problems), simplistic economic models, old-fashioned worker management (as opposed to a PW-like system), etc are all rather primitive for a modern strategy game. And to add make things worse, they've taken away much of the strategy as well. With ICS being the default strategy for the AI, the human has no choice but to utilise it as well. A problem made worse by the resource system: if you don't expand like mad, you're very likely to miss out on several key resources. Moreover, since diplomacy doesn't guarantee access to these resources the way military conquest does, you're often pretty much forced into a strongly militaristic style of play. Too strengthen this, science is not really worth investing in either: it's best to buy your advances from the AI. It also doesn't help that if you don't have a strong army the AI will punish you before you can say 'mobilization'. Civ3 clearly favours the warmonger over the builder and the scientist.

But while we're talking military strategy, the game doesn't excel there either. Especially in the later stages of the game, the infinite units per tile, infinite railroad movement, limited ZOC and small differences in technological level kill much of the military strategy: just have a huge stack of units ready somewhere in your empire and you can fend off any invasion. Launching invadions works is really simple as well: just bombard a city to the ground, when it's (almost) undefended take it with one or two units and then move in your huge army over the just-captured railroad system. It's all so simple even the AI can handle it... Overall, I like some of the major and many of the smaller changes to Civ3's gameplay, and the synergy between major concepts is great. But not improving upon Civ2 enough while killing much of the strategy was in my opinion a big mistake. Had this game been released in 1997-1998 or so, I might have accepted it as a sequel to Civ2, but I expect more from a game released in late 2001 with the latest expansion pack still fresh in the shops today.

As final of the major issues, there's variation. In the original release it's almost non-existant. No MP, very limitied mod/scenario support, no scripting, non-standard file formats, no editor, etc. Things improved a bit with the patches but it took one expansion pack to get MP at all and from what I understand a second one to get it working properly (and from what I've heard, even now there are plenty of problems with it -- but I can't speak from personal experience there). Also, although editing simple properties of the game is now possible, there are still no really powerful editing tools, certainly no scripting. And only with the second expansion pack where a handful of scenarios and a number of new start-up options provided. For me as a modmaker, Civ3 fails miserably in this department.