Civ3 vs. Civ4

[Qwertqwert]

Is Civilization 4 a lot better then Civ 3? I got Civ 3 with 6 other games for $25 (great value). Now I thought it was fun, I am sure everyone else here thinks they are more fun then I thought. But I am just wondering on a fair comparisson between Civ 3 and Civ 4. And please don't use any obscure details of the game, I probabally won't understand.

[Malleus Dei]

Civ 4 is the best Civ ever. IMO it's the best *game* ever. If you are a strategy gamer and you don't have a copy yet, then do yourself a big favor: stop reading this and go get a copy RIGHT NOW. Donate blood if you have to. Just get yourself a copy by any legal means.

Yes, it's *really* that good.

[Adagio]

I haven't played Civ3 in over a year, but I remember back then I never got the "just one more turn" feeling, while with Civ4 I've been playing all the time*



*Or at least all the time I've been able to... I wish we had more hours per day

[xxFlukexx]

Civ4, hands down.

Civ3 had some great ideas(culture and rare resources and stuff) but that game was just too unpolished.

I agree with Malleus Dei, this game(first impressions) is that good. I mean there are sooo many great options that strategy gamers will just love.

For your first game, put it at a low difficulty, read all of the stuff your advisor says, and have a blast. When it gets too easy or boring, bump up the difficulty and change your civ or change your style of play or go for a different type of victory. Endless options here.

Civ 4 is the best TBS game since since since, umm MoO2? Something like that.

[Atahualpa]

Yes Civ4 seems interesting as you get a lot of different choices to compete against other civs. E.g. I fought two wars on two fronts, one was a cultural war and the other was a military one. Both are interesting. I think you could even play total builder and never fight a single war in the whole game. In Civ3 this was hardly possible. OTOH, you can also be warmongering a lot and the new combat system is very interesting indeed.
Religion and Great People are another thing that add spice to the game and diplomacy has improved a lot since you're able to see your modifiers in detail.
And finally, the game was designed with multiplayer in mind. Even if you start a SP game.. you can read "<Playername> has joined" at the start and each time you load a save game

There are ofc some downsides as well. One I think is a steep initial learning curve, because the game really has a lot of icons that you have to memorize if you don't want to hover over any of them. You have to approach the user interface differently (look and memorize the pictures, don't search for text).


As with Civ3. The concepts are already there, but they are not fully unleashed. Culture is there and you could go for a cultural victory, but it was a lot less fun and it didn't seem like a viable option most of the time. The strategy part in Civ3 was way thinner and flatter than Civ4 whose strategy part is more rugged, thicker and way more interesting.
And I always felt alone in Civ3 SP. In Civ4 you can build good AI allies and that makes it way more interesting as well.

[VetLegion]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=134067

I really like civilization and have been playing it since the first civ. I was eagerly awating civ IV and bought it the first day (I upgraded my computer just to play it). Unfortunanetly, however, the game just plain sucks. The interface is HORRIBLE!!! Civ III's interface was so much better. The game is just not fun to play anymore; its hard to see what's going on and hard to play. I really hate Civ IV, and wish they just had improved Civ III. I'm really upset, and I can't believe the reviews of this game have been so high.

Well, I'll be... if there is one thing I never expected it was to see Civ IV compared to Civ III and found lacking . I was expecting the usual SMAC, CtP and Civ2 comparisons, CivIII being below the radar...

[Solver]

I played Civ3 for a bit, thought it was good, then it became apparent to me quite soon how there is, regarding many things, just one right path to follow. The game was largely too simplistic, I also got tired of the excessive micromanagement of Workers and the diplomacy system, while very good in theory, turned out into where you could easily bribe anyone.

I've been playing Civ4 for months, and my impression is, thus far, most favorable of any Civ game. I was already addicted in mid-summer, playing on unfinished builds.

Civ4 is a true strategy game. There are a lot of choices to be made, many tradeoffs, many interesting decisions. At the same time, the gameplay is streamlined enough, so you don't have to worry, if you don't want to, about doing micromanagement every turn in order to, say, not waste an extra 2-3 shields of production.

[VetLegion]

I don't have Civ IV yet, but I'll put it this way: if Civ IV finally makes me uninstall Civ II, only then it's Da Bomb

[Malleus Dei]

Originally posted by Solver
Civ4 is a true strategy game. There are a lot of choices to be made, many tradeoffs, many interesting decisions. At the same time, the gameplay is streamlined enough, so you don't have to worry, if you don't want to, about doing micromanagement every turn in order to, say, not waste an extra 2-3 shields of production.

Exactly. There's a lot of completely different ways to win Civ 4 - and a lot of completely different ways to lose.

[Igloodude]

Originally posted by Malleus Dei
Exactly. There's a lot of completely different ways to win Civ 4 - and a lot of completely different ways to lose.

And I've already found a few of them after playing for two days. If you're used to Civ3 barbarians, you're in for a surprise with Civ4.

[Venger]

I liked the look of Civ3 better - believe it or not - as what I wanted to see and click seemed better placed and more intuitive. And the game itself ran better - Civ4 is a buggy nightmare.

But the underlying game - Civ4 is far better. More moddable, etc. There are things that were better in Civ3 - the Civilopedia for instance, and how most things were clickable to transition to - for instance, clicking a city on the list brought the city screen up. But as far as the underlying game principles, I prefer Civ4.

Venger

[Atahualpa]

Originally posted by VetLegion
I don't have Civ IV yet, but I'll put it this way: if Civ IV finally makes me uninstall Civ II, only then it's Da Bomb

I don't know why you should. They are two different games. Civ 1/2 is great because it is simple, inspiring and straight forward.
Civ 4 is great beaucse it is complex, twisted and strategically challenging in every way.

In my personal ranking judging each game by its time, Civ1/2 is still the greatest. But Civ2 can still compete with Civ4 nowadays and win at least some categories. Wonder movies for example. Sure Civ4 has them, but they are not that inspiring. Wonder movies in Civ2 were much better, my favorite being the Eiffel Tower and Universal Suffrage.
Advisors were also a lot of fun in Civ2 (the council lol). In Civ4, I have yet to learn to make use of them.

[tomcat ha]

Ahh yes the councill. I loved them getting pissed when in anarchy. I so hate that i need to use a cracked version of civ2 because i lost my civ2 cd. I also miss the music that pissed my sisters off because i played civ2 so much for years. Ahh well its 2 comps later now. I still hope that on one day my civ2 cd will fall from the sky into my hands. I miss the intro, i miss the councill, i miss the wonder movies and i miss the music.

[VetLegion]

Originally posted by Atahualpa


I don't know why you should. They are two different games. Civ 1/2 is great because it is simple, inspiring and straight forward.

Multiplayer and scenarios have kept Civ2 on my hard disc for so long. If Civ4 has good multiplayer, Civ2 goes to its well deserved retirement.

And, arhm, Civ2 is not simple, don't let me hear that ever again

[VetLegion]

Wait... you're saying that manual offering of sums of gold in Civ III, the absolute low of the franchize as far as friendly UI goes, is topped in Civ IV?

[Arnelos]

As someone who actually LIKED Civ3 and played the heck of it for years (including beta testing for C3C), I still say Civ4 is better. The *game* is just so much more strategically interesting and fun.

That said, Civ3 had a better UI, graphics that could actually run on most systems, etc. Civ4 seems to have some pretty sloppy production when it comes to interfacing with a lot of graphics cards or using system resources. Hopefully, that's all patchable.

[Nailfoot]

Originally posted by tomcat ha
Ahh yes the councill. I loved them getting pissed when in anarchy. I so hate that i need to use a cracked version of civ2 because i lost my civ2 cd. I also miss the music that pissed my sisters off because i played civ2 so much for years. Ahh well its 2 comps later now. I still hope that on one day my civ2 cd will fall from the sky into my hands. I miss the intro, i miss the councill, i miss the wonder movies and i miss the music.

Here you go:
www.ebay.com




And the Fantastic Worlds expansion is right there too! Have fun.

[Khaim]

If your computer can run Civ IV, get it. It's a good game, and I'm sure they'll patch the really bad bugs soon.

That's a big "if" though. A lot of people are having trouble with the graphics, which are way more complicated than they need to be, and seem badly programmed on top of that.

[Arnelos]

Originally posted by VetLegion
Wait... you're saying that manual offering of sums of gold in Civ III, the absolute low of the franchize as far as friendly UI goes, is topped in Civ IV?

I'm just saying that, in general, the user interface in CivIV is less intuitive and user friendly than the one in Civ3.

Sure, all of the bells and whistles are nice, but they somewhat get in the way of having a simple and easy-to-use interface at times. This is worse for those of us with lower-end machines that have to disable the bells and whistles, but still get a suboptimal UI.

The *game* is awesome and certainly well above the previous Civ games. The UI, however, needs some work.

[VetLegion]

I hear you, I have a low end machine. I just disliked Civ III UI very very much. I don't have Civ IV yet, so I can't say.

[Falconius]

If you have the money to spend on upgrades, CIV 4 is a great game. After upgrading RAM, video card, and buying the game itself, I'm in over $400 !!!

That said, the game is great so far. It has a lot of personality that Civ 3 was lacking. I hated the bland yellowish background of Civ 3: whether you were looking at the terrain or the Civiliopedia, always the same bland yellow. Only two zoom levels in C3 also irked me. It had animated units you could barely see or distinguish because you couldn't zoom in close enough!

Playing my first C4 game as Rome on the Earth Map at Noble Level (the "even" level). Having fun, but the AI doesn't seem as challenging as in C3. My praetorians are knocking Germany on their butts. It's 1680 ad, and no one has declared war on me. I hope this changes at higher levels.

[Qwertqwert]

My computer is good enough I'm sure, 3000+, 6600GT, 2GB DDR400 RAM.

What I am asking is if this Civilization 4 is really worth $50 over Civilization 3, if you're not completly addicted to this game.

[Atahualpa]

Originally posted by VetLegion
And, arhm, Civ2 is not simple, don't let me hear that ever again

How's that a negative? Some players loved Civ1/2 because it was very abstract and simple. You didn't need to think about where to spread your religions or where and how to get your resources or any such things.

[John-SJ]

Originally posted by VetLegion
I don't have Civ IV yet, but I'll put it this way: if Civ IV finally makes me uninstall Civ II, only then it's Da Bomb

I doubt I will be uninstalling Civ II anytime soon, but as of now, Civ III is on my short list of games to uninstall if I need disk space.

Put quite simply, CIV (IMO) is the best Civ game ever, and likely the best game ever! It really is that good!

[John-SJ]

Originally posted by Atahualpa

They are two different games. Civ 1/2 is great because it is simple, inspiring and straight forward.

I'd agree with that. Civ I/II are simple games, but in te way that chess is simple IMO. Sometimes simple games are the best, IMO.

[Sartaq]

I feel Civ IV is about getting back to basics. It also seems that they spent some serious time play balancing. So many great strat games have been utterly ruined by not taking the time to tweak the gameplay. I always prefer simple complexity over complex simplicity. Civ IV delivers, it feels very natural to play.

[spy14]

Very true, they could have taken the "make it awful pretty and screw the gameplay" road that some developers choose. Just a shame that its not quite finished yet