C3C REVIEW thread - Post yours here

[WarningU2]

In answer to your question about bugs ... it has a few issues i.e. more than 6 players and others read more here ...http://civ3players.proboards2.com/in...oard=CONQUESTS

But overall it's better than when PTW came out. The developers worked extensively to improve the reliability of MP with this version.

[Elias]

Has anyone noticed a change in the AI behavior I herd they were changing a few basic things but havent noticed anything.
Yes poor me revoked finally some pity

[aaglo]

I don't have the final version of conquests yet, but I like almost everything in conquests. I don't think very highly of the WW2-scenario, because I am so bad at it

It is as good as expansions can get.

[Adm.Naismith]

Hi! Just coming back from a very looong time

After some time away from Civilization (the classic III, because I passed on PTW) I give a try at Conquest.

Just installed in Italian version. Got an error on a missing file (I suppose because of a bad translation), then uninstalled and reinstalled as English.

Playing my first new game on easy level, I'm just calling back my memories. More info soon.

[slohanz]

The games ships are much more fun to play with..u get more ship types that r worth building..destroyers rock with bomber/artilery help vs battleships. Planes can now destroy ships! and subs can pick a target from a stack

I like the new wonders alot..I found the ancient cavalry were so-so fighters but once I made 2 armies out of 6 of them,,they really started kicking butt, even vs riflemen. FAR better than horsemen. More options = a good thing.

The new governments Im not sure about. I tested fascism and found that i preffered republic (so long as i have 2 + luxuries while at war).

Its kinda weird that attacking a stack of spearmen and archers allows the archers to get a shot in as the spearmen defends, as sum units (not sure which yet) can. This clearly makes attacking harder, but with the AI still playing like AI's do, its probaly a good thing

Slohanz

[Paddy]

I am loving the new expansion of this great game.

As a Napoleonic fan from way back, I am really enjoying the Napoleonic scenario.

If you have not had the opportunity to see C3C in action, find away soon.

Thoroughly enjoying the experience, and highly recommend the expansion pack.

looks like the programmers have heard some of the issues and desires of the game playing community...

[smellymummy]

C3C is great. The new editor features is going to allow for lots of nice scenarios. The conquests are great, although I modded the Age of Discovery one (made privateers stronger and more expensive).

Middle age conquest is fun too! Playing as one of the vikings, those beserkers are really cool. I found playing norwegian much easier than the danes..

Does anyone know what the story about the bonus disk? i've seen it mentioned a few places, although I don't have one.

[Mano3]

Hello All! New here, but not new to CIV III and Civ Fanatics.

I love Conquests! It's nice to have a change of pace from epic games that can take many moons to finish. They did a pretty good job on the scenarios and details within them.

I like the locked alliances feature. I've been working on a LOTR - War of the Ring mod, and now I can have the good and evil at war and allied with the right folks.

[joncnunn]

Well, have enough material to review several conquests now:

Overall, the Conquests appear much easier at each difficulty level than the epic game. This shouldn't be too much of a shock considering that the same was true with regard to the scenerios in Civ II compared to it's epic game. For the same level of challenge, add a dificulty level or two the first time, and raise it another level each time you see it until your at Sid.

Mesoptainan on Monarch as Egypt : This is a peaceful player's dream. Minor unit blocking to keep Phoenicans from founding colonies and one city pumping up WC were all I needed to avoid fighting anyone except some barbs. I won most of the way the second era. No wars the entire game, trigured GA with my first wonder.

Fall of Rome on Monarch as the Huns: This is ideal for a hybrid player that first builds up the techs and basic inferstruture, then once reaching those techs builds lots of units, and only then sends them forth. I finished up all techs prior to the game ending. Only surviving players besides myself were Angle-Saxons (had lost 7 cities and was about to lose the 8th when I went over in score), Franks (had lost at least 4 cities), and Celts (had lost at least 3 cities, and they had 5 on the mainland, so I wouldn't have needed to cross the canal)

MesoAmerican on Monarch as the Incans: Ideal for the Hybrid player that just wants a war for the GA. Built a few UU and had them ready for right after I switched to Monarchy, and started the war just for the GA, took 3 cities, and then remained at peace the whole game with non-barbs. Finished reseraching all techs before the game ended. Note that there are some minor annoyance issues with this conquest:

1. Barb camps formed in immpassible terraign to all units. No way to wipe out without culture expansion.

2. Doesn't really make sense that cities along the edge of impassible terraign can work those tiles at all, even though they only produce 1 gold at most.

3. That box in the bottom right hand corner is in the way along the southern edge of the map and I had to look at the city view of my southern most city to see what was going on there.

Discovery on Monarch as the Aztecs: Also great for the hybrid player that also likes to limit their number of cities. Just took over a few Mayan cities both times they were idotic enough to declare war on me, the first of which resulted in my GA after I'd switched govts. Tech wise I got into the Discovery era before winning via culture. Didn't quite finish the 1st of these techs though.

Epic game:
Mayan traights are excelent for the builder; Agricutral + Industrious is made for territory with a lot of forest to chop and desert to irrigate, and the rivers help building as well.

Looking into the industrial era, the Hoover Dam is sufficent to trigure the GA by itself, so no need for a builder to actually use their ancient era UU for that purpose and so it's very plausable to stay pure builder.

Republic's free unit support + double cost : With the number of cities with natual aquaducts I had combined with half price for those without them, the bypassing Monarchy was a lot less painful in Conquests given the free unit support.

Democracy's no free unit support + normal cost : Well, this has certiantely delayed my normal switch to Democracy as soon as discovered if not actively building a GW or in a GA. It is 2/3rds of the way thru the Middle Ages and I calculate that I would gain less in the form of loss corruption than I would less in lost unit support. (I have exactly 3 X units as I do cities, most are size 11 & 12 and smallest is size 8.)

[Dain]

Here is my review of the Conquest expansion:

Overall, the expansion offers you a number of fun scenarios to play, a few additional civilisations and introduces a few minor modifications to the game in the form of types of resources and special abilities.

In general those changes have improved the game as you have more variety. One of the key flaws with the balance of individual civilisations still remain in so far that the abilities each civilisation has are not balanced across the board.

Most of the racial abilities become obsolete with technological advancement whilst some are worthwhile throughout the entire game. Similarly, the special units are not as evenly balanced.

I was hoping that they would add in alot more than just one special civ unit offering more individualism when playing a particular civilisation. Perhaps that will be a feature of future expansions or versions.

Unfortunately, the civilisation AI is still extremely poor. Difficulty is only determined by what kind of advantages the AI has access to which bend the rules. The AI civilisations have lower corruption, maintenance, build costs, lower values when trading with other Civs and starts out with alot more than you do on higher difficulty levels.

It is the 'utterly stupid' decisions the AI makes which eventually turn the tide of the war more often than brilliant thinking on your behalf.

The types of things which make the AI look stupid are the situations where you have crushed a particular AI until it is all but defeated and he has a fortified troop still in your territory, you tell him to remove it and he declares war again. So you just go and wipe him out.

The AIs make outrageous demands at higher difficulty levels and will often plunge themselves into suicidal wars when you refuse their demands. I have no problem with a stronger Civ trying to bully you if you are weaker, but when their military force is a joke, declaring war on you will just hasten their demise.

The most infuriating aspect of the game which still exists in this expansion is the total lack of border-respect the AI has. It will cross into your terrority at a whim even if it is significantly weaker than you. There is no strategic benefit in doing this and having to place a line of troops just to keep them from blindly wandering through your territory adds nothing to the game.

Trying to get them out of your territory, if you let them in, is not so easy. At higher difficulty levels more often than not telling them to get out of your territory will result in them declaring war even if they are far weaker than you. At lower difficulty levels you can keep telling them to get out of your territory but they just continue to walk right through your territory.

The only real strategic level of the game occurs during the first and second ages. That is where the game is decided, if they can stop you from getting to the modern age or not.

The AI is totally unprepared to handle modern warfare. In the space of 20 turns you can quite easily dominate the entire map.

Railroads, ICBMS and Airports allow you to totally dominate all the AIs in the modern age. Their lackluster use of advanced artillery or the ability to respond to an invasion makes conquest trivial in the modern age.

The AI has too much of a reliance on bending the normal rules rather than becoming smarter like chess difficulty levels. The AIs are not designed to win, they are just designed to slow you down. If an AI wins then it is an issue of the player not being aggressive rather than sound strategic and tactical decisions by the AI.

Once you can overcomethe numerical advantage the AI has access to it offers very little in the form of challenge. Victory at that point is inevitable, the only thing left to offer a challenge is to finish it quicker and get a higher score than the last time you did it.

That being said, Civ is still an entertaining game and I still enjoy playing it. The expansion gives it more variety and generally improves the game (except for corruptions which is fubared). Likes most games, if you do not have constant internet access the game you purchase will not be anywhere near as good as after it has been frequently patched to remove the critical bugs and flaws in the game.

For its price i think its good value, but it does not represent major improvement in gameplay because it still has inherited the same AI weaknesses.

The trick to winning in Civ is just understanding how the AI functions and what how it responds to your actions and inactions, once you do its predictablity makes it extremely easy to manipulate and overcome.

[dexters]

Dain, I agree with you that the AI could be better. But for a game of its complexity, there are limits to how well the AI can function.

A comment I want to make about AI launching into suicidal wars. I think it looks illogical on the surface, but it's actually quite logical. A human player has the option of not playing a game we are losing. And I assume many of us quit these games. For the AI ,they have no choice but to play on. I think the programmers assesed, quite rightly, that in such a situation, an AI's job is to make the surviving Civ's (not just the human player) as difficult as possible. And this can include delcaring war even if they are down to 1 city.

One one PTW game in fact, Russia, down to 1 island city declared war on me and due to accumulated war weariness plunged my civ, the premiere world power into disorder, paralyzing production, research and gold income for a turn and requiring painful re-allocaiton of workers. I'd argue that even if there's no chance of them winning the game, their action weild disproportionate effect. In fact, a favorite trick of the weak AI is to start an innocent looking war that a human player can laugh off, and then drag larger AI civs into the war against you. This is the point where most of us either quit, play a gambit to see if we can pull it off or cheat excessively by reloading turns. (heh). I've actually grown to like playing hopeless and difficult games just for the challenge. Trust me, C3C has many of those opportunities in epic games. try starting on a nice size island on a pangea map and see if you can actually pull off a victory. I tried that once, survived to the very end, but didn't win.

I've been the biggest fan of the continual patching system. I actually revisted one of my earliest Civ3 games and was appaled by how different the AI was in that game. Lots and lots of legacy units, and the way the AI expanded was horrific, and those are just obvious things I could see from loading up the map and looking at it.

What I feel Firaxis has done is a good job of listening to the community and closing loopholes to some of the more glaring exploits. PTW introduced a lot of interesting AI strategies such as the defense unit pillage. Revised SOD etc.

What was disappointing for me with C3C though was that unlike PTW, which seemed to have created a better AI overall, C3C was much more ambitious. It Unfortunately, a lot of bugs and problems were introduced/reintroduced.

Ultimately, the AI of any game is going to be predictable. Ideally, and I like to say this as a fan of what Firaxis has done with the game's AI is a patching service ala GalCiv where the developers collect human strategies and periodically update the AI to add to its "volume of knowledge" without requiring a patch. These AI updates would be more frequent and allow for the AI to learn more strategies rather than the few it learns every time there's a patch.

My wish for Civ4 is a planning AI. It doesn't have to be amazingly sophisticated, but an AI that can analyze the current situation. See who are its threats (like it does now) but then go one step beyond that and formulate a plan. (I don't want to call it strategy). It can then even prep cities with pre-builds in anticipation of a wonder or a new building, an oft used human exploit. That's my wish. and I actually think a simpler version of this might be possible in Civ3, if only Atari is willing to fund a programmer to go in and work on the AI full-time.

[Nosferum]

---I was playing the Japan campaign (circa 1500) and found it extremely difficult to take cities. Defensive units are easy to get, and I've lost whole armies to a single city. I then tried to bombard the city with 22 Rocket Carts, and 17 of those Fire gun things. They almost NEVER hit. Finally, I decided to build a Ninja, just out of curiosity. I walked him up to the capital city, picked out the King unit to fight (stealth units can choose their target) and BOOM, I assassinated him, completely eliminating the entire civilization. Basically, all you do is claw your way to the Ninja tech, build about 8 Ninjas and you can't lose. It's a little silly.

[vmxa1]

Here is look at how the game mags and sites saw C3C. 4 A's and 3 B's, not bad.

[Sava]

Conquests is what the first Civ3 release should have been.

[vmxa1]

Maybe, but it would have been a few more years coming and cost a lot more. so I am fine with it as it transpired. But then, I am easy.