surely there is a way to play without the civ-specifics?

[Algernon Pondlife]

This is very frustrating. I can't get C3C to play without civ-specific traits and units. Does anyone know how to get round this? In "Civ-content", if I choose "No Civ traits" the startup screen claims that there will be no specific units either. But that is simply untrue. The incas even have a specific scout available to build as soon as they found their first city. Further, if I want to play a map mod, or a civilization mod that come with standard rules (i.e. not specifically designed in such a way as to make the civ-specifics integral to the scenario), I will get traits and units and no choice about it.

Now I know that there are lots of people who won't care or (perhaps) even understand this, but, while the civ-specifics can be great fun (and I do play them some times), they do introduce a distortion into the underlying premise of the game. There is an inherent contradiction in the idea of starting from scratch (with your settler and perhaps an odd scout or warrior unit) and being predestined to have some particular capacity with unique charactersitics, sometime down the line in a few thousand years. There is something very "gamey" (and not quite right) about being able to identify important characteristics about another civ from the moment of first contact, however fleeting and remote that encounter is.

If the characteristics were applied randomly (albeit there could be an option to make your own choices in any particular game instance) so that you could not predict behaviour etc. of your opponents, and if unique units appeared (or didn't appear), e.g.emanating from developments and resource features, occuring in the particular game, then they would be vastly more satisfactory.

For me the benefits of C3C consist in the introduction of additional civilizations and, most significantly the limitations put on mapping and meeting remotely in the early stages of the game. I have little interest in tactical scenarios and even less in the proliferation of (especially modern) units.

Meanwhile, should I be sending back C3C as "not as advertized" or is there a way round this? Or will there be a fix?

I know my perspective is a minority among players and even among forumites, but it is legitimate and I have practically every instance of the Civilization suite, including the original Hartland Trefoil boardgame. I don't want to stop others getting a different kind of enjoyment from the game, but I don't want mass considerations to wipe out the utterly unique raison d'etre for this game and turn it into just another (admittedly very good) game.

[MyOlde]

You say: 'There is something very "gamey"...'


Well, it IS a game. That's the whole point.

[Algernon Pondlife]

I try hard to be clear in my meaning. I apologize that the message is obscure. With any game, game is never the whole point. Each game has its own charactersitics that make it attractive to some people and less so to others. If this was not the case then the drive would be to the "ultimate" game which would suplant all others and everyone would play it. Of course it would have to be wholly abstract. Now I already play Chess, Go and, occasionally, Bridge. but I also play Civilization, Master of Orion, Railroad Tycoon, Stars!, Warcraft, Championship Manager, Command and conquer, The operational Art of War, Battleground Antietam Commander Keen and many others. All for their different flavour.

By "gamey", I intend an attribute that detracts from the essence of the particular game in pursuit of some gameplay mechanism. In this particular case, there is a requirement for a degree of uncertainty as to certain features of the game environment (including for example, the geography, the distribution of resources the distribution and composition of other civilizations). Instantly Knowing that someone you meet is, say, expansionist and militaristic, allows you to set your plans accordingly. A better representation of the spirit of the game (and, obviously, of what the game is attempting to represent) would require the player to ascetain such characteristics by observing behaviour etc.

If you want to play a game in which all the relevant characteristics are known from the start (or are given out easily and without real effort on your part) then what you are looking for is a game that tends towards Chess or Go, in which the only uncertainty is what your opponent's actual strategy will be and the only complexity is derived by the number of practical possibilities dictated by the available moves. In Civilization, there is no one best strategy in any position (possibly excepting the most dire straits). It is always an issue whether to build a worker or a spearman, a temple or a barracks or a market. mostly it is only with hindsight that an alternative will have been clearly better (if you had known that the Romans were massing an army just over the horizon, then obviously you would have raced a dozen spearmen into position).

To get back to my primary intent, can anyone help?

[Alex]

I don't think it is possible to play without the civ-specifics. One idea the designers had when they started to create Civ3 was to make the experience of playing with a particular nation more unique and personal. In civ2, all nations were basically the same, and the only difference between them was their colors. SMAC changed this concept introducing the different factions's abilities, and this gave a totally new flavor to the game (and a whole bunch of new strategies too). Civ3 only tried to follow this trend.

Now, you certainly have a point when you say that it feels contrived to have a civilization with predetermined traits since the beginning, but I'm one of those who are willing to pay the price of a 'gamey' internal mechanics in exchange for some (much needed, IMO) diversity.

The idea of a civ which could develop its traits according to its evolution during the game is certainly interesting.

[MoonWolf]

You can remove all the civ specific stuff in the editor, including units.

However, to make all the traits random for each civ will a be a kind of a strike against the original idea behind the Civilization-series; to build up a society/ civilization from the dawn of civilization. This has been the mother idea from the very start in the early 90's. By bringing traits and unique units into the game this have developed further as it's meant to have some historical accuracy in the game. Looking through history, empires have rosen and fallen and it contiunes like that. This is what they want to "mirror" through the traits. I'm Norwegian and I think they have made a good choice about the Vikings in the game. Suddenly meeting a Viking warrior that was agricultural and industrios would have been strange.

But you can use the editor for some of this. Not giving civ's random traits though (and I think it would be stupid if they did). The only way for you to play with random traits is to choose "random" when starting a new game (and remove the unique units). If you're unsure about the editor and how it works I can help you...

[MoonWolf]

Alex write quicker than I!

[Algernon Pondlife]

Alex and Moonwolf, thanks for your comments.

I suspected that I could probably do something with the editor and I will have a go soon. but it does seem unreasonablr that I should have to for something so fundamental and simple.

Moonwolf, I don't agree with your assesment of the history of the game. It may be because I was playing the board game years before Sid did his work, but I take the view that the introduction of historical civilizations was a necessary gloss to make the original game attractive and comfortable for the players. My idea is that the game is in fact a study of how communities develop and interact through the whole of history, but in no way an attempt to recreate history per se.

In fact, if you think about it such a game would be considerably different in its composition of civilizations since they would logically have to be contemporaneous. I think that is why I am attracted to such mods as TAM and MEM and GLC. (of course none of my comments apply to the design of mods since they can be designed for any feasible objective including the use of tha game engine for out and out warfare if people so choose).

I like the idea of the traits and found it a great feature in Stars!, MoO and SMAC(X). My only concern is that the way they are implemented here you can say "aha! the Persians. They are scientific and industrious and I'll have to watch out for their swordsman". Randomly assigning them would get round this quite easily (I don't think any of the random buttons can do this i the present incarnation), but having them evolve through circumstance is attractive although it may be very difficult to implement.

Unique units could appear very naturally if there were defined prerequisites that would occur relatively rarely. In that way it wold be possible for two civs to develop the same type of unique unit, but only rarely ( I know that stretches the meaning of unique, but uniqueness is not the true goal. In the game The units are are kind of like an "extended phenotype" representing the application of specific technologies in particular circumstances. In a sense the technologies do battle through the medium of the units. Now, howver true it is that a particular type of fighting force (or implement) has been unique to a specific power at a specific time, there is no sense in which it could not also have been adopted by some other culture given the will and fortuity of circumstance.

I consider that there is room for all approaches to this game (becuse the underlying design parameters are so rich) and have no wish to take anything away that others relish, but if you are correct about the natural direction that the game is taking then I am going to be increasingly uninterested in the future developments. On the other hand, what I am wanting of this particular version does not require any radical redesign, merely leaving in a feature that was in Civ3 vanilla and PTW. I don't think that is a lot to ask.

In some senses vthe original version was better than the subsequent ones. not in an overall way of course. It had less unit clutter; the AI civ attribute could be randomized. The tech tree was less available for forward planning (although that benefit diminished as you played more games and remembered more of it).

[pauli]

i can see a very strong allure in the idea of an option to set all civs to random traits, and even one or more randomly selected unique units.

i like the historical aspect; however, i'd also like a bit more of an unknown. i think it would really bring something to gameplay.

(and remember, smac let you randomize the ai's priorities and whatnot...)

[Algernon Pondlife]

"the historical aspect" :-

This is core to where one's sympathies lie.

For me the references to nations, peoples, historical individuals, events and artifacts serve only as flavour, not as part of realism in the game. The flavour is very necessary, but is not related to the "realism" of the game, rather to the comfort of the players.

The realism comes from the interactions of neighbours; from the relationship between say location and population growth; from the momentous changes that can arise from a scientific breakthrough (but also from the difficulty in predicting this effect - something not yet well developed in the game); from the evolution of a city's (and a civilization's) infrastructure; from the attempts to find a viable political model, from the need to cope with the unanticipated; from resolving conflicting priorites; etc. If these things behave in the game in a manner that seems plausible from our understanding of history, then we have historical realism.

On the other hand, the assigning of traits to America, The Mongols, Russia etc., while not strictly arbitrary, is taken from a number of choices that could be said to characterize how we think of these peoples. And we will not all agree on the most appropriate. Indeed, any society with a reasonably long history must have different periods in which very different attributes would be most legitimate. To take a simple example, America is assigned "expansionist", but it can be well argued that for a period in American history they were anything but. And America, in the way it is represented has not been around all that long.

So I don't consider these attributions in any meaningful sense historical within the framework of the game. Rather more important is the requirement for a wide variety of combinations, if for no other reason than to make game play a rich experience.

Don't forget that the purpose of the traits in game terms is to ensure variation in behaviour and thus in strategic drivers. It is only a simple logical step further to conceal the attributes during play so that players have to react to situations rather than predict (and, for some clever people, actually engineer) them. This will provoke the player to deduce how a rival is playing by observing behaviour in interactions over time and to gradually develop a strategy for dealing with each of their rivals.

For me Civilization is not in any sense a rerun of history, but rather a study of the components of human society and culture illustrating just how differntly things could have been and what the limits of these differences are. this is something of great interest to any historian because it seperates the nature of things from the specific events and better allows an understanding of cuase and effect than simply assuming that the historical chain of events was in some sense inevitable.

This begins to sound a little grand for a "mere" game, but at some level this game does this and it remains a game. In fact it remains the ultimate "just one more turn" game.

[Swissy]

There are two scenarios in the Civ Content section of the game. There is "No Civ Traits" where everyones starts at scratch with tech and there are no scouts, but UU's are available. Also, there is "No UUs" where civs get traits and there are scouts, but no UU's. I remember reading there was a problem with the "no civ traits" setting, so they eliminated it. But I cannot recall where I read it.

If you want to make a totaly "vanilla" version of civ, just take the "No UU's" scenario and edit out the civ traits for each civ.

[Algernon Pondlife]

Yes Swissy, but then I've still got to "fix" every other map scenario etc. that I want to play. It's a lot of work for something that used to work fine.

[Fried-Psitalon]

There was a significant problem with the "vanilla civ" option when combined with some of the new C3C material, yes - that's why it was removed.

[Algernon Pondlife]

I've had a wee think about it today. I can't see what the problem can be. There is a scenario supplied that runs without the unique units and there is a seperate scenario that runs without the unique traits. So neither can be the cause of a problem to the game engine. So it would have been just as simple to supply an additional scenario without either (just like the title of the no traits one falsely claims). Now I can create it myself by going through all the units and eliminating the unique ones and then going through all the remaining units to make sure that they are all available to all the civs.. If I do this on the no traits scenario and save as "no nuthing" or somesuch it shouild work. (equally, could start with the "no unique units scenario and edit out the traits). A bit of work, not too much, but it could have so easily been included. After all they are the specialists, not all the players are expert in such things (and why should they be?).

That still leaves all the general mods to tackle before I can play them. And of course there will always be more being developed. So it gets more frustrating all the time.

If it is this simple, I don't see why the game engine could not derive it all at run time. It's only a few simple and wholly defineable steps.