C3C is dissapointing

[MrWhereItsAt]

Re: C3C is dissapointing

Originally posted by dandan
I thought I would make my dissapointment with the Civ3 Conquests expansion pack known to others. As a long standing fan of Civ, I must say that the newest addon doesn't live up to the hype. It has very few fully developed scenarios, many of the other scenarios do not work (and even crash my machine), new units, buildings, etc. are not available in normal play, and it's still full of bugs to a point that is not becoming of a professional game development group.

As a beta tester (for a brief time), I shouldn't be surprised at this less than Civ-worthy product. The developers were very gung ho (when not rude) with the suggestions made by testers, and they made sure that some of us simply got thrown off the test team (because of the awful online interface) never to be readmited as the login arrangements were beyond belief in terms of accessing the test site.

Some of the ideas in the pack are good, pity it doesn't extend to the whole of the game. Of Great Sid Meyer, please have mercy and come back to save us from these awful addons that spoil thy greatest game!

Am happy to say you are in the gross minority, at least on these boards.

How are the scenarios 'less than fully developed'? This is news to me. And if you have crash issues you should report them, but Firaxis and Breakaway have been very proactive in dealing with these and I would be surprised if you had many problems with... the latest patch.

I too struggled with the interface of the beta testing, and eventually couldn't reregister the game, so I never actually got to test anything! However, who cares now with the full expansion out, and where all our suggestions seem to have been paid close attention to. We have had a helluvan influence on the patches to date, and I am so astonished that we got so much of what we wanted.

[WarpStorm]

Originally posted by lethe
It's got to be more than simple pathfinding that bogs it down in lag. As said, in SMAC we never experienced anything similar. (Nor in any other MP game where pathfinding is critical, like RTS games a plenty.)

SMAC had stupid pathfinding that often didn't work.

Please tell me an RTS that has good pathfinding (with different terrains and roads that influence movement cost), I have yet to see one.

[Cookie Monster]

Originally posted by GhengisFarb
Tragedy? I think not, sad yes, but not a Tragedy.

MoO 3 now that was an absolute abomination and plague on all mankind. Evil incarnate has a name and it is Quicksilver.

[lethe]

Originally posted by WarpStorm


SMAC had stupid pathfinding that often didn't work.

Please tell me an RTS that has good pathfinding (with different terrains and roads that influence movement cost), I have yet to see one.

I never had any problems giving smac units going around the world, and they actually _followed_ the line that is highlighted when you drag the cursor there. (Unless something changed en route.) In C3C if I point three squares over and tell a unit to move there the white line will quite often not represent the path the unit will take. This is a serious issue when moving fast moving units near enemy fortresses.

And I've never played a RTS with especially good pathfinding. From reading some of the post mortems on Gamasutra it's quite clear why, each unit gets very few chances at the pathfinding algorithm. (As low as 4 in some of the C&C games.)

Even if C3 expans ALL trees fully for each change on the map it's hard to see how it ends up quite this slow. Especially as the slowness is many, many times worse in MP. (Performing orders takes easily 10x as long in MP.) And the speed in MP starts out at snail speed and never really degrades. We only play Tiny and Small maps.

The single player speed problems on Huge maps with lots of water generally gets worse as the game progresses. (More units and cities I suppose, as well more roads and harbours.)

Even if units sometimes wandered off in SMAC (which I never encountered in probably nearly 1000 game hours) I could live more easily with that than the incredible slowness. At comparable map sizes and number of opponents a turn of C3 takes significantly longer on my 2.1ghz machine with 1gb of ram than SMAC did on a 133mhz machine with 64mb ram.

I don't understand how the pathfinding algorithm can suddenly require several hundreds times as many clock cycles to complete and still manage to cause units to run off like headless chickens when moving three tiles.

[lethe]

Oh, I forgot. To exemplify the MP slowness.

2 players on a Tiny Pangaea with minimal water and 5 billion years old. No AI. No cities. First turn we each move the worker one tile.

Speed of that single movement is about comparable to the speed at which units move in single player when I have run into the city and unit limits. (Though the end of turn process isn't slowed in MP like it is in these huge SP games. It's just moving units that is slow.)

Note 2: Changing specialists in cities is just as slow in MP as moves are. These can't reasonably rely on the pathfinding algorithm.

Someone poured honey somewhere in the code.

But that's my only beef with the game. (The MP part, that huge maps are slow don't affect me, as I don't play em anyway. Micromanaging 30 cities is more than enough, I don't need 80 more.)

[TheRockit]

I was happy with C3, I liked PTW, I am very happy with Conquests. There are certainly things that could or should have more attention paid to them during development (art work, bugs, documentation) but I personally enjoy getting the game and having a chance to play it through the fixes.

Civ has always been like that for me and I understand it when I pay for the product.

[WarpStorm]

MP slowness has a different cause. Civ3 (unlike RTS and FPS games) must ensure delivery of all packets in order. Every action is important and must be done in order. Real time games usually fudge this and allow things to happen on "dead reckoning" unless and untill they get a message that causes them to have to resync. This can't really be done in a turn-based game.

[lethe]

WarpStorm: Yes, but _no_ other TBS game I ever played in MP has been even near this slow. It's like we suddenly exchanged our 100mb lan for 300 baud modems. (The _real_ modems, where you hooked off your phone and put it on a black box with a speaker.)

It's a problem everyone else has solved.

Not a deal breaker for me, I can multitask well enough to ponder tactical and strategic problems while my little honey covered units slowly, slowly crawl to their destinies. (Atleast occasionally traveling by the route they submitted to HQ when they got visas to leave their home tile.)

[vmxa1]

I don't know about them real "real", but they are acoustic coupled modems. Yeah I used them back in the 70's on mainframes.

[PGM]

Originally posted by WarpStorm

No, but he was very much in on the Civ3 design and development. A lot of the original design and code was from when he was in charge of it.

AFAIK, Brian Reynolds left the CIV3 project way early, I'm not sure he had that much to do with the game as we know it today. At least, that's what I remember reading back then, and I believe that Soren was the main contribution behind the scenes. (I'm not even sure Brian's name appears in the game credits at all, but I may be wrong here).

He was indeed very important in CIV2 and other games, and most recently in Rise of Nations.

I noticed many people often think of BR as some sort of unreplaceable genius, but let's not forget that while CIV2 was a great and innovative game (I played it for years, up until CIV3 came around), it had tremendous flaws, much more annoying than any CIV3 bug, IMO (pop-ups for 200 cities in civil disorder, foreign cities being founded inside my territory without penalty... )

And as far as I know about Rise of Nations (only played the demo for 1 hour before I got bored), it's a much weaker Age of Empires rip-off with a more complex tech tree (Civilization, anyone?).

Anyway, that's just my opinion. Only meant to make people think of having a little hope in the Firaxis staff because they achieved great things in CIV3 and let's not turn Brian Reynolds into a God just because he's not around anymore.

*PGM gets up against the wall and waits for firing squad*

[Capt Dizle]

Insofar as I am concerned Civ2 and SMAC contitute the most advanced evolutionary form of pc gaming.

Credit>BR

Civ3 was by almost all serious standards a regression.

[Aqualung71]

Re: C3C is dissapointing

Originally posted by dandan
As a long standing fan of Civ, I must say that the newest addon doesn't live up to the hype.

As a beta tester (for a brief time), I shouldn't be surprised at this less than Civ-worthy product.

As a non-beta tester, I bow to your experience.

As a long time Apolyton lurker and more recent contributor, I say "take thyself to the AU threads and mix it with the game's masters". AU501 was fantastic!

Cheers!

[Aqualung71]

Originally posted by jimmytrick


Insofar as I am concerned Civ2 and SMAC contitute the most advanced evolutionary form of pc gaming.

Credit>BR

Civ3 was by almost all serious standards a regression.

Maybe I got into Civ2 too late to appreciate it enough and then moved on to Civ3....but firstly, the two games are vastly different in terms of actual gameplay, and secondly I believe Civ3 is much more attractive in terms of a strategy game in almost all respects, even though it could certainly be improved in some areas.

But that's just my opinion.

[Grond]

Rise not Nations is actually a very well made game with a couple design decisions that didn't pan out in my opinion. Between attrition, cost ramping and counters bonuses defense is far too strong. If ramping was eliminated and counters were slightly nerfed it would be an excellent game. I'm not sure who had the bigger role In Gettysburg but I still think its the best computer game of all time. On a side note on a Saturday I noticed a random scenario was quite unbalanced so I got Sid Meier's email and wrote him about it including the scenario number and what I thought the problem was. Sunday I got an email back from him saying he had looked at the scenario and at the code for assigning points to reinforcements and discovered a flaw. A couple days later there was a patch on the Firaxis website. That's how a gaming company should be run.

[hexagonian]

Some nice tweaks in the interface (group movement button), some new civ attributes (Agricultural for one), some adjustments to AI behavior (trespassing seems to be less frequent), finally make civ3 the game it could of been when it was released 2 years ago - (despite my gameplay issues with civ3 based on preferences.)

For the $10 I payed for C3C at Amazon, I'd say it was a worthwhile purchase.

The price was the only reason I decided to get it though...Knowing what I do about C3C now through gameplay would not inspire me to pay $20-30 for C3C.