Farewell Forum, Part I: Your Favorite Ally

[TomVeil]

I propose a grand gala of farewell forums (fora?) to thank CivIII as it eases into retirement.
In this one I propose a toast to that most sublime of strategies: allying with the harmless nation.
My favorite was the Americans. They'll almost never go to war with you, plus they do a good job of building roads and rails, so "right of passage" is to your advantage, and they keep up scientifically, so you can benefit from trades with them.
Your favorites?

[vmxa1]

Allies? Long term, you mean like 6 to 10 turns?

[TomVeil]

I mean longer than 10 turns, as in countries that are more useful alive than dead.

[vmxa1]

I was being faceous, I knew what you meant. I was just saying, I don't see a need for a long alliance. All countries are better when dead to me. Evil grin here

[TomVeil]

I thought maybe that was the case, but I figured I'd reply anyway and keep this message near the top, in the hopes that maybe someone else would think it's an interesting topic. Oh, well.

[conmcb25]

Indians

[ChaotikVisions]

The Greeks, they always seem more interesting in just building and trading. Abe always wants to go to war with someone, and Gandhi loves to backstab people. Not very good for longterm allies.

And this forum won't die, once all the die-hard Civ2 players decided they've finally suffered enough without a new Civ game and go play Civ4, some Civ3 players will come back here to say how much Civ4 sucks compared to Civ3 so that the balance in the universe can be maintained.

[James]

Greeks.

[Montesquieu]

Abe is good for railroads, but when I play as the Iroquois my goal is to always destroy him.

[wilebill2]

A lot of older desktops and laptops out there will run Civ III, but will not run Civ IV, or not run it very well. Civ III is far from retired, I think.

[Neal the Neophyte]

Nor will Civ4 run well with only minimum requirements on most machines - especially with less than 500 megs. I now consider most software needs so called "reccomended" specs to be in fact minimum specs. Prepare to upgrade your video card with the very latest drivers, if not an outright hardware upgrade.

I guess in time the 3D graphics will prove to be an asset, but I would have been happy with the graphics (with some mod improvements) that Civ3 used. Save the fancy graphics for the shooter genre.

I plan, as I have all along, to wait for the first patch. This is not intended as a slam, but recognition that a new engine and complex software is probably going to need tweaking. Reading the Civ4 posts seems to confirm this.

[Shogun Gunner]

none of the ai's make very good allies. If you get too far ahead, even your closest, most loyal AI ally will stab you in the back.

That is why they all must die

[Egbert]

I don't find any of the AI civilisations very reliable. You just never know when they will backstb you. If you keep up trades with them they are usually quite reliable until you get into a war with someone and your ally is not also at war with the same civilisation. The AI seems to charge far too little to attack someone.

If you and your allies are permanently at war with veryone else then the aggressive civs (eg Zulu and German) are best as they seem less likely to make peace and it seems to cost less to get them to immediately rejoin the war.

[Dis]

Farewell oh Civ3. You had many imperfections, but you still gave me many fun hours of play. I especially enjoyed conquests. It's not likely I'll be playing this game anymore though. Though I still wanted to play a couple more conquests scenarios with a few different civs. But I just can't see that happening any time soon.

As I said in the Apolyton/community forum. We need a tribute smilie.

I'll just go out with a