What is the worst thing in each Civ game?

[civer3]

Battleships in 4000 BC

Battleships in 4000 BC.

Alright! This incident happened quite sometime back. The only explanation I could come up with was that somehow one of the AI civs went into a hut and discovered ancient scrolls of wisdom that said Steel. The date was not exactly 4000 BC. More like 1000 years after the first year that the player started with 5000 BC.

[DrSpike]

You can't pop steel that early, unless you were playing a mod.

[Jonah5]

The other day I was playing civ3 and out of now where this horseman attacks one of my tanks, I was thinking maybe it was going to be a suicide horseman so naturally I fired a shell at him and by my amazement it bounced off of him. ( I told myself thats weird) Then all of a sudden it whips out a spear (I start laughing ) and starts beating my tank, so I presume to run over him. Then bam >>RANDOM ACT OF GOD<< and now the horseman is laughing over my grave. I had deju vu of civ1.

I hoped that by civIII conquests that their could be better diplomacy so that when you have a mutual protection pact with 2 different civs that it would become a (i.e. the triple alliance of 1882 and the triple entente) three-way alliance and that they couldn't declare war on each other...Which if it hasn't been mentioned already for civ4 it should.

Thats whats wrong in my opinion of civ3

[LDiCesare]

Hardly Civ3's fault.

Civ3 repeatedly crashing is not civ3's fault? Whose is it then if that piece of software crashes infinitely more often than civ or civ2 ever did?

[DrSpike]

The point is this thread is about bad gameplay elements.

Additionally the fact that it wouldn't work on your machine, and very very few others, is perhaps a reflection on your setup, not the game. The thread is not "What is the worse thing about LDiCesare's machine", alas.

[LDiCesare]

I wouldn't mind if it didn't crash the OS and if my machine didn't meet the requirements. CtP has been bashed as buggy, but CtP2 was much less buggy than Civ3 in my experience.
The reason Civ3 crashes is, apparently, linked to memory consumption. So what, I should buy more ram? Well maybe, but the end game in civ3 is SLOW. I mean it is really really slow. The ai takes forever to move. This is in part because of the insane amount of workers on any map beyond small size. Getting more ram doesn't help much about that because the resources eaten by a relatively uninteresting piece of game (cleaning pollution or, for the ai, being busy polluting the world) eats many resources at no good avail.

[DrSpike]

Many will sympathise about endgame slowdown. There are solutions.....post in the Civ3 forums and I'm sure you can get some assistance.

[OliverFA]

The worst thing in all the Civ games has been the very limited tools and possibilities availables to produce scenarios. True, there are suberb scenarios in C3C, but they have to deal with the engine limitations. In most cases if not all, the scenarios are great just becasue their designers have made a very good effort to overcome the limitations they had, like in the famous Japan scenario.

This is not a big issue, because Civ has never been about scenarios, but anyway it would be nice if they fixed it for Civ4.

The other big problem also present in all Civ incarantions if the boring micromanagement. (workers anyone?) If they could find a workaround for this the game would be more dynamic and enjoyable.

[gunkulator]

Civ2: Almost too many to choose: stack death, spies, caravans, too high defense bonuses with ZOC, bombers left outside of cities, boring predictable combat, steamroll once you get even a slight edge - pick one.

Civ3: My #1: Too much emphasis on warfare for success.

[Guardian]

Civ I: Military units / combat system. Too much of a random element involved in determining the outcome of a battle. (I once had a bomber shot down by a phalanx!) Units have no hitpoints. Defeating one defender eliminates the entire stack unless inside a city.
AI acting incredibly stupid at times. Also, the caravans/trade system was kind of unrealistic, effectively allowing you to fund a global empire almost exclusively through trading with one single small foreign city. How in the hoot would the poor sods have that kind of money??!?

Civ II: AI acting incredibly stupid at times. Like when you're the #1 superpower in the world, you have an alliance with a much smaller civ, your allies have a (for them) powerful enemy at their doorsteps, and they tell you to go f@#? yourself if you won't give them a free tech every 5 or 6 turns... Combat system improved somewhat (or so I seem to think I remember), but still leaves much to be desired. Caravans: Still possible to conquer pretty much the entire world and then fund your entire empire by sending caravans to trade with a single small foreign city.

SMAC: Too much micromanagement in the late game. I occasionally ended up feeling like I was performing chores rather than playing a game. I did play on a huge map and manually control most of my formers though. Also, on just about every turn I'd go through the entire list of all my bases to make sure everyone finished their building projects within 1 turn or some times 2 turns.


Civ III: AI much improved, but they tend to get way greedy as the game progresses. Early in the game, you may be able to make perfectly reasonable deals with the AI, but later in the game, it can be almost impossible to use diplomacy as a means to sort things out in a reasonable, civilized manner. If for instance they have a strategic resource or a luxury that you need, it seems that quite often you either have to sell your soul every 20 turns or you get mad, go to war and take it from them. Now, after making a truly generous offer once or twice, most players will tend to do the latter, possibly destroying a civ that they otherwise wouldn't have made war upon (I have done this myself many times). Hence there is some sense in the claim that there is too much emphasis on warfare for success. Some times, with their insulting remarks, empty threats and unreasonable demands, the AI almost seems hell-bent on ensuring their own destruction. Like I said, the AI is greatly improved from earlier versions, but there are still times when I'm more inclined to call it AS (Artificial Stupidity).


In spite of their weaknesses, I have loved every one of these games and I have no doubt that I'll love Civ IV as well.

[LDiCesare]

The worst thing in all the Civ games has been the very limited tools and possibilities availables to produce scenarios.

That's not true of Call To Power II. Though there are more mods than scenarios. Also Civ 2 ToT allows great scenarios, but that's in part because talented people worked very hard to produce them.

[bigvic]

civ1 - never played it
ctp1 - my 1st exposure to the genre. ai - though at the time it seemed cool for a while. lack of ai presence in space
civ2tot - stupid kill one kill 'em all combat. sheesh...
smac - not too much, actually - inability to mod, i suppose - free market sucked
civ3 - stupid artillery craznap, steps backward from smac in many ways, diplomacy not really so advanced, esp inability to form real friendships
ctp2 - general mess of a product technicaly, lack of support from publishers - though well supported by others not paid....
galciv - lack of decent manual - what the heck does this thing do?

[Eagle Scream]

Civ 1: that a spearman can beat a battleship
Civ 2: AI building a city in that one spot left on your continent in the middle of all your cities
Civ 3: That at war you can have a cultural conversion of one of your cities (that it had most of my best units in it as it was on the front lines did not help matters either)
Civ 3 (PTW): That Unique Units are not ALWAYS an option

What I did not like about all versions: workers cannot build canals

[Colonâ„¢]

I think all of them suffer from imbalances, bad AI and too much micromanagement, just in varying degrees.

[Alex]

and yet they're all addictive as hell...