Which game is better? Civ3 or CtP2?

[Mr. Nice Guy]

I have Civ3 and hate the game's guts. But instead of taking it back, I decided to keep it and figure out what was wrong with it and let Firaxis know my opinions. I've never played CtP or CtP II but I am interested in seeing how Call To Power II compares to Civilization III.

So which game do you think is better? Are they both about the same? Do they both suck? Voice your opinion here!

[ALPHA WOLF 64]

If you had played CtP2, you'd see how much better Civ3 is. I spent 2 months trying to learn how to program a decent AI in CtP2, and finally gave up, even tho it was substantially better than as purchased, it was every civ city on its own. CtP2 was one of the biggest disappointments i've ever seen in a PC game, second only to Axis and Allies.

i hope the next generation of Civ games actually tries to program the AI to act as a civ instead of x number of independent cities. Determine what the civ as a whole needs and allocate cities to produce it. i think they attempted that this time by limiting each wonder to a single city so that an AI didnt have half its cities building the same wonder.

[Harovan]

Another Civ3 vs. CtP2 comparing thread... Oh well, nice try after your "official civ3 sucks thread".

I played CtP2 the whole 2001, till Civ3 came out. First I enjoyed it, but later... It's got no AI (not even a stupid one like Civ2, but none), the map generator is bad, the early game is tedious and the pollution sucks. It's moddable great style, but the better mods run lousy with localized versions, or produce an awful mix of languages. Tried to install Cradle 1.3 yesterday but it didn't run. Laughed, deleted, gone. Civ3 has got severe problems at the moment, but at least it's still supported. CtP2 is abandoned and without a mod it's worthless.

CtP2 is absolutely no match for Civ3 even in it's current state.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Oh well, nice try after your "official civ3 sucks thread".

[delfino]

CTP1 and 2 had many new and interesting features and allmost as many annoying ones. it is difficult to compare them. one thing is for sure if I could merge Civ3 and CTP2 in to one single game I am pretty sure the outcome with be better than just adding the two together. CTP2 had ocean and space colonization, had virtually unlimited city radius, stack movement, public works, nice graphics and imaginative units, specially the invisible ones. CTP2 would allow you to have a taste for some future technologies. Under these concepts Civ3 is shallow and a lot more down to earth. I might be wrong but I seem to be unable to shake the feeling that Civ3 was made by people that did not love the game and that it was a rush job.

[exeter0]

I agree with Sir Ralphs argument but not his conclusion.

Personally I find CTP + Mods (Cradle 1.3 works fine for me) to be a much more immersive and involved strategic game.

BUT... I agree that vanilla CTP2 is pretty lame. I must praise the power of the CTP2 customisability though. It is to CTP2's credit that it has become 300% the game it was due to enthusiast support.

I agree 200% with Sir Ralph that the Map generator in CTP2 is hopeless... but Maps in CIV III aren;t much better... you always get masses of Jungle, Mountain etc. which is not condusive to interesting or fair gameplay.

Things like Stacked combat and increased combat complexity + the greater degree of micro-management optionslends me to feel more immersed in a CTP2 game.

Having said all this I love the aesthtic shell of CIV 3 and I believe that all the essential (and non-essential) flaws of CIV 3 have been aired by loyal CIV 3 players in this and other forums.

Hopefully Infogames will allow Firaxis to further develop the game and we will end up with what we want CIV3 to be... and then CTP2 will be redundant.

Until then though... I think CTP2 is the better experience.

Cheers.

[exeter0]

Originally posted by delfino
CTP1 and 2 had many new and interesting features and allmost as many annoying ones. it is difficult to compare them. one thing is for sure if I could merge Civ3 and CTP2 in to one single game I am pretty sure the outcome with be better than just adding the two together. CTP2 had ocean and space colonization, had virtually unlimited city radius, stack movement, public works, nice graphics and imaginative units, specially the invisible ones. CTP2 would allow you to have a taste for some future technologies. Under these concepts Civ3 is shallow and a lot more down to earth. I might be wrong but I seem to be unable to shake the feeling that Civ3 was made by people that did not love the game and that it was a rush job.

Very succinct and accurate summary response!

[Harovan]

Not quite accurate, because CtP2 (unlike CivCtP) has no space colonization.

The other arguments are a matter of taste. Personally I don't like stealth units and futuristic stuff (I can play SMAC if I want) and I am glad they aren't in Civ3. Workers vs. PW is a tough question and I understand the PW supporters, although I think the Civ3 workers with their different nationalities add a nice element to the game.

[nbarclay]

I was really looking forward to CTP2, but it turned out to be a major disappointment.

(1) The limit on the number of cities drove me nuts, especially if circumstances called for war and I couldn't absorb additional cities.

(2) The AI's city placement contributed immensely to the "too many cities" problem since captured cities were usually too close together given how big cities in the game can get. Trying to build down cities to a point where I could disband them got rather tedious.

(3) If I slid the production slider way up to maximize production in smaller or newly conquered cities, I didn't dare build mines in my more productive cities because pollution was too much of a problem.

(4) The "cities work all the land in their radius" rule took away one of my key micromanagement tools (as well as the ability to control pollution by not working mines). It also significantly reduced the value of tile improvements in towns that were small enough they just NEEDED a couple tiles improved to have plenty of good land to keep everyone busy. And frankly, I consider it more realistic that people will work more useful and better improved areas a lot harder than they will unimproved desert.

(5) The final straw came when I was in an alliance with one country for almost purely commercial and scientific reasons, had finally gotten on reasonably good terms with another after some previous fighting, and had my ally ask me to go to war to help it out against the other country. I was THE world power, but the game didn't even give me the option to threaten war to try to get the other country to make peace with my ally. It was either get into an unwanted war or abandon an ally. I got annoyed enough that I didn't want to play any more that day, and I haven't touched the game since.

Nathan

[Harovan]

Originally posted by exeter0
... but Maps in CIV III aren;t much better... you always get masses of Jungle, Mountain etc. which is not condusive to interesting or fair gameplay.

You might try the 5 billion years setting, but the default is sound for me. The Earth has (or better, originally had...) huge forest and jungle areas, it has vast mountainous regions etc. It has also big deserts and plains. It has no octopus shaped continents with tentacles all around the World and it has much less forking rivers, and no checkerboard-like river monsters. The Civ3 map generator is quite good, it could be perfect if it would make more than just 2 continents on a huge map. Four would be good. No, that's not the same like archipelago.

[campmajor!]

I just had a rotten banana, so I had to choose something else!

This poll has been done before, but probably it will be done after this one as well.

I just happen to like polls....

[Alex]

Oh, no! Not another Civ3/CTP2 poll...

But the better game is Civ3, of course.

[Locutus]

The CtP series is IMHO by far superior to Civ3 and the reason is simple: innovation. Civ3 is just Civ2 with strategic resources, not much else has been added (culture has been emphasized somewhat more, but it's by no means an entirely new concept, even Civ1 had 'flipping cities'). I think even calling Civ3 'Civ2.5' would be flattery. CtP OTOH adds many new features and concepts that greatly improve the genre (the most important of them have been mentioned already) and, above all, is more customizable than Civ3 will ever be, allowing the fans to continue the process of innovation almost indefinitely, something commercial companies can never do for simple economical reasons. Contrary to Firaxis, Activision realized that here the true strenght and replayability of a game lies. (To make Civ3 as customizable as CtP2 would require major changes to the basic game engine, which Firaxis is never gonna do for Civ3 - and if they did the result would be called Civ4).

Although the basic (unmodded) game of CtP2 is not great (like Civ3, CtP2 was released a few months too early), all the new concepts make it very much worthwhile to play. There's a very basic mod out there, the Apolyton Pack, which (together with the patch) fixes most of the major problems of the unmodded game and brings it in a state in which it was supposed to be for release. This simple mod already makes the game much better and, thanks to all the innovative features that CtP2 already has out-of-the-box, superior to Civ3. The only thing that could have been even better in this mod is the AI (but AIs can *always* be better). I think the GoodMod takes this idea one step further and does the same thing as the Apolyton Pack but improves the AI even further.

But more interesting are the MedMod and Cradle of Civilizations mod. The latest versions of these mods are a complete remake of the game and really deserve to be renamed CtP3. They add tons of new features on top of the default game (militias, elite units, wonder units, wonder buildings, unit upgrading, city capture options, unit repair, natural disasters, prisoners of war, refugees, surrendering and merging civs, new victory options, etc, etc), with even more in the making (wonder visible on the map, strategic resources, religion, generals, more random events, etc). On top of the already diverse default game, they add many more new units, buildings, wonders, governments, civs, city styles, tile imps, etc; they radically improve the AI (if you haven't played CtP2 for a while you're probably not gonna be able to win Cradle v1.3 on the highest difficulty level) and do a complete revamp of diplomacy (if you played and liked Diplomod you're gonna be pleasantly surprised by New Diplomod).

In fact, with CtP2 we're now getting at a point where we have to be careful about adding new features and making more improvements. When it comes to features: more isn't always better ('less is more', as Brian Reynolds told us in a Gamespy column many months ago). And when it comes to AI: you don't want to make it *too* good, it still has to be possible to defeat it (one example is that we were able to make the AI ICS so well it makes Civ3's AI look like a sitting duck (40-50 cities in the first 100 turns) - but this would make the AI pretty much undefeatable so we didn't use this technique anywhere (yet )). Until recently there were really two standards for truly innovative CtP2 mods (MedMod and Cradle) but at the moment more and more 'smaller' mods are arising, giving people different sets of features, styles of play and time periods to play with, rather than just more, more, more...

Scenarios are now also really starting to kick off, strategy discussions and things like succession games are, due to the complexity and variety of the game, much more interesting than the ones for Civ3 and the MP community seems more alive than ever before as well.

In short, if you like Civ games and you're not looking for Civ2.5 but rather for a truly innovative game, CtP is the way to go. If you still want to continue to play something similar to Civ2 until the end of time, SMAC and Civ3 would be better choices.

[Locutus]

Alpha Wolf,
You learned adjusting the AI in a period when everyone was still learning, we knew very little back then. Had you continued to hang around for a little longer, you would have been present in the period when we truly started to make progress. Right now the AI of CtP2 is extremely strong and nothing compared to the AI from the early period. You are completely wrong about the city-focuss though: the biggest problem of CtP2's AI is not that it is too city-focussed but rather that it is too civ-focussed and is too busy with the big picture to manage individual cities carefully enough. This doesn't show how wrong you are per se, it rather shows how little we understood of the AI in the time you were still with us.

Sir Ralph,
The language issues are certainly a problem but if you install an English mod on a German system, what do you expect? There are two simple solutions for this though: either switch to an English version of the game (all the files you need are available if you ask for them on the forums) or translate the mods to English. Civ3 AFAIK has the exact same problem and so does any other game I've ever played, so you can't hold this against the game IMHO. If Cradle didn't run for you, explain your problem in the forum. It can be a bit tricky to get a mod to run if you've never done it before but so far I've never heard of anyone not being able to run mods at all, it's just a matter of asking for help and not giving up the minute it doesn't work perfectly. The support for CtP2 is quite frankly better than for Civ3, the designers of the mods are gamers themselves and always willing to aid new players and release improved versions, the people of Firaxis are often almost invisible (for good reasons, I'm sure). The map generator, like everything else in CtP2, can be customized, so if you really don't like it (which is a matter of taste)...

[Harovan]

Locutus: I'm aware that mixing languages between game and mod can lead to problems. I tried what was described in your FAQ (copy the english gamedata over the german after modding) but that didn't help. Cradle 1.2 ran after about 1 hour work, Cradle 1.3 not even after 2. Then I gave up and removed both, Cradle and the game (worthless without mod). Only the patch survived, for future use.

Generally I'd not mind to throw in a CtP2 game now and then. May be even a CivCTP. Just like I did not abandon Civ2 or SMAC. If there was a playable "no futuristic bullsh*t" mod for CtP2, now that would be awesome. And I would not at all mind to play the English version, at the countrary. So if somebody would send the English text files (or an appropriate link) to sirralph@gmx.com, who knows, may be I would even install them...