Civ3: Who's resolve is first to falter?

[Nap Bonaparte]

I agree with both AH and Smash......the ancient part of the game is the best with all the exploration and discovery and the end game is very lonnnggggg and tedious. My addiction with CivI and CivII is 9 years and still counting. My addiction to CivIII was less than 30 days. I hate having to negotiate with the AI for techs.....Id really prefer stealing the techs with diplos. Come to think of it, I really miss the caravans and diplos. Id rather move 30 caravans/diplos around the map than 60-75 workers. Can you imagine Civ3 MP with 8 players moving 50 workers every turn. And then artillery units. And then all the other military units.
I havent touched Civ3 since I purchased EU2 2 weeks ago. The new Civ3 patch is supposed to fix the IFE and the Air Superiority bugs but I still dont know if the Civ3 modern era is worth the trouble.

[Steve Clark]

Something dawned on me this weekend as I was attempting to continue my second game. Because they listened to the wrong people who wanted the [stick in your favorite age] last longer, Firaxis made ALL of the ages last longer. The thought that struck me was that the Civ3 regular game is just like playing 4 Civ2 scenarios in a row. First you start out with an ancient age one (like Kull's), then onto a medieval one, then an industrial age one (like Civil War) and then finally playing a modern one like RF or SF. Each one by itself would be a handful but four of them back to back is too much. Because of my "pay attention to everything" each and every turn, I can see a single game taking 80+ hours whereas 25-30 would be my limit.

I knew all along that the regular would not interest me, esp. in comparison to scenarios (just like with Civ2). It seems to be even more true for Civ3. I am going to wait for the scenarios to play Civ3 again.

[Alexander's Horse]

I miss tech stealing too!

Slowing down scientific development wasn't the best way to make the ancient period last longer. They should have just added more turns to it (duh!)

[Steve Clark]

But we need to not be afraid of the civ3mod.bic file. It's no different than rules.txt, only infinitely more robust. Perhaps just a simple number change on the max # of turns to research or some other tweaks will produce a faster, more playable regular game? Can we experiment with this?

[CapTVK]

Originally posted by Steve Clark
But we need to not be afraid of the civ3mod.bic file. It's no different than rules.txt, only infinitely more robust. Perhaps just a simple number change on the max # of turns to research or some other tweaks will produce a faster, more playable regular game? Can we experiment with this?

Steve,

The problem is that we will never agree on an improved ruleset because there's no basis to start from. Firaxis rushed the game without a properly balanced ruleset. The fact that Firaxis is still doing heavy tweaking inside the rules.txt is evidence of that.
Did the original Civ2 rules.txt need heavy tweaking? No, the fact that every Civ2-SP/MP player still plays with the standard rules is proof of that. The only time when the rules.txt are, or "should be", tweaked is in scenarios.

Which are sorely missing in Civ3

[Steve Clark]

But I don't think the Civ2 rules.txt defaults are any more "balanced" than the civ3mod.bic. This is evident in that we all think the AI is laughable in Civ2. At least in Civ3, we have much greater control over nearly everything. But you are right in that it would be hard to agree, I think that is the purpose. For example, some whiners cried bloody murder when they increased the max # turn to research from 32 to 40. What should it be? Do you really think that there is an ideal number? I don't know, that's why it's editable.

Let's say it's set at 23 or 24, some will say that it makes the game too easy but frustating because you can't keep up in building stuff, while others will complain about how slow it is. They came out with 32 initially based what they know about the game engine, then they bumped it to 40 when they saw many folks winning at the higher levels. I'm not saying that this one parameter is the key (it probably goes together with other 'tweaks').

But then again, I see your point. I saw what monkspider is doing with his Balancer mod and I have said that without rigorous testing, such things are foolish if they think it makes the game more 'balanced'. So while we didn't have to mess with the rules.txt in Civ2 for a regular or MP game, there wasn't much thing we could tweak anyways, as compared to what's available in Civ3.