Optimistic Civ3 reviews- Grin Grin

[loinburger]

I thought that reviews usually come out after the game has been, well, reviewed? :banned:

[EDIT]
My bad, I didn't realize that everybody was being sarcastic.

[Sabre2th]

Originally posted by technophile
I thought that reviews usually come out after the game has been, well, reviewed? :banned:

It's more a preview of what they would like/not like and the possibilities for civ.

[Father Beast]

continuing my review...

INTERFACE:
Really cool. tok all those AC improvements and added a bit too, although superficially looking the same as the Civ2 interface. no more of thse zillion popups at the end of turn anymore. The build queue is back with a vengeance. I can set a default build queue for new cities, and even set a city to build and sell an improvement over and over (something I used to do for extra cash in the days before capitalization). The city screen has column tabs which allow for resorting your cities by size, production, happiness, item producing, etc. You can also select a group of cities and set build queues for all at once. wow...

GAMEPLAY:
I can't describe how fun this is to play. Going after resources is fascinating, and figuring out how to weasel them out of your neighbors for as cheap as possible is also fascinating. the trade/diplomacy menu is a BIG step up from the old pathetic den=manding techs and cash we used to have. back and forth haggling is a big pull (at least to me). You can get cheating when you discover what the particular civ values the most, and foist something useless onto the from that category, but they seem to mostly refuse bad deals. on the higher levels, I couldn't get resources for making advanced units unless I agreed to pay a LOT of gold per turn.
Oh, and did I mention that the first time I met a foreign unit, I didn't know what it was? it turned out to be a warrior, it just had a different picture than my warriors. it seems that each civ has its own set of graphics. neat.
CULTURE:
This seems to make the biggest difference to me. those who have it, prosper. those who don't get left in the dust. part of this is the army making leaders. The only way to attack with stacked units is to have a leader show up and make an army. if your culture is low, few to none of these leaders ever show up, and you can be trounced by the efficient fighting stacks of the culturally elite.
similarly, other leaders, such as those associated with wonders, are attracted by a high culture rating. Copernicus, for instance, is neccesary to build Copernicus' Observatory. If you don't build for him, he might up and head to another civ that will. Some greedy civs have traded him away, though. And if you take the city that is building his observatory, there's a chance you might capture Copernicus himself, too. Then you would be able to start building it.

AI:
I'm not much of a judge here, not being that good of a player, but my use of the cheat menu has revealed all sorts of strategies used by different civs. some are building just units and cities, some seem to follow a sort of perfectionist strategy, and I even saw one civ build only coastal cities and make a huge navy.
more about this in the EDITOR section.

WORKERS/SETTLERS:
I love these guys! settlers are just for founding cities, and Workers do all these tile improvements. I can set a job queue for a worker, and even draw lines for him to build roads on. There doesn't seem to be the civ2 limit of worker helps, so if you have enough, you can get ANY job done in one turn. Workers don't cost nearly as much as settlers, and I can really crank them out. Both can join their pop points to cities, but Workers are so much cheaper that I only build a settler to found a new city, then pump up its pop with workers as needed.


What a great game! But there's something more!

EDITOR:
The civ3 editing suite comes on a separate CD, and requires separate installation. you have to have Civ3 installed to use the editor, but you don't have to have the editor installed to play civ3 or use scenarios and mods.

Once you are running the editor, it integrates with the civ3 program so you can play with your scenario whenever you want. You can edit units like in the old rules.txt, but its on an easier interface now, with places to select or deselct certain unit abilities. You can also change around which civs have which unique units, or give all of them to one civ, or make all units unique to a civ. change the tech requirements, resource requirements, whatever you want.

The interface for making custom wonders and improvements is just as comprehensive. there are a variety of effects you can choose from, and can make improvements obsolete just like wonders. Kind of like the old obsoleting of barracks, but more customizable.
Governments can also be customized at will, with an SE like series of bars on which to make your settings.

The map editor can place resources, pollution and tile improvements wherever you want. you can even set roads on the ocean, strange as that sounds (and yes, my units have walked on them. I was thinking of designing a world with a few ancient bridges that could be pillaged if I wanted to cut off an attacker. but make it so they couldn't be rebuilt.) You can set the values for tiles, too, and even make it possible to build roads on the ocean. You can set which improvements are possible to the worker, and its successor the engineer.

According to the manual, the AI can also be adjusted. this has to do with some special language they are using. I don't get it, but I think I could do something with it if I tried. It talked a lot about triggers and threshholds and stuff I can't quite follow. I sure hope somebody can make use of this.

I give this game 2 thumbs up, and the editor (though I probably won't make much use of it myself, I drool at what some of our guys might do) gets another 2 thumbs up.

[loinburger]

Alright, here's my review:

Civ III is released in late 2001, and technophile waits to buy the game until others have already reviewed it.

PC Gamer gives Civ III "104%, the best game that has ever been made, ever, really, we're not joking!" In the same issue PC Gamer gives "Redneck Rampage 5, Bubba Gets Jiggy With It" a rating of 98%. technophile vows to never read PC Gamer again, and looks for other sources of reviews.

He asks his brother what he thinks of the game. technophile's brother is the person who first introduced technophile to the Civ series, and Civ II is one of his brother's favorite games of all time. However, when asked what he thought of Civ III, his brother admits that for the past four years the only computer games that he has played have been Solitaire and Minesweeper. Apparently, technophile's brother's girlfriend does not like video games, and technophile's brother is whipped. technophile continues his quest for an honest review of the game.

He had hoped that Apolyton would be a good source for reviews; however, shortly after the release of the game, the Civ III forum dissolves into a brutal flame war that results in the temporary banning of no less than 32 posters, most of whom never return. The subject of the flame war was whether Civ III is the "bestest game of all time" or "a stinking pile of dog ****." It did not appear that ANYBODY took a middle position in the argument, with the exception of Alexander's Horse, who no longer has any time to post on Apolyton after his wife suddenly has quintuplets.

technophile's quest for a decent review is suddenly cut short, however, when Fallout III and Deus Ex II are both released. technophile purchases both games. He spends the next couple months beating both games (he does this several times so as to see all 23 endings to Fallout III and all 12 endings to Deus Ex II). In the ensuing joy, technophile completely forgets about Civ III.

Two years later he finds the game in a used software dealer, marked down to ten dollars. He buys it; it holds his interest for awhile, but after a couple of months he loses interest. His final verdict is "Not enough 'splosions."

[Father Beast]

Poor guy technophile.
"king of pain" indeed.