Civ 3 and EU2

[Grumbold]

Originally posted by Steve Clark
That may be true, but for many of them, you have no clue as to their effect. Some may like that nebulous-ness, but that's too obtuse for me.

You are right that some of the military ones do nothing other than mean that, everything else being equal, the one with level 13 will lose to level 14. Having so many of them does allow the military strength to increase gradually, rather than the big jumps you get in Civ, and helps keep neighbouring states from developing a significant tech gap. My bigger gripe is that they are not predictable i.e. level 16 may cost much less to get than level 15, but it works once you are used to it. The Trade and Economy levels are all useful.

[Fidel]

well, depending on the timespan you want to cover. tech advances in middle ages were really slow, while a nuke is a nuke

[Steve Clark]

I posted this in the Civ-like games thread and thought it makes my point here as well...

Personally, I prefer Imperialism II because it has a resource/economic model similar to Civ3 where you have to first, find the commodity, exploit it, use it to build units/improvements which allows you to find/conquer more commodities and so on. This, to me, is the essense of Civ-like (or 4X) games which EU does not do (it has a vague Center of Trade concept).

[Kautilya]

Actually most of the techs seem concrete enough to me. They do things like allow to make certain buildings or build certain units or allow your units to explore more territory or improve a specific branch of your military. The economic techs increase your income in fairly well-defined ways.

The main difference is that the tech tree is linear unlike Civ. That's no big loss to me. Some of the connections in Civ were downright bizzare.

The main problem is that documentation is poor so you have to spend too much time trying to figure out how everything works. This is going to rectified in EU2.

One of the great things about EU to my mind is the ratio of click-work to strategy. Far too much of the Civ games , to me, was just drudgery especially handling large numbers of units. In EU the combat model , for instance , might look very simple but it is actually quite subtle once you begin to understand it. You don't have to control dozens of units but you have to think carefully about how to handle your armies. To me minimizing the ratio of click-work to strategy is the essence of good design.

[Urban Ranger]

To me one of the biggest drawback of Europa Universalis is the inability for a player to conduct tactical combat. It has a lot of details elsewhere but not in one of the most important aspects. To me that's having details in the wrong places.

[Grumbold]

None of the Civ games have had tactical combat either. CtP has come closest with the mixed army groups but you still only get to watch and hit the 'run' button if losing. At least in EU you can pick an army mix to suit the terrain you will be fighting in. In Civ the terrain affects the attack and defence numbers of all units equally.

Imperialism II had my favourite resource model too. I'm not so sure about the research. It had some very good points with scalable effort, multiple channels and effective espionage but it ultimately came down to the richest country having the best tech. In EU the rich big countries may be able to support the biggest armies but don't outstrip the smallest countries in technical innovations. Still, if Civ even partly took the Imperialism route I would be delighted because it is definitely progress.

[Chronus]

I don't think I'll be buying EU2. IMOHO, the first EU doesn't hold a candle to Civ2. Granted, I have yet to finish an EU game, but it's because it simply doesn't hold my interest.

One day, just for fun, I decided to do a back to back comparison between the two by playing "The Age of Napolean" in Civ2 and "The Age of Enlightenment" in EU. I was Prussia in both games. Again, Civ2 was, IMO, the far superior game in so many ways. Unfortunately, I could not get far in the EU game because it kept crashing whenever I saved it.

[XarXo]

MOO3 Sucks, like MOO2

I played MOO2 and I can remember the stupid tecnologies presented by a Star Trek copy actor.

A future game is a difficult task, in SMAC I found real and possible teconology, with an intelligent background (and a bit silly in some aspects, like the strange images that I found in the game directory). In MOO3 we probably found the "Tachion Power", the "Phaser Ray" and (coz the Borg are the revolution in the actual Star Trek) a "Transwarp Trasportation" or "Collective Social Model".

I hate the futuristic series, cause:

- The aliens are in the 99% humans with a third eye or another stupid thing.
- In the 1% always have a minimum of 50% to similitude with humans (two legs, two eyes, we are perfect!! WOW).
-All speak english (this is annoying if you have seen the *CRAP* STARGATE serie). Why not french, esperanto, catalan or better: They don't know any human language??????

Star Trek is the smallest crap in the crap-crap world of futuristic tv series, but has enormous errors that I don't type here (no time, sorry!), but WORSE is a game that copy a serie. In MOO3 probably we will see amaizing graphics, with a good background, but we never will sense a proximity with the basis or the possibility to change a file game making a "Monica Lewinsky's Blue Dress" wonder or a "Microsoft" tribe.

[Lou Wigman]

I have played ALL the civ games for many years now and enjoy them ALL. I have also played EU to death. Unfortunately this only took a few months. The fundamental problem with EU is its lack of depth. It has a wonderful diplomacy model and superficially it plays 'historically'. The AI is crap, but then the AI in most civ games is little better.

What I missed most in EU was the inability to get in and develop my country ala civ. Couldn't get my hands dirty on building improvements etc. Trade is a joke, but then civ games handle this poorly too. The tech-tree is utterly meaningless and has to be one of the most alienating of any game out there. I liked the religion thingy though.