My First Post: Wondering about AI

[SSBLoveU]

I have played many AI games like Eliza, Adventure. They were fun. The AI in "The Sword of Argonne" and "The Rise and Rule of Ancient Empires" were weak (please excuse any spelling errors). The Sword of Argonne had really good culture effects, and the multiplayer aspects of The Rise and Rule of Ancient Empires made war fun. However, it was easy to solve any problem presented in The Sword of Argonne, i.e., the strikes over resources (one party system), the Elves and higher level spells like disintegration, and the naval AI in The Rise and Rule of Ancient Empires was barbaric. I have heard a lot about how great Civilization was. However, the AI and cultural and war aspects were less developed than Eliza and some other games. From what I have read about Civilization III, I have preordered the limited special PC edition for mid-October (?) release. If the AI, cultural, peace and war features are really great, then I see many fun hours of both Internet play and home family play.

By the way “Portal" and "The Ancient Art of War and Sea" were great civilization games of the 1980s too.

http://www.gametalk.com/talk/pc/civilization_iii/page01.htm

http://www.civfanatics.com/civ3infocenter.shtml

Civilizations:
Americans (Special Unit: F15 Fighter)
Chinese (Special Unit: ?)
Egyptians (Special Unit: ?)
English (Special Unit: Man-o-War Frigate)
French (Special Unit: Musketeer)
Germans (Special Unit: Panzer Tank)
Indians (Special Unit: ?)
Iroquois (Special Unit: ?)
Japanese (Special Unit: Samurai)
Romans (Special Unit: Legion)
Russians (Special Unit: MiG Fighter)
Zulus (Special Unit: Impis)
Greek (Special Unit: Hoplite)
Mongols (Special Unit: ?)
Aztecs (Special Unit: ?)
Persians (Special Unit: ?)

Units and Resource Requirements:
Phalanx: bronze
Nukes: uranium
Tank: steel, oil, rubber
Cavalry: horse
Modern wheeled vehicle: rubber
Jet fighter: oil
Swordsman: iron
Nuclear Missiles (ICBM and tactical nukes) are covered in the Military section of Info Center.

List of governments:
Despotism
Monarchy
Republic
Nationalism
Communism
Democracy Culture

List of resources (incomplete, not including luxury goods):
Iron
Oil
Horse
Rubber
Bronze
Gold
Coal
Uranium

List of luxury goods (Incomplete):
Silk
Wine (Grape)
Ivory (Elephant)
Gold
Spice
Diamond (Gems)
Dye
Incense

Old and New Wonders

Level of Play

There are three ways to win the game:
"UN Victory", essentially like "Diplomatic Victory" in SMAC is added.
Conquest
Spaceship

What is a win by Spaceship? One builds a spaceship and wins?

I am also a little unclear about the details of the AI in Civilization.

[Rhysie]

A win by spaceship is to be the first to get a ship to Alpha Centauri (i.e. the unity in SMAC) - In civ 2 this was done by building modules in your cities and placing them on the spaceship. The more thruster modules you had the faster it went, etc, so it was feasible to have a space race, whereby one civilization sent a ship, and then another one went right at it trying to build one which would be fast enough to get there before it, though usually whoever got to the right technology to build all the modules would win.

[SSBLoveU]

Thank you for the update Rhysie. I would have never guessed it. I hope the space flight has some adventure in it in Civilization 3. A simple space race with only one winner is not too intriguing.

(Also, I forgot one Civilization above:

Americans (Special Unit: F15 Fighter).

Oh well, no one is perfect)