Tweet
Ok. I'm really a casual civ fan. I played Civ 2 because a good friend of the family was kind enough to give us his copy. I literally heard about Civ 3 weeks before it was released and after reading www.civ3.com I decided to buy the game.
Since the release, I've been looking for Civilization 3 resources and I found this great site, Apolyton. Anyways, I've been lurking reading all the posts, complaints, and so on, and I know there are several threads complaining about corruption/waste problems. I just want to give a more casual joe smith type of impression to this problem.
First of all, to the people at Firaxis who reads this. I understand that more liberal forms of government such as Democracies needen't be excused from corruption. This is actually something I've always felt should have been included in Civ2. I also understand the problem of ICS (I've read up on it!) yay me.
The problem with the corruption issue is familiar so I'll spare you. But here's a brief run down of my expericence-- The first day I got Civ 3, I played a game on the largest map 180x180 (I prefer isolationist games) Because I was still learning the game, I kept my empire mostly isolated to the large continental island I started with, but by the 1900's I found myself lagging behind in culture and in power. The reason? My AI opponents had gone on a major expansion spree, they have cities everywhere. Sure, those far flung cities for the AI may only give back liyylr tax dollars or shields, but by GOD they still RACK UP CULTURE POINTS and the armies that defend them add to the POWER of the civilization.
This is the major dilema for a player and it is unfair. How can we ever win a culture game, or a points and power game for that matter, if we are to play sensibly by keeping our city count low and our empires compact, when our opponents go ahead and overextend themselves and rack up culture and power points, irregardless of the practicality of having those cities there to begin with.
Civilization is play by many people for many reasons. A lot of players like to play on small/medium size maps where contact is immediate and games are short and bloody. But others prefer to play on large maps, and I believe that in an attempt to dissuade the ICS strategy, the developers have unintentionally crippled the playability of games on large maps.
And yes, in my games on the large maps, I only chose 7 civs, instead of the maximum 16, but that was intentional. Too many civs is still too much clutter even on a large map.
I was happy to know map sizes can now be 256x256 through the use of the scenario editor. But I'm questioning how playable that map can be when in an 180X180 map, creating empires are impossible, and occupation of enemy territory ensures those cities will not give the conquering a return on their investment because those cities pushes a civilization over the optimum city limit and they their distance also adds to the corruption and waste.
Here's a couple of suggestions for the patch
1) like communism, standardize corruption among cities in democracies. It makes sense. In a democracy, power is not concentrated in the capital, but is instead spread with the people. To infer that corruption increases by distance in a Democracy is ridiculous. The City is Washington, is in many ways far more corrupt than many cities in the west coast, like Seattle.
2) eliminate or readjust the optimal city count. to combat ICS, I think you guys can add some code into the game that does simple location comparisons between cities. Cities within a certain distance away from each other are punished by more corruption and waste -- we can rationalize this in the real world by saying cities who are close to each other with overlapping city grids tend to compete against each other and resources are diverted from production into bribing citizers from competing cities and other activities involved in inter-city competition for population.
I notice that the Firaxis team has been silent on most of the corruption posts. But I hope this one gets a read from the developers, and perhaps this gets passed on to the person responsible to writing the code for this portion of the game.
From a casual gamer,
Dexter
Since the release, I've been looking for Civilization 3 resources and I found this great site, Apolyton. Anyways, I've been lurking reading all the posts, complaints, and so on, and I know there are several threads complaining about corruption/waste problems. I just want to give a more casual joe smith type of impression to this problem.
First of all, to the people at Firaxis who reads this. I understand that more liberal forms of government such as Democracies needen't be excused from corruption. This is actually something I've always felt should have been included in Civ2. I also understand the problem of ICS (I've read up on it!) yay me.
The problem with the corruption issue is familiar so I'll spare you. But here's a brief run down of my expericence-- The first day I got Civ 3, I played a game on the largest map 180x180 (I prefer isolationist games) Because I was still learning the game, I kept my empire mostly isolated to the large continental island I started with, but by the 1900's I found myself lagging behind in culture and in power. The reason? My AI opponents had gone on a major expansion spree, they have cities everywhere. Sure, those far flung cities for the AI may only give back liyylr tax dollars or shields, but by GOD they still RACK UP CULTURE POINTS and the armies that defend them add to the POWER of the civilization.
This is the major dilema for a player and it is unfair. How can we ever win a culture game, or a points and power game for that matter, if we are to play sensibly by keeping our city count low and our empires compact, when our opponents go ahead and overextend themselves and rack up culture and power points, irregardless of the practicality of having those cities there to begin with.
Civilization is play by many people for many reasons. A lot of players like to play on small/medium size maps where contact is immediate and games are short and bloody. But others prefer to play on large maps, and I believe that in an attempt to dissuade the ICS strategy, the developers have unintentionally crippled the playability of games on large maps.
And yes, in my games on the large maps, I only chose 7 civs, instead of the maximum 16, but that was intentional. Too many civs is still too much clutter even on a large map.
I was happy to know map sizes can now be 256x256 through the use of the scenario editor. But I'm questioning how playable that map can be when in an 180X180 map, creating empires are impossible, and occupation of enemy territory ensures those cities will not give the conquering a return on their investment because those cities pushes a civilization over the optimum city limit and they their distance also adds to the corruption and waste.
Here's a couple of suggestions for the patch
1) like communism, standardize corruption among cities in democracies. It makes sense. In a democracy, power is not concentrated in the capital, but is instead spread with the people. To infer that corruption increases by distance in a Democracy is ridiculous. The City is Washington, is in many ways far more corrupt than many cities in the west coast, like Seattle.
2) eliminate or readjust the optimal city count. to combat ICS, I think you guys can add some code into the game that does simple location comparisons between cities. Cities within a certain distance away from each other are punished by more corruption and waste -- we can rationalize this in the real world by saying cities who are close to each other with overlapping city grids tend to compete against each other and resources are diverted from production into bribing citizers from competing cities and other activities involved in inter-city competition for population.
I notice that the Firaxis team has been silent on most of the corruption posts. But I hope this one gets a read from the developers, and perhaps this gets passed on to the person responsible to writing the code for this portion of the game.
From a casual gamer,
Dexter
Maybe I too will be ticked off when I try a game of world conquest - but in my current game I managed to secure one half of a large continent, got maybe 15 cities with the capital being at the far end of the continent. Corruption is definitely managable - after having built courthouses, the forbidden palace, and having secured three or four sources of luxuries. I pay through my nose for those luxuries, but it gives me We love the king days in half of my cities at least, and like I said a rather managable corruption. I believe I'm out-producing and out-researching everyone else, so in this particular game I think I'll go for a cultural victory, just to see how it works.
Comment