Civ3 + CtP = perfect game

[Auslander]

Originally posted by Ray K
Another KEY benefit of a Public Works system is the elimination of road sprawl. Idle workers are a waste of a resource, so we end up putting railroads everywhere. With PW, every tile improvement costs money, so you are less likely to put railroads everywhere. The resulting map on CtP was much cleaner.

Even though improved tiles allow for more production and farming and have improved transport capabilities?

In my experience PW is far greater effort. Not only did you have to build an improvement once, but over and over again. Some of those improvements such as mines and fishnets have 3 or 4 layers of upgrades. You have to scan the map every turn and remember to upgrade each one of these things. Now if there was an upgrade all tiles with x improvement then that would be one thing. But as it stands the ability to give tasks to the worker, which by the way are more than just "automate" now, are a more efficient.

PW is more micro-management in my book.

[Grumbold]

Well I'm going to assume that all the previous posters loved the CtP combat system too since all the complaints are about PW

PW is a love/hate thing. I prefer the worker but you're not going to convince anyone to convert from their side of the arguement. I certainly agree that CtP had it right when making (rail)roads useful only for movement so the tiles stay cleaner and the incentive to create guarded routes is stronger. If worker AI is ever perfected you could have the best of both worlds. Limited clicks required without the ability to save up PW points to auto-develop a super city from scratch in one fell swoop.

In CtP if you wanted to enslave workers you just went to the cities to get them. Slavery was too powerful a tactic, not too weak

[Ray K]

Originally posted by Auslander


Even though improved tiles allow for more production and farming and have improved transport capabilities?

It's been a while since I played CtP, but I do not believe that production and farming were improved by railroad. There were improvements for this purpose

In my experience PW is far greater effort. Not only did you have to build an improvement once, but over and over again. Some of those improvements such as mines and fishnets have 3 or 4 layers of upgrades. You have to scan the map every turn and remember to upgrade each one of these things. Now if there was an upgrade all tiles with x improvement then that would be one thing. But as it stands the ability to give tasks to the worker, which by the way are more than just "automate" now, are a more efficient.

I think those complaints are irrelevant to Civ3 since there are not multiple layers of upgrade in Civ3. There's roads, railroads, and either mines or irrigation.

I wasn't a big fan of the double irrigation approach in Civ2 for the very reasons you suggested.

[Kautilya]

Overall CTP2 , out of the box, was a pretty ordinary game because of the terrible AI. The mods probably solve that problem but I have had too much trouble running them so I have given up on the game. But there are indeed several areas where it is better than Civ3.

CTP2 graphics were better than Civ3 IMO. I took a look at the screenshots and it was easy to distinguish between the units which is not always possible in Civ3. I really don't understand why Civ 3 graphics are so mediocre.

Also the CTP2 combat system was superb. Not only did stacked combat really reduce micromanagement but the concept of mixing up the different kinds of units in one stack; ie ranged,flanker etc was really cool.

Civ 3 is much too stingy with stacks; there are so many restrictions on how many stacks you can make and the no. of unit in each stack are too small.

I find moving large numbers of units from one place to another quite boring so this substantially reduces my enjoyment.

CTP2 had some cool management features; you could change a whole group of city production orders at once with the national manager IIRC.

And finally CTP 2 is much more modifiable with SLIC.

So, yeah I agree that a game which combined the best features of both would really rock.

[BigBopper]

CTP/CTPII had some good features, but taken as a whole they don't hold a candle compared to Civ III. While Civ III needs lots of bugs squashed it still has that fun factor that I thought that was missing from CTP/CTPII and even SMAC. Any ways, to get to the topic of the post, there are ideas that CIV III needs to steal from the CTP line. Unit stacks is one of them, even if they fight seperatly, it would make movving bunches of units around much easier. Secondly, I like the idea of the future techs, perhaps not in the quantity of CTP, just take us 50 years or so in the future. (Fusion power, and Genetic Engineering anyone) Last but not least I think that the PW system and the worker system should be combined. I would like to be able to lay down "plans" and then have my workers who are assigned to that duty work on those improvements. (this idea is talked about earlier in this thread) I know I said my last item was last but I lied, Workers need to be more specialized. I.E. workers that just build roads and railroads (and not just between cities (ctrl N)) and workers that are on pollution duty, they would go into a suspense mode when no pollution was around.