A UK review, 5 days in

[rid102]

The one striking thing is I feel the interface is not as "secure" as Civ2, and niceities, such as displaying your bank balance whenever money deals are made, are missing.

I feel as though the interface is very much for prettiness only. There isn't great emphasis on functionality. What's wrong with the standard Windows toolkit (a la Civ2)? You can do everything with that you need, and making your own stuff just makes things harder for the developers (they need to do more work).

Also, some things are difficult to spot clearly (I'm very surprised no-one else had complained about this). E.g. "commerce" icons look similar to "food" (same colour), happy/content/unhappy citizens are hard to distinguish (no colour coding), unit types are very difficult to distinguish from one another (especially at a glance) etc.

The culture thing is going to take getting used too, but I like it.

Culture seems good. It opens up additional tactics to use.

As far as "war weariness" being partially "hidden", that's good for me too, I prefer games with a "fog of war" effect on formulated issues too

The thing that annoys me is not that it is partially hidden, it is entirely hidden from the player. I want to know how to stretch my populace to the limit during a war while still keeping up near-normal production etc. As I don't know how war weariness works, exactly, that's very difficult to do. It limits my power. What factors affect how your citizens react? It's just not explained yet is a factor that affects how you run your entire empire.

[Grumbold]

Originally posted by rid102
May sound like a stupid couple of points but:

- Are you sure you're building Mass Transit and Recycling Center improvements in the problem Cities? (I assume, yes).

- Have you got either Hoover Dam Wonder (I'm assuming it still counts as hydro-power, i.e. no pollution) or Hydro Plants in the problem Cities? (again, I assume yes where appropriate).

- Even in Civ2, if you had a City over a certain size (quite large, high 30's I think) it would still produce a couple of smoke stacks in pollution. Although the problem was easily containable, you could still have cities which produce pollution despite having done everything possible to count it.

Yes to all points. I even tried building solar power stations as well as mass transit and recycling to see if it did better than the Hoover hydro power. It seems any city of 15+ pop with a factory will produce 2 pollution even with all of these in place. Often two of the three are sufficient to get it down to 2 pollution and the third then achieves nothing except increased cost. I've yet to build a Manufacturing Plant that pushed it up from 2 pollution either when the measures are in place. It seems to be a hard to crack limit, a bit like the 4 turn per science barrier

[Patient English]

Another Brit view...

This post is largely a lift from the main "First Impressions" thread, but might be worth cross-posting here (if that doesn't get me banned! )

I have been playing Civ for a week or so, and my first impressions were very positive. Once I started getting beyond the first few cities, though, the famous corruption problem reared it's head. It was next to impossible (unaffordable) to rush build improvements in cities away from the starting continent, and building them 1 shield at a time would take 80 turns. 1000 years to build a courthouse. Hmmm. Overseas colonies without a nearby city with a harbour were also useless. It took 1000 years to build harbours, too. I can accept colonies/remote cities would not contribute much to the taxman for a long time, but they would be able to get on with building stockades, churches, harbours and so on - possibly with even greater energy than their stay-at-home countrymen.

The overall difficulty of maintaining a far-flung empire is one area where Civ III is definitely more realistic than its predessors, I would accept. However, IMHO it is also the main area where a little bit of unreality helps gameplay enormously.

It depends on your play style, I guess, but one of the things I always liked about Civ I and II was the ability to build up an empire, and associated outlying colonies. It WAS Civ, to me. OK, I didn't like to use huge Armour and Howitzer armies to conquer the whole world via a massive rail network, either (although the broken AI often forced you to do that in sheer self-defence).

IMO, Civ III penalises anything but ICS or a small, tight-knit, high-culture-high-tech group of cities. There is no middle ground that I can see. I have many other gripes about the graphics and the crazy combat system, but these are less fundamental. (Civ I combat was pretty broken in the same way and the base Civ I & II graphics were hardly beautiful).

The AI is better, true, but the "feel" of Civ has got lost, for me. No doubt I am too lightweight a player to examine all possible strategies to circumvent these problems, but frankly the game frustrated - and then bored - me too much to be bothered. Never thought I would say that about a Civ game! I think that the designers at Firaxis had another type of player in mind when they coded this game. As it stands, it is not for me. I'm sure many others will have fun with it 'though.

I have uninstalled the game from my hard disk and will go back to Civ II (scenario development and PBEM and online multiplayer). As and when Civ III has these things and has had a chance for some gameplay patches, I will look at it again - maybe.

I might have been totally seduced by Europa Universalis II by then!



John

[Grumbold]

Hmm, try a commercial civ. Playing as the Romans I could control a third of the entire playing surface with practically no cities in the 99% corrupution zone just by careful positioning of the Forbidden Palace then moving my Palace around to affect any new aquisitions. It is not perfect but you can control quite a lot that way. Later I fully intend to make the airport act like a mini forbidden palace if I can balance its cost-effectiveness properly. That should prevent curruption free ancient empires while curing the modern day malaise.

To build anything in a corrupt city (although there are some posts on the strategy forum suggesting you dont, you just milk them for tax) you need to lumberjack.

[Libertarian]

Grumbold, I just gotta say that yours was probably the most level-headed review I've seen. [...tip o' the hat...] In my opinion, you cited the critical issues in a civil and balanced way. I apologize for fawning all over you this way, and ordinarilly a balanced review would be no big deal, but after the past couple of weeks, well...

Suffice it to say that my already high admiration of the British has shot up yet another notch. Thanks.

I do like the stack movement idea very much. And I do believe that the air defense bug ought to be fixed and released immediately, since the late game is positively crippled without it. But all in all, I feel the same as you. It will be a great game after the patch.

(By the way, someone mentioned not being able to see the treasury during diplomacy. But it's there. When you click that option for trade, it will drop down.)

[Grumbold]

*blush* Aw, thanks.

There seem to be a lot of good extra features that turn out to be in the game when you know where to look, but this fixation about avoiding obvious drop-down windows or big buttons seems to have made them far too difficult to find. I know I read a post the other day about how to examine and cancel your existing trade deals but I can't find it now - or the way of doing it on the trade screen. No doubt the vital information is buried somewhere in the readme.