Not a complaint, just a question.

[The Rook]

How does a bug, like the air superiority bug, make it into the game? Did the play testers never make it that far? It's such an obvious flaw! I love Civ3, I play it endlessly, but I just don't get how something so obvious can make it into a finished product. Other bugs, like the million gold per turn thing I can understand; because, that is not a normal thing a player would do. But, Air Superiority is such a fatal flaw. My bombers are at a distinct disadvantage. Does anyone know a work around? Just ranting, 'cause I was doing pretty good, but this bug is kicking my ass.

[Pyrodrew]

The patch is coming out next week. I would delay your current game until the patch comes out & start a 2nd one in the meantime. When the patch comes out resume with your original game.

I'm puzzled how that kind of bug could make it in too. The ModernAge in general seems to be the least balanced in all aspects as well. Yet, coastal fortresses don't shoot back like they should & fortresses are flawed too... and those are not a ModernAge things.

[The Rook]

Hey! That's a good idea

[Capt Dizle]

The company line on some of these obvious flaws is that last minute code tweaking to fix other things "broke" some existing mechanics.

This is plausible. I will leave it up to you to decide if you buy it.

Currently, the patch is in its 7th version, as testing has shown that the new fixes are causing new bugs.

History has taught us the with each patch we can indeed expect new bugs to be introduced. They won't even halt the patch unless they classify the new problems as show stoppers.

It is also plausible that they never did get the air superiority to work and ran up against a deadline and went to press anyway.

It is possible that it will never work in the way it was designed to. Scary thought.

[yin26]

Did the play testers never make it that far?

The play testers (all 4 of them or whatever, which is also part of the problem here with their in-house testing -- they'll never learn I guess) no doubt got that far. I imagine a moderately intelligent monkey would even notice that particular problem. It's the programming you should focus on ... and that was hacked away to meet a release deadline.

You paid $50 to beta test Civ3. The good news is you'll get a few patches 'free' that might fix the things you find most irritating.