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...I have.
I haven't played any of the previous versions so I got this one with some expectations of an interesting, challenging strategy game. I am very disappointed. I'd go so far to say that for me, Firaxis have damaged their reputation with this release. The more cynical amongst us might look at the release date, do some calculations and reckon that the patched version will be on the shelves for the Christmas rush, having been play-tested by the few thousand early adopters...
The game is flawed. It's not just the bugs that knock SOUND.DLL over every so often, or the fatal redraw errors with the (admittedly very pretty) graphics or even the cheap and cheesy comments the game puts into the mouths of the other leaders.
I believe the random number generator implementation to be flawed. This particularly affects combat. The way the random seeding works, entire portions of the game are predetermined. I also believe this implementation leads to a phenomena of long stringsof outcomes that would be statistically unlikely in the real world (think 50 heads out of 50 coin tosses). Such a claim is obviously difficult to prove, so I have to leave that in the realms of faith.
But the final straws were in a game on a huge map. I was engaged in an interesting war with the Romans; fairly evenly matched but I was making progress...then the following occurred (not in sequence)
A legionary wandered onto my saltpetre resource. I imagine that he was going to pillage the improvement to cut me off from it. It was on a mountain square. I moved 3 artillery units by rail into a nearby city and started a bombard. First unit: -2HP; second unit -1HP. The Roman unit has 1 red bar left. My 3rd bombard does not damage the Roman unit; instead it destroys the improvment on the square, thus cutting myself off from my saltpetre resource...I believe this is a bug. I have noted also that when bombarding naval units, you CANNOT bombard a unit that only has a single HP left. Artillery does 0, 1 or 2 HP damage in a turn so the Roman unit should have gone first. I can live with the idea that bombardment can damage territory, but not when there is an enemy unit on the square.
In fact, this legionary would have been impregnable if it had stayed where it was - fortified on a mountain. The only way I could touch it was with artillery and that wouldn't work to eliminate the unit. But the AI seems to want to move severly damaged units out of enemy territory...
Then...my Army of ELITE infantry (3 units) moved against a veteran cavalry unit. My army went from green to red in one turn. On the next turn, the cavalry unit, also with 1 HP attacked and defeated my army. This is a nonsense.
The Indians then invented a time machine. I kid you not. On one turn, a Roman elite cavalry unity took 2 artillery from me. On the next turn, my elite infantry took it back. As soon as I won the battle, screen focus shifted from my unit to the middle of the Indian empire (where I had no units or interest), then shifted back. On the next turn, guess what? My two artillery units had gone back to Roman control and the elite cavalry was back on the scene. It was deja vu all over again.
Then just for the hell of it, I threw my veteran immortal unit against an elite roman legionary in a size 2 city. And won the city. This is also a nonsense (although one that I prefer...)
The AI is not logical. I offered to settle with Rome for peace and they told me to get lost. On the next turn, Rome offered me a peace deal.
These were the last straws. Someone from Firaxis commented on "emergent behaviour". I'd like to point out that bugs are an emergent property of software and not all emergent behaviour is good or correct.
For a game of strategy to be enjoyable, it must be logical and consistent. If the game, as Civ III does with its references to history, technology and natural resources, claims to reflect some aspects of the real world, the player must be able to transfer what they know about the real world into the game. Battleships should defeat frigates; wounded cavalry should not be able to take out armies etc etc. If the player cannot make a logical transferrence in this way, the game reduces to the random manipulation of numbers, albeit with a fancy graphical portrayal of the results. That is the worst of gameplay - an attempt to seduce the player into some artificial reality where the way to succeed is to exploit the quirks of the implementation.
DRM
I haven't played any of the previous versions so I got this one with some expectations of an interesting, challenging strategy game. I am very disappointed. I'd go so far to say that for me, Firaxis have damaged their reputation with this release. The more cynical amongst us might look at the release date, do some calculations and reckon that the patched version will be on the shelves for the Christmas rush, having been play-tested by the few thousand early adopters...
The game is flawed. It's not just the bugs that knock SOUND.DLL over every so often, or the fatal redraw errors with the (admittedly very pretty) graphics or even the cheap and cheesy comments the game puts into the mouths of the other leaders.
I believe the random number generator implementation to be flawed. This particularly affects combat. The way the random seeding works, entire portions of the game are predetermined. I also believe this implementation leads to a phenomena of long stringsof outcomes that would be statistically unlikely in the real world (think 50 heads out of 50 coin tosses). Such a claim is obviously difficult to prove, so I have to leave that in the realms of faith.
But the final straws were in a game on a huge map. I was engaged in an interesting war with the Romans; fairly evenly matched but I was making progress...then the following occurred (not in sequence)
A legionary wandered onto my saltpetre resource. I imagine that he was going to pillage the improvement to cut me off from it. It was on a mountain square. I moved 3 artillery units by rail into a nearby city and started a bombard. First unit: -2HP; second unit -1HP. The Roman unit has 1 red bar left. My 3rd bombard does not damage the Roman unit; instead it destroys the improvment on the square, thus cutting myself off from my saltpetre resource...I believe this is a bug. I have noted also that when bombarding naval units, you CANNOT bombard a unit that only has a single HP left. Artillery does 0, 1 or 2 HP damage in a turn so the Roman unit should have gone first. I can live with the idea that bombardment can damage territory, but not when there is an enemy unit on the square.
In fact, this legionary would have been impregnable if it had stayed where it was - fortified on a mountain. The only way I could touch it was with artillery and that wouldn't work to eliminate the unit. But the AI seems to want to move severly damaged units out of enemy territory...
Then...my Army of ELITE infantry (3 units) moved against a veteran cavalry unit. My army went from green to red in one turn. On the next turn, the cavalry unit, also with 1 HP attacked and defeated my army. This is a nonsense.
The Indians then invented a time machine. I kid you not. On one turn, a Roman elite cavalry unity took 2 artillery from me. On the next turn, my elite infantry took it back. As soon as I won the battle, screen focus shifted from my unit to the middle of the Indian empire (where I had no units or interest), then shifted back. On the next turn, guess what? My two artillery units had gone back to Roman control and the elite cavalry was back on the scene. It was deja vu all over again.
Then just for the hell of it, I threw my veteran immortal unit against an elite roman legionary in a size 2 city. And won the city. This is also a nonsense (although one that I prefer...)
The AI is not logical. I offered to settle with Rome for peace and they told me to get lost. On the next turn, Rome offered me a peace deal.
These were the last straws. Someone from Firaxis commented on "emergent behaviour". I'd like to point out that bugs are an emergent property of software and not all emergent behaviour is good or correct.
For a game of strategy to be enjoyable, it must be logical and consistent. If the game, as Civ III does with its references to history, technology and natural resources, claims to reflect some aspects of the real world, the player must be able to transfer what they know about the real world into the game. Battleships should defeat frigates; wounded cavalry should not be able to take out armies etc etc. If the player cannot make a logical transferrence in this way, the game reduces to the random manipulation of numbers, albeit with a fancy graphical portrayal of the results. That is the worst of gameplay - an attempt to seduce the player into some artificial reality where the way to succeed is to exploit the quirks of the implementation.
DRM
May be this is a little too much on the desperate side, isn't it?
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