Civilization 3: End of the Line

[David Murray]

I find it very worrying that grown men like Yin and Venger have so much time on their hands to be constantly deriding Civilization 3 and the designers. And over a PC game as well. It must be an American trait to get incredibly argumentative over very trivial matters.

I still don't understand why the unrepentant haters don't just...umm...go away if they dislike the game so much.

[korn469]

I think the biggest problems with Civ3 in my opinion are the following

1) The game has been dumbed down on purpose and has lost some of its functionality, tile improvement is a great example of this, since specialist are virtually worthless under most circumstances once you have enough citizens so that 20 can work the land happily then your city doesn't need extra food any longer. So the best terraforming option is mostly mines with railroads, with just enough farms and railroads to feed everyone. That is a far cry from the interesting (though unbalanced, forest should have cost 5 or 6 turns instead of 4) tile improvement system in SMAC. Civ3 has even less tile improvement options than Civ2 did.

The problem with changes of this type were not so much to relieve players swamped by a magnitude of different options, but it was to relieve the AI, that means that although the player might make the exact same number of choices in a game of civ3, each choice is far moe automatic since the choices are set up to channel the AI to reaching the optimum outcome, and therefore decisions becomes tedious.

2) Although a gameplay itself centers around diplomacy more than any previous Civ game, the diplomacy menu is a mixed bag. The trade menu has obviously improved, however the other options are less than what SMAC had to offer. No matter how close an AI is to destruction it can't offer to surrender. Players can't act as peacemakers between warring factions. Players can't become allies and garrison each others bases. Players can't coordinate attacks. Players can't trade or turn over military units for some unknown reasons. The U.N. is a major disappoint compared to the U.N. council in SMAC, since the U.N. in Civ3 serves no gameplay role other than to allow diplomatic victory. Players can't meet to vote on proposals or international accords, players can't contact other civs and even bribe them to vote for them in the U.N. election. The option of actually calling for a U.N. election has been taken away from the player. Atrocities and rivalries are much less pronounced in Civ3 than they were in SMAC. You can burn down a civs cities for years then nuke them, and although they will be furious they will still negociate with you and certainly won't muster all of their resources to defeat your civ. Certianly the other civs won't unite to stop a civ with blood on its hands from commiting more atrocities. Another long asked for feature, multiple civ alliances like NATO were also left out, so the amount of innovation outside of the trade window in diplomacy is nonexistant.

3) The ancient era is by far the most interesting era in Civ3. It contains a wide variety of all kinds of play options, and it goes downhill from there. Nationalism and mobilization is a nice feature in the industrial era, yet mobilization seems not to have any downsides, and a player might as well always stay mobilized. By the modern era the game has sunk to the depth of boriness, this problem has plauged all civ games but it appears that it is more acute in Civ3 than in the other.

4) The player isn't rewarded in the game by any multimedia perks except for the palace screen and the the era advance screen. This leads me to believe that a lack of resources rather than improvement in gameplay lead to this decision. While wonder moviesget quite tedious and virtually all players cut them off if they are playing day in and day out, i found that when playing SMAC less frequently I would leave the wonder movies on. Also i don't understand why the written and verbal description of techs and units was left out (speaking solely on gameplay reasons).

5) Civ3 lacks lacks little touches like courthouses make one citizen happy under a democracy, philosophy grants one free tech, nuclear power increases naval movement by one, etc. that Civ2 had. Civ3 replaces little touches by more arbitrary decisions like well garrisoned cities defecting and the occupying army disappear without a trace and with no harm to the reverting city. Usage has no effect on resource depletion, and unless a player is heavily using a resource it is better not to connect it to the trade grid, a resource can only disappear once a road or colony is on it.

6) Lack of multiplayer and a real scenario editor. Although many will disagree agree with me on this point, all I have to say is that in just the apolyton forums alone, there is still a number of Civ2, Call to Power, and SMAC games going on. Multiplayer is still quite active for both SMAC and CtP. There is more activity in the CtP multiplayer forum than there is in the entire CtP2 section. In short, both multiplayer and scenarios keep a game alive in the long run, and without either civ3 will have a much shorter lifespan.

7) Moore's law. Gordan Moore one of the cofounders of Intel came up with this little observation that about every 18 months computer power will double. So if we apply that law, each time a new game comes out it should be better than all previous games because the amount of computer resources that it has to work with is much greater. Since the original Civ came out ten years ago computers have made substantial advances. This in turn should lead to substantial advances in the quality of games. Everything has far more raw computing power to utilize, so games today should be much better than games from 10 years ago. A picture is worth a million words, so here is two screen shots, one from doom and one from return to castle wolfenstien.

doom (1993)

RtCW (2001)

and i was hoping to see that kind of advance in Civ3 compared to Civ1

EDIT:

That being said though, Civ3 still did include some innovations and the fact is that Civ3 is a stable game on windows 98. It still maintains the same basic civ gameplay and it is firmly anchored on human history rather than SciFi. For those who liked civ2 because you could recreate history, but hated the scifi elements of SMAC then it is a worthy upgrade and superior to Civ2 in most areas. Thos of you who like the Civ formula and aren't nitpicky then it is also a worthy upgrade to SMAC. All in all its a good game, yet it is far from being the second coming of civ or anything. It has high and lows, and don't believe either the best or worst things that people have to say about.

[David Murray]

I certainly agree with your summary of the limitaitons of diplomacy korn. It would have been brilliant to see all the missing features you described added. But it would also take a heck of a lot of programming and effort. What with Firaxis' fixation on "fun" perhaps that extra effort was foregone for simplicity's sake (and it's not as if there's really that many people complaining about the diplomacy system besides a handful).

Furthermore, the removal of fundamentalism and nasty espionage missions like planting nukes and diseases are sorely missed by myself, although perhaps not that many other people. I just think they are important elements that we have to learn to deal with/eliminate.

[Deathwalker]

I just wish they had finished the game and then properley tested it. Also that they would stopp trying to explain there crap game concept e.g. Planes can;t shink ships. As part of some grand plan to balance the game, what crap

[korn469]

David

It would have been brilliant to see all the missing features you described added. But it would also take a heck of a lot of programming and effort. What with Firaxis' fixation on "fun" perhaps that extra effort was foregone for simplicity's sake (and it's not as if there's really that many people complaining about the diplomacy system besides a handful).

Since Civ3 was built on the SMAC engine and all of the diplomacy features i listed except for something like NATO was part of the codebase it doesn't seem like it should have been that hard to include it in Civ3, however there seems to be an either either conscious or not, to not include ideas Brian Reynolds added to SMAC in Civ3. This might be because of an agreement signed when he left firaxis or i might all be coincidence.

Besides the terrorism scare, I guess that Civ3 is more disney than SMAC was, so when you put 100,000 people to death in SMAC it showed a burning base and the leader of the civ you did this too would vow to see you burn, and other civs would put economic sanctions on you. In Civ3 after you kill that many people, a friendly looking advisor shows up acting like nothing has happened and ask if you would rather build cultural raising buildings in your empire instead of ICBMs. Then it's back to the oh so pleasantly cartoony killing fields.

[korn469]

Deathwalker

lso that they would stopp trying to explain there crap game concept e.g. Planes can;t shink ships.

if planes could sink ships then you would have the game concept of B-17s being able to sink Aegis Cruisers, while F/A-18 Super Hornets would have trouble sinking Ironclads. Yeap that sounds absolutely realistic.

[David Murray]

Originally posted by korn469
In Civ3 after you kill that many people, a friendly looking advisor shows up acting like nothing has happened and ask if you would rather build cultural raising buildings in your empire instead of ICBMs. Then it's back to the oh so pleasantly cartoony killing fields.

Very well said.

I suppose you can't have it all. Good graphics and good, realistic gameplay takes too much effort.

[Fidel]

Originally posted by korn469
3) The ancient era is by far the most interesting era in Civ3. It contains a wide variety of all kinds of play options, and it goes downhill from there. Nationalism and mobilization is a nice feature in the industrial era, yet mobilization seems not to have any downsides, and a player might as well always stay mobilized. By the modern era the game has sunk to the depth of boriness, this problem has plauged all civ games but it appears that it is more acute in Civ3 than in the other.

agreed on UN
as for mobilization, i think that the penalty of not being able to build any non-military improvements is pretty substantial...

and IMHO, modern era is the best part....except for the cheap victory costs for UN and spaceship. the warfare and other thingies simply rock.

that said, attrocities and diplo stuff should be better

[korn469]

LaRusso

it might be a bug but it has been my experiance that even when i am mobilized that i can build non-military improvements, i just don't get the bonus

this is prepatch, try it out and see if it works

[yin26]

I still don't understand...

Dave, you should have stopped there.

Don't presume to know how much time I have on my hands. I work 3 jobs and just got grabbed to work for one of the most prestigious institutes in Korea. In all likelihood, I'm busier than you by orders of magnitude.

So the better question is: Why, if I'm so busy, do I 'waste' my time here? Two reasons come to mind: 1) I have friends here and since I'm often at a computer, it's not hard to drop comments and 2) I still have outside hope that the Gold Edition of Civ3 will be worth trying.

Beyond that, I find it sad that you have so much time on your hands to waste time wondering why we are wasting our time.

[Simpleton]

Originally posted by jimmytrick
Its not everyday you can get 5 stars from Yin and bore a simpleton with the same post.

How come Yin gets his name capitalized buy mine isn't!! I demand equal rights!!! I got rights!!!

[Capt Dizle]

ok

Simpleton. Simpleton. Simpleton.

There.

Actually, my intent when I started this thread was to post and hopefully just forget Civ 3.

So, I am going to try to do that. Goodbye and god bless.

jt

[Fidel]

Originally posted by korn469
LaRusso

it might be a bug but it has been my experiance that even when i am mobilized that i can build non-military improvements, i just don't get the bonus

this is prepatch, try it out and see if it works

IIRC you can build some 'mixed improvements' like harbors, but no banks, marketplaces, etc. they are just not an option....

[moomin]

Originally posted by Velociryx

If it IS to be a Builder's paradise.....

I'm a card-carrying builder and would like to contend that Civ3 is much less of a builders game than SMAC ever was. Why? Both SMAC and Civ3 favor the war-monger. SMAC favors the warmonger _more_, but then a throuroghly peaceful game is possible, if kind of difficult, in SMAC. As far as I can tell, there is no peaceful option in Civ3 - resource shortage will eventually force you to stab, at least on Diety.

I used to derive my gaming pleasure from playing builder Transcend games in SMAC, using scenarios to set up the AI as a powerhose and then trying to survive by excellence in regard to terraforming and square expliotation, combined arms defensive strategy, diplomatic wheeling and dealing and so forth. None of this is remotely possible with Civ3. Terraforming has fewer options than even in Civ2 and optimal tile usage is so obvious they could well have set govenors to autoimprove tiles without much loss, the diplomacy has been gutted, the spying options (while I, personally, like the god-mode) are largely useless, the specialist are even more so.

If anybody has come close to winning any kind of Diety game playing _peaceful_ builder, I'd be glad to hear it. I find it's the worst of two worlds - I must go on brutal military assault from day one to survive, and by doing so there's no real challenge even at Deity.

And to think I used to win by transcedence and vote in SMAC games at trascend level playing Playing Zak against Yang, Miriam and Santigo _without ever firing a single shot during the entire duration of the game_. Those were the days.

[Venger]

Re: wow,

Originally posted by jimmytrick
my excitement is palpable as I run to the dictionary to look up the word
juxtaposed.....

Heh, great line...

juxtaposed positions...gee, Venger, who knew you would be the one to bring sex into this thing...

Come on, you know sex talk is off limits, you trying to get me banned or something?

Venger