Civilization 3: End of the Line

[Wrong_shui]

Civ3 does its job.

It fills the time between my GF taking my money and death.

[Venger]

Think the the builder/conqueror model is flawed, because it predisposes itself to assuming these groups are mutually exclusive.

I am both. My cities are magnificent - always have been. Why? Because cities are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. In order to conquer, I must build, in order to build, I must have production, in order to produce, I must have shields, in order to have shields, I must work tiles, in order to work tiles, I must have population, in order to have population, I must have growth, in order to have growth, I must have infrastructure.

I got cash money that my FIRST game of Civ3 has more money tied up in city improvement maintenance than 99.9% of all the games played here. I have a glorious civilization, a huge population, sprawling cities that produce 70+ shields a turn. My newly acquired cities go on a crash bulding program that adds a temple, factory, courthouse, marketplace, and then branches into either an aqueduct or library depending on size. No units, not a one. Not until they are finished.

My production comes from my powerhouse cities, cities that have nothing left to build. 30 of them. 40 of them. Every two turns producing veteran Modern Armor. That's 20 new units a turn. I am the arsenal of freedom (well, liberation maybe)...

Conquering without bulding is as dull as building without conquering. Building is a means to an end...

Venger

[Velociryx]

Excellent points, Sir Venger, though I should point out that the model (Builder/Conquerer) is not flawed, I simply used shorthand when writing about it.

The full model is actually a sliding scale:

Builder-----Hybrid-----Momentum

With each player residing *somewhere* along it.

Ultimately, the extreme ends of "Builder" and "Momentum" are points that no sane player EVER plays at, because, as you say, both are necessary in order to excel at the game. Thus, in their purest, most undiluted forms, the extreme ends of the spectrum can be seen as....archtypes.

-=Vel=-

EDIT: "Building is a means to an end"

Quite true....Conquering is also a means to an end. The flip-side of the same coin.

-V.

[David Murray]

Originally posted by yin26
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.

Can you see just how impressed I am? I really can't commend them on their choice. I hope they know what they've let themselves in for--a whole lot of motherf***ing grief if your attitude on the forums is anything to go by.

In all honesty, I think it's obvious that you are a very arrogant and obnoxious man.

The way you act I am pretty amazed you have any friends at all. A man of your stature! Working all those jobs, so busy, all those friends! Pissing your pants over a PC game!

Sheesh. I sincerely hope (and I make no assumptions at this point) that you don't talk to your "many" friends and your family like you do to complete strangers. Otherwise, I feel intense pity for them.

Like I say. If you have such a hangup over Civ, I suggest you seek therapy. Wasting bandwidth on Apolyton and making everyone else suffer from YOUR problems is not a good way of releasing your tensions.

Come back when you have something useful to say, mate.

Ahh, the unbridled joys of the "ignore list".

Merry Christmas.

[gaikokujin]

Originally posted by N. Machiavelli
My Trekkie/geek roots remind me of 5 of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition:

#202: The justification of profit is profit.

Correction: the justification of profit is MORE profit.

(and jimmytrick is right on the money)

[N. Machiavelli]

Originally posted by gaikokujin


Correction: the justification of profit is MORE profit.

(and jimmytrick is right on the money)

Sorry, typo. The sad thing was that I recalled these from memory, so sue me.

[yin26]

David:

I see. Can't hold your own in a conversation, eh? Once again you presume to know everything there is to know about somebody by how much and in what way you read what they post on the Internet?

Talk about a horribly simple and rather dense view of life.

Meet me one day, then make your decisions. You know jack-crap about me, and to presume you *do* shows you don't quite understand something larger than a bulletin board?

LOL! Sad!

[Dis]

what the hell? I have been playing a crappy game all this time and didn't realize it.

good thing I read this thread

I am going to throw away my copy of civ3. No more bad games for me. Back to deer hunter 2.

[Velociryx]

LOL@ Dissident's comment....and a good sig line, btw....sooooo, by extension then....

"...spirituality is for people who have....been married?"

-=Vel=-
(with apologies to my ex-wife)

[David Weldon]

The reason I posted in support of JT's opinioin early on in this thread is not because CivIII is a crappy game. I have an opion of it's quality, but that's not relevant right now. There's no way anyone can win a "CivIII is good/bad" argument. Crappy is in the nose of the unfortunate observer...

What really gets my goat is that CivIII is a magnificently shoddy product. It has a huge array of inspired ideas and cool gameplay innovations, almost all of which are implemented poorly. See the first page of this thread for detailed lists of many such features. Granted, some of the points mentioned could be considered judgement calls, but the vast majority of them are so simple and obvious as to be almost common sense! Others are simply an un-doing of things that were already done better in previous games.

Now it seems like they've spent their patch-time reacting in a very ad-hoc way to problems created by a combination of sub-optimal game systems. They should instead be improving those systems.

I don't think most of the anger/unrest is the result of catering to a builder or momentum crowd, I think it's the result of an obvious lack of respect for us consumers. We're all subconsiously pissed that Firaxis would screw us like they have.

If the game were simply too "peaceful" for some and/or too "warlike" for others, I don't think we'd see the venom that exists. Likewise, if the game just flat out sucked, we wouldn't even be here talking about it.

We're insulted. I'm insulted. I'm going to go play now...

[Tyrion]

Originally posted by David Murray


Can you see just how impressed I am? I really can't commend them on their choice. I hope they know what they've let themselves in for--a whole lot of motherf***ing grief if your attitude on the forums is anything to go by.

In all honesty, I think it's obvious that you are a very arrogant and obnoxious man.

The way you act I am pretty amazed you have any friends at all. A man of your stature! Working all those jobs, so busy, all those friends! Pissing your pants over a PC game!

Sheesh. I sincerely hope (and I make no assumptions at this point) that you don't talk to your "many" friends and your family like you do to complete strangers. Otherwise, I feel intense pity for them.

Like I say. If you have such a hangup over Civ, I suggest you seek therapy. Wasting bandwidth on Apolyton and making everyone else suffer from YOUR problems is not a good way of releasing your tensions.

Come back when you have something useful to say, mate.

Ahh, the unbridled joys of the "ignore list".

Merry Christmas.

I haven't seen the arrogance and obnoxiousness you're complaining about...perhaps you're lashing out at yin because you cannot accept criticism of Civ 3?

I don't think yin is "wasting bandwidth and making everyone else suffer". At least, I'm not suffering. I actually like to hear more than one opinion of a game, even if that opinion doesn't toe the party line.

Civ3 could have surpassed SMAC. Instead it kept many of the worst flaws of the Civ series, threw out the innovative and cool features of SMAC, and introduced a whole new slew of bugs and poorly-implemented concepts. Now, with patches, some of these bugs and poor design decisions can be painted over with quick-fix solutions. That's just my opinion, in case people have to be reminded of that continuously...which is the impression I get from many posters on this board.

Why am I on this board if I hate the game so much? Maybe because I hold out hope that one day Civ3 will become the game I think it should be. Maybe because I'm sad that the Civ legacy is diminished, and I'm just looking at the broken pieces, the way people slow down at car wrecks.

-Tyrion