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Civilization III: The Good, the bad & the Ugly
Now that I have played CIV III my feelings are a mixture of approval, disapointment and supprise at the number of missed opportunities for innovation. In the sense that I expected much more from a third generation product, the ambivalence about it constitutes an effective failure of the product to meet the expectations of the player. Lets call it CIV 2.45.
The Good.
There are several significant changes that deserve to be praised. The first is the implimentation of meaningful resources and the simple and elegant way in which it was accomplished. It advances an idea from the original game that was undeveloped in the sense that tile bonuses added little to play beyond a few extra coins or shields. Now these features have become very valuable to the player and make a qualitative difference in what the player is able to do. So much so that certain resources are worthy of conflict to obtain them. This adds a new level of excitment and anticipation to play and gives the player new ways to manipulate the play environment. The method of using strategic and luxury resources is an excellent compromise between simplicity and reality. By making resources available only when their need is recognised is a good concept and bypasses the issues of exploration and search in an believable and senseble manner. The fact that they are tradable is also excellent. All in all, this is a good idea done well and a logical evolution of the game. One thing missing though is manufactured luxuries and resources. Steel, televisions and microchips are some obvious ones. Level I and II manufactures could be very powerful boosts to a civilization but will make it vulnerable to a loss of some vital low level component.
The other praiseworthy change is the ability to do sophisticated trading in diplomacy. What ever complaints about how it works and a rather clumbsy feedback mechanism, the ability to trade a range of products and services for some custom package of goods and services is a welcome innovation and adds flavor to the diplomatic aspect of game play. This change makes diplomatic relationships complex and valuable, with the result that, again, the player has more ways to manipulate the direction of game play in ways that change the quality of play. ie, if you devlope a strategic partner that can supply you oil when your own supply fails, doing things for that partner becomes significantly valuable and influences your strategic decisions. An improvement to the functionality of the negotiation would be to have the lump sum and per turn amounts presented as permenant value sliders, and the comparative values of the offered amounts linked to an acceptability graph that updates with each change. There should be two graphs, one for acceptability or happiness with the trade and one for 'good will'. Trade items should display a 'trade value' so you can get a sense of worth and there should be a slider on the item displays so you can easily view a long list of trade goods. The animated heads keep nodding in some eternally repetitive fashon which is both weird and annoying, but after a while you can train yourself to partly ignore the graphic.
Culture and its relationship to political influence is an interesting and positive addition to the CIV series. It gives the player another meaningful tool to use in developing his civilization and gives multiple values to city structures. While much work needs to be done to properly develope this concept, it is a good start.
The way in which air missions are done is very good and solves the perrenial problem of spear chuckers knocking down F16s.
The small wonders, essentually unique civ level improvements, is very good, and should be expanded.
The key to the success of these changes is that they are natural evolutions of existing concepts, thus they contribute to the fundimental direction of the game and aid in involving the player in the fantasy. They make give more meaning to those particular game aspects and provide for more choices in manipulating play.
The Bad:
No Stack Movement. It has become dreary drudgery to move all those units to the same place especially when the program keeps flicking back and forth between target distinations and the stack of units you are trying to move. Unless if flicks back to units that you are not yet ready to deal with. This becomes a physically demanding and stressful activity in any sizable game. How seemingly thoughtless it is that the ability to designat a large number of units to 'go there' is absent. Did the people who designed and wrote the program ever use it?
A little intelligence in the way in which the screen recenters would go a long way to releive stress also. The screen does not need to recenter every time it goes to a new unit, only when that unit is beyond visual range. And it should select units to cycle through in a spiral around the last activated unit. This way my perspective isn't constantly shocked by rapid changes in perspective.
Unit combat insanity. While I can accept the use of a highly idealized and simplistic combat resolution system, some recognition of the quality of units must be made beyond attack values. That is if you want to maintain belief in the illusion of the game. The way things currently are, I am much better off building ten viking war galleys and attacking a battleship with them than doing anything else. While some players may have no trouble with the concept of a magical war galley, I do. If you want to identify a unit as a specific type of real world device, you must consider all its relevant qualities. Did the programmers visualize in their minds a knight in shiny armour and pointy lance charging into a Sherman Tank and prevailing in the resultant collision? Did Viking war galleys really have advanced ASW (anti submarine warfare) capabilities sufficient to hunt down and sink a 688 nuclear attack sub, or the ability to plow their bronze covered wooded ram through the 26 inch steel armored hull of a WWII style battleship? If so, why doesn't every navy in the present day world have a fleet of them to go into battle with, it would certainly be more economical than an Ageas destroyer. Visualize it, how does a war galley attack even a critically crippled battleship? Assuming that plowing through the hull is not an available option, the shear height of the hull is twice the length of the galley, thus the act of climing over the sides of the battleship is rather difficult. Assumning all the deck guns are dead, even the small arms of the sailors would be sufficient to fight off the galley or even sink it. Ok, lets say someone lost the key to the armory and the crew has to fight the galley hand to hand, well, there are 1,500 men on the battleship and at best 50-60 on the galley. At those odds, the battleship crew doesn't even fight, they can win by stampeding in the direction of the invaders and crush them like fans at an English soccer game. What should really happen is that when the first monitor class ship hits the water, everybody with a heavy investment in wooden warships wets their pants in fear as they realize that their vast proud fleets just became kindling for someone's fireplace.
Catapults and cannon have artillary functions but the 'cannon' on a tank does not. What is a tank but primarily a very moble cannon.
The problem is that there is no relationship between the unit designation and its behavior. This makes units relatively meaningless beyond the incremental value of their combat numbers and breaks the illusion of the game when clearly impossible and irrational situations occur.
The sentry option for units disappeared. Oddly, this has been a standard feature of games of this type for nearly a decade, did it somehow become obsolete.
My advisors, while they love to put forth a constant stream of trivia and insipid commentary, don't feel that I, as supreme diety of the nation, should be informed when one of my cities is nuked. I feel that I should be informed about this bit of trivia, and maby even see a flash from the direction of said city if it is just out of visual range or the mushroom cloud itself. It is also annoying that there is no flash and fireball when I nuke something, I need that visual and tactile feedback as it adds to the illusion of accomplishment. Those little electon lives shouldn't die in vain, there should be at least some resultant entertainment.
Speaking of the advisors, these guys remind me far too much of the Microsoft Word paperclip helper. The paperclip is both cloying and annoying, there when you don't want it and hard to use when you do finally try to do someting with it. It does however have the virtue that you can get rid of it, unlike the CIV paperclip persons who you can't ever shut up. The commentary in the advisors screen has a rich range from painfully obvious, to irrelevant, to insultingly insipid. They actually obscure information rather than help present relevent data in a meaningful way. If you enjoy watching tv commercials and talk about them excitedly with your friends or are enthralled by laundry moving in the washer window you will enjoy these critters, othewise you will find you hand stabbing the esc key spasmatically when ever you hear that chime.
Its is nice to be told that I can build some new minor miracle, please don't tell me that maby I should as I can decide that myself. Please don't force me to have to acknowlege purly informational announcements, it is physically tiring and difficult to target that little dot. Infact the whole turn should be processed and a list of events presented that I can respond to or not at my leasure. I should not have to constantly monitor the screen to keep these dialogs from stopping the program's progress.
I don't want to be constantly told to build an aquaduct or hospital, there are so many other important things that require my attention that having to explain to the program that I really do want to finish that unit or factoy again and again is a serious problem. I find myself building things I don't want just to avoid seeing messages or having to constantly monitor my cities. There is a way to get the govener to force the city to build units but it is cumbersome.
If I don't have enough money to buy an upgrade or city enhancement, show that information and disable the button. Do not force me to click the button and subsquent dialoge boxes just to find out what should already been known.
It would be very nice to be able to click on the shield bucket itself and drag my cusor down, filling the bucket and emptying the treasury as I feel is needed. I don't always want to buy the whole thing, just speed it up a little here and there.
I should be able to find out what my current agreements are from my foreign advisor without the necessity to reinterview the other civ. I should also be able to access known statistical information about the other civs.
My cultural advisor should be able to give me a list of wonders existing and under construction that I am aware of, maby even completion times if my intel is good enough.
The list of cities in the domestic screen will not stay sorted, how am I to get information from this fleeting list? CIties in civil disorder or close to reovlt should be highlighted, as they are difficult to discern either on the list or on the map.
I can't even talk about the city govener it is so bad and unweildy. But I wish my cities would continue to produce those units I tell it to, not pirate ships and wonders It can't possibly finsh. The cities often switch tasks without telling me just to sneak these useless things through.
A pull down, scrollable list of cities in the city screen would be nice so that I can, without leaving the city screen, to directly to any other city I want to change.
An actual build que would be nice, and something more advanced that the simple one thing at a time project builds.
There are so many orphan technologies. Things like philosophy, steel and radios, are just meaningless speed bumps on the way to something useful. Why doesn't the discovery of large scale steel production give me a steel mill to produce or some other artiface or ability? Philosophy and religion could be more sophisticated and give me a choice of philosophies or religions to follow, choices that have significant future consiquences. Hindi and Buddisim are very successful religions, and they are pantheistic, why is monotheism the only path forward? Religion is a fundemental (forgive the pun) influence on how sociaties develop, but in CIV it is a simply a speed bump and a build.
The tech tree concept is very old, and needs to evolve. Why not more than one tree in the tech forest, some with different advancement requirements like culture or religious values or some event in the civ or world.
There should be a means by which advances are lost from the civilization, just as what happened in the dark ages.
The Ugly:
The defeat dart board and its infantile baiting has got to go or at least have a disable option. This is such a variance from the original CIV ideal that surviving as far as you did, no matter your score or victory, was a victory in itself. This feature is so mindlessly revolting as to spoil the game for me and anytime I am not absolutly victorious I just kill the game to avoid it. Eventually I just won't play the game to avoid it.
The win screen is almost as annoying and really provides a negative incentive to attain that victory condition.
The barbarian with the mallot and bell is not as revolting as the defeat/victory screens, but gives the game a juvinile/carny feel that just runs counter to the central theme of the game, kind of like finding Barny the Dinosaur shaking hands with Bogart at the end of Cassablanca.
It is not that this stuff is juvinile and mean, it displays an appalling lack of immagination. It would have been better to have done nothing at all than to grease my screen with this useless drek.
Now that I have played CIV III my feelings are a mixture of approval, disapointment and supprise at the number of missed opportunities for innovation. In the sense that I expected much more from a third generation product, the ambivalence about it constitutes an effective failure of the product to meet the expectations of the player. Lets call it CIV 2.45.
The Good.
There are several significant changes that deserve to be praised. The first is the implimentation of meaningful resources and the simple and elegant way in which it was accomplished. It advances an idea from the original game that was undeveloped in the sense that tile bonuses added little to play beyond a few extra coins or shields. Now these features have become very valuable to the player and make a qualitative difference in what the player is able to do. So much so that certain resources are worthy of conflict to obtain them. This adds a new level of excitment and anticipation to play and gives the player new ways to manipulate the play environment. The method of using strategic and luxury resources is an excellent compromise between simplicity and reality. By making resources available only when their need is recognised is a good concept and bypasses the issues of exploration and search in an believable and senseble manner. The fact that they are tradable is also excellent. All in all, this is a good idea done well and a logical evolution of the game. One thing missing though is manufactured luxuries and resources. Steel, televisions and microchips are some obvious ones. Level I and II manufactures could be very powerful boosts to a civilization but will make it vulnerable to a loss of some vital low level component.
The other praiseworthy change is the ability to do sophisticated trading in diplomacy. What ever complaints about how it works and a rather clumbsy feedback mechanism, the ability to trade a range of products and services for some custom package of goods and services is a welcome innovation and adds flavor to the diplomatic aspect of game play. This change makes diplomatic relationships complex and valuable, with the result that, again, the player has more ways to manipulate the direction of game play in ways that change the quality of play. ie, if you devlope a strategic partner that can supply you oil when your own supply fails, doing things for that partner becomes significantly valuable and influences your strategic decisions. An improvement to the functionality of the negotiation would be to have the lump sum and per turn amounts presented as permenant value sliders, and the comparative values of the offered amounts linked to an acceptability graph that updates with each change. There should be two graphs, one for acceptability or happiness with the trade and one for 'good will'. Trade items should display a 'trade value' so you can get a sense of worth and there should be a slider on the item displays so you can easily view a long list of trade goods. The animated heads keep nodding in some eternally repetitive fashon which is both weird and annoying, but after a while you can train yourself to partly ignore the graphic.
Culture and its relationship to political influence is an interesting and positive addition to the CIV series. It gives the player another meaningful tool to use in developing his civilization and gives multiple values to city structures. While much work needs to be done to properly develope this concept, it is a good start.
The way in which air missions are done is very good and solves the perrenial problem of spear chuckers knocking down F16s.
The small wonders, essentually unique civ level improvements, is very good, and should be expanded.
The key to the success of these changes is that they are natural evolutions of existing concepts, thus they contribute to the fundimental direction of the game and aid in involving the player in the fantasy. They make give more meaning to those particular game aspects and provide for more choices in manipulating play.
The Bad:
No Stack Movement. It has become dreary drudgery to move all those units to the same place especially when the program keeps flicking back and forth between target distinations and the stack of units you are trying to move. Unless if flicks back to units that you are not yet ready to deal with. This becomes a physically demanding and stressful activity in any sizable game. How seemingly thoughtless it is that the ability to designat a large number of units to 'go there' is absent. Did the people who designed and wrote the program ever use it?
A little intelligence in the way in which the screen recenters would go a long way to releive stress also. The screen does not need to recenter every time it goes to a new unit, only when that unit is beyond visual range. And it should select units to cycle through in a spiral around the last activated unit. This way my perspective isn't constantly shocked by rapid changes in perspective.
Unit combat insanity. While I can accept the use of a highly idealized and simplistic combat resolution system, some recognition of the quality of units must be made beyond attack values. That is if you want to maintain belief in the illusion of the game. The way things currently are, I am much better off building ten viking war galleys and attacking a battleship with them than doing anything else. While some players may have no trouble with the concept of a magical war galley, I do. If you want to identify a unit as a specific type of real world device, you must consider all its relevant qualities. Did the programmers visualize in their minds a knight in shiny armour and pointy lance charging into a Sherman Tank and prevailing in the resultant collision? Did Viking war galleys really have advanced ASW (anti submarine warfare) capabilities sufficient to hunt down and sink a 688 nuclear attack sub, or the ability to plow their bronze covered wooded ram through the 26 inch steel armored hull of a WWII style battleship? If so, why doesn't every navy in the present day world have a fleet of them to go into battle with, it would certainly be more economical than an Ageas destroyer. Visualize it, how does a war galley attack even a critically crippled battleship? Assuming that plowing through the hull is not an available option, the shear height of the hull is twice the length of the galley, thus the act of climing over the sides of the battleship is rather difficult. Assumning all the deck guns are dead, even the small arms of the sailors would be sufficient to fight off the galley or even sink it. Ok, lets say someone lost the key to the armory and the crew has to fight the galley hand to hand, well, there are 1,500 men on the battleship and at best 50-60 on the galley. At those odds, the battleship crew doesn't even fight, they can win by stampeding in the direction of the invaders and crush them like fans at an English soccer game. What should really happen is that when the first monitor class ship hits the water, everybody with a heavy investment in wooden warships wets their pants in fear as they realize that their vast proud fleets just became kindling for someone's fireplace.
Catapults and cannon have artillary functions but the 'cannon' on a tank does not. What is a tank but primarily a very moble cannon.
The problem is that there is no relationship between the unit designation and its behavior. This makes units relatively meaningless beyond the incremental value of their combat numbers and breaks the illusion of the game when clearly impossible and irrational situations occur.
The sentry option for units disappeared. Oddly, this has been a standard feature of games of this type for nearly a decade, did it somehow become obsolete.
My advisors, while they love to put forth a constant stream of trivia and insipid commentary, don't feel that I, as supreme diety of the nation, should be informed when one of my cities is nuked. I feel that I should be informed about this bit of trivia, and maby even see a flash from the direction of said city if it is just out of visual range or the mushroom cloud itself. It is also annoying that there is no flash and fireball when I nuke something, I need that visual and tactile feedback as it adds to the illusion of accomplishment. Those little electon lives shouldn't die in vain, there should be at least some resultant entertainment.
Speaking of the advisors, these guys remind me far too much of the Microsoft Word paperclip helper. The paperclip is both cloying and annoying, there when you don't want it and hard to use when you do finally try to do someting with it. It does however have the virtue that you can get rid of it, unlike the CIV paperclip persons who you can't ever shut up. The commentary in the advisors screen has a rich range from painfully obvious, to irrelevant, to insultingly insipid. They actually obscure information rather than help present relevent data in a meaningful way. If you enjoy watching tv commercials and talk about them excitedly with your friends or are enthralled by laundry moving in the washer window you will enjoy these critters, othewise you will find you hand stabbing the esc key spasmatically when ever you hear that chime.
Its is nice to be told that I can build some new minor miracle, please don't tell me that maby I should as I can decide that myself. Please don't force me to have to acknowlege purly informational announcements, it is physically tiring and difficult to target that little dot. Infact the whole turn should be processed and a list of events presented that I can respond to or not at my leasure. I should not have to constantly monitor the screen to keep these dialogs from stopping the program's progress.
I don't want to be constantly told to build an aquaduct or hospital, there are so many other important things that require my attention that having to explain to the program that I really do want to finish that unit or factoy again and again is a serious problem. I find myself building things I don't want just to avoid seeing messages or having to constantly monitor my cities. There is a way to get the govener to force the city to build units but it is cumbersome.
If I don't have enough money to buy an upgrade or city enhancement, show that information and disable the button. Do not force me to click the button and subsquent dialoge boxes just to find out what should already been known.
It would be very nice to be able to click on the shield bucket itself and drag my cusor down, filling the bucket and emptying the treasury as I feel is needed. I don't always want to buy the whole thing, just speed it up a little here and there.
I should be able to find out what my current agreements are from my foreign advisor without the necessity to reinterview the other civ. I should also be able to access known statistical information about the other civs.
My cultural advisor should be able to give me a list of wonders existing and under construction that I am aware of, maby even completion times if my intel is good enough.
The list of cities in the domestic screen will not stay sorted, how am I to get information from this fleeting list? CIties in civil disorder or close to reovlt should be highlighted, as they are difficult to discern either on the list or on the map.
I can't even talk about the city govener it is so bad and unweildy. But I wish my cities would continue to produce those units I tell it to, not pirate ships and wonders It can't possibly finsh. The cities often switch tasks without telling me just to sneak these useless things through.
A pull down, scrollable list of cities in the city screen would be nice so that I can, without leaving the city screen, to directly to any other city I want to change.
An actual build que would be nice, and something more advanced that the simple one thing at a time project builds.
There are so many orphan technologies. Things like philosophy, steel and radios, are just meaningless speed bumps on the way to something useful. Why doesn't the discovery of large scale steel production give me a steel mill to produce or some other artiface or ability? Philosophy and religion could be more sophisticated and give me a choice of philosophies or religions to follow, choices that have significant future consiquences. Hindi and Buddisim are very successful religions, and they are pantheistic, why is monotheism the only path forward? Religion is a fundemental (forgive the pun) influence on how sociaties develop, but in CIV it is a simply a speed bump and a build.
The tech tree concept is very old, and needs to evolve. Why not more than one tree in the tech forest, some with different advancement requirements like culture or religious values or some event in the civ or world.
There should be a means by which advances are lost from the civilization, just as what happened in the dark ages.
The Ugly:
The defeat dart board and its infantile baiting has got to go or at least have a disable option. This is such a variance from the original CIV ideal that surviving as far as you did, no matter your score or victory, was a victory in itself. This feature is so mindlessly revolting as to spoil the game for me and anytime I am not absolutly victorious I just kill the game to avoid it. Eventually I just won't play the game to avoid it.
The win screen is almost as annoying and really provides a negative incentive to attain that victory condition.
The barbarian with the mallot and bell is not as revolting as the defeat/victory screens, but gives the game a juvinile/carny feel that just runs counter to the central theme of the game, kind of like finding Barny the Dinosaur shaking hands with Bogart at the end of Cassablanca.
It is not that this stuff is juvinile and mean, it displays an appalling lack of immagination. It would have been better to have done nothing at all than to grease my screen with this useless drek.
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