Gamespot's Single-Player Strategy Game of the Year: Civ3

[GodSpawn]

Hmm, I haven't tried EU because from what I read, it didn't seem quite the game for me. Perhaps I should try it.

I quite liked Empire Earth, Tropico and Startopia, but to be perfectly honest I like Civ3 best out of all the strat games I've played this year.

But this year's strat games just aren't that good - compared to my favorite games of the year (Diablo II expansion and Baldur's Gate)

[Trifna]

Civ III is the game with the more POTENTIAL to be a good strategy game. It is theorically (its core) extraordinary. But some things makes that it has some problems (which doesn't make it awful to everyone...). And for Gamespot, well it seems they didn't made a profound research on their subject before writing, which makes that they didn't saw some things. A little reading on Apolyton forums would have show them some problems easily (because that, as a good fan community, we stress-tested the game on every aspect). But I don't expect them to read forums with every game they review...

[Desert Dog]

I agree Civ 3 is over rated

Hey lighten up on him because he is right about civ 3. The front end and middle game is fairly decent if you don't install the patch and use say Korn's Blitz mod. If you install the patch you will most likely have crash occur around industrial or modern age right at picking your tech.
How many of you people that think civ 3 is great using the patch have made it into modern times? How many of you have launched to Alpha Centauri? Are there any of you out there that like to build up a hugh peaceful empire without any crashes? How many have played on a 230x230 map with 8 civs without a crash?
I would be interested in hearing some honest replies. Just curious if anyone has actually saw the entire game from beginning to end with the patch installed? I have tried 3 games w/patch all of them crashed at industrial or modern times.
It even seems evident that the game will NEVER be fixed to function correctly. Firaxis is not the same since all of its top programmers left.

Desert Dog

[Libertarian]

Trifna,

I just wanted to say how much I enjoy your posts. They are always insightful, always thoughtfully measured, and always are testimony to the goodness of the person behind them.

Thanks for being here.

[Moraelin]

Well, in all fairness, while Civ 3 IS a step back from SMAC, it's not bad at all if you compare it to other strategy stuff from this year. Basically everything else is straight C&C clones, and more straight C&C clones. You've played one, you've played them all. There's THAT little innovation in that genre.

I've been playing Empire Earth these days, and while it DOES have some GREAT ideas that I would have loved to have in a proper empire-building game, it really is Age of Empires 3. They did some amazing things with those epochs, scenarios and campaigns (if you ignore that some of that stuff is far more historically inaccurate than Civ 3, and combat is even worse modelled.) No doubt. If your dream was to play one more RTS, there's none finest than EE. But it's Yet Another RTS (TM) nevertheless. A proper empire building game it is not. Sorry, nothing composed of disparate pre-made scenarios counts as actually seeing your empire through human history. You'll still have the exact same scenarios, no matter what choices you make. There is no diplomacy at all, for example, so there's no way in heck to avoid having to fight a mis-represented Sparta if you play the Greek campaign.

(But again, it had some great ideas. If someone wanted to take some ideas from EE and put them into Civ 3, I'd be one happy camper.)

Tropico was a GREAT game, but I guess it wasn't for everyone. I LOVED it, and played it for hundreds of hours. But I can understand that if someone really wanted a _war_ strategy, it's definitely not going to be their cup of tea. Tropico is an economic sim. (Same as, say, Capitalism or Railroad Tycoon.) Not a military strategy. It also was many months ago, so most people forgot about it by now.

So what I'm trying to say is: maybe Civ 3, for all its flaws and mediocre design, does deserve being strategy game of the year after all. I still wouldn't have given it the insanely high scores that some of those sites gave it, but then the other "strategy" games from this years would have got a lot lower scores from me, too.

[Libertarian]

I guess it's sort of like Ordinary People winning Best Picture in 1980 over Coal Miner's Daughter, The Elephant Man, Raging Bull, and Tess.

[player1]

Yes, CIV3 had lot of potential to better than now.

But still, IT IS BEST STRAT. GAME of THIS year.

My score: 8.8/10 (with patch)


Played many games this year, and still think that Civ3 is best one.

If some game is best of the year it doesn't mean that it is excellent & revolutional.

[Moraelin]

Yep. While 2001 has been a great year for some genres, it's been a totally crap year for strategy. Frankly, there are two games on that list (Tropico and Commandos 2) which don't even belong there. You know it's a bad year when you have to fill the top list from other genres. Tropico was an _incredibly_ innovative game, if you've played any city building games before. I could fill a page with stuff it did in a new and better way, just off the top of my head. But it was actually an economic sim. And Commandos 2 was more of a puzzle game with a war theme, than anything else.

I've read an editorial on Firing Squad this year. Not as much an editorial, as one of their reviewers' plea to give turn-based games another chance. I could almost feel that guy's pain. I mean, I had to play like two RTS games in the whole year, and got fed up with them. That guy likely was sent every single major RTS for review. He's likely had to put up with yet another C&C clone with just changed graphics every month, if not more often. (And he does try to hint at the lack of inovation, only in a somewhat diplomatic way.)

So try to see Civ 3 from one of those guys' perspective. You're drowning and you get a breath of air. It's not even fresh air. It's stale, it's damp and it smells of rotting algae. If you were on land, you'd hold your breath. But it's AIR. It's your ONLY choice.

Or to put it less dramatically, it may not be perfect, it may be a step back from some past games, it may not really be too inovative if you compare it to SMAC instead of Civ 2... but it's still better than the other "strategy" games that reviewer has reviewed this year. And he already gave those RTS games scores around 90%, only because of lack of competition at the time. Since he can't go back and say "oops, actually I've changed my mind, those games only deserve 50%, so I can give Civ 3 a 60%", all that remains to somewhat keep the proportions is to give Civ 3 a 95% and name it game of the year.

[Libertarian]

The most balanced review I've read so far:

It's stale. It's damp. It smells like rotting algae. But best of all, it's your only choice!

[yin26]

Well, I think you make a good point. I would go a bit further and add that precisely because they are used to the twitch and flex kind of games (as you say, they must play tons of them), they have lost ... or maybe never really had ... the ability to evaluate a TBS strategy game very carefully. There are simply too many signs that they played the game MAYBE once. You just can't do that with a strategy game and even hope to come close to understanding its merits and faults. It seems clear to all of us here, even the staunch supporters of CIv3, that the late game is awfully weak, suggesting that Firaxis had little time left to really make the game fun from start to finish. Sure, that can be patched, but patches are like promises that 'the check is in the mail.'

As for why EU didn't win, I think the same dynamic is in play: EU is an awfully hard game to get used to. My guess is these same guys who played two hours of Civ3 and gave it a 90+ score (noting the 'complete editor') also played two hours of EU and figured it wasn't worth continuing.

My only complaint here is: If you dare pretend to know enough about strategy games to name one Game of the Year, at least have reviewers dedicated enough to know what they are talking about ... not FPS hacks who managed to load up 1/2 a game during lunch.

[Moraelin]

Well, in all fairness... I wouldn't have nominated EU as game of the year, either. Precisely on account of that learning curve. You can't really blame a reviewer if he doesn't recommend a game based on "you'll have to spend a week trying to even understand what's happening there, and likely wishing either you or it were never born, but trust me, after that chances are you'll like it." For all its other faults, Civ 3 does kind of look more intuitive from the first time.

However, in defense of reviewers (or at least SOME reviewers), the Firing Squad did give EU not only a great score, but made an editorial to praise it and almost literally say that it's the only real-time strategy worth being called strategy at all. If it weren't for their "EU rules" sort of offensive, I probably wouldn't have bought EU at all. Kind of surprising for a site whose main qualification seems to be FPS games.

It's also worth noting that unlike the others, the Firing Squad review DOES mention that Civ 3 has almost no innovation. In fact, they say it on two different pages in a single review. Admittedly, they try to downplay that in a rather weird way, and it doesn't prevent them from giving it a 96% score either. (Guess noone's perfect after all.)