why did they get rid of farmland irrigation?

[Gatekeeper]

Everyone:

Deleting the farmland option from Civilization III was one of the most foolish decisions TPTB made, IMHO. That and leaving the Mongols out — good grief, they had been in Civ since the beginning.

CYBERAmazon

[Libertarian]

Why move a bunch of individual units when you can put them in a Army and move those instead.

Well, there's a few problems with it. For one thing, you can't use it to move workers. And for another, armies are like roach motels: you can check in, but you can't check out. Plus, you lose special unit abilities, like repeat attacks. And then, there's the fact that they require Leaders, which can be more rare than a Firaxian on Apolyton.

[Minmaster]

TPTB?

what is this TPTB?

[Willem]

Originally posted by Libertarian


Well, there's a few problems with it. For one thing, you can't use it to move workers. And for another, armies are like roach motels: you can check in, but you can't check out. Plus, you lose special unit abilities, like repeat attacks. And then, there's the fact that they require Leaders, which can be more rare than a Firaxian on Apolyton.

No it doesn't work for Workers, however there are ways around your other points.

If the Army has the Unload flag set, it's possible to unload units from it.

Granted there is a loss of special ability, but that's not a problem if you use only foot soldiers, and just use those other units for special tactics.

No you don't need a leader. All you need is the flag on a small wonder checked that allows for creating an Army without one. You could make Military Academy available very early in the game, have the flag set so that it doesn't require a victorious army, then add the Build Larger Army flag to any Small Wonder that comes along after that. Everytime you build one, it will increase the size of your Army by one. (This is something I haven't personally tested yet, though someone told me it works.)

I just had a count, there's 10 small wonders, 1 of which isn't a sure thing.
That means it's possible to increase the base size of the Army by 9 units (Military Academy can also have the Build Larger Army checked). So you increase the base number to 4, change the number of cities required to 1, maybe reduce the cost by half, and you could have a bunch of 13 unit armies moving around the map by the endgame, rather than a bunch of individual units.

[Libertarian]

Goodness. It's hard to decide which is more trouble. Ten small wonders, eh. I reckon if you can have ten cities productive enough to build them while still having enough productive cities to build units, it might be worth a try.

[paulmagusnet]

farms

I had a simpler solution, I deleted the game from my disk and began playing Imperialism II again.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Libertarian
Goodness. It's hard to decide which is more trouble. Ten small wonders, eh. I reckon if you can have ten cities productive enough to build them while still having enough productive cities to build units, it might be worth a try.

Well like I said, they certainly didn't use the Army unit to it's fullest potential. At best this is a compromise. It would be much better to have a building that increases the number of units by more than one at a time. However, it does show that at least some of the issues people are complaining about can be fixed quite easily in the next patch, if they choose to.

[Quasar1011]

I have had a city up to size 37, but it starved back down to size 36. Had a city up to size 63 in Civ 2, but I had tweaked the rules. I miss farmland too, it looked cool. There is a mod on here that turns irrigation into farmland-looking squares, will download that for my next game. What I also miss is the ability to program events in Civ3. In Civ2, whenever refrigeration was discovered for the first time, I had a wav file that played the sound of a cow mooing...
-Daryl

[Daveraver]

The Reason:

There is no farmland for the same reason there is no terraforming and somewhere around thirteen useless techs in the modern age:




The game was released two or three months early.



I happen to prescribe to the school of thought that the game was made chronologically, why else would the early game be so fun, and the late game a practice in mind numbing mouse clicking?

[RickBlaine]

The modern era certainly seems to suffer from insufficient (or any) play testing. Assuming you want to play the game to a conclusion and enable a spaceship victory (and I bet that is a far more common type of victory in Civ3 than world conquest), the SS techs come far too early, and the SS components are far too easy to build. This makes the techs, improvements, wonders, and units that come later really irrelevant. And the SS builds so quickly, that there is little time to use even those modern era advances gained before launch. (The diplomatic victory, of course, is even worse, since the game lacks the SMAClike complexity in its diplomatic model to make this much more than arbitrary.)

[Libertarian]

I happen to [subscribe] to the school of thought that the game was made chronologically, why else would the early game be so fun, and the late game a practice in mind numbing mouse clicking?

What an apt description! The last game I played, I finally stopped after dismissing the Domestic Nag several dozen times with her moronic reminders about hospitals. I stared at the screen, dreading the prospect of moving my workers. Yet again.

I decided that I'd rather spend an evening at dinner with Jesse Helms than continue with this game. What a shame. One more turn? Please, no!

[Archaetus]

It's always time to quit when you start considering giving automate-worker orders.

I'm beggining to hate those little damn workers. They're evil, all of them. They're Children of the Corn I tells ya.

[Hurry]

Someone pointed out in another thread that the farmland was removed to improve AI behaviour. Since the AI always builds a web of railroads (like they did in Civ2), why not make railroads needed in every square. This way the AI workers aren´t doing any unnecessary work railroading each tile.

Still, I agree that this is a lame excuse. Firaxis should have made smarter workers instead.

[Dis]

another simplification to help the pathetic ai keep up with humans (someone had an excellent thread about this)

I'm not asking for a realistic game. why would I? But I say modern farming is a significant change in civilization. Or even industrial age farming had significant advantages. I just feel this is a part of the game that should be addressed in some way. Not necessarily the civ2 way- which I didn't care for. But they have to account for modern farming some way.

[DrFell]

It's funny that in the civ2 manual they mentioned how ugly the railroad covered maps were in civ1 and how they'd introduced farmland, superhighways, etc. to better balance city development. Then when civ3 comes out, suprise suprise, it's gone again, once again the game rules are compromised because of a crap AI. I was really shocked when I heard that, almost as shocked as I was when I heard mp wasn't an option. Another step in the wrong direction IMHO.

'I have had a city up to size 37, but it starved back down to size 36. Had a city up to size 63 in Civ 2'

You can actually get cities up to size 127 in civ2 without any rules modifications, using the food caravan trick. It's useless to have cities that size though, as any specialists over the 16th are elvises with no effect on the city.