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Please note the title of the thread. I would rather not begin making a habit of asking the moderators to close my threads because they devolve into flame wars.
The goal here is not to whine, not to complain....simply to point out specific *design decisions* that were made during the course of putting Civ3 together that were....weak.
Were they wrong or incorrect? :: shrug:: Not for me to say. In my mind, the answer would be yes, but I wasn't on the design team. Some people may disagree with my words here, and if so, that's cool, but if you wanna flame me for it, send me an e-mail, and let's keep the conversation here on topic, 'k?
I'm going to take a bit of a different approach here than all the other threads I"ve seen on the topic thus far. It is all well and good to propose fixes for patches, wish lists for Civ4, and so on, but in order that there might be some understanding between those who enjoy the game and those who do not, it is important to look beyond that.
To look deeper than that.
It is my hope that this thread will illuminate for those reading it (including perhaps some members of Firaxis) exactly *where* things began going astray.
That begins with the design decisions made in the early goings.
First, and quite obviously, there was a conscious effort made to close in-game loopholes, exploits, and clamp down on the most common ways that human players win vs. the AI.
I applaud that. Excellent move!
It is in the *execution* of that plan that it falls short.
To specifics, in this case:
Anti-ICS: One of the biggest, most powerful tools at a human player's disposal, if Civ3 was to be significantly different from its predecessors, then clearly this had to go....or at least be weakened severely.
They did so in two ways: First and most obvious to the eye, by making the AI expand ICS style....very rapidly, very aggressively, simply denying the human player the opportunity to do the same, or at least limiting the options in that regard. Generally, you settle what you can, where you can and thank God you're keeping pace. That's cool....that's good, even. It sharply defines the early game as a competition for scarce resources (decent land). As it should be, and the early game is one of the most exciting parts of civ3, thanks in part to this very thing.
The second thing was by REALLY jacking up corruption.
That's not so good, and it's not for a couple of reasons.
The model itself would be fine (aggregate corruption levels) if there were no "distance from the capitol" weight, and it was simply corruption due to number of production centers.
Before I uninstalled the game, one of the things I would do is run 'start tests.' Repeatedly start new games, play ten turns and restart....just to get a feel for what the most common sorts of starts a player could expect.
In a 20-game spread, I got 11 Peninsula starts and 6 Coastal starts. 3 "midland" starts.
Given the state of the corruption model (where corruption due to distance is a HUGE factor), on a standard sized map, this means I can safely build two new cities (3 total) with a peninsular start before crippling corruption levles begin to kick in--this mostly due to the lay of the land at the start).
Three.
Coastal starts generally give you a bit more flexibility, allowing for an average of five cities total before crippling corruption sneeks in (counting the capitol).
Midland starts allow for a total of nine.
The disparities between these is simply too high....clear evidence that too much weight is given to corruption due to distance.
Pre-patch, things weren't too bad, because you could keep up a normal pace of expansion and slowly but surely build your palace out to a better location.
Ahhh, but here's where we begin to see symptoms of what is wrong.
It was discovered that people were "bouncing" their palaces hither and yon, taking advantage of an element of the "flip" formula (the element that relied on proximity to the capitol) to snag AI cities with ease. And, in an effort to close that loophole, the palace price was raised to astronomical heights.
It's true....doing so had the effect of closing that in-game loophole.
It's ALSO true that it made 17 out of 20 of my test game starts all but unplayable, because I could no longer keep a normal rate of expansion and relocate my palace. No...what it forced me to do was stop expanding, pick a fight, generate a leader and THEN relocate my palace.
Games like civ have been famous since their inception for being open ended and fostering a wide variety of playstyles, and yet, with the "fixing" of one problem, another (and much deeper) was created....now, rather than flexibility in playing style, I'm playing a game with effectively only "one way to win." I either pick a fight, or suffer with rampant corruption and get overwhelmed by AI civs who don't seem to suffer from it.
Ever.
Thus, the closing of that loophole...the manner in which the loophole was closed, created a more linear game play.
***
Strategic Resources and Luxuries:
For all intents and purposes, this is a *superb* addition to the game. It fosters strategic planning and diplomacy. It also brings forth in this iteration of Civ the notion of a "strategic war" rather than simply a war to exterminate an AI civ. (Especially when taken together with the corruption model....if you see a resource you need, and you see that it is controlled by an AI, you can either trade for it or whack the civ in question to gain control of that resource. What you DON'T generally want to do is take the civ out entire, else you're left with the aforementioned corruption problem. In general, it is simply more profitable to leave the civ weakened an alive, slowly repair your relations with them, and turn them into a client state for your surplus resources).
The problem here though, is two-fold:
In the first case, luxuries are overpowered and strategic resources under powered. Luxuries, because a single "source" of a given luxury type is enough to increase happiness in ALL your cities (magnified by the effects of a Market), and it never runs out. Strategic resources are weak because, whether you build anything that requires that resource or no, there's a chance it'll run out "just because." Invariably, when this happens, the resource will relocate to an AI's territory, forcing you to worsen your corruption problem if you want to maintain a stable supply of the resource.
It would not have taken many more lines of code to implement it thusly (I say this after having held meetings with my own design team for the Candle'Bre project....eventually we'll be incorporating resources as well, and will do so thusly):
Each resource is given a value between 400-900. Each time you build something requiring the USE of that resource, the value drops (the amount of the drop is dependant on exactly what is built). They player gets a general sense of where the value is (a range: 100-300, 300-500, 500-700, 700+, but does not know the precise amount left available to him. This fosters greater strategic USE of said resources, and can influence your desire to trade your excesses. Also, some resources are renewable (ie - Horses. If your herds begin to grow thin, simply don't build anything requiring the use of them, and they'll grow back at X per turn (to a maximum of whatever the initial value was)).
The same basic principal can be applied to luxury items, meaning that they'll serve you in a pinch to control unhappiness, but you must manage them so as not to overdo it, lest you REALLY work yourself into a bind.
As I said, the above implementation *would not* require terribly much more coding, and would greatly strengthen the whole concept of resources and their use. It would also dramatically alter their value, and allow for more "espionage type" options. For example: You could build an explorer and send him "prospecting" to check out the size of an AI player's iron deposits near your border. If the report came back indicating a feeble vein, it may well prompt you NOT to attack....after all, once gained, you would deplete it fairly quickly, so you'd have to weight the potential cost of acquiring it against what it would likely net you. And what does that equate to?
More strategy.
Given that this is a strategy game....I think that'd be a good thing.
***
The Tech Trees:
Another very cool concept was to break the time line up into eras that approximate actual historical eras. Good move.
Again, however, the way that this was implemented creates an extremely linear in-game approach. Simply put, it doesn't really matter WHAT you research, or in what order. The same cannot be said of Civ3's immediate predecessor, SMAC, which had no less than half a dozen popular and quite playable early game tech beelines, each with a dramatically different style of play.
You just don't get that here.
One of the reasons is that, with essentially four distinct tech trees, there aren't all that many techs per era, and correspondingly fewer tech branches. Had some effort been made to bolster the number of techs per era (also not difficult to do....once the tech tree structure is in place, adding more techs is easy....and there's certainly no shortage of ideas!), this part of the problem could have been avoided entirely.
It was not.
Design decision.
***
Combat:
I'll not even repeat the arguments. Everybody knows them by heart. Some like it the way it is (including me....I've never had any particular problems with it), some can't stand it.
The one thing I will say about combat is this:
Mounted units are broken.
Too powerful.
It's just that simple, and after less than half a dozen games played, that fact becomes obvious.
With such an imbalance in the game's combat units, you're right back to a linear playing approach....the game practically FORCES you to use massed horsemen on the attack. For a strategy game to do so in not one, but multiple areas of its design is....not good.
Oh, you can use combined arms and it DOES make the game more interesting and draw it out a bit, but the simple fact is that mounted units are, pound for pound, cost for cost AT LEAST half as expensive as they should be for their current power. Two ways of fixing it are to decrease the % chance of withdrawl, or double the price and require a point of pop for each mounted unit (and even the latter sugesstion might not balance them).
***
The Editor:
Ahhhh the editor. The box promised full-featured, and the ability to create our own secnarios....and we can, now that the hacker community has given us at least a few of the features conspicuously missing from the editor, but with the editor that shipped? About all you could do in it was go tweak corruption levels. Hardly "full featured allowing for unmatched flexibility" and no matter how much of a fan of the game or the company you are, that is plain to see. There's no way around that.
The editor that shipped was not the editor promised.
Even post-patch, some of the fundamentals are missing. Again, everyone here knows these by heart, so I'll not even mention them except to say that even WITH the hackers working diligently at it, there's so much that lies beyond the reach of the editor, that our best efforts can't really make a dent.
And that's too bad, because one of the hallmarks of the series has been its moddability. One of the reasons Civ2 is STILL played regularly is because of the Mod community.
The Civ3 mod community is dying on the vine....not for lack of effort on their part, but simply because you can't build a skyscraper with a pair of chopsticks.
There are others, to be sure.
Other areas of the design where the decision was made to close a loophole and deny the human player an easy win (again, that's a good thing). But when the implementation of those plans hobbles gameplay and forces players to "play this way or not at all," then the game loses much of its appeal for strategy fans.
For a strategy game to be a turn off to strategy fans is....the kiss of death, I would say.
-=Vel=-
(hushing now, to give others a chance to speak)
The goal here is not to whine, not to complain....simply to point out specific *design decisions* that were made during the course of putting Civ3 together that were....weak.
Were they wrong or incorrect? :: shrug:: Not for me to say. In my mind, the answer would be yes, but I wasn't on the design team. Some people may disagree with my words here, and if so, that's cool, but if you wanna flame me for it, send me an e-mail, and let's keep the conversation here on topic, 'k?
I'm going to take a bit of a different approach here than all the other threads I"ve seen on the topic thus far. It is all well and good to propose fixes for patches, wish lists for Civ4, and so on, but in order that there might be some understanding between those who enjoy the game and those who do not, it is important to look beyond that.
To look deeper than that.
It is my hope that this thread will illuminate for those reading it (including perhaps some members of Firaxis) exactly *where* things began going astray.
That begins with the design decisions made in the early goings.
First, and quite obviously, there was a conscious effort made to close in-game loopholes, exploits, and clamp down on the most common ways that human players win vs. the AI.
I applaud that. Excellent move!
It is in the *execution* of that plan that it falls short.
To specifics, in this case:
Anti-ICS: One of the biggest, most powerful tools at a human player's disposal, if Civ3 was to be significantly different from its predecessors, then clearly this had to go....or at least be weakened severely.
They did so in two ways: First and most obvious to the eye, by making the AI expand ICS style....very rapidly, very aggressively, simply denying the human player the opportunity to do the same, or at least limiting the options in that regard. Generally, you settle what you can, where you can and thank God you're keeping pace. That's cool....that's good, even. It sharply defines the early game as a competition for scarce resources (decent land). As it should be, and the early game is one of the most exciting parts of civ3, thanks in part to this very thing.
The second thing was by REALLY jacking up corruption.
That's not so good, and it's not for a couple of reasons.
The model itself would be fine (aggregate corruption levels) if there were no "distance from the capitol" weight, and it was simply corruption due to number of production centers.
Before I uninstalled the game, one of the things I would do is run 'start tests.' Repeatedly start new games, play ten turns and restart....just to get a feel for what the most common sorts of starts a player could expect.
In a 20-game spread, I got 11 Peninsula starts and 6 Coastal starts. 3 "midland" starts.
Given the state of the corruption model (where corruption due to distance is a HUGE factor), on a standard sized map, this means I can safely build two new cities (3 total) with a peninsular start before crippling corruption levles begin to kick in--this mostly due to the lay of the land at the start).
Three.
Coastal starts generally give you a bit more flexibility, allowing for an average of five cities total before crippling corruption sneeks in (counting the capitol).
Midland starts allow for a total of nine.
The disparities between these is simply too high....clear evidence that too much weight is given to corruption due to distance.
Pre-patch, things weren't too bad, because you could keep up a normal pace of expansion and slowly but surely build your palace out to a better location.
Ahhh, but here's where we begin to see symptoms of what is wrong.
It was discovered that people were "bouncing" their palaces hither and yon, taking advantage of an element of the "flip" formula (the element that relied on proximity to the capitol) to snag AI cities with ease. And, in an effort to close that loophole, the palace price was raised to astronomical heights.
It's true....doing so had the effect of closing that in-game loophole.
It's ALSO true that it made 17 out of 20 of my test game starts all but unplayable, because I could no longer keep a normal rate of expansion and relocate my palace. No...what it forced me to do was stop expanding, pick a fight, generate a leader and THEN relocate my palace.
Games like civ have been famous since their inception for being open ended and fostering a wide variety of playstyles, and yet, with the "fixing" of one problem, another (and much deeper) was created....now, rather than flexibility in playing style, I'm playing a game with effectively only "one way to win." I either pick a fight, or suffer with rampant corruption and get overwhelmed by AI civs who don't seem to suffer from it.
Ever.
Thus, the closing of that loophole...the manner in which the loophole was closed, created a more linear game play.
Strategic Resources and Luxuries:
For all intents and purposes, this is a *superb* addition to the game. It fosters strategic planning and diplomacy. It also brings forth in this iteration of Civ the notion of a "strategic war" rather than simply a war to exterminate an AI civ. (Especially when taken together with the corruption model....if you see a resource you need, and you see that it is controlled by an AI, you can either trade for it or whack the civ in question to gain control of that resource. What you DON'T generally want to do is take the civ out entire, else you're left with the aforementioned corruption problem. In general, it is simply more profitable to leave the civ weakened an alive, slowly repair your relations with them, and turn them into a client state for your surplus resources).
The problem here though, is two-fold:
In the first case, luxuries are overpowered and strategic resources under powered. Luxuries, because a single "source" of a given luxury type is enough to increase happiness in ALL your cities (magnified by the effects of a Market), and it never runs out. Strategic resources are weak because, whether you build anything that requires that resource or no, there's a chance it'll run out "just because." Invariably, when this happens, the resource will relocate to an AI's territory, forcing you to worsen your corruption problem if you want to maintain a stable supply of the resource.
It would not have taken many more lines of code to implement it thusly (I say this after having held meetings with my own design team for the Candle'Bre project....eventually we'll be incorporating resources as well, and will do so thusly):
Each resource is given a value between 400-900. Each time you build something requiring the USE of that resource, the value drops (the amount of the drop is dependant on exactly what is built). They player gets a general sense of where the value is (a range: 100-300, 300-500, 500-700, 700+, but does not know the precise amount left available to him. This fosters greater strategic USE of said resources, and can influence your desire to trade your excesses. Also, some resources are renewable (ie - Horses. If your herds begin to grow thin, simply don't build anything requiring the use of them, and they'll grow back at X per turn (to a maximum of whatever the initial value was)).
The same basic principal can be applied to luxury items, meaning that they'll serve you in a pinch to control unhappiness, but you must manage them so as not to overdo it, lest you REALLY work yourself into a bind.
As I said, the above implementation *would not* require terribly much more coding, and would greatly strengthen the whole concept of resources and their use. It would also dramatically alter their value, and allow for more "espionage type" options. For example: You could build an explorer and send him "prospecting" to check out the size of an AI player's iron deposits near your border. If the report came back indicating a feeble vein, it may well prompt you NOT to attack....after all, once gained, you would deplete it fairly quickly, so you'd have to weight the potential cost of acquiring it against what it would likely net you. And what does that equate to?
More strategy.
Given that this is a strategy game....I think that'd be a good thing.
The Tech Trees:
Another very cool concept was to break the time line up into eras that approximate actual historical eras. Good move.
Again, however, the way that this was implemented creates an extremely linear in-game approach. Simply put, it doesn't really matter WHAT you research, or in what order. The same cannot be said of Civ3's immediate predecessor, SMAC, which had no less than half a dozen popular and quite playable early game tech beelines, each with a dramatically different style of play.
You just don't get that here.
One of the reasons is that, with essentially four distinct tech trees, there aren't all that many techs per era, and correspondingly fewer tech branches. Had some effort been made to bolster the number of techs per era (also not difficult to do....once the tech tree structure is in place, adding more techs is easy....and there's certainly no shortage of ideas!), this part of the problem could have been avoided entirely.
It was not.
Design decision.
Combat:
I'll not even repeat the arguments. Everybody knows them by heart. Some like it the way it is (including me....I've never had any particular problems with it), some can't stand it.
The one thing I will say about combat is this:
Mounted units are broken.
Too powerful.
It's just that simple, and after less than half a dozen games played, that fact becomes obvious.
With such an imbalance in the game's combat units, you're right back to a linear playing approach....the game practically FORCES you to use massed horsemen on the attack. For a strategy game to do so in not one, but multiple areas of its design is....not good.
Oh, you can use combined arms and it DOES make the game more interesting and draw it out a bit, but the simple fact is that mounted units are, pound for pound, cost for cost AT LEAST half as expensive as they should be for their current power. Two ways of fixing it are to decrease the % chance of withdrawl, or double the price and require a point of pop for each mounted unit (and even the latter sugesstion might not balance them).
The Editor:
Ahhhh the editor. The box promised full-featured, and the ability to create our own secnarios....and we can, now that the hacker community has given us at least a few of the features conspicuously missing from the editor, but with the editor that shipped? About all you could do in it was go tweak corruption levels. Hardly "full featured allowing for unmatched flexibility" and no matter how much of a fan of the game or the company you are, that is plain to see. There's no way around that.
The editor that shipped was not the editor promised.
Even post-patch, some of the fundamentals are missing. Again, everyone here knows these by heart, so I'll not even mention them except to say that even WITH the hackers working diligently at it, there's so much that lies beyond the reach of the editor, that our best efforts can't really make a dent.
And that's too bad, because one of the hallmarks of the series has been its moddability. One of the reasons Civ2 is STILL played regularly is because of the Mod community.
The Civ3 mod community is dying on the vine....not for lack of effort on their part, but simply because you can't build a skyscraper with a pair of chopsticks.
There are others, to be sure.
Other areas of the design where the decision was made to close a loophole and deny the human player an easy win (again, that's a good thing). But when the implementation of those plans hobbles gameplay and forces players to "play this way or not at all," then the game loses much of its appeal for strategy fans.
For a strategy game to be a turn off to strategy fans is....the kiss of death, I would say.
-=Vel=-
(hushing now, to give others a chance to speak)
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