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Zylka’s 95 theses on why Civilization 3 is an utter dissapointment
Or 65 theses, whichever comes first 
It has become painfully apparent that, in frustration, the bulk of the logical critics of Civ 3 have left these newbie-infested forums unscathed for quite some time. Optimists may not rejoice, for we will be back to crush your collective head in like a melon subject to a baseball bat - when that wonderful time that multi-player is released comes about. Yet with the temporary absence of our genius, will Firaxis uphold its tainted reputation in screwing up the mp release, as well? Not if we can reiterate long held dissapointment. The following 65 thesis of protest to firaxis are the result of 6 months of sh*ty gaming for all true Civ fans. No shortcoming or broken promise will be withheld, or forgiven, in our quest to dissolve the rampant corruption (pun intended), which plagues the once classic Civilization Series:
Software/Packaging
1 - The pathetically packaged “collectors edition” tin which sums up your entire operation. Anyone end up getting those designer notes? Anyone’s tech “poster” end up enlarging itself into an actual poster, or aligning its print to the paper? I do hope those biscuit tins are large enough to hold your customer's shattered expectations.
2 - Bugs upon release. I won't specify the overly horrendous and inexcusable variety of the aforementioned, otherwise it would be Zylka’s 1,425 theses on why your programmers suck.
3 - Lack of multi-player upon release. Anyone in their right mind would have waited an extra few months for it to be included, but that doesn’t work with planned obsolescence, now does it?
4 - Lack of Scenarios. One of the many steps backwards in regards to civ2.
5 - “Maps” included. Seriously, those shouldn’t have taken more than 20 minutes to make, so you’re either lazy, or incompetent. I vouch for the former with a touch of the latter.
6 - Lack of editor upon release. Current editor is a sad consolation worthy of a swift kick to the gonads.
7 - Lack of windows format, or anything close to not being a pain in the as* for minimizing. Alt + tab makes for an incredibly messy scheme, often crashes the program, and does not work without another program already running.
8 - Patches. Not enough changes, not fast enough. Quite amusing how over half of the listed “changes” for each patch have consisted of fixing typos. Care to borrow my ms-word spell check, next time?
9 - Speed. Why is it so slow, even on a hotrod of a computer? Was an incredibly dated processing engine used for this game?
Graphics
10 - The water is jade, the mountains are red. What (other than reality) inspired you to choose such an unrealistic terrain palette? And no, fixes by the mod community don’t count in saving your collective as* (thank you, Sn00py).
11 - Mountains are way too obtrusive on the land’s layout. It does not look good, quite irritating in fact. Perhaps you should have made them even more unrealistically gigantic and thornlike, I don’t think the common idiot can decipher them as mountains, yet.
12 - Civ score caveman "animation". I won't even attempt to vent my frustration on the fact that an already flawed game had some of it's production diverted to that pile of sh*t.
13 - The 3-D advisors and Leaders are so lame. Again, I would rather you had just used static pictures, with the saved amount of work put towards the intrinsic side of the game. Then again, (neo)classical portraits of leaders don’t sell as well as goofy looking 3-D animations.
14 - Joan de Arc’s cleavage really sexed up civ. No really, you sexed it right up and into a filthy wh0re of half-wit humor.
15 - Modern resources look horrific. The sight of a tire for rubber, a neon-green slab for uranium, and a garbage can for aluminum literally makes the modern map look like a garbage dump.
16 - Firing of nuclear missiles was done in such a lame manner, it makes red alert look professional in comparison. OOH BOY LOOK DAR SCREEN IS SHAKING BOOM I R USE EXPLOSIFFS!
17 - The “loser” screen. Stupid, not at all well done, tacky.
18 - More shots of the “Evolution” Tower of Babel, please. That’s what we paid for, right?
19 - Why do all naval units have such a melodramatic firing animation? Battleships don’t violently rock back and forth with active turrets, they do weigh a good 50, 000 tons, after all. This may seem petty, but it’s yet another piece of crap decision to make the game a little more radical/explosive oriented exciting for the market’s idiots.
20 - Civ colors. Saints preserve us, an Easter-egg was not a good source for influence. Looks silly, mmmk?
21 - Cities need a subtle, blending grid outwards. Current form looks like a clumsily dense mass of buildings sticking up out of nowhere, more of an outpost than anything.
Gameplay
22 - Corruption. It's not, nor has it ever been realistic. It was a pathetically obvious overlay fix for an unexpectedly high timeline speed. Next time, hire logistics programmers before you make such crucial decisions.
23 - Culture, and city reversions. Nice try implementing the abstract of immigration/emigration, it was done horribly. Whole cities do not leave and join empires, “individual” populations (by that I mean 1 city size) should have been the integer. Even a choice route bank specifying to what city(s) immigrant populations should add on would have worked better. Of course, the emigration would have worked on a non-choice level, deriving from cultural formulas according from city to city. See? Even I would have made a better logistics advisor than whoever you had. Problem is, I don’t associate with two-bit operations. No wait, my solutions are too difficult for a drooling moron to comprehend – that wouldn’t work for marketability!
24 - AI cheats. However, it does its job just fine – and anything short of a human must cheat to be challenging. The issue here is admitting it cheats, against what was previously implied, and the programmer’s ego.
25 - AI exploit issues. Tends to militarily expand in odd pocket-spaces past their periphery territories, often leaving huge power vacuum areas which are easy to pick off repeatedly throughout the game.
26 - Trade was a half noble/ half cowardly streamlining change. Smart people want more options and more manual control, that includes setting up individual routes from city to city, be it moving the caravan itself. A combination of the two would have been nice, but that would’ve taken more than an hour lunch break to come up with.
27 - Domestic nag. Kill, murder, destroy, gone.
28 - War weariness. Why is it that a celebrating democracy crumbles on the exact turn that some sh*t island nation half way across the globe declares war on it? I fully realize that you were bent on making warfare near useless in this game, but this is just absolutely unacceptable. Closer to real life next time, is that yet clear?
29 - Limited terra-forming is needed.
30 - ICS has become even more a horrible necessity than it was in civ2. REX compounds the problem. Players used to work like hell to secure that perfect setting for a city; a river running through it, a nice patch of grassland, rich resources within hinterland radius… now it just doesn’t matter. Filling up every piece of the map is an immediate necessity, and it doesn’t matter where you choose to settle. Huge mistake.
31 - Ships which should, do not have even minor AA abilities.
32 - Resources. Oh goody, my civ has a near infinite cluster of gems. The concept of strategic resources was a noble one, but poorly executed. No civilization should have the need (due to shortage of) a resource as widely available as aluminum. Horses as a strategic resource - seriously? Oil is understandable, yet this kind of limiting factor will wreak havoc on multi-player. You must add an option which turns strategic limitations off. Back to the basics, to give multi-playing equality of opportunity.
33 - Lack of unit obsolescence. This ties in to dependence on strategic resources, and should be dealt with accordingly for multiplayer
34 - Modern ships do not take 20 years to trek the globe, in parallel with soldiers who can travel a continent via rail instantly (realistic given the time frame). Modern naval units really should have been given a one move infinite range, followed by a 2 or 3 single square allowance, and the standard 1 attack move. I’m pretty much talking about giving modern ships a chess queen’s move, followed by the specifics necessary for combat.
35 - 89 technologies in civ2. 82 technologies in civ3. An increase was widely expected, but a decrease is just as good! Did the other 7 techs run off to join Snow White?
36 - Submarines are useless.
37 - Wonders are handed out on a near random basis, with great leaders and lack of ability to rush production. The only plus being that caravans were taken away in wonder production.
38 - Bombers are useless.
39 - Bombers can land on aircraft carriers. Next time you’re landing 50+ meters of wingspan on a quarter mile deck meant to hold fighters, tell me so that I might take a picture.
40 - Nuclear warfare was completely botched. An immediate counter launch chance upon initial launch system
should have been adopted, but that would have made things more realistic, right?
41 - Spying was completely botched. What suggestions would you like, seeing as how it’s irreparably screwed up?
42 - The tech tree. Simplified, and dumbed down with almost no real choice of direction. I’m beginning to wonder if the repeatedly aforementioned market range is that of the 8-12 year old developmentally disabled.
43 - Civ specific units. Yet another attempt to push this game over the not so fine line between classy and red-alert tacky. You’re lucky we can disable them.
44 - Privateers are useless.
45 - There are less governments than civ2. Unacceptable. It should have been expanded with the likes of democratic socialism, fascism, totalitarianism, whatever. Fundamentalism could have easily been dealt with to make for a more realistic model.
46 - Barbarians are absolute pushovers.
47 - All your base are belong to us? You say you want a revolution? How about grow the f*ck up. Lame cult classic sayings have absolutely no place in the game we were expecting.
48 - Armies are useless, especially in the modern era. Who in their right mind would give up a wonder for a useless army?
49 - Whoever decided that cruise missiles should have a range of 2 squares should receive an on-the-spot **** punching. A fitting follow up would be Jimmytrick’s suggestion to put them on a mental disability leave as soon as possible.
50 - Colonies are useless.
51 - Whoever decided that howitzer type artillery has a 2 square firing range deserves a swift elbow to the sternum. 155 mm canons are not capable of lobbing shells 200 mile distances. It is so bloody easy to exploit this, in rendering armored warfare near ineffective.
52 - The Iron Works is: A – rarely possible B – Useless, for the amount needed to build it.
53 - UN based victory??? Do I even need to pick on that one? Just who thought it up – seriously, which member of the team was it? Again, you’re lucky we can opt out. See a pattern here? Good players want more options.
54 - Helicopters are useless.
55 - Unit hit points & firepower were brought back to a halfway point between civ 1 and 2. They should have logically been brought to a higher level than civ2; further specified so more accurate ratios could have been assigned according to unit type. Then the whole “my tank lost to a fehking spearman” complaint would have been less frequent, if not absent.
56 - Units can not use enemy roads. It’s fine enough that you can’t use enemy railroads, but roads??? Again, you’d like to render warfare in it’s entirety obsolete, I see. What’s the story here - are you a bunch of hippies, or what?
57 - A nuclear warhead halves a city’s population (point based) and infrastructure – whilst a warrior, a few hundred men with spears (or molotav cocktails, it’s irrelevant how you want to justify it), can destory EVERYTHING in an instant? Something is wrong here.
58 - Bombers can not sink ships
59 - Razing cities is a ridiculous option. It should only be an open choice to smaller cities, preferably 3 and under. A unit of a few thousand (or less) soldiers can not effectively murder and destroy an entire city of over a million people with them sitting idly by. It has not, does not, and will not happen - It’s just that simple.
60 - Bombers can not target specific improvements.
61 - Even less civs than number 2: too few to pick from. Redundant streamlining.
62 - “Random number generator” has been proven time and again to be completely out of whack.
63 - AI trades very poorly
64 – I want the 90 minutes of my life which I spent writing this back.
65 - You have sold your souls to a ship of fools.
Now before all rhetoric is lost in telling the critics to go away and stop playing the game, do remember that the majority of us do believe civ3 is an overall improvement on civ2. Take, for examples, a few of my own pros hinting to why:
I applaud the improvements made to the AI.
I applaud the higher number of units.
I applaud the increase in number of AI at a time.
I applaud the implementation of borders.
I applaud the removal of bribing.
I applaud (some) of the graphic improvements.
I applaud the addition of stacked units upon popular demand.
I applaud the recent changes to cultural reversion upon popular demand.
Yet in light of the much larger opposing list, this is not enough. This game is civ2, sprinkled liberally with stupid, in a 3-d vein. At current stance, drastic change is needed.
Just as you have heard my thoughts, you have heard critical solutions from many of the brilliant minds at Apolyton. Keep in mind that these vivid theses, which I have now nailed to your door, are in no way a complete list of common complaints. Take, for example, the doctrines of Cal-Yin-ism – if you need more convincing of the universal disappointment. I am not doing this because I am angry, nor am I doing it because I have too much time on my hands [well, for the most part]. I am doing this for much needed change, and as fair warning. Single player is so easy, so overly streamlined, and so mediocre for replay value, that I have no want or need to continue playing. The only attractive reason to have hope in civ3 is the thrill of playing another human being, and therein lies the theme in its entirety:
Listen up, Firaxis. You had better get multi-player right.
It has become painfully apparent that, in frustration, the bulk of the logical critics of Civ 3 have left these newbie-infested forums unscathed for quite some time. Optimists may not rejoice, for we will be back to crush your collective head in like a melon subject to a baseball bat - when that wonderful time that multi-player is released comes about. Yet with the temporary absence of our genius, will Firaxis uphold its tainted reputation in screwing up the mp release, as well? Not if we can reiterate long held dissapointment. The following 65 thesis of protest to firaxis are the result of 6 months of sh*ty gaming for all true Civ fans. No shortcoming or broken promise will be withheld, or forgiven, in our quest to dissolve the rampant corruption (pun intended), which plagues the once classic Civilization Series:
Software/Packaging
1 - The pathetically packaged “collectors edition” tin which sums up your entire operation. Anyone end up getting those designer notes? Anyone’s tech “poster” end up enlarging itself into an actual poster, or aligning its print to the paper? I do hope those biscuit tins are large enough to hold your customer's shattered expectations.
2 - Bugs upon release. I won't specify the overly horrendous and inexcusable variety of the aforementioned, otherwise it would be Zylka’s 1,425 theses on why your programmers suck.
3 - Lack of multi-player upon release. Anyone in their right mind would have waited an extra few months for it to be included, but that doesn’t work with planned obsolescence, now does it?
4 - Lack of Scenarios. One of the many steps backwards in regards to civ2.
5 - “Maps” included. Seriously, those shouldn’t have taken more than 20 minutes to make, so you’re either lazy, or incompetent. I vouch for the former with a touch of the latter.
6 - Lack of editor upon release. Current editor is a sad consolation worthy of a swift kick to the gonads.
7 - Lack of windows format, or anything close to not being a pain in the as* for minimizing. Alt + tab makes for an incredibly messy scheme, often crashes the program, and does not work without another program already running.
8 - Patches. Not enough changes, not fast enough. Quite amusing how over half of the listed “changes” for each patch have consisted of fixing typos. Care to borrow my ms-word spell check, next time?
9 - Speed. Why is it so slow, even on a hotrod of a computer? Was an incredibly dated processing engine used for this game?
Graphics
10 - The water is jade, the mountains are red. What (other than reality) inspired you to choose such an unrealistic terrain palette? And no, fixes by the mod community don’t count in saving your collective as* (thank you, Sn00py).
11 - Mountains are way too obtrusive on the land’s layout. It does not look good, quite irritating in fact. Perhaps you should have made them even more unrealistically gigantic and thornlike, I don’t think the common idiot can decipher them as mountains, yet.
12 - Civ score caveman "animation". I won't even attempt to vent my frustration on the fact that an already flawed game had some of it's production diverted to that pile of sh*t.
13 - The 3-D advisors and Leaders are so lame. Again, I would rather you had just used static pictures, with the saved amount of work put towards the intrinsic side of the game. Then again, (neo)classical portraits of leaders don’t sell as well as goofy looking 3-D animations.
14 - Joan de Arc’s cleavage really sexed up civ. No really, you sexed it right up and into a filthy wh0re of half-wit humor.
15 - Modern resources look horrific. The sight of a tire for rubber, a neon-green slab for uranium, and a garbage can for aluminum literally makes the modern map look like a garbage dump.
16 - Firing of nuclear missiles was done in such a lame manner, it makes red alert look professional in comparison. OOH BOY LOOK DAR SCREEN IS SHAKING BOOM I R USE EXPLOSIFFS!
17 - The “loser” screen. Stupid, not at all well done, tacky.
18 - More shots of the “Evolution” Tower of Babel, please. That’s what we paid for, right?
19 - Why do all naval units have such a melodramatic firing animation? Battleships don’t violently rock back and forth with active turrets, they do weigh a good 50, 000 tons, after all. This may seem petty, but it’s yet another piece of crap decision to make the game a little more radical/explosive oriented exciting for the market’s idiots.
20 - Civ colors. Saints preserve us, an Easter-egg was not a good source for influence. Looks silly, mmmk?
21 - Cities need a subtle, blending grid outwards. Current form looks like a clumsily dense mass of buildings sticking up out of nowhere, more of an outpost than anything.
Gameplay
22 - Corruption. It's not, nor has it ever been realistic. It was a pathetically obvious overlay fix for an unexpectedly high timeline speed. Next time, hire logistics programmers before you make such crucial decisions.
23 - Culture, and city reversions. Nice try implementing the abstract of immigration/emigration, it was done horribly. Whole cities do not leave and join empires, “individual” populations (by that I mean 1 city size) should have been the integer. Even a choice route bank specifying to what city(s) immigrant populations should add on would have worked better. Of course, the emigration would have worked on a non-choice level, deriving from cultural formulas according from city to city. See? Even I would have made a better logistics advisor than whoever you had. Problem is, I don’t associate with two-bit operations. No wait, my solutions are too difficult for a drooling moron to comprehend – that wouldn’t work for marketability!
24 - AI cheats. However, it does its job just fine – and anything short of a human must cheat to be challenging. The issue here is admitting it cheats, against what was previously implied, and the programmer’s ego.
25 - AI exploit issues. Tends to militarily expand in odd pocket-spaces past their periphery territories, often leaving huge power vacuum areas which are easy to pick off repeatedly throughout the game.
26 - Trade was a half noble/ half cowardly streamlining change. Smart people want more options and more manual control, that includes setting up individual routes from city to city, be it moving the caravan itself. A combination of the two would have been nice, but that would’ve taken more than an hour lunch break to come up with.
27 - Domestic nag. Kill, murder, destroy, gone.
28 - War weariness. Why is it that a celebrating democracy crumbles on the exact turn that some sh*t island nation half way across the globe declares war on it? I fully realize that you were bent on making warfare near useless in this game, but this is just absolutely unacceptable. Closer to real life next time, is that yet clear?
29 - Limited terra-forming is needed.
30 - ICS has become even more a horrible necessity than it was in civ2. REX compounds the problem. Players used to work like hell to secure that perfect setting for a city; a river running through it, a nice patch of grassland, rich resources within hinterland radius… now it just doesn’t matter. Filling up every piece of the map is an immediate necessity, and it doesn’t matter where you choose to settle. Huge mistake.
31 - Ships which should, do not have even minor AA abilities.
32 - Resources. Oh goody, my civ has a near infinite cluster of gems. The concept of strategic resources was a noble one, but poorly executed. No civilization should have the need (due to shortage of) a resource as widely available as aluminum. Horses as a strategic resource - seriously? Oil is understandable, yet this kind of limiting factor will wreak havoc on multi-player. You must add an option which turns strategic limitations off. Back to the basics, to give multi-playing equality of opportunity.
33 - Lack of unit obsolescence. This ties in to dependence on strategic resources, and should be dealt with accordingly for multiplayer
34 - Modern ships do not take 20 years to trek the globe, in parallel with soldiers who can travel a continent via rail instantly (realistic given the time frame). Modern naval units really should have been given a one move infinite range, followed by a 2 or 3 single square allowance, and the standard 1 attack move. I’m pretty much talking about giving modern ships a chess queen’s move, followed by the specifics necessary for combat.
35 - 89 technologies in civ2. 82 technologies in civ3. An increase was widely expected, but a decrease is just as good! Did the other 7 techs run off to join Snow White?
36 - Submarines are useless.
37 - Wonders are handed out on a near random basis, with great leaders and lack of ability to rush production. The only plus being that caravans were taken away in wonder production.
38 - Bombers are useless.
39 - Bombers can land on aircraft carriers. Next time you’re landing 50+ meters of wingspan on a quarter mile deck meant to hold fighters, tell me so that I might take a picture.
40 - Nuclear warfare was completely botched. An immediate counter launch chance upon initial launch system
should have been adopted, but that would have made things more realistic, right?
41 - Spying was completely botched. What suggestions would you like, seeing as how it’s irreparably screwed up?
42 - The tech tree. Simplified, and dumbed down with almost no real choice of direction. I’m beginning to wonder if the repeatedly aforementioned market range is that of the 8-12 year old developmentally disabled.
43 - Civ specific units. Yet another attempt to push this game over the not so fine line between classy and red-alert tacky. You’re lucky we can disable them.
44 - Privateers are useless.
45 - There are less governments than civ2. Unacceptable. It should have been expanded with the likes of democratic socialism, fascism, totalitarianism, whatever. Fundamentalism could have easily been dealt with to make for a more realistic model.
46 - Barbarians are absolute pushovers.
47 - All your base are belong to us? You say you want a revolution? How about grow the f*ck up. Lame cult classic sayings have absolutely no place in the game we were expecting.
48 - Armies are useless, especially in the modern era. Who in their right mind would give up a wonder for a useless army?
49 - Whoever decided that cruise missiles should have a range of 2 squares should receive an on-the-spot **** punching. A fitting follow up would be Jimmytrick’s suggestion to put them on a mental disability leave as soon as possible.
50 - Colonies are useless.
51 - Whoever decided that howitzer type artillery has a 2 square firing range deserves a swift elbow to the sternum. 155 mm canons are not capable of lobbing shells 200 mile distances. It is so bloody easy to exploit this, in rendering armored warfare near ineffective.
52 - The Iron Works is: A – rarely possible B – Useless, for the amount needed to build it.
53 - UN based victory??? Do I even need to pick on that one? Just who thought it up – seriously, which member of the team was it? Again, you’re lucky we can opt out. See a pattern here? Good players want more options.
54 - Helicopters are useless.
55 - Unit hit points & firepower were brought back to a halfway point between civ 1 and 2. They should have logically been brought to a higher level than civ2; further specified so more accurate ratios could have been assigned according to unit type. Then the whole “my tank lost to a fehking spearman” complaint would have been less frequent, if not absent.
56 - Units can not use enemy roads. It’s fine enough that you can’t use enemy railroads, but roads??? Again, you’d like to render warfare in it’s entirety obsolete, I see. What’s the story here - are you a bunch of hippies, or what?
57 - A nuclear warhead halves a city’s population (point based) and infrastructure – whilst a warrior, a few hundred men with spears (or molotav cocktails, it’s irrelevant how you want to justify it), can destory EVERYTHING in an instant? Something is wrong here.
58 - Bombers can not sink ships
59 - Razing cities is a ridiculous option. It should only be an open choice to smaller cities, preferably 3 and under. A unit of a few thousand (or less) soldiers can not effectively murder and destroy an entire city of over a million people with them sitting idly by. It has not, does not, and will not happen - It’s just that simple.
60 - Bombers can not target specific improvements.
61 - Even less civs than number 2: too few to pick from. Redundant streamlining.
62 - “Random number generator” has been proven time and again to be completely out of whack.
63 - AI trades very poorly
64 – I want the 90 minutes of my life which I spent writing this back.
65 - You have sold your souls to a ship of fools.
Now before all rhetoric is lost in telling the critics to go away and stop playing the game, do remember that the majority of us do believe civ3 is an overall improvement on civ2. Take, for examples, a few of my own pros hinting to why:
I applaud the improvements made to the AI.
I applaud the higher number of units.
I applaud the increase in number of AI at a time.
I applaud the implementation of borders.
I applaud the removal of bribing.
I applaud (some) of the graphic improvements.
I applaud the addition of stacked units upon popular demand.
I applaud the recent changes to cultural reversion upon popular demand.
Yet in light of the much larger opposing list, this is not enough. This game is civ2, sprinkled liberally with stupid, in a 3-d vein. At current stance, drastic change is needed.
Just as you have heard my thoughts, you have heard critical solutions from many of the brilliant minds at Apolyton. Keep in mind that these vivid theses, which I have now nailed to your door, are in no way a complete list of common complaints. Take, for example, the doctrines of Cal-Yin-ism – if you need more convincing of the universal disappointment. I am not doing this because I am angry, nor am I doing it because I have too much time on my hands [well, for the most part
]. I am doing this for much needed change, and as fair warning. Single player is so easy, so overly streamlined, and so mediocre for replay value, that I have no want or need to continue playing. The only attractive reason to have hope in civ3 is the thrill of playing another human being, and therein lies the theme in its entirety: Listen up, Firaxis. You had better get multi-player right.
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