Why the Anti-Civ3 Attitude?

[cutlerd]

I agree with much of what has been stated here previously. Essentially many of the whiners have placed Firaxis into a catch-22 situation. Too many folks who are complaining that CIV3 is too much unlike CIV2 or SMAC would, I think, have turned around and complained that CIV3 was not a new enough game or was CIV2.5 had Firaxis made it too much like its predecessors.

I can say as a long time civ player, way back when CIV 1 was a new game, that CIV 3 has held my interest and challenged me far longer than CIV1, CIV2 or SMAC.

I found CIV2 to be horribly bound as a single player game into certain set strategies. With little or no difference between CIVs, the only basic difference between game #1 of CIV2 and game #2000 of CIV 2 was your starting location...and that was basically: am I on an island or a continent?

After that, it was race to Armour, go Fanaticism, and Spy the crap out of every non-Democratic civ in the game. Once done with that, you then turn on the Democracies by landing mlllions of Robotic Arty on their rail lines and take them down in 1 turn.

It got really boring!

SMAC was an improvement. The different strengths and weaknesses of the civs was pretty cool, so that playing Diedre was a different experience from playing Morgan, but the game bogged down in massive combats after a while and the story line, while excellent the first time I played it, became annoying when playing for the 100th time. Fungus shmungus.

CIV3, however, is almost never the same game twice. Each Civ plays so differently from the others, and the introduction of resources means each civ itself plays differently depending on what combination you have.

Playing India? Who cares about resources? Don't need horses. Don't need iron. You can kick arse anyways!

Playing Persia or Rome? You are a god with iron and a wimp without it. No iron in your neighbourhood? Better find it quick even if it means distant colonies.

Playing Iroquois? Again....who needs iron? Get a horse and go to town.

I enjoyed playing the Germans my last game. Everyone beating up on me and me saying to the computer screen "enjoy this now laughing boys....one day I'm gonna have panzers...and I'm keeping a list of everyone who has wronged me...and there will be a reckoning!" And there was.

In CIV2, playing the Americans starting next to the Romans was no different than playing the Indians starting next to the English. In CIV3...it's a HUGE difference...and vive la difference!

In addition, I enjoy bombardment in CIV3. It allows for economic warfare, for strategic warfare, and for combined arms. Need to invade a strongly defended continent in CIV3 in modern times? You have to work at it. You have to bombard the flanks of your invasion path to cut the enemy's roads so as to blunt his counter attacks. Very realistic...very historical. Very DDay.

I also think Culture is a great addition. In CIV2 your side felt like a collection of loosely tied city states rather than a nation. In CIV3 you get borders. Also, Culture opens up the game by allowing you a new way to get territory.

I find the AI in CIV3 to be much improved. I have had times when in thinking about the game when not playing, I have tried to imagine what I would do in the AI's position. Lo and behold...when I fire up the game and resume, the AI does just that. They work together against a common foe, and each has its own temperament. The AI also actually challenges me....and while yes, it does trade more easily with the other AI civs than with me...nonetheless I do a fine amount of trading.

And speaking of trading...thank God they got rid of those damned camels from CIV2! Talk about boring....moving your trading caravans up and down the map. Ech! Same with spies. WAY too overpowered in CIV2. I happen to think they are too expensive in CIV3....but I'd much rather err on that side than the CIV2 ubber super spy mode.

With the latest patch 1.21 my complaints with CIV3 are few and far between:

1. More late age wonders

2. The space race needs to be delayed...it happens before some interesting techs are discovered

3. Spies need to be a little more effective

4. Nukes should be more devstating but the penalties for using them should be more severe

Devin

[Civ Old Timer]

Tassadar5000 - You might already know this but there was a red-green patch for SMAC's eye sore art that might help you see that land better. It made the land more brown than red.


I'm in the CIV 3 is weak camp but there's no denying that it's better than most of what's out there. But given the game's past that just isn't good enough. Why remove things that people like? Why remove things that worked, especially when the stuff you're adding doesn't work? It makes no sense. It would not have been hard to do that. If you're pressed to get something out for x-mas why re-build the logic of it from the ground up?

As it stands the game has a weird mesh of goals - simplicity on the one hand and more true to history on the other (culture, resources, high spy failure rate, etc). The whole thing has a frankenstein feel to it. And I see that in the patches too, where things are modded up and then back down again. Nobody seems to be at the helm of this boat.

The gaming industry is too obsessed with making things brand spanking and revolutionary (to be fair our whole culture is like that). I didn't want that. I wanted the developer to focus on making what was weak in the earlier games better. SMAC had a lousy intrusive interface and no way to get rid of it. Its tech was hard to understand and the colours were gross. But that game's concept in a historical setting would have been great.

For what it's worth, I really like the graphics in Civ3. The advisors need some tweaking, because some don't work well or are arranged oddly (gov't type in the military advisor and not the foreign advisor? huh?). The modern resources are quite ugly and often hard to see. Now that would be an easy thing to patch, so why hasn't it been done?

I think this whole whiner vs. fanboy thing is really overdone. Every game community does this. Get some tougher skins, I say. We can all disargree, sometimes strongly, and not dive into the "why do the [whiners] [fanboys] people come here? They ought to... " Fill in the blank with something nasty.

C'mon, we're all trying to enjoy the same game here. Discussion is good. I've seen a lot of good posts on both sides.

[Andrew Cory]

I played SMAC for (maybe) a month. The unit workshop was dull, the dipolmacy was fun, but I didn't get enough chance to use it, as there were only 8 factions. Overall, I felt a bit cheated by SMAC.

Civ2 was a lot of fun. The problems with it were (as has been noted elsewhere) the undefined boarders and no difference between civs.

To me, the holy grail of TBS has always been, and will always be: MoO2. How much so? Well, a buddy of mine and I sat down over the course of months, and just for fun, designed a MoO3 to correct any obvious flaws with the game, as well as adding in new ideas. (BTW: immagine my surprise when MoO3 was announced and many of my (documented) ideas were in the game!)

If the test we must use is "how well does Civ3 compare to games made today", then I would say that Civ3 kicks ass. It _is_ the new standard and all TBS have to at least match it. I would love to see a more complex diplomacy screen, a better spying system (the one MoO2 had was _perfect_), and trade is getting better, but needs a bit of work, but for all that, this game is the best TBS I have ever seen. Yes, it has problems, yes, there is room for improvement, but even if they did not release an XP or another patch, I could happily play this game for years to come.