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Hi, all
I waited until I could get CIV3 at a reasonable price for my Mac, so I am way behind most of you people.
But I wish I had saved my money. Alan's Law: "There is nothing so good that some fool can't improve it into uselessness" seems to apply; I am saddened by how hard it is to find serious criticism of the game on the Web, too: I mean, many of us have been Civ nuts for, er, a long time. The game is a disaster.
Briefly:
1 clunky as in awful user interface, which is to say everything bad about Call to Power ripped off, everything good (trade routes) ignored.
2 Buggy as all hell on Mac 1.17 -- as in mad "autoscrolls".
3. In game terms: really cool ideas
*sarcasm mode on*
a) make air units useless, although still expensive. Five Bomber attacks reduce a warrior to near-uselessness. Excellent, let's have more of the same.
b) vitiate naval units. Can't bombard meaningfully; aircraft carrier air groups can't sink ships.
c) make roads useless in enemy territory - which is not only realistically absurd, but slows the game down - and allows your tanks to be devastatingly counterattacked by, er, spearmen. Now, making *railroads* useless might have made all sorts of sense, for both realism and (more important, gameplay) or indeed even adopting the CtoP railroad bonus, rather than faster-than-light RR, sure.
d) Call to Power again: best antitank weapon, value for money, is a spearman. Do me a favour. The printed manual smugly explains that "improved combat" ho ho ho makes firepower concept unnecessary. But when a Spearman can seriously harm Modern Armor we are into nonsense.
d) #1: slow nearly everything down, good plan. Complicate interface (Cto P showed the way) and don't think: animate.
e) Price all units so that it is almost impossible to use city production efficiently. (ie, in late game your best cities can run to around 80, 90 p points, but all costs are multiples of 100).
f) AI an improvement (it will attack sensibly, at least occasionally) but still frankly woeful; observe how weak Civs will provoke you and provoke you stupidly. Diplomacy offers at least as silly and random as Civ2, with no compensating advantages.
g) really a summary. Spend all your efforts programming the cool graphics, and let the game look after yourself. I should have been warned by Alpha Centauri (hey, let's rename all the Civ2 units something weird, put a big graphics overhead on the whole thing and hope no one will notice that there isn't any more game there....)
h) will not be buying Civ4.
i) snarl, grunt
best wishes to all
alan
I waited until I could get CIV3 at a reasonable price for my Mac, so I am way behind most of you people.
But I wish I had saved my money. Alan's Law: "There is nothing so good that some fool can't improve it into uselessness" seems to apply; I am saddened by how hard it is to find serious criticism of the game on the Web, too: I mean, many of us have been Civ nuts for, er, a long time. The game is a disaster.
Briefly:
1 clunky as in awful user interface, which is to say everything bad about Call to Power ripped off, everything good (trade routes) ignored.
2 Buggy as all hell on Mac 1.17 -- as in mad "autoscrolls".
3. In game terms: really cool ideas
*sarcasm mode on*
a) make air units useless, although still expensive. Five Bomber attacks reduce a warrior to near-uselessness. Excellent, let's have more of the same.
b) vitiate naval units. Can't bombard meaningfully; aircraft carrier air groups can't sink ships.
c) make roads useless in enemy territory - which is not only realistically absurd, but slows the game down - and allows your tanks to be devastatingly counterattacked by, er, spearmen. Now, making *railroads* useless might have made all sorts of sense, for both realism and (more important, gameplay) or indeed even adopting the CtoP railroad bonus, rather than faster-than-light RR, sure.
d) Call to Power again: best antitank weapon, value for money, is a spearman. Do me a favour. The printed manual smugly explains that "improved combat" ho ho ho makes firepower concept unnecessary. But when a Spearman can seriously harm Modern Armor we are into nonsense.
d) #1: slow nearly everything down, good plan. Complicate interface (Cto P showed the way) and don't think: animate.
e) Price all units so that it is almost impossible to use city production efficiently. (ie, in late game your best cities can run to around 80, 90 p points, but all costs are multiples of 100).
f) AI an improvement (it will attack sensibly, at least occasionally) but still frankly woeful; observe how weak Civs will provoke you and provoke you stupidly. Diplomacy offers at least as silly and random as Civ2, with no compensating advantages.
g) really a summary. Spend all your efforts programming the cool graphics, and let the game look after yourself. I should have been warned by Alpha Centauri (hey, let's rename all the Civ2 units something weird, put a big graphics overhead on the whole thing and hope no one will notice that there isn't any more game there....)
h) will not be buying Civ4.
i) snarl, grunt
best wishes to all
alan
) I hate having to target that tiny spot... OTOH, many important orders (e.g. production changes) can be issued from the city right-click menu, with no need to open the city screen at all.
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