Tweet
Let me start by saying that I love Civ 3, and am looking forward to playing it vs. other humans in the expansion. Concepts such as new diplomacy, reworked trade and resource system and culture make me think that Civ 3 is the best game in the genre as of yet. However, any game might be improved, and Civ 3 has a fair number of flaws. I will here try to list things that are in my opinion to be listed as flaws. Also, I’ll speak about Civ 3 as it is, without any mods applied, and will try to give my ideas on how can these flaws be fixed, by modding the game or some more global changes to the game engine itself.
Also note that this post does in no way discuss the ups and downs of the Civ3Edit program.
Yesterday night I was pondering and thinking about how Ensemble Studios releases games. Their upcoming title, Age of Mythology, is now ready as a game for several months, so they could have released it in spring. However, ES decided that they need to make it sure the game is balanced, has no easy to use exploits or giant gaps. This is why they first has an internal test with 200 players, and are now doing a large beta test, by sending out the beta version of AoM to ten thousand gamers worldwide. I really appreciate this approach, for having some of the best players there are as testers will ensure that the game will have no unbalanced factions. To those who played the Age of Kings, may I remind the Teuton civilizations before the patch came out, that was banned from almost every game, due to their Town Center bonus.
Civ 3 is a pretty nicely balanced game. No civilization is unbalanced, no unit is unbalanced, after the patches, and there no longer seems to be such an amount of strategies that would net you a win in any situation. Disasters such as the Howitzer rush in Civ 2 are eliminated. So, some of the problems Civ 3 has or had are:
Before patch 1.21f – Corruption. While in previous civ games corruption remained an element to be dealt with, it could never ruin your empire as much as it did in Civ 3. It often made colonizing other landmasses a daunting waste of resources, as you would get a city that wouldn’t grow above two shields per turn, surely doesn’t look like something you want. The Forbidden Palace is a nice thing, but if you conquered another nation or two, you probably want the FP in their territory – where it would take like 80 turns to build. Does not seem quite fair. At the moment the corruption problem is pretty much fixed. I have increased the optimal number of cities to prevent corruption from going rampant too early, and have also used the corruption slider to lower the effects of it somewhat.
Before patch 1.17f – fast units. Let’s face it - the original Civ 3 and Civ 3 version 1.16f had one big unbalancing thing about it – the retreat effects of fast units. A fast unit fighting a slower unit would always retreat when having one hit point remaining, if the other unit had more than one hit point remaining. Needless to say, I then used to play my games as a race to Chivalry, where I could just keep building Knights and overrun anyone I wanted, with a pretty low number of units in my army, knowing I won’t be taking heavy casualties. Also, this was an issue in the Ancient Age, where Horsemen were much of a powerhouse – all in all, noone in the Ancient Age protects his cities with 5 units. And the Mounted Warrior also goes here – with a whopping attack of 3 and the ability to retreat, being Iroquois granted you conquest of any civilization there is nearby, even the Greeks. In the Industrial Age, Cavalry was very powerful, and so on – this was probably the biggest unbalance ever in Civ 3. Fixed by patch 1.17f through making retreat random.
Useless/badly designed units. Oh, I love this one. Now I’ll list all the useless units in Civ 3, giving reasons why are they useless.
Marine – as expensive as a Tank, this unit has an attack of 8. By the time you discover Amphibious War, everyone is certainly defending by Infantry (defense of 10), and the most advanced civs might have first Mech. Inf units entering service. Simply put, the Marines are not able to be much of a threat to cities, especially big ones, defended by such guns. You’re much better off building Tanks instead. Marines might be useful for backwards civs or civs lacking Rubber, and thus defending by Riflemen, but not more than that. I have made the Marine one of the best units in the game, by giving it attack of 12 and 2 extra hit points – so I’m oftentimes building the Marines for land combat, even when I have Tanks available. Actually, the Marine is now some sort of a Special Forces unit for me. I have successfully used the improved Marine for both fighting in the open, as well as amphibious assaults on cities protected with Infantry – just the way it was supposed to be. And the 2 extra hit points make the Marine hang there for the entire game.
Paratrooper – another unit which can potentially be very fun to play with, but didn’t get used at all. You would get Advanced Flight in the Modern Age, and I usually didn’t hurry to research it too much, so generally Mech. Inf were already around by the time I discovered Paratroopers. Paratrooper has a pretty short drop range, bad attack factors, and can’t move the turn it dropped. This means that, even if you manage to drop these guys on the enemy soil, the other player will just move a couple of Tanks during his turns to dispatch the threat. Even if your Paratrooper survived till the next turn, all it could actually do is pillaging improvements, for its combat value is low somewhat. In my mod, I’ve still not made the Paratrooper useful, but at least maybe not completely useless – attack and defense of 10, improved drop range, 2 extra hit points. Not exactly as useful as my Marines, but at least a viable choice in certain situations. Other solutions can include giving the Paratrooper the ability to move the turn it drops, or maybe giving it an unlimited drop range.
Helicopter – of the units mentioned thus far, by far the most useless. If the Marines can be used on inferior civs and Paratroopers for sitting on resources, I have completely failed to find a use for the Helicopter. Let’s look, it can transport one foot unit to anywhere within 6 squares of your city, and can not be landed on Aircraft Carriers. Most probably, 6 squares away from your city means no more than 2 squares deep in the enemy territory, is it really worth the hassle? Moreover, it can only transport foot units, but you’re certainly attacking with Tanks and Mech. Inf now. True, you probably have some Infantry around, but isn’t it better to send it by the land? The only possible situation of use for the Helicopter I can imagine is if you are attacking another landmass within 6 squares of your city, and you have a nice number of Helicopters – but even then it’s a pretty arguable alternative to the Transport ships – I think it’s better to build one Transport and use it, rather than build 8 Helicopters and be limited to foot units only. Fixes to this? Pretty tough… I’ve given the Helicopter range of 8, though I would want it to have somewhat around 10 or 12. Also, I allowed it to carry up to 4 units, this should make it useful in some situations, but even with these changes, I’ve used the Helicopter only once, more to see how it works and is it better than because I needed to. I think Helicopters should have the ability to land on Carries with their cargo, but then, the AI would have to be tweaked to be able to handle this – not easy thing to, either.
Explorer – not a completely useless unit, but certainly not what it’s supposed to be. It arrives at the end of the Middle Ages, and surely can not do much work exploring – you should know most or entire map already by now, since you’ve traveled a lot, and also have been into map trades with other civilizations. The Explorer can still be useful in a few situations, such as keeping him into territory of two other warring civilizations to monitor the events there, and know when and how to join the battle, but this use of the Explorer might be a good one in a pretty limited number of cases. And the Explorer is certainly no match to its Civ 2 counterpart that was often really used to explore the lands. Big changes would be needed to prevent you from knowing all the map by the time Explorer arrives, so maybe it should just be put earlier on the tech tree, where you can actually make use of this fellow.
Cruise Missile – does this sound familiar? I think this is the most commonly mentioned example of a useless unit. Cruise Missile can kill a unit by bombardment, but it will get lost anyway, and can only kill a unit if it’s already low somewhat on hit points. Having a short range, this one-hit weapon was rarely, if ever, used by human players. I have gone pretty far in modifying this unit. I let the Cruise Missile sometimes kill a unit at full health, gave the Battleship an ability to carry two of these, increased the attack range, and also gave the Missile the Precision Strike ability. Just look, in real life missiles are often used for targeting specific structures, why not in Civ3? What I currently got is a nice alternative for a few units, and I keep a few of these around for sinking ships or attacking stacks of units – who knows when the need comes?
Nukes – ahh the nukes. Let’s face it, the way they’re implemented is not the best possible way. Currently nukes are very expensive for what they do, and there’s also no real drawback to using them. I see it as a bad thing that you can never destroy a city with a nuke. Think real life, can a city survive after 3 or 4 nukes are dropped on it? Probably not. In Civ 3, nukes don’t even kill all the units in attacked square – they just have a chance of doing so. They’re only useful because they destroy tile improvement around the city, so nukes are nice to use on enemy capitol, to prevent trading, but generally, you’re usually supposed to use standard forces instead of nukes. I did all I could do – I just lowered the cost for the nuke, to make it worth building for its small effect. Other suggestions on improving nuclear weapons could be increasing the effect of nukes. By this I mean, ability to destroy cities, better blast radius, more damage to city infrastructure and such. Also, give nukes drawbacks. Other civs should start disliking you in case you are using nuclear weapons. Yes, they’re programmed to declare war on you in case nukes are used, but there’s one big problem with it – Nukes come in the modern age, and by then, all the wars are global, with every civ involved on either side. And so, your enemies can’t get worse, even if you nuke one of them, and your allies are always happy if you nuke a mutual foe. I don’t think it should be this way – there should be a chance that your allies will break the alliance or even shift sides if you use too much nuclear weapons. I have, however, used a fair number of nukes in a 3 on 3 war, and neither of my allies got upset – they both were happily taking the territory glowing in radioactive rain. Nukes cause too much pollution, you say? That’s rubbish. When I have been nuked, my army of workers cleared all the pollution in two turns. When the AI is nuked, it will either clear pollution itself, or other AIs/human that conquers the land will clear it a bit later. And even if the global worming affects a square or two within your land, it’s not much of a tragedy. Just think, all the previous civgames, CtP included, had nice effects of Global Warming – so, terrain could be affected globally, leading to worldwide starvation and production shortage, or water levels were just raising, submerging cities and, at times, whole landmasses. Then Global Warming disasters were something you really didn’t want to occur, most of the time, in Civ 3 it’s not much of a problem.
Nuclear submarines – while I’m speaking of nuclear weapons in general, let me throw the nuclear sub here, too. What we have is a more expensive version of the standard sub, which still isn’t much of a deal attack wise, and can only carry one Tactical nuke. As I showed above, the Tactical Nuke isn’t something you would die for, and the carry capacity of one isn’t too promising, especially taking in account that the sub can hardly be used to do anything else – it would probably lose to a Battleship if you tried to attack one. You would be better off building fair numbers of regular Submarines, if you want an underwater fleet, or just resort to the usual ships. I gave it an attack factor of 10, to give the nuke sub reasonable chance again modern ships, and a carry capacity of 4 tactical nukes. This, I believe, can be a threat. All in all, if I build and load just three of these, that’s 12 nukes, which can be a threat to another nation. However, as long as nukes in general don’t get fixed, the nuclear submarine will still remain a unit of average usefulness.
Stealth Fighter – this is a unit almost never built even by fans of airpower, such as myself. It can do everything the Stealth Bomber does, but does it worse – less chance of hitting, less damage inflicted if the hit takes place. While the Stealth Fighter is cheaper somewhat, it’s still better not to build it at all – those lower production cities for whom it matters can as well be building other stuff, and chances are high your civilization will benefit more from it. I’m pretty much lacking ideas on how to fix it. Maybe the Stealth Fighter should also be able to intercept, making it a universal plane, or have some other sort of a special ability. However, as I see it, the unit can just be removed from the game – I’d rather see the Gunship Helicopter instead of it.
Catapults and Cannons – this might be just mine opinion, but I think these two are useless. I do not naysay the idea of artillery bombardment, I actually find Artillery units quite useful due to their two square range, and will often build some to supplement my main attack force, but I will not be using Catapults and Cannons. Simply put, they are slow, so you need a unit to keep backwards to protect these. By the time they arrive to the target city, your main force is already there, and possibly should have already been striking. Especially during the Ancient Age, every unit and every city matters, so you’d rather get another Swordsman than a Catapult. Look, the Catapult will miss its target more often that not, and if even if it hits, not much damage is done – chances are high that the extra Swordsman could have done more, or even killed the defender. This stays true for the Cannon, where you’re actually better off using your Knights to attack the city – they can reach it faster, and do also hold a chance of retreating. As I see it, Cannons and Catapults are of use exclusively on defense, stacking them with other defensive units you got along the border or in cities. As I say, this doesn’t apply to Artillery and other modern bombarding units. Possible fixes to this include increasing strength of these units, so that you would have more of a motivation to build these.
This would pretty much conclude the section of useless units, I don’t think I missed out many, but I might well have forgotten something, you know how it is to write a long post such as this. Now a bit more of other problems with Civ 3, in a pretty random order, I just feel too lazy.
Age of sail – this one is just too short. With Galleons and Frigates arriving only at Magnetism, you’re getting Ironclads very soon. Steam Power is always my first technology in the Industrial Age, and, given that on many maps navy isn’t at all that important, Frigates never really come into play. Maybe the Ironclad should have its movement lowered, so that it wouldn’t make the Frigate obsolete, or also make the Ironclad a bit more expensive, to give the player an alternative cost-wise, too.
Reconnaissance missions – this air mission is just useless, and sometimes ridiculous. Say, you saw an enemy ship move into the fog of war and know where it is. You can’t see it, but your bomber can reach it. However, to be able to attack that ship you have to first fly a Reconnaissance mission to get in sight – pretty ridiculous, given there’s no armed reconnaissance – in real life, one plane doesn’t just fly around without attacking to let the attacking planes know where to drop their bombs.
Modern Age – the game doesn’t have four ages, it has three and a half. Simply put, as I reach the Modern Age, I get Computers, and then act along one of two scenarios. If everyone else loves me, I go for Fission, build UN, game over. If not, I go for Space Flight, and am then only researching spaceship technologies, while having my best cities produce the spaceship parts, which are cheap – I get them completed by the time the next tech arrives. This early victory is why, before I modified this, I haven’t build an AEGIS cruiser a single time – I haven’t actually discovered Stealth, Robotics, Genetics, etc. – victory just came too fast. I think the whole Modern Age needs a major remake from Firaxis, but what we can do with the Editor is resetting some of spaceship parts to later techs. Yes, it’s not realistic, but at least will make you research. Oh, and don’t forget to increase the cost for all the spaceship parts. I really hope Firaxis reworks the Modern Age in Play the World.
Armies – before the game was released, we supposed that armies are going to be powerhouses. It turned out that they’re not, and I will rarely build an Army with my Leader. Basically an Army is three units sharing hit points. So, you get a Cavalry with 15 Hit Points instead of 3 Cavalry with 5 Hit Points. How good is it? First, let me refer to situations where there are units with one movement point in an army, such as Infantry or my improved Marines, or early armies of Swordsmen. Three Elite Swordsmen can kill three units in one turn, and each will also have a chance of at least 1 in 16 of generating you a Leader. Sounds nice. An army of Elite Swordsmen can only kill one unit per turn. It will almost certainly kill that defender, but that’s only one unit beaten, and with a zero chance of generating another Leader. Think what you like better. Also, Armies do not come cheap. They come at the expense of a Leader, something I will often want to use for completing a Wonder. This is why I don’t build Armies in the Middle Ages- there are just too many Wonders to complete, and I’d rather use the Leader to get yet another of those. The Military Academy, though, can be quite useful, if you get it, with a productive city giving you an Army each 2-3 turns… under certain conditions, can be a neat bonus. Another huge drawback is impossibility to upgrade – if you built an army of Swordsmen, it will become useless in the Middle Ages. I would certainly like to see Armies improved – maybe give it the ability to attack several times a turn even with slow units in it, make them upgradeable, add something else, but make a pretty peaceful player such as myself wanting to acquire one. And warmongers aren’t dying for armies too much, either.
Also note that this post does in no way discuss the ups and downs of the Civ3Edit program.
Yesterday night I was pondering and thinking about how Ensemble Studios releases games. Their upcoming title, Age of Mythology, is now ready as a game for several months, so they could have released it in spring. However, ES decided that they need to make it sure the game is balanced, has no easy to use exploits or giant gaps. This is why they first has an internal test with 200 players, and are now doing a large beta test, by sending out the beta version of AoM to ten thousand gamers worldwide. I really appreciate this approach, for having some of the best players there are as testers will ensure that the game will have no unbalanced factions. To those who played the Age of Kings, may I remind the Teuton civilizations before the patch came out, that was banned from almost every game, due to their Town Center bonus.
Civ 3 is a pretty nicely balanced game. No civilization is unbalanced, no unit is unbalanced, after the patches, and there no longer seems to be such an amount of strategies that would net you a win in any situation. Disasters such as the Howitzer rush in Civ 2 are eliminated. So, some of the problems Civ 3 has or had are:
Before patch 1.21f – Corruption. While in previous civ games corruption remained an element to be dealt with, it could never ruin your empire as much as it did in Civ 3. It often made colonizing other landmasses a daunting waste of resources, as you would get a city that wouldn’t grow above two shields per turn, surely doesn’t look like something you want. The Forbidden Palace is a nice thing, but if you conquered another nation or two, you probably want the FP in their territory – where it would take like 80 turns to build. Does not seem quite fair. At the moment the corruption problem is pretty much fixed. I have increased the optimal number of cities to prevent corruption from going rampant too early, and have also used the corruption slider to lower the effects of it somewhat.
Before patch 1.17f – fast units. Let’s face it - the original Civ 3 and Civ 3 version 1.16f had one big unbalancing thing about it – the retreat effects of fast units. A fast unit fighting a slower unit would always retreat when having one hit point remaining, if the other unit had more than one hit point remaining. Needless to say, I then used to play my games as a race to Chivalry, where I could just keep building Knights and overrun anyone I wanted, with a pretty low number of units in my army, knowing I won’t be taking heavy casualties. Also, this was an issue in the Ancient Age, where Horsemen were much of a powerhouse – all in all, noone in the Ancient Age protects his cities with 5 units. And the Mounted Warrior also goes here – with a whopping attack of 3 and the ability to retreat, being Iroquois granted you conquest of any civilization there is nearby, even the Greeks. In the Industrial Age, Cavalry was very powerful, and so on – this was probably the biggest unbalance ever in Civ 3. Fixed by patch 1.17f through making retreat random.
Useless/badly designed units. Oh, I love this one. Now I’ll list all the useless units in Civ 3, giving reasons why are they useless.
Marine – as expensive as a Tank, this unit has an attack of 8. By the time you discover Amphibious War, everyone is certainly defending by Infantry (defense of 10), and the most advanced civs might have first Mech. Inf units entering service. Simply put, the Marines are not able to be much of a threat to cities, especially big ones, defended by such guns. You’re much better off building Tanks instead. Marines might be useful for backwards civs or civs lacking Rubber, and thus defending by Riflemen, but not more than that. I have made the Marine one of the best units in the game, by giving it attack of 12 and 2 extra hit points – so I’m oftentimes building the Marines for land combat, even when I have Tanks available. Actually, the Marine is now some sort of a Special Forces unit for me. I have successfully used the improved Marine for both fighting in the open, as well as amphibious assaults on cities protected with Infantry – just the way it was supposed to be. And the 2 extra hit points make the Marine hang there for the entire game.
Paratrooper – another unit which can potentially be very fun to play with, but didn’t get used at all. You would get Advanced Flight in the Modern Age, and I usually didn’t hurry to research it too much, so generally Mech. Inf were already around by the time I discovered Paratroopers. Paratrooper has a pretty short drop range, bad attack factors, and can’t move the turn it dropped. This means that, even if you manage to drop these guys on the enemy soil, the other player will just move a couple of Tanks during his turns to dispatch the threat. Even if your Paratrooper survived till the next turn, all it could actually do is pillaging improvements, for its combat value is low somewhat. In my mod, I’ve still not made the Paratrooper useful, but at least maybe not completely useless – attack and defense of 10, improved drop range, 2 extra hit points. Not exactly as useful as my Marines, but at least a viable choice in certain situations. Other solutions can include giving the Paratrooper the ability to move the turn it drops, or maybe giving it an unlimited drop range.
Helicopter – of the units mentioned thus far, by far the most useless. If the Marines can be used on inferior civs and Paratroopers for sitting on resources, I have completely failed to find a use for the Helicopter. Let’s look, it can transport one foot unit to anywhere within 6 squares of your city, and can not be landed on Aircraft Carriers. Most probably, 6 squares away from your city means no more than 2 squares deep in the enemy territory, is it really worth the hassle? Moreover, it can only transport foot units, but you’re certainly attacking with Tanks and Mech. Inf now. True, you probably have some Infantry around, but isn’t it better to send it by the land? The only possible situation of use for the Helicopter I can imagine is if you are attacking another landmass within 6 squares of your city, and you have a nice number of Helicopters – but even then it’s a pretty arguable alternative to the Transport ships – I think it’s better to build one Transport and use it, rather than build 8 Helicopters and be limited to foot units only. Fixes to this? Pretty tough… I’ve given the Helicopter range of 8, though I would want it to have somewhat around 10 or 12. Also, I allowed it to carry up to 4 units, this should make it useful in some situations, but even with these changes, I’ve used the Helicopter only once, more to see how it works and is it better than because I needed to. I think Helicopters should have the ability to land on Carries with their cargo, but then, the AI would have to be tweaked to be able to handle this – not easy thing to, either.
Explorer – not a completely useless unit, but certainly not what it’s supposed to be. It arrives at the end of the Middle Ages, and surely can not do much work exploring – you should know most or entire map already by now, since you’ve traveled a lot, and also have been into map trades with other civilizations. The Explorer can still be useful in a few situations, such as keeping him into territory of two other warring civilizations to monitor the events there, and know when and how to join the battle, but this use of the Explorer might be a good one in a pretty limited number of cases. And the Explorer is certainly no match to its Civ 2 counterpart that was often really used to explore the lands. Big changes would be needed to prevent you from knowing all the map by the time Explorer arrives, so maybe it should just be put earlier on the tech tree, where you can actually make use of this fellow.
Cruise Missile – does this sound familiar? I think this is the most commonly mentioned example of a useless unit. Cruise Missile can kill a unit by bombardment, but it will get lost anyway, and can only kill a unit if it’s already low somewhat on hit points. Having a short range, this one-hit weapon was rarely, if ever, used by human players. I have gone pretty far in modifying this unit. I let the Cruise Missile sometimes kill a unit at full health, gave the Battleship an ability to carry two of these, increased the attack range, and also gave the Missile the Precision Strike ability. Just look, in real life missiles are often used for targeting specific structures, why not in Civ3? What I currently got is a nice alternative for a few units, and I keep a few of these around for sinking ships or attacking stacks of units – who knows when the need comes?
Nukes – ahh the nukes. Let’s face it, the way they’re implemented is not the best possible way. Currently nukes are very expensive for what they do, and there’s also no real drawback to using them. I see it as a bad thing that you can never destroy a city with a nuke. Think real life, can a city survive after 3 or 4 nukes are dropped on it? Probably not. In Civ 3, nukes don’t even kill all the units in attacked square – they just have a chance of doing so. They’re only useful because they destroy tile improvement around the city, so nukes are nice to use on enemy capitol, to prevent trading, but generally, you’re usually supposed to use standard forces instead of nukes. I did all I could do – I just lowered the cost for the nuke, to make it worth building for its small effect. Other suggestions on improving nuclear weapons could be increasing the effect of nukes. By this I mean, ability to destroy cities, better blast radius, more damage to city infrastructure and such. Also, give nukes drawbacks. Other civs should start disliking you in case you are using nuclear weapons. Yes, they’re programmed to declare war on you in case nukes are used, but there’s one big problem with it – Nukes come in the modern age, and by then, all the wars are global, with every civ involved on either side. And so, your enemies can’t get worse, even if you nuke one of them, and your allies are always happy if you nuke a mutual foe. I don’t think it should be this way – there should be a chance that your allies will break the alliance or even shift sides if you use too much nuclear weapons. I have, however, used a fair number of nukes in a 3 on 3 war, and neither of my allies got upset – they both were happily taking the territory glowing in radioactive rain. Nukes cause too much pollution, you say? That’s rubbish. When I have been nuked, my army of workers cleared all the pollution in two turns. When the AI is nuked, it will either clear pollution itself, or other AIs/human that conquers the land will clear it a bit later. And even if the global worming affects a square or two within your land, it’s not much of a tragedy. Just think, all the previous civgames, CtP included, had nice effects of Global Warming – so, terrain could be affected globally, leading to worldwide starvation and production shortage, or water levels were just raising, submerging cities and, at times, whole landmasses. Then Global Warming disasters were something you really didn’t want to occur, most of the time, in Civ 3 it’s not much of a problem.
Nuclear submarines – while I’m speaking of nuclear weapons in general, let me throw the nuclear sub here, too. What we have is a more expensive version of the standard sub, which still isn’t much of a deal attack wise, and can only carry one Tactical nuke. As I showed above, the Tactical Nuke isn’t something you would die for, and the carry capacity of one isn’t too promising, especially taking in account that the sub can hardly be used to do anything else – it would probably lose to a Battleship if you tried to attack one. You would be better off building fair numbers of regular Submarines, if you want an underwater fleet, or just resort to the usual ships. I gave it an attack factor of 10, to give the nuke sub reasonable chance again modern ships, and a carry capacity of 4 tactical nukes. This, I believe, can be a threat. All in all, if I build and load just three of these, that’s 12 nukes, which can be a threat to another nation. However, as long as nukes in general don’t get fixed, the nuclear submarine will still remain a unit of average usefulness.
Stealth Fighter – this is a unit almost never built even by fans of airpower, such as myself. It can do everything the Stealth Bomber does, but does it worse – less chance of hitting, less damage inflicted if the hit takes place. While the Stealth Fighter is cheaper somewhat, it’s still better not to build it at all – those lower production cities for whom it matters can as well be building other stuff, and chances are high your civilization will benefit more from it. I’m pretty much lacking ideas on how to fix it. Maybe the Stealth Fighter should also be able to intercept, making it a universal plane, or have some other sort of a special ability. However, as I see it, the unit can just be removed from the game – I’d rather see the Gunship Helicopter instead of it.
Catapults and Cannons – this might be just mine opinion, but I think these two are useless. I do not naysay the idea of artillery bombardment, I actually find Artillery units quite useful due to their two square range, and will often build some to supplement my main attack force, but I will not be using Catapults and Cannons. Simply put, they are slow, so you need a unit to keep backwards to protect these. By the time they arrive to the target city, your main force is already there, and possibly should have already been striking. Especially during the Ancient Age, every unit and every city matters, so you’d rather get another Swordsman than a Catapult. Look, the Catapult will miss its target more often that not, and if even if it hits, not much damage is done – chances are high that the extra Swordsman could have done more, or even killed the defender. This stays true for the Cannon, where you’re actually better off using your Knights to attack the city – they can reach it faster, and do also hold a chance of retreating. As I see it, Cannons and Catapults are of use exclusively on defense, stacking them with other defensive units you got along the border or in cities. As I say, this doesn’t apply to Artillery and other modern bombarding units. Possible fixes to this include increasing strength of these units, so that you would have more of a motivation to build these.
This would pretty much conclude the section of useless units, I don’t think I missed out many, but I might well have forgotten something, you know how it is to write a long post such as this. Now a bit more of other problems with Civ 3, in a pretty random order, I just feel too lazy.
Age of sail – this one is just too short. With Galleons and Frigates arriving only at Magnetism, you’re getting Ironclads very soon. Steam Power is always my first technology in the Industrial Age, and, given that on many maps navy isn’t at all that important, Frigates never really come into play. Maybe the Ironclad should have its movement lowered, so that it wouldn’t make the Frigate obsolete, or also make the Ironclad a bit more expensive, to give the player an alternative cost-wise, too.
Reconnaissance missions – this air mission is just useless, and sometimes ridiculous. Say, you saw an enemy ship move into the fog of war and know where it is. You can’t see it, but your bomber can reach it. However, to be able to attack that ship you have to first fly a Reconnaissance mission to get in sight – pretty ridiculous, given there’s no armed reconnaissance – in real life, one plane doesn’t just fly around without attacking to let the attacking planes know where to drop their bombs.
Modern Age – the game doesn’t have four ages, it has three and a half. Simply put, as I reach the Modern Age, I get Computers, and then act along one of two scenarios. If everyone else loves me, I go for Fission, build UN, game over. If not, I go for Space Flight, and am then only researching spaceship technologies, while having my best cities produce the spaceship parts, which are cheap – I get them completed by the time the next tech arrives. This early victory is why, before I modified this, I haven’t build an AEGIS cruiser a single time – I haven’t actually discovered Stealth, Robotics, Genetics, etc. – victory just came too fast. I think the whole Modern Age needs a major remake from Firaxis, but what we can do with the Editor is resetting some of spaceship parts to later techs. Yes, it’s not realistic, but at least will make you research. Oh, and don’t forget to increase the cost for all the spaceship parts. I really hope Firaxis reworks the Modern Age in Play the World.
Armies – before the game was released, we supposed that armies are going to be powerhouses. It turned out that they’re not, and I will rarely build an Army with my Leader. Basically an Army is three units sharing hit points. So, you get a Cavalry with 15 Hit Points instead of 3 Cavalry with 5 Hit Points. How good is it? First, let me refer to situations where there are units with one movement point in an army, such as Infantry or my improved Marines, or early armies of Swordsmen. Three Elite Swordsmen can kill three units in one turn, and each will also have a chance of at least 1 in 16 of generating you a Leader. Sounds nice. An army of Elite Swordsmen can only kill one unit per turn. It will almost certainly kill that defender, but that’s only one unit beaten, and with a zero chance of generating another Leader. Think what you like better. Also, Armies do not come cheap. They come at the expense of a Leader, something I will often want to use for completing a Wonder. This is why I don’t build Armies in the Middle Ages- there are just too many Wonders to complete, and I’d rather use the Leader to get yet another of those. The Military Academy, though, can be quite useful, if you get it, with a productive city giving you an Army each 2-3 turns… under certain conditions, can be a neat bonus. Another huge drawback is impossibility to upgrade – if you built an army of Swordsmen, it will become useless in the Middle Ages. I would certainly like to see Armies improved – maybe give it the ability to attack several times a turn even with slow units in it, make them upgradeable, add something else, but make a pretty peaceful player such as myself wanting to acquire one. And warmongers aren’t dying for armies too much, either.
.
. Some ideas are pretty nice.
)
Comment