reflective reevaluation of pre ptw civ III after all the patchwork

[bigvic]

this thread is something of a rehashing of all the generally legitimate griping and *****ing that followed the less than perfect beta game firaxis first packaged for us last xmas. in my opinion, with all the patches, it has come a long way, about a releaseable, finished product, as a matter of fact.

i've gotten over most of my initial dissapointment as familiarity has grown and patches have plugged holes, but still harbor cerrtain regrets.

1. city radii - wish they had adopted ctp2's expandable city radii. hate missing out on resources and goodies just 1 tile away.

2. colonies - if no change on city radii, at least they could have made colonies more like supply crawlers in sma/ac, able to not only prpvide access to luxury/resources, but simply able to ferry extra food/shields/gold back to home city. hate to see a city, part of an integrated civ, moribund because no one helps out in feeding it. alternative would be to ferry food from 1 city to another as in civ 2 - though trade differences sort of preclude this.

3. military - although i've become quite adept at the use of armies in civ III, still prefer the way they did it in ctp2, ability to lock together armies of units of different types (offensive, ranged, defensive, flanker) freely without having tp permanently lock them into something that limits the abilities of the individual units as well as opp to upgrade. overall bad idea.

4. diplomatic options - still nothing better than all the options under smac/ac - esp. the one that allows you to ask someone to stop attacking your friend. makes it nearly impossible to build real coalitions diplomatically.

5. tile based production - back to ctp2, loved being freed from having to allocate those irritating citzens. what purpose does this serve but to slow the game down from ai as well as human perspective? really?

6. lack of sea development - again harping on ctp2, but smac/ac as well, such a shame that island cities must wait til off shore platforms in the modern era to really develop.

overall, that is about it. most of the early beefs i had related to the shoddy beta quality of the original release, which has been, imho, pretty much fixed w/ all the patches. other probs i had have dissapeared w/ familiarity w/ game. what do you all think?

[dojoboy]

I can't disagree w/ your points. I never played ctp2 because it was never ported over to the mac. I wonder if legal issues kept Firaxis from adopting some of the ctp2 features you are so fond of. They sound like solid aspects for inclusion. As far as SMACx goes, it rocks!

[cgannon64]

1-There are expandable radii. The limit is 21 tiles, however. If the limit was higher, cities would become too powerful, with too much production and too much population. THink of the city center as a metropolis and the tiles as suburbs---the suburbs can't go on forever.

2-There are colonies to connect resources and lux outside your borders, but not being ferries as you describe. THe ferry idea is a good one, however.

3-The reason Firaxis made the armies unupgradeable and locking the units in is because those abilites would unbalance the game. Armies would become WAY too powerful if it went like you said.

4-No arguement.

5-???

6-Very very true.

Nice post, but either I'm not understanding you on one and two, or you are mistaken about a few things.

[bigvic]

Originally posted by cgannon64
1-There are expandable radii. The limit is 21 tiles, however. If the limit was higher, cities would become too powerful, with too much production and too much population. THink of the city center as a metropolis and the tiles as suburbs---the suburbs can't go on forever.

2-There are colonies to connect resources and lux outside your borders, but not being ferries as you describe. THe ferry idea is a good one, however.

3-The reason Firaxis made the armies unupgradeable and locking the units in is because those abilites would unbalance the game. Armies would become WAY too powerful if it went like you said.

4-No arguement.

5-???

6-Very very true.

Nice post, but either I'm not understanding you on one and two, or you are mistaken about a few things.

thanks
ctp2 was a potentially great game that got dropped by its supporters, unlike civ3.
1. cities could expand beyond 21 tiles, though not too much - allowed option for few gigantic metropolii, or many smaller cities. cool. also had to plan well, as bigger cities coul kind of crowd out smaller ones. then you could build otherr things like trading posts and outlet malls, which i thought of as, like smaller satelite cities, and all sorts of cool stuff. really worked out nicely.

3. ctp2 (and 1, for that matter) did not have armies as civ3. you built your units, and at your option, could group them into armies of up to 12, which was the tile stacking limit, and move/fight together. just the way it was done. seemed more realistic to me - they all fought at once on a battle screen and it paid to have a mixed force. u could unload as desired, load back, verry flexible.

5. in ctp2, when u clicked on the city screen, no map showing which tiles were being worked. in other words, production was divided up, so every improvement u made helped, no worries about constantly messing with where to place citizens, tile improvements, etc. saved time, made sense, i liked it.

maybe i should check out the ctp2 section, would be fun change of pace to play if i could debug it and mod a little.

[vmxa1]

Re: reflective reevaluation of pre ptw civ III after all the patchwork

Originally posted by bigvic

5. tile based production - back to ctp2, loved being freed from having to allocate those irritating citzens. what purpose does this serve but to slow the game down from ai as well as human perspective? really?

I can no longer recall much about either CTP games except after 3-4 of them, I was tired of them. I am not sure if I prefer CPT2 civil works concept better or not. I mean you are correct it is less of a problem with micromanaging. I just wonder if they are not locked into the current method for fear of alienating too many customers. How will you get captured works? You would lose the strategy of using working better than others or the AI. I am not sure if I care either way.

[bigvic]

i just think specifically allocating citizens is a drain on computer resources, programming, and my time - and the gov never gets it right all the time. maybe i'm lazy, but again, i like finishing games.

[Cyclotron]

Re: reflective reevaluation of pre ptw civ III after all the patchwork

Originally posted by bigvic
1. city radii - wish they had adopted ctp2's expandable city radii. hate missing out on resources and goodies just 1 tile away.

That sounds like an interesting idea. Cultural borders already expand, but actual city radius expansion might me an improvement.

2. colonies - if no change on city radii, at least they could have made colonies more like supply crawlers in sma/ac, able to not only prpvide access to luxury/resources, but simply able to ferry extra food/shields/gold back to home city. hate to see a city, part of an integrated civ, moribund because no one helps out in feeding it. alternative would be to ferry food from 1 city to another as in civ 2 - though trade differences sort of preclude this.

Food definitely needs some vehicle of trade.

4. diplomatic options - still nothing better than all the options under smac/ac - esp. the one that allows you to ask someone to stop attacking your friend. makes it nearly impossible to build real coalitions diplomatically.

Actually, I thought the whole bargaining table deal was a big improvement. Of course, there can always be more, but I quite liked how the diplo system turned out.

5. tile based production - back to ctp2, loved being freed from having to allocate those irritating citzens. what purpose does this serve but to slow the game down from ai as well as human perspective? really?

Well, whatever... I love the tile system, I love managing it. The purpose it serves is to allow intelligent resource allocation... once again, I really like the system.

[cgannon64]

1-Now I understand you, and that seems like a very good idea. So you could have one city with, say, 30 radius, and another with 9? I like that idea, it could make placing cities a little tougher and a little more strategic.

2-Now that I understand what you said about the armies, I think the ctp2 way could unbalance the game, unless the AI learns to fight like that...

3-I don't know about this. In my mind the current method of receiving food/shields/gold is quite alright.

Thank you for clarifying these things.

[bigvic]

yeah, everyone has own preferences. currently in the process of upgrading my old ctp2 game to latest on the ctp2 forum, w/ some help. maybe i'm over nostalgizing, but will see soon.

[Bamspeedy]

I still love civ3, but ctp2 did have some good things about it. Ctp2 just needed some things fine-turned to work better, and of course improved graphics among other things. City managing (food/shield distribution) was one thing I liked about it. You could make farmers, allowing food gathering to be more efficient, thus you could get a few more population points out of those mountains/desert areas. Likewise, you can make shield specialists making your production more efficient that would help out with your high population/but low production areas.

It would be great if the high food areas could ship excess food to the mountain areas and the mountain areas could ship shields elsewhere. The way it is now, you might only get to use a whole 2 squares of mountains if the city is in a massive mountain range, because of low (no) food sources.

[Blake]

Farmers, hehehahah. I remember my size 9 cities in the icecaps, built them up by assigning 100% farmers, then when they grow no more leave 2-3 farmers to stop them starving and set everyone else as scientists/merchants/laborers. But what I want to know, is what the HECK are they farming?!

With cities in mountains, i think they should have to remain fairly small, unless it's a coastal city there simply isn't incentive to expand, it's not easy to live in mountains so pratically everyone will immigrate away to the plains city where it's easy for the city to sprawl. (port cities are an exception because a port can generate excellent revenue and there are usually patches of low lying land along the coast -- and ofcourse fishing and water based recreation).


But by far my biggest gripe is the armies issue, they really should have made CTP2 style armies because it would have added so much to the game and taken away so much clicking. Would have improved the AI too because an army of tanks would easily dislodge a MI from a mountain, unlike lots of seperate tanks, which inividually cant dislodge the MI. So the AI would have an easier time recognising it has enough military force to dislodge entrenched opponents.

I think Firaxis just used a hardline approach of Zero innovation for Civ3.

[Bamspeedy]

Originally posted by Blake
Farmers, hehehahah. I remember my size 9 cities in the icecaps, built them up by assigning 100% farmers, then when they grow no more leave 2-3 farmers to stop them starving and set everyone else as scientists/merchants/laborers. But what I want to know, is what the HECK are they farming?!

With cities in mountains, i think they should have to remain fairly small, unless it's a coastal city there simply isn't incentive to expand, it's not easy to live in mountains so pratically everyone will immigrate away to the plains city where it's easy for the city to sprawl. (port cities are an exception because a port can generate excellent revenue and there are usually patches of low lying land along the coast -- and ofcourse fishing and water based recreation).

yeah, farmers aren't really a good idea when you look at realism, since you can't farm icecaps or mountains. But the transfer of food/shields makes sense to me. If I want to get more production from my massive mountain range I would send citizens to that region to work. Those citizens need to be fed, so food gets sent there, and the finished product (shields, or whatever) gets sent to wherever I need it. Either the mountain cities could produce stuff right there (like military units), or produce shields (think of it as raw materials) that can be shipped to coastal areas to help them produce ships or other things.

Of course, cities should still be succeptible to corruption, so that claiming a ton of mountains thousands of miles from your capital is still pretty useless. But since food could be shipped there those distant cities might grow big enough to produce more than 1 uncorrupt shield .

On another note: Since they will keep the tile based system for production, I wish border expansions were more solid. First you start out with a 3 X 3 area (9 tiles). When you expand your borders you get a 4X4 area (16 tiles), and add a 2nd expansion for a 5X5 area (25 tiles). This would make city placement easier, so it would be easier not to get overlapping of city tiles and/or gaps in between your cities, if you wanted to play like that. And this would make it more important to get more than 10 measly culture points in all your cities, so they can make use of all 25 tiles.