Inquiry for Firaxis personnel

[Alex]

Yep. Thanks, Jeff.

[Dinner]

Thank you Jeff. It is nice to get some honest anwsers to our questions.

[TechWins]

While it is nice to get a response from Jeff, it is quite dissapointing to see the little elabaration Jeff put into his answers, however, Jeff just answering the questions at all is better than nothing.







Let all of the misinterpretation of my post begin...

[marc420]

Actually, I like Civ3. Or I would like it if I could play with the changes in the patch without the game crashing in the industrial age. About all that leaves as a challenge is how big of an empire can I build before the crash.

I happen to really like the changes introduced with Corruption and Culture. They provide a nice balancing effect to the geometric growth models that most turn based strategy build an empire games suffer from. By that I mean the empire that has one extra city twenty turns into the game has a growth advantage that multiplies from then on. Picture two geometrically increasing growth lines. The one that is a little ahead early ends up way ahead and uncatchable. The new features like corruption did a lot to fix that. Now running over that neighboring civ early on does not give you a huge advantage 'cause the corruption dampens down that curve. I consider this an improvement. Too bad the game doesn't have multiplayer, cause I think this would make multiplayer more interesting. Seems like you are more likely to have a balanced game deep into the game, thus more interesting diplomacy.

Since the last patch introduced that mid-game crash (I've since uninstalled the patch and have been crash free ever since), how about a fix to that problem so that we can actually use the last patch instead of playing the original cd version. A lot of good improvements are going unused due to the crashes.

Of course, I'm still PO'd about having to buy two games to get MP. Pretty much means I'll wait till I can pull that out of an discount bin somewhere. Its not just Firaxis, but I've grown pretty tired of this sales strategy that says lets try to soak our biggest fans out of two or three times the price of the game, while the people who don't like our stuff can buy the whole shebang as a bundle from a discount bin a year later. Most businesses try to treat their dedicated customers better than others --- frequent flyer programs are an example. The computer game industry seems to have the opposite approach of trying to mistreat their most dedicated customers. The people who really love a designer's games and who are willing to run out a pay full price the day they are released first have to deal with buggy games that aren't finished by the release date, then to get the full functionality of the game they have to buy a release pack. The obvious smart strategy for a game consumer is to try not to buy games when they are released. If you can hold off and wait, by the time you buy the game you can get the expansion pack for the full price (or less) than what the original buyers paid for just a portion of the game. Plus you don't have to deal with the "we rushed the game out to be on the shelves for Christmas so sorry about the crashes" blues.

I'm not just picking on Firaxis here. By modern game company standards, Civ3 was a relatively non-buggy pre-Christmas game release.

But it is aggravating to have an industry basically set up a sales model that says if you are really smart you won't go buy the game you really want when it first comes out.

[vmxa1]

The only crash I have encounter is when I drag the movement circle all over the map and it freezes. I had that 3-4 times. I select a unit and then can't find the place I meant to sent it and while scroll the map it locks up. This did not happen before the patch. Got to love Windows, what a system allowing an app to kill it.