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OT: Civ3 rant from MoO3 v GalCiv topic

I tend to agree with Fyron on his arguements against Civ3. Civ3 does have a few redeeming qualities that are good. Such as the way air units work. I enjoyed that... once they got it working. Also the infinite range of ICBM's was nice. Culture has potential but they didn't do enough with it. It seemed to just be thrown in for a new feature they needed. Same for the strategic resources.

But the bad just overwhelm it.
In order to get a game with difficulty and no cheating I had to use the editor and make that. Then I discovered the "built in" parts of the difficulty levels. I could edit existing levels but not make a new one. If I put it in the place of the lowest difficulty level the AI would NEVER EVER declare war against each other or me unless I started it off. If I moved it to a higher level slot the units got the inherent combat bonuses Fyron talked about which I couldn't change. Also the AI was far more likely to declare war on me at the drop of a dust particle than it was to declare war on fellow AI's at the drop of a bomb.

Political and diplomatic model? You make one mistake in Civ3 or PTW and the AI NEVER forgives you. Play for thousands of years and in the year 2050 AD they still remember when you betrayed the Greeks back in 3000 BC. The government types you can choose are all PC and incredibly similiar in type and fuction just covering the basics. Even Civ 2 had more government options that had more meaning. One thing I personally find horrible is the equating of Democracy with Capitalism and Communism with totally controlled gov economy. There are many nations in this world that refute those claims. The game takes Cold War political shouts and taunts and insults and makes it into the reality of making political AND economic choices all in one basket with TADA a total of 5 options, 6 if you count Anarchy.

Having tried to make my own mod with it I was terribly frustrated by the infexibility of the editor and the huge amounts of material that were hard coded.

Fyrons comments on AI tech trading are the exact same that I have found. You have your super power AI's that you can trade with at super costs and are more advanced than you almost always (early game) and then you have the retarded (economically and developmentally speaking) nations that STILL ask for super prices when trading even though you could kill them faster than swatting a mosquito! Try asking for the smallest most run down city in trade for ALL your gold ALL your techs and ALL your cities. The AI gets insulted! You are asking for one city in exchange for your ENTIRE empire and they REFUSE?!?!

Now I don't really like the Civ: CTP series but it did several things quite well. It had far more meaningfull government choices broken down into many Groups. Also units were more complex than simply a defense rating and an offense rating then compare the two and you have combat. How many times do you see medieval infantry kill mechanized infantry or modern armor? Even once is too much and you see it far more than just once. People say stuff well you have the nations like Vietnam and Afganistan beating modern powers like the US etc... yes... With Guerrila infantry! When was the Last time ANYONE used a mace or morning star or ARMORED cavalry or crossbows in warfare. The Last use of the crossbow in warfare was WWI. The others died out WAY before that. Why? Because you CAN'T win with those in modern warfare no matter how much you have.

The Civ3 unit system is far to simplistic is the problem. No naval only bombardment (torpedoes anyone) stealth system that is either 0 or 1 with nothing in between. Meaning of course that WWI era submarines were just as easy to detect as Los Angeles Class attack submarines with a sound signature equal to a school of feeding SHRIMP.
Everywhere you look in CIV3 things are limited and hardcoded and often poorly.

Back to the AI. Line up a huge number of units all along your border in forts with just a single opening that they can move through unopposed, put tons of artillery there with lots of attack units to take out anyone coming through. What does the AI do? Instead of trying to break through the line somewhere they ignore the line, including any weakspots in it and go straight for the empty open space and let you bombard and attack them to death... over and over and over...

How about pointless micromanagement... late game having to keep on going out and removing pollution then going into the cities that were affected and making sure they get that square back and productive so they don't starve... Oh yah. We have auto pollution removal. That is great. If you get pollution every turn. Which I don't. They don't keep the autoremove pollution order if there isn't any pollution that turn! So when pollution pops up I go and find where I put them. I take them off sentry I tell them to remove the pollution or just click auto remove they do it. Next turn I move them back so I can find them (no auto option for that!) and sentry them again or don't move them back and risk having to take several minutes to find them the next time pollution rears its ugly head and threatens to cause starvation in my cities.

How about the half-a#$#d implementation of strategic resources? What is strategic about these? Grab one oil area and all your nations needs for oil are met for all of time... or maybe one turn... you never know since they dissapear totally at random! And of course you can only hae X amount of them around at any given time. One dissapears and another appears. That would be like saying that Afganistan has the same demand for oil as the United States, both can have all their oil needs met by the oil fields in Texas, but not both at the same time, AND there is no way to tell how much oil is there and plan for when it will run out AND there are only 16 oil fields in the world FOREVER. You can only find more oil if some oil somewhere else in the world goes away! Oh... and of course the AI is more than willing to sell you some oil if it has extra... for several hundred gold per turn all you have in your treasury 2 strategic resources you have AND 3 luxury resources! And they are more than willing to buy it from you if you have it and they don't for a few hundred gold per turn all they have in their treasury and if you get lucky maybe a luxury resource. Yay...?

Yah. The AI trades totally fairly in every way... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/blush.gif

Civ3 has its good points. But they are just too far and few between to overcome the bad points. And the fact that Civ3 looks at all the other Civ type games that came before it and pretends like they never existed and never did any of the stuff they did that was great and fun and just ignores all that throwing in super simplified systems and pretty graphics without removing any of the tedius and fun draining micromanagement.

Culture? BAH. That isn't culture in Civ3. That is just a half baked system for border expansion. Since when has culture had anything to do with a nations borders? China had great cultural inlfluence of Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and many other nations in that region... but they never had control of those nations politically for very long, and in several cases not at all, EVER. England has complete control of around half the world at one point. What did that have to do with culture? Did their borders in India have to do with culture? Did the United States break away from them because of poor culture? If culture influenced happiness and political influence... THAT I could understand. But your nations borders? And when was the Last time a part of one nation revolted and decided to join their neighbor because it had better culture, especially when the other nation has a military 10x the size of the "cultural" nation. When did any of the dark ages European nations go over to the Arab nations because they had better culture?
What does culture mean to KKK members? Try telling them of the wonders of African nation culture. Try and get several nations to agree on what "culture" is. Then try to rate nations on their "culture" and see how far you get. The age of something affecting it's cultural value? Please. Ask most people which nation has more culture, France or Egypt. I would be willing to bet that most people would say France. Why? The Pyramids are thousands of years older than the Eiffel Tower! Don't they know how much more culture the Egyptians have!

Civ3 has culture all right. But it is a totally artificial concept that has no bearing whatsoever on anything that it actually does in the game!

Feel free to like it yourself. As for me... I uninstalled it and PTW a month ago after trying almost a year of finding the good qualities in it that would overpower the bad...

Colonization was a great game, SMAX was a great game, Civ2 was a great game.

Civ3 is at best an OK game.

I tried several of the Civ3 mods as well. And while several of them made the game better than it was, they couldn't overcome the fundamental flaws in the game engine itself that no amount of modding can fix.

[ April 23, 2003, 17:57: Message edited by: Cyrien ]