[Tanus]

The AI cheats way too much. The various AI civs have no problem finding ways to trade their technologies with each other. As soon as one gets a new tech, most of them will have it within a turn or two... They will always demand far more from me than what a tech is worth. If the game was fair and they demanded the same things from AI civs, they wouldn't be able to get new techs to each other so very quickly. Additionally, it has happened maybe 50 times that when I am building a wonder, circumstances will have it that an AI civ completes the construction of that wonder exactly 1 turn before I would have completed it. There is no way this could just be coincidence, due to the fact that it happens with such regularity...

The AI has cheated in all civ games, and from what I can see, civ 3 cheats less than 2. I often will run into AI empires of widely varying tech levels, depending on their size and position. What difficulty are you playing at? as this might affect their play. As for the wonders 1 turn before yours, I very rarely have this happen any more. Civ 2 was far more problematic in this regard, at least from my own experiences

The entire nature of the combat system is just... wrong. They should have stuck with the Civ 2 system... 16 attack strength units should almost never lose against units with 3/4 defense, yet tanks frequently are destroyed by _pikemen_ and _musketeers_. Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense... And don't bother with those absurd arguements that the units could have modernized weapons and whatnot. They do not. They are pikemen and musketmen. They have pikes or muskets.

I'll agree here, there definitely seems to be some 'back-stepping' in terms of the combat system, though as you said, this can be alleviated slightly by increasing the differences in combat values

Further, the bombardment system is just absurd. 40 bombers bombing a city and doing maybe 2 or 3 points of damage to units in the city and not even destroying a single building or any population doesn't make any sense...

I find this hard to believe... While I prefer the civ 2 system of aircraft (although stealth fighters were way overpowered), I've been able to level cities with fewer bombers than you speak of. Roughly 1 in 3 seem to miss, but that is still enough to knock the city down in short order, especially in combination with other units

Spying is useless. It costs so much gold to perform that it is completely impractical. There was nothing wrong with spy units...

Agree with you there...

The use of resources in Civ 3 hurts the game more than it helps it. Sure, it might be realistic to not be able to progress past stone/bronze age units if you don't find any iron (aka North America pre-Columbian age), but it sure doesn't make the game any fun to play when you have no units available after spearmen for a huge portion of the game just because you have no iron... At least allow weakened Versions of the units that require special resources!

This can be easily solved: by increasing the 'chance to appear' of each resource, you can make it so you'll never have a problem of finding what you need.

The necessity of building cultural facilities to establish a border of your empire is, quite frankly, absurd. It leads to the AI sending streams of settlers through the gaps to colonize cities in small pockets of "free land", which by all accounts should be within your borders, but are not due to not having enough "culture"... Because everyone knows that to claim territory you have to have plenty of religious organizations, museums and acting troupes...

I agree that this could have been done better, and should have a military aspect to it, but such is the way of things. If you want to remove this, simply increase the culture value of temples by a large margin, so that a simple temple will fill in those gaps relatively quickly. (As the AI always uses temples as well, this balances out reasonably)

Oh yeah... and one major problem is the idiotic move of making the data files _not_ editable in a text editor. You have are forced to use the clunky "scenario editor" to make mods... ugh.

Honestly, how many modern games can be edited in a text editor? Very, very few. We are spoiled by the likes of SEIV and similar games, but while the scenario editor could have been much better, not being editable as text files is hardly an uncommon thing.


As for all the Test of Time features, I can't really comment, as by some odd set of circumstances I do not own it and have only played it once, so I have no reference point. Judging by what you have said, there are indeed many features that could have been implemented and were not, which is odd, all things considered. However, as one who hasn't played it, I don't miss what I didn't know.

Indeed, Civ 3 could have been better than it is, but it is still a good game worth playing, imho.