[Saber Cherry]

I thought Starcon 3 was horrible. I derived no pleasure from it *except* for melee mode, which took no game designing, as it's been present since SC1.

I should not have said "Unplayable". In fact it was playable on most ATI cards, but there were major graphical flaws. In my case - I have 512 MB ram and a Radeon 9800 Pro, which had the latest drivers (and the latest DX) - I got no wonder videos, a black diplomacy screen 80% of the time, the screen went all *weird* when I zoomed out (orange blocks rather than cloud cover). But it was playable. However, that was after the patch that was supposed to fix problems with ATI cards.

I also had no music at all except for the intro (maybe that's the only music, I don't know), and after my fourth city, the game would slow down as time progressed so that I had to restart the game every 20 minutes or so, rather than experience 0.5 FPS. That was a memory leak combined with a graphics caching problem, I understand.

And then there were the crashes, but there were only a few of them. However, I only played for about 7 hours. Civ IV is the only game I can think of that's crashed in WinXP SP2 (though I have a bad memory). WOW crashed, but that turned out to be a motherboard problem, due to crappy Taiwanese industrial espionage (they messed up when stealing the Japanese electrolyte formulas, but used them anyway). If they didn't have a virtual monopoly, I'd never buy another Taiwanese motherboard again... and I see no reason to cut Firaxis slack for shipping a technically broken product, either. Developers know at release whether their game works or not, just like mobo makers know whether they are using black-market child-labor capacitors based on crayon drawings smuggled on the underwear label of a dyslexic Japanese janitor. The Taiwanese execs may not have known the capacitors would explode and leak, but they sure knew that they didn't care. And Firaxis didn't really care whether ATI users could play their game within two months of buying it, or whether anyone could play more than 2 hours without a crash or more than 10 turns (mid game) without restarting. I know there were reports of people not having problems, but you can't launch a new jetliner based on scattered reports of them not crashing on takeoff... and you shouldn't do that with software, either.

As for not using exploits... it wasn't like I tried to. The typical AI diplomacy routines, like those in Civ 3, demanded strictly unequal trades. But if you used the new feature, the "What will make this deal work?" button, the AI would accept any deal you had put on the table, even if they had rejected it before. And they would never accept my peace settlements otherwise, no matter how badly they were losing in a war, or how little I asked for.


As I said earlier, GC2 is in much better shape. No major graphical flaws, working music, no crashes, no slowdown after 10 straight hours DESPITE defragging my other harddrive for the first 4 hours of it. They simply care more... though not *quite* enough for me.