I just brought Civilization III, anyone else have it?

Come on, now Milo - you KNOW you want to.

If you like strats/builders, you'll love it. Also - like Arcanum - it has no multiplayer mode :grin:

Do it, boy! The Civ boards are so empty my last post actually echoed.

 

Arcanum has multiplayer. If you cant play it, then its too bad- me too.

 

what board are you taling about Sheriff?

 

what board are you talking about Sheriff?

 

I'm talking about several, really. I did a little surfing from the links page at the official site ( http://www.civ3.com ) and checked out the activity on the boards. I think I even registered and posted at one (Civ Nation, I believe).

They ARE getting posts. I just couldn't find any that gave the impression of a flow, rather than a trickle.

Do you know of one where the posts are coming pretty steadily?

 

I didn't like Civ 3 much. In fact, I played it about a day then uninstalled it. Oddly enough, Civ 2 Gold is still on my harddrive.

My first big beef with it is the AI. I really hate AIs that cheat, and Civ 3's AI cheats big time. For example, I had a scouting swordsman attack a japanese warrior miles away from my base. A few turns later, HORDES of japanese units were swarming my cities. They never ran across it on their own, they just showed up. After all these years, you'd think they would actually invest some time in to making a less half-assed AI that didn't cheat.

They added governors, which is nice, but they're fairly stupid. If you change a person to an entertainer, they'll change him right back once order is restored. That means in a few turns, there will be riots all over again. This makes governors useless since they end up causing you more work than not having them.

Basically, they also didn't change that much from Civilization 2, but what they did change, I didn't care much for. If you haven't played a Civilization game, I'd recommend getting Civ 2 Gold over this. It's cheaper, better, has more gameplay options including modifications of the game, and has multiplayer.

 

Ah well, I can see where you're coming from, but I loved Civ2 and love Civ3.

All your points are valid (except maybe the governor one on the grounds that they are not responsible for your strategy, just the city, and also that the Civ 2 governors are equally short-sighted) but it's not enough to spoil the game for me.

If someone had asked me "Would you pay for Civ2 with better graphics and UI" I'd have said yes.

 

Seeing as I can't find my Civ 2 cd, Civ 3 sounds like a worthy investment :smile:. I have almost no complaints with Civ 2, so I'm pretty sure I'll like Civ 3.

If it ain't broken, don't fix it and don't bother re-inventing the wheel.

Although, some idiot over here actually patented the wheel under a "circular motion device" or something like that. Moron...

 

I'm not sure the governors would fit any playing style, because of how quickly corruption builds up in Civ 3. You pretty much have to rely on Entertainers to keep the order, just because of how Depotism works in the game and how fast corruption builds. If you have a governor managing happiness, they'll remove the entertainer the turn when the riots stopped.

 

From some of the material I have read, the idea in Civ 3 is slightly different, in keeping with the whole adjustments they've made regarding victory conditions.

As I understand it, the idea now is to go for a realtively small number of "super-cities" rather than proliferating like mad, which was pretty much one of the silver bullets for Civ 2. They even suggest seriously considering razing captured cities to avoid overextending your empire (although I prefer to give the cities to my allies as "gifts").

Corruption seems to be one of the game balance incentive/deterrent they're using to guide us toward these playing styles.

I haven't yet had a major problem with corruption (on warlord level) because I generally don't go over about a dozen or so cities.

 

See, that's what I loved about Civ 2...I was playing as the Spanish once on one of the pre-made maps...had the best start ever...If you remember, the first turns for quite a while represented 20 years...before 1000 years was up, I had nine cities. 2 turns later I had 11 (like I said, incredible luck - pretty much every hut either gave me horseman, or turned into a city. Half of them were along the river as well, which only made it easier :smile:.

That game rocked. I spied, I incited revolts to take over cities, when other 'empires' had a biff with me, I crushed them, eventually. The Persians were my main threat, because they started far away from me, and managed to dominate their area.

 

Fatman,

You have to admit, that "several megacities" versus "lots of decent cities" is a damned odd approach to an Empire building game. :smile:

 

I tried the few 'megacities' approach in the first Civilisation, and it didn't work very well...

Saint_Proverbius, not really. I mean, the Romans didn't go building great cities everywhere when they had their empire. Sure, they built cities, but not megacities - they saved those for their own country. Ditto the Greeks under Alexander the Great. Having an empire doesn't mean having 20 cities on a mass of land that can only support 5...

 

SP, I kind of agree with you. With the right government, I don't really understand why having a large number of decent sized cities should be inherently impossible.

Then again, looking at the history of some large empires (Rome, China) , there does seem to be some kind of trend of the empire's collapse being triggered by corruption.

Such dubious rationalisations aside, the need to build mega-cities has yet to spoil the game for me. I just see it as another rule of the 'puzzle' that is winning Civ 3, and take it from there.

 

I tried to make every city in Civ 2 a mega-city anyway :smile:. I'd railroad everything I could, get as many mines etc etc etc. Make all of a cities resources the best possible, with farmlands everywhere etc etc etc...hehehe, I used the in-game cheats to kill everyone then advance time heaps...all the nukes that had been used caused so much global warming that the entire world was overgrown with that weird swampy shit...