My Review of Civ 3

[Father Beast]

Beautiful, RAH!

You managed to make it look as good as I made it look bad. The problem I ran into when trying to do your optimistic version was that for yins, I used the actual game. I couldn't figure out how to do yours and have it the same game. You guys messed me up a bit when you described different games in your reviews.

Oh well. You managed the job for me. Great going!

[yin26]

FB: Glad to be of service! I'm delighted you and Rah stepped up to smack me down.

Rah:

And the foreign adviser is HOT.

LOL!!!! Some brilliant stuff!

You guys have taken the art of argument to new levels. Very entertaining. Very enlightening. I don't know about other people, but this series of posts has really proven to me that liking or not liking a game depends SO much on how the individual is willing to forgive certain things. Nicely done, gentlemen.

[rah]

Takes a bow, but we learned from the master.
I just hope people find all the reviews entertaining.
Different strokes for different folks.
But I must admit, that it was difficult to stay so syrupy.

I'm really trying to get that optimists title
Point Mark in this direction :rollesyes:

RAH

The real challange will be doing a review on SIDGOLF

[TCO]

Originally posted by Father Beast


GRAPHICS
This looks to be the place where Sid and Co. tried the hardest, and failed most miserably. There are several "movies" included, from small wonder films to an animated high council giving bad advice. To a one, these are poorly produced.


hopefully that will give us some perspective,

The movies are spectacular. They should leave them as is for Civ3.

[yin26]

The real challange will be doing a review on SIDGOLF

LOL! Yes, if God wanted to really punish me for past and future sins, he'd force me to write a positive review of Sim Golf. Just the thought made me lose some hair on my head.

[Father Beast]

Originally posted by yin26


LOL! Yes, if God wanted to really punish me for past and future sins, he'd force me to write a positive review of Sim Golf. Just the thought made me lose some hair on my head.

You HAVE hair on your head? I would have thought it all fell out while waiting for civ3 to arrive

[yin26]

What I said:

"Wait, is this even fun or challenging? Does it really add anything to the game?" In a sense, it IS fun--for a while. After all, it takes quite a streamlined economy to support all these buildings, and one begins to feel at times that Civ 3 is a sort of grand Sim City or Tropico.

What Firaxis said:

By building (and more importantly maintaining) the city improvements that generate culture, you're closing off certain other play styles (like large, offensive military forces).

So, you'll be building, what? Libraries? Mmmmm, sounds FUN!

This will be an on-going look at how close or far-off my review was. So far, I'm sadly sadly dead on with this culture thing.

[MarkG]

yeap, let's assume how good our assumptions are....

[yin26]

Markos, the man just said you'll be spending lots and lots and lots of your money on BUILDINGS if you want to do that culture thing. Sound like Sim City instead of a war game? Now, I fully realize Civ was "never meant to be" a war game, so the 'fix' is to let you just plaster up building after building after building.

Fun, eh Markos?

[MarkG]

the sim city series has sold much more than the entire civ genre in the last years....


beyond that, it is an interpration of yours that Jeff's quote means that civ3 will be a "sim city". therefore, i think i'm right when i talk about assumptions

[yin26]

the sim city series has sold much more than the entire civ genre in the last years....

I know. Sim Meier told me.

it is an interpration of yours that Jeff's quote means that civ3 will be a "sim city".

O.K. A "Build-lots-and-lots-of-buildings-instead-of-units City." Thanks for helping me clarify.

[MarkG]

so you agree that this all about interpration on a part of the picture titled "civ3", and basically has no value at all

[Solver]

What about a Civ 3 strategy guide from the screenshots ?

[yin26]

That's easy: Do exactly what you did in Civ2, unless you want to be REALLY bored, in which case build tons and tons and tons and tons of buildings. That will be $8, Solver.

[Beckdawg]

well the sim games have out sold the civ games for an obvious reason. They have actually had good games. In my opinion the last good civ game was Civ 2. i have never played Call to power I or II. I didn't buy it because it didn't look all that great. I did play SMAC and thought it sucked compared to Civ 2. i mean it was fun for the first two or three times through but got very boring very quickly. That is all i can think of for Civ style games. now for the sim side they have released The sim's, sim city 3000 and sim city 2000 might have even been out after civ 2. So obviously they would sell more because the sim's was a good game that was actually fun to play and sim city 2000 wasn't bad. I dunno about 3000 never played it

[Colon™]

Actually, SC2k was released in 1993, three years before civ2.

[Beckdawg]

ok your right about sim city 2k but my point still stands. i had no idea when 2k came out but it thought it was some where close

[korn469]

I did play SMAC and thought it sucked compared to Civ 2. i mean it was fun for the first two or three times through but got very boring very quickly

i really don't get that...SMAC is really just civ 2.3, in almost everyway SMAC is superior to civ2, i would almost write a mod that would change the name of the tech advances to civ2 tech advances, change the name of the building (network nodes=libraries, recreation commons=temples, etc) and would change the name of the factions to civ names, then it would be practically the same thing with many improvements (including graphics) but a few things missing (where is the senate for example)

so if SMAC's gameplay is boring then civ2's gameplay is boring, and since civ3 is a conservative sequal then it will be boring as well...so Beckdawg might as well and go buy SC3k (which blows by the way) instead of getting civ3

[Beckdawg]

ok let me restate what i meant. i guess what i was tring to say is that SMAC sucked in the mod developed area. I found hundereds of good ones for Civ 2 and i didn't find one i liked for SMAC. maybe you can recommend some but i didn't find any. Also, the AI for SMAC just seemed messed up to me. I found it very easy to win at the medium levels. The giving certain civ's city walls and things like that was another thing i didn't like. I realize it has to do with the plot of the game but it unbalances the game at the start. Also the whole mindbore thing wasn't very good i think. i realize they were supposed to be like barbarians but if you had the right combination of governments you could capture one of them ever time you find one or close to every time. after that you had an invincible army of mind bores. Another thing i didn't like was the 3D tiles. i liked Civ 2's flat ones 100 times better. So, i guess i should say it is a lot of small things that i didn't like. However there where things i did like. The planetary council, being able to move in alley's cities, but the regular game gets boring for me after about 10 times through. With Civ 2 it was more like 40, but i still replay the mods which i love, and since i cant find SMAC mods that are good i find it crappy. Maybe if you made a mod out of it that was like Civ 2 i would like it better. However, the thing that made Civ 2 great was all the mods out there. I love some of the WWII senarioro's out there. "new" germany was GREAT! and red front was very challenging although it did have a flaw in the version i played because you couldn't capture one of the cities in Italy. So, overall i feel it was a below average game although i admit i had high expectiations.

[Rommel393]

The worst thing about SMAC was the unit editor. It was just a "me too" sort of thing and didn't really improve gameplay. Not only did it make the strategy change for the worst but it also made most of the units look basically the same.

[korn469]

Beckdawg

when you restated your point i totally agree with you...the scenario creation tools in SMAC were rudimentry at best, and once you created a scenario it was pretty much as is because the it lacked a unified event trigger...there is alot you can change in the alpha.txt but some important items were left out and most of these things are more of a change to making an overall game mod and do not help in scenario making

as for the AI i do think it was better than the civ2 (in terms of launching attacks) but i think that many of the new features were beyond its grasp and these were the tools players used to whip the AI into submission almost every game...the AI's understanding of air power and crawlers was close to nonexistant and this basically destroyed the AI's ability to play competitively...one would have to completely remove supply crawlers, and all airpower before the AI would even have a chance

about certain factions having special abilities, get used to it...civ3 will have more of the same and it will probably differentiate them even more than the special abilities in SMAC did

i think mindworms were in the game from a game mechanics stance because the design workshop prevented barbarians from being able to be a proper fit in terms of firepower in the game...psi combat overcame this...and people understand how to counteract mindworms so they aren't a huge threat, but the ai on the otherhand is clueless again and cannot stand up to mindworms

so what you are saying is that your favorite part of civ2 is the scenarios? since SMAC hasn't has the number or quality of scenarios that this is the main reason you find the game unappealing correct?

forgetting about scenarios, and if you just had to play normal games of civ2 and SMAC then how close do you think they are in terms of gameplay? do u still think it is 4 times better than SMAC? after playing normal SMAC and then going back and playing normal civ2 do u miss any of the interface or gameplay enhancements?

[Beckdawg]

ya i forgot about that unit editor. i am assuing you mean the unit workshop. i didn't like that either. It was basically a dumb add in that didnt' serve much of a purpose. I think we would not have missed it if it was lefted out

[Beckdawg]

well i still would rather play Civ 2 but from that stand point it is closer. The fact that the AI couldn't handle all the new stuff really hurt the reply value in my mind. I realize the Civ 2 AI wasn't all that good either but on prince level i at least had a challenge. anything below is still too ez but the same level(don't rember what it was called off hand) on SMAC was a lot easier. So, if you put the improved graphics, planetary council(or UN) into Civ 2 i think it would have been a real fun game. Also, i forgot to metion rasing and lowering terrain or water level. while it is nice to be able to make canals it sucked because u could use it to make a city go under water. i still don't like the 3D terrain though. some places looked really crappy(moutains) but the graphics do look better(if they used a color other than that ugly bright red).

[TCO]

Originally posted by Beckdawg
well i still would rather play Civ 2 but from that stand point it is closer. The fact that the AI couldn't handle all the new stuff really hurt the reply value in my mind. I realize the Civ 2 AI wasn't all that good either but on prince level i at least had a challenge. anything below is still too ez but the same level(don't rember what it was called off hand) on SMAC was a lot easier.

Who cares what the game plays like at Prince or below. Are you a wussie?

[Beckdawg]

well my point about prince or below is that that is supposed to be above medium. Since prince was easy that would make it well below medium. I think the game setting should be like the red front senario, well a little bit easier because it was hard or at least challenging on cheiftan. I think cheiftan should be fairly easy then get harder on up. i think by the time you reach prince it should be very hard. Detiy should be ruthless and almost impossible to beat. Also i am not a wussie as u put it. I scored like 900% in my best game and if i recall it was on deity or king. I just think the lower games should be harder. I was playing on prince level like the 3rd day i had the game. But that is just my opinion

[TCO]

king is medium. (closest to fair playing field with the AI.)

[Beckdawg]

ok forgive me i was just thinking off hand. i was thinking prince for some reason, but i haven't played civ 2 in like 3 months so it has been awhile and the memory goes quick w/ me.

[yin26]

Well, I was just re-reading this 'review' that I wrote a few months before the game ever came out. Some of it (the missing MP, for example) were terribly prophetic. Other things, like how I predicted the AI would *not* know how to secure resources, seems wrong.

Anybody care to point out how many things I got pretty close and how many I totally missed?

Thanks.

P.S.: Since people love to second-guess my motives, I am *not* trying to bash Firaxis, etc. I'm just honestly curious how off I was ... and since I'm in Korea and refuse to d/l warez, I won't be able to play for a while.

[Imran Siddiqui]

You dirty spammer!

[yin26]

Look what happens: I spend some time in OT with you and AH ... the next thing you know, I've got all kinds of great ideas on how to keep interesting topics alive. Thanks guys!

Seriously, though: How 'off' was this review? I'm curious. That's all.