These people dared to spoil the legend of gaming.
Firaxis did the same thing as Activision and Sid Meiers did nothing to prevent it from happening!
I have played civilization since it had been released. I played on Atari, PC, Sega Genesis. I played Civ, Civ2, Civ2MGE, CivTOT. I have spent thousand of hours on it.
Finally, after being hugely disappointed with Activisions Call to Power, I have been waiting for Civ3 for more than a year. Under no other circumstances, would I have said anything bad even about the word Civilization.
HOWEVER, now that the game is released, and I have spent 60$ on the collectors edition (of coarse money does not count in cases like this and I do not want to be reimbursed) , I am realizing that these people removed all the things (although some might call them small details) that made the simple Civ2 and even, possibly, Civ infinitely better than Activision's Call to Power and Sid Meiyers Alpha Centaury combined.
What are the these things?
-Infinite replayability due to virually unlimited scenario creating possibilities
- Historic accuracy, made possible by decent world maps and accurate starting positions.
Even the world map from Civ was decent. The world maps that come with Civ3 are horryfying. On the huge map, England is a small chunck of forest above a shady peace of land that, I suppose, we should call Europe?! Come on! Madagascar is twice is big as England? And Japon? Guys you will lough! Three times bigger?
There are no rivers in Europe. Rhine, Rhone, Danube, Thames? What the hell is wrong? Spain is covered with forests. Ha, Ha, Ha.
Whatever. I do not care. Really. There are lots of qualified people out there who dedicate hundreds of hours of their lives to making Civ better. We all owe these people at least as much as to the creators of the original Civilization. Captain Nemo, Alex the Magnificent, John Petroski, Michael Jeszenka to name just a few undeniable authorities in the civilzation community.
We do not care about the maps. Just give us the tools, the platform and we'll take care of ourselves.
Is not that simple? Yes or no?
I guess it is not. These people spoiled a great game by not incluing all the good stuff that made the legend of Civ2.
I cannot play Civ3 right now. I am just too pissed off. I cannot play on a real world map with random starting places. That's impossible.
I can play on a random map, but it does not have the same charm.
It can be argued that I am making a big deal out of nothing. It is true that Civ3 remains a great game and there are lots of new great ideas, such as elite units and leaders, strategic resources, culture. Yes!
But if I cannot play WW2 scenarios I am not going to play at all. I have played so many times on random maps and went through the technology tree, that the minor changes in technologies and the effects of wonders are not going to lure me. My plan was to play a full game once on a huge world map just to get the feel of the new details and the interface and then to start making scenarios in the editor. This plan is screwed.
The dowline is: Util the game is fixed I am going to stick to CivTOT.