Okay, I'm not as much of a civilization fanatic as most people around here, but I have enjoyed long sessions of all previous iterations of the series and have been looking forward to Civ3 for quite some time now. I have now played it for a good amount of time, and I just have to get these things about the game off of my mind.
But first of all, I really really like it. It's a great game, and I'm going to be spending more than healthy amounts of time playing it over the next years. Okay, here goes:
- No multiplayer... What the hell were you thinking? You could've skipped the intro movie and put your resources here instead, people would have LOVED you for it. Seriously, we (me and some of my friends) hadn't got that it didn't ship without MP, so we had plans for just checking out an entire weekend with minimal sleep and political powerplay like in the good ol' SMAC days, just better!... Needless to say we were disappointed
- Manual is crappy and seems more like an afterthought. Look at SMAC's manual for the way to do a manual. It (along with the civilopedia - what a stupid name btw) is also so vague on a lot of things that it's next to useless. And the funny thing is that although parts of it seem like they were genuinly written for the beginner, most parts are clearly in civ jargon written by a hardcore civ player to a hardcore civ player (and still too vague for that even).
- Interface didn't get playtested? It sure doesn't feel like it, it's that crappy. For instance, you just have to KNOW some of the commands that for instance the workers are able to do. What happened to the magnificent rightclick menu in SMAC? That was awesome! And a lot of things are just not readily available. I have for instance yet to find out where I mobilize my civilization for war. And at the beginning of your turn when cities revolt, starve and so on, if you're not quick and attentive you don't get to read all that stuff. Too bad, now it's gone, sorry. That's just crappy since your victory really depends on the amount of information you have at your fingertips as Gates so elloquently put it. You should seriously consider redesigning the overall interface design in the next patch, I mean that. Look to SMAC for a good interface. Although I do like how you can change production without having to zoom to city.
- Certain parts of the civilopedia seem like an after thought... And why isn't there a search function? It would be so easy to implement.
- GROUPING!!
For gods sake, if you do nothing else on this game ever again, add grouping of units for ease of movement. How the hell did you NOT catch that in playtesting?
- AI movement. I don't really care at ALL about the Aztecs moving their 20 some horses back and forth back and forth back and forth back and forth, and I HATE having to watch it every single turn. There're two things in that. First of all the AI often just seems to be moving its units around at random instead of positioning them at strategic locations or along wellthought out routes like a human would. It really breakes the illusion that a unit is just walking around in circles with obviously no purpose. Secondly ticking and unticking the View AI movement box in the options (or whatever the name of it is) has no effect at all it seems...
- I built my spaceship, and then I couldn't access the spaceship screen anymore... what's up with that? Must be a bug, I can accept that, just means I have to kill the egyptians (they're also building a spaceship
) and get my hands on all the uranium in my world... troubled times ahead
- The updated pack with units over at civfanatics.com seems to be pretty dead-on, maybe some of those will make it into a patch, so as to make it more official?
Well that was all the bad.
The good? Everything else. DAMN this game is so addictive that I could seriously loose myself in it for days on end (and I will!!). I LOVE resources, they're just so well implemented and I have really found myself on the verge of plummeting the world into world war just to get uranium so I could build nuclear weapons. (And those pesky egyptians have incense like nobodies business!!).
MPA's (mutual protection agreements) are cool, I can't remember if they were in the other games, but they definetly work well (triggered WWI in my current game because of some small struggle between two computer players).
The graphics are great, good job guys, I really like them. Although some of the horse units are hard to differentiate from eachother.
And the computer REALLY has a hard time letting go of me backing out of an MPA ONCE some several hundreds of years ago. I can hardly get any agreements going now which is pretty annoying (especially since my backing out back then was just me not paying attention, guess I was
)
Well, I'm off, I've got to stop Egypt from launching their spaceship!
Please don't take the critizism as me bashing the game, I'm just wondering why you released it now and not wait until christmas, that way you could've polished most of these things out in no time.
