Preface: I've been a long time Civ player. The very first game that I bought for my first PC was Civilization...and it almost cost me my new marriage then
. Since then I rushed out and bought on release day Civ 2, ToT, MGE, SMAC, SMAC-X, and now Civ 3.
Graphics: When Firaxis was designing Civ3, they wanted an overall theme for the graphics. They found that theme in a painting by Brueghel. His "Tower of Babel" served as the basis for all graphic designs as well as the overall palette. Civ3 is right on the mark overall as the overall graphic theme fits the painting perfectly.
But, while making their graphic target the game has an overall "brown" feeling to it. The water has a brown tint...the mountains are brown/red...even the green grass has that brown tint to it. This has a tendency to distract at times. Luckly, the Mod Community has already been active with graphics that improve the game considerably. ---->
Score 7/10 for achieving their design goals, but the overall tint tends to grate over time.
Gameplay: Taking a page from the Civ 2 book, this is most definately one of those games were you just want to play "one more turn", even tho there is nothing revolutionary about the design. The two biggest ideas introduced were Culture and Resources. They make a tremendous difference on how you grow your civilization.
Culture is the amalgamation of the age of your cities as well as some of it's improvements. Does your civ encourage learning and art? If so, your civ will show a unique culture and because of this uniqueness the boarders of influence expand out. If your cultre become great you can swallow cities just by culture alone, becoming in essence the "Borg of Humanity" and assimillating cities by the handful. This makes it important to build at least some improvements as soon as possible to increase the overall culture of your civilization to hold back the AI from taking your own cities.
The use of Strategic and Luxury Resources also adds a new spin on gameplay. In the earlier titles, once you developed Gunpowder you could build all the muskets you wanted. In Civ 3, you need to have access to Saltpeter in order to build those muskets. It makes trading with fellow civilizations important, as you can trade off excess resources in order to gain the ones you need. It also means that building colonies in resource rich areas, as well as making sure that they have a link to the rest of your civilization, becomes important as well.
These two features add considerably to gameplay. Civ 3 also includes some ideas from earlier titles such as City Govenors and Build Queues, as well as including more aspects in Diplomacy and Espionage (for instance, no more Diplomats and Spies are needed, their functions are more abstracted so that you can concentrate more on the overall picture). ---->
Score 8/10 because the new features and improvements to old ones make Civ 3 even more interesting than the earlier games.
Design: When Civ first came out, it was heralded as an "Evolutionary" game. One that brought gaming to the forefront of the computing experience. Here was a game that allowed you to "Create a Civilization that would stand the Test of Time". The sheer complexity of it astounded most reviewers and players. Over the years since, Civ and Civ 2 espically were listed as the "Greatest Games of All Time" by many different publications.
I bet when Firaxis sat down and started the initial design for Civ 3, they were hard pressed to find areas to radically improve upon. While the community at Apolyton were able to create a very vast list of ideas and new thinking, it was still a daunting task to come up with another evolutionary title. While Civ 3 retains the basic game play and does improve considerably upon the original, it does not have that evolutionary feeling to it. It feels more polished than what a "Civ 2.5" would be, or even the next in the SMAC line, but it doesn't have enough of a change that would leap the series into a new direction. ---->
Score 7/10 for desiging new ideas and improvements, but I was disappointed in seeing a basically MOTS title.
AI: Once of the biggest pieces of information released somewhat late in the development cycle was that Civ 3 was going to be a single player only game. This caused alot of uproar in the community, because both Civ 2 and SMAC had multiplayer (tho admittedly very late in the Civ 2 cycle and the SMAC multiplayer was more of an afterthought). This meant that in order to be a game to truely take its place with the other titles the AI needed to be something close to top notch.
There are alot of improvements in the AI in areas such as planning, aggressiveness in both combat and city building, and diplomacy. The AI does have that overall polished feel to it. It has shown some good moves and forethought in planning that was lacking in the other games. At times, it leads well planned and well timed combats, striking at vunerable areas with a well rounded force. It also does understand about the use of resources and tries to get supplies of them as needed.
Yet, there are areas that show a lack of polish. In my own observations I have seen some computer civs plant their cities in areas that no one would build in, and it shows. I have seen masses of cities that don't grow past 2 or 3 regardless of the amount of time spent terraforming and improving. Also while the new diplomatic options allow for agreements such as "Right of Passage", there are times that the computer civs ignore the fact that you dissallowed such agreements in the first place, forcing you to spend time keeping them out of your boarders manually.
Also, as in the other games of the series, the AI at the upper end gets advantages in order to give a challenge. I feel that while this is an unfortunate drawback to the AI, that there isn't much else that could be done. While at this time a true Neural Net AI that improves with each turn is not completely possible yet (not even for Derek Smart
), it does show an ability to learn from it's mistakes over time. I only wish that it could do this without cheating or being given breaks in production.
The AI still needs some tweaking and tuning, and in my opinion either a patch from Firaxis or from the Mod Community will bring the AI to where it needs to be. ---->
Score 7/10 for showing some improvement in the overall AI strategies, but at least it's not too far from being finished.
Customization: Civ 3 was created with the knowledge that there has been a very active mod community since Civ 2. Firaxis has taken steps to ensure that Civ 3 can be customized easily. In the week the game has been out now, there have been mods for new graphics, new civs, new governent types, new maps, as well as changing how corruption works. It is good to see that Firaxis has listened to the community and has made it so Civ 3 can be so customized.
There are still some problems however with scenario creation. For some reason, the editor that ships does not have the ability to create a scenario where a specific civ can start in a specific place. In order to do some of the more demaning scenarios, it is imperative that this ability needs to be added and quickly. ---->
Score 5/10 because of the lack of ability to place civs. This is major feature loss for scenario creators.
Bugs: While it is an admirable goal to ship without bugs, it is also a fact that most software released has them. Luckly, while there are bugs in Civ 3, there seems to be only a few of them. If Firaxis had tested the game in a more open environment, I feel that even these bugs would of been removed before shipping. Most of them are related to graphic and sound drivers on hardware configurations that were probably not part of their standard testbed.
There are a few gameplay bugs (offering 1mil in gold being a good example) that will be fixed quickly. Overall, I am pleased to say that Civ 3 seems relatively bug free. ---->
Score 8/10 for shipping very clean and complete code. The few problems that have cropped up should be fixed easily and quickly.
Reviewer's Tilt: Being a long time Civ player, I admittedly had extremely high hopes for Civ 3. I wanted a game that was evolutionary, yet still had the same "gotta play one more turn" feel that Civ and Civ 2 had. I wanted the AI to be challenging without having to resort to trickery and cheating at the upper end in order to be challenging. Overall, I was most pleased with Civ 3. This is a game that will stay on my hard drive for a long time to come. ---->
Score 8/10 for being a worthy game in the Civilization series.
Overall Score -----> 50/70
Taliseian
