(A word about why these reviews are "unusable" -- it's a reminder to both of us that I am throwing curves here. I figured there will be plenty reviews coming right down the middle at this game, so, again, not to say I'm being inaccurate -- far from -- I just think that word "unusable" ought to be assumed, be it regarding literature, movies, music, painting -- in everything the critics say. Usually, anything of usable material is 99% by chance, not intentional, and probably won't happen again. There may be some of that below. Nah...)
You won the battle with Rome -- of course you did, they had one outpost city on your entire continent -- but at the cost of war now with Russia.
You left the middle ages without ever hearing CHAMBER MUSIC, not a harpsichord to found, nary a Gregorian CHANT. This is somewhat alarming to you as you have been told Civ's music and production values are top notch (you have yet to reach the modern era -- you stay tuned...)
By this point, mid-nineteenth century in the game you are playing, you have a good sense of the new battle system in Civ 3 and your best judge of it is the breathlessness you experienced once or twice in the heat of actually watching it in action, when that city on the iron was almost yours, then wasn't again and then finally was, at last. This is an example not only of how the battle system is efficient, but visually dramatic as blows are swapped, and helped by the new addition of strategic resources -- for without those, you surely would not have cared what you were fighting for -- and THAT is something that must be credited to Firaxis.
In that battle, you watched some units rise to become elite, only to die in the next turn. Again, dramatic. Story-telling at the unit level -- this, as much as the algorhythm behind it, makes it a better battle system than previous incarnations -- but remember you are also "romantic-minded" -- as opposed to "classical-minded" (read Robert Persig) -- player of Civ. In short, you are not as interested in math, in process or form (which are all essential and interesting), as you are interested in the QUALITY of the experience and nuance of the game -- you want to be as foolishly involved in Civ as you are intellectually involved, if not moreso. You want to play, to pretend. And you find that while Civ 3 has faults emerging that bother even your romantic sensibilites (more below) it also invites you to play and pretend more than any previous Civ game, and you have played them all.
You have yet to see a single Great Leader emerge (you flip to the Civolepedia once or twice -- which is flipped to with impressive ease in this game, btw -- to remind yourself what such an event as getting a Great Leader would entail) and you expect it would be thrilling to come back and fight this battle again with an army.
Most of the map is known to you now, and sometimes you miss the little map within the city window that showed you where in the world you were. It's easy to get lost when you manually move from city to city staying within the city window for each.
And you are in the city window because you know you are up against the Russian Cossack unit. Your strategy is to play defense. Defeat them with your as-yet-non-existent English Man-O-War fleet before they ever reach your shores. Not a bad 1st half strategy -- in Civ 3 you can play your advantage and hope you have the edge on the other guy's advantage -- i.e., my unique unit will hopefully be better than his in this unique situation. Over all, the balance between the unique units impresses you. One thing that bothers you as you set your production queues for Man-O-War is that you cannot delete certain items from being in said queue. You notice it is still possible to build a warrior in the mid-nineteenth century, and that is fine, the governor can take care of what you want to build, but the governor control is inexplicably un-intuitive -- adjusting the governor in Civ 3 is a little bit like playing that card game trick where you figure out which card belongs to the other guy by eliminating everything BUT the card you're looking for -- and here you as often get the governors to give you what you want by telling them what you don't want. You ought to be able to get things done right there in the production window of your city screen by deleting obsolete units from the pool of choices.
So, doing it all by hand, all your thriving coastal cities are now instructed to build the Man-O-War, but you manage to build only one before the iron you fought so hard for depletes itself (a la Colonization), and China TRADE EMBARGOES you, thereby cutting off your supply of saltpeter and hence stopping your ability to make the Man-O-War unit.
So, now that your fleet has maxed out at all of one vessel, you begin humming the theme to Gilligan's Island as you sail your one-Man-O-War fleet up and down your western coast, searching for a Russian invasion force on what you are certain will be at best a three-hour tour. This again is kudos to the AI -- Russia, perhaps thru might (previously demonstrated against you) and diplomatic wrangling (presumably demonstrated on China) has you now experiencing genuine dread.
Then it occurs to you that Firaxis did NOT put in a "patrol" function for the units (a la Alpha Centauri), and you are not happy about that, but at the same time you wouldn't want to leave your Man-O-War to its own devices -- in Alpha Centauri putting a unit on Patrol was often tantamount to Captain Kirk ordering a red shirt to join his landing party. You suspect in Civ 3 the AI is still not smart enough to get the hell out of Dodge on its own, if need be.
Suddenly you come across a Chinese galleon which you blast out of the water because they cut off your saltpeter supply and they embargoed you and war was probably only a matter of time (although not necessarily -- the diplomacy AI in Civ 3 is far more measured than in Civ 2, where declarations of war were foregone conclusions -- Here the AI civs can be just as touchy, but not quite as predictable -- at least not two weeks into playing against it).
A First Victory by your Man-O-War triggers a Golden Age for the English, which increases your production capacity -- as does mobilizing your civ for war in the well thought-out domestic adviser screen, your second home -- but unfortunately your lack of resources constrains you from taking full advantage of this spike in England's as yet inglorious history.
So, you are resigned. The war with Russia is going to be ugly, that is, NOT pretty, but you can't bring yourself to sue for peace now because you are holding out hope that you will be able to dramatically take the saltpeter they have on THEIR coast, and hold it like a rabid bulldog, thereby getting them to sue YOU for peace. (That's a long way from your Man-O-War plan, but hey, you knew you were a romantic when you booted this thing up).
You watch a rifleman take on a Russian archer and you are dismayed to see such an even swapping of blows -- your veteran rifleman wins, and even gets promoted, but these Ruskies with the arrows have left him at the strength of a conscript. You have yet to discover Battlefield Medicine which means he won't be able to heal in the field (a nice touch), and you are inclined to be resentful about the fairness of this battle. You make a dubious sort of "eh...." sound about the play balance of an archer giving a rifleman an even time, but you give this one to Sid. Hey, ask Mrs. Custer about the effectivenss of well-trained archers. With re to the battle balance issue in general, you suspect Firaxis has not come up with a system that prevents this particular thrice dead horse from being beaten on yet again -- so it probably comes down to this:
Raingoon: Hey, Firaxis, can a phalanx still kill a battleship in Civ 3?
Firaxis: No way! We took out the phalanx a long time ago....
So, you want to leave your Man-O-War on sentry, and again this annoys you that you cannot. Will he awaken on his own from being fortified? You don't remember. That truly better be the case, it seems an unnecessary streamline in any event.
Now you concentrate on laying siege to the Russian city in control of that saltpeter (and here the game demonstrates what no Civ game has before: the tactical importance of castles to the surrounding land in history) though of course your naval BLOCKADE, which in Civ 3 is very possible to do, is now out of the question.
You experience nagging gameplay frustrations, though not about the siege itself. Later, the new bombardment abilities of units like artillery and battleships will make sieges like this one very effective. Your list of patch wishes begins to grow...
You wish you could slow down the city messages the game gives you at the beginning of each turn.
You wish there was a diplomatic option for getting other warring civs to make peace with each other.
It bugs you that embargoes cannot be lifted at will -- they perforce must last 20 turns -- and you are certain if you were embargoing somebody else it would be most advantageous at the negotiating table to offer them a cessation of same. Worse, right now it is the Chinese who have an embargo against you, yet your adviser insists it is YOU who has the embargo against them. This is not a bug, per se, you realize, but rather a simple way of stating what amounts to the same thing -- while underscoring the flaw that it should most definitely NOT amount to the same thing.
Along with the inability to swap units, these bargaining table points are classified by you as must-fix in a future patch. You remember a promise by Jeff Briggs that the new diplomatic model would allow you to do any negotiation in Civ 3 you could think of. You remember how many things Apolyton's own Harrel thought of for his excellent Diplomacy List, posted here over a year ago and you wonder if Jeff Briggs read it...
You enter end game with a sense that the game is unfolding for you as it is for others -- the core is a strong and Sid-like substance, worthy in every way of the mantle of "3"; it's in the peripheries where it sometimes is weirdly not as effective as it ought to be...
End of Raingoon's Unusable-but-Totally-Accurate Increasingly-Misnamed-30-Second Review Part 4 (Industrial Age)
(Conclusion Coming....)
Raingoon's Unusable-but-Totally-Accurate Review Part 1 (Intro)
Raingoon's Unusable-but-Totally-Accurate Review Part 2 (Ancient Era)
Raingoon's Unusable-but-Totally-Accurate Review Part 3 (Middle Ages)
Raingoon's Unusable-but-Totally-Accurate Review Part 5 (Modern Age/The End Game)
Last Word & Final Score
