My Criticisms of Civ3 (with questions for Firaxis)

[Libertarian]

I have a couple of reasons for opening this thread. For one thing, I'd like to dispel the myth that I'm a Firaxis agent or sycophant. But more importantly, these are game issues that are not being addressed — at least to my satisfaction — by the good people at Firaxis. Note that my criticisms are of the game, and not of them.

I would appreciate answers from Dan or someone right here so that we'll have a single organized source of reference.

City Population Numbers

All these numbers, except for 1s, are utterly unreadable. Their drop shadows are not rendered properly. In fact, they are hideous, and I believe the eyes make an unconscious effort to avoid looking at them. This attribute hit me like a brick the moment I loaded a file into the patched game.

Questions

How did this get missed? Why was it allowed to pass muster? And when will it be fixed?

No Stack Movement

As a professional developer with experience going all the way back to Timex Sinclairs with 8K of RAM, I've been through the whole drill of software development from design to implementation to maintenance. Sometimes, a missed feature can nearly cripple an otherwise stellar application. This comes close.

I like the idea of workers as opposed to some synthetic and abstract public works model. However! Having to move more than a hundred workers one unit at a time is simply insanity. It is like having a beautiful suit with a gaping hole in the crotch.

This well documented and ubiquitous tedium is multiplied when combined with my next criticism, but it is a separate issue.

In my opinion, any nondeterminism issues with respect to stack movement are trivial to minor. This would not be difficult to design and implement with simple properties and methods that are coordinated between the unit objects and the tile objects (assuming an object oriented design).

Questions

Do you or do you not believe that the ability to move all units on a stack at once would greatly facilitate game play, and would greatly enhance the civ playing experience? If not, why not? If so, is this an item on the table for you to implement?

Unit Activation Order

Whatever rhyme or reason there is with respect to what unit is the next to be activated, it is a hard nut to crack. Just when you seem to have a handle on how this works, you get torpedoed by a surprise activation of some irrelevant unit far away from the area where you are currently working.

There are two contexts in particular where this is so annoying as to cause me to curse and rant out loud.

1. Say that I have put together an array of building brigades with my workers: a couple of mountain brigades, a hill brigade, and a loose cannon or two for pollution mop-ups, etc. With Replaceable Parts for an industrious civ under democracy, it takes exactly 9 foreign workers to build a road/railroad combo on a mountain. My mountain brigade stands ready. I order the first worker to build. Then the second. Then the third. Suddenly, without warning, a unit outside this brigade is activated. One of two annoying things happens: either I must find my way back where I was, if I am lucky enough to notice the abberation; or I give the wrong order to the wrong unit, and must decide whether to reload and do over, or forget about it.

2. Say that I am in the middle of a battle. The entire battle has been meticulously planned beforehand. There is a continuity of thought, movement, and attack. I order my first unit to attack. I order my second unit. Woah! That wasn't my second unit! That was some horse's ass worker way back in my homeland who has now been moved to a mountain tile where he has wasted a move and now must waste a move to get back. Once again, I have to muddle my way back to the scene of battle and try to recover the train of thought that was jerked from my head by this bizarre implementation of unit activation.

Questions

Can you and will you implement unit activation such that all units in the current stack are exhausted before focus moves to another stack? Can and will you further change this item such that once one stack has been exhausted, the next stack or unit to be activated is the one in closest proximity?

I suppose these are my primary criticisms and questions, as they are the things that most affect my enjoyment of the game.

May I get answers, please?

(edited for spelling)

[yin26]

It is to laugh!

[Libertarian]

Yin,

I don't presume to know what you might be laughing at. Psychosis is a particularly robust state at blockading attempts to predict it. Fortunately, for my own well being, I had already counted on your crashing this thread, trolling it, and contributing nothing.

Thanks.

You forgot your "Ha!".

[yin26]

I don't presume to know ...

You NOT presuming to know something? WOW! Must be tough on a programming genius such as yourself, eh? Can't imagine how you have time to post here, what, with all the offers from government agencies and top software development houses looking at that 8K experience and saying: "Get him. Any cost!"

[Libertarian]

Oh. So that was it. Criminey, you never cease to disappoint.

For your edification, have someone explain to you that "going all the way back to" this or that implies a continuity of experience that encompasses the entire synclasm.

You've come in and dropped your turd. Now please go away.

Else, I shall taunt you with twice as many words as these.

[yin26]

Oh, I know what it means ... just found it pathetically funny you felt such pride to mention it!

[Libertarian]

Oh, I was proud of it indeed.

Those were the days when you had to consider every detail of what you were doing. There was no storage device (not an affordable one, anyway). You had a limited amount of time to write your application and get your analysis before the unit burned up. With a mere 8K of memory, and with nontokenized variables, you had to conserve like nobody's business in order to do something — anything!— that was more than simply trivial.

However, the unit's ability to bank-switch out its own ROM and replace it with yours meant that you could write your entire code in machine language. Not assembler! That would have been too weighty.

So, code looked something like this:

FF E0 11 D8 44 41

As I recall, that would have printed a letter "A" in the upper left corner of the screen.

Ah, the memories!

[yin26]

Hey, could you try to type your future posts in machine language? Thanks.

[Libertarian]

FF E0 11 D8 44 46
FF E0 11 D8 44 4F
FF E0 11 D8 44 52
FF E0 11 D8 44 20
FF E0 11 D8 44 59
FF E0 11 D8 44 4F
FF E0 11 D8 44 55
FF E0 11 D8 44 2C
FF E0 11 D8 44 20
FF E0 11 D8 44 59
FF E0 11 D8 44 45
FF E0 11 D8 44 53
FF E0 11 D8 44 21

[Libertarian]

Domestic Nag

I forgot this one. Often, I use a slow-growth strategy for various purposes. Clicking through one-by-one on the domestic advisor suggesting I build an unwanted aqueduct or hospital is a waste of time.

Question

Any chance the domestic nag can be made optional? Alternately, can there be a selection of response to her along the lines of, "No, and don't bother me about this anymore."?

[moomin]

Questions
Can you and will you implement unit activation such that all units in the current stack are exhausted before focus moves to another stack? Can and will you further change this item such that once one stack has been exhausted, the next stack or unit to be activated is the one in closest proximity?
[/QUOTE]

You raise excellent points I've wondered about myself. Let me just add that in lieu of stacking and half-intelligent unit activation, _at least_ it should be possible to activate all military units _first_ and all workers _later_. This simple fix would relive some, if not all, frustration with unit activation.

Not that your suggenstions aren't much better, mind.

The 1.16f patch has made my game crash, for the first time ever, as well. Can anybody else reporduce this: I get a freezeout evey time I offer a strategic resource and wonder what they'd like to give me for it.

[Libertarian]

And here's one other. Clearer download and installation instructions of the various patches, along with where to find them, would be most helpful.

[docken]

I agree that your points should be addressed, However:

Numbers: I don't seem to be having the same problem that you are- I saw your screenshot depicting the numbers and mine look nothing like that. Interesting.

Stack Movement: The biggest point you bring forward, yet one that strangely doesn't bother me all that much. Perhaps I am too used to Civ 2... Still it is worth patching sometime in the future

Activation: This can be solved by activating ALL the units you want to use by first right-clicking on the unit and then clicking on the unit- doing this multiple times will in effect stack up the activation list.

[barefootbadass]

Originally posted by docken

Activation: This can be solved by activating ALL the units you want to use by first right-clicking on the unit and then clicking on the unit- doing this multiple times will in effect stack up the activation list.

This certainly works, but is IMO a LOT of hassle. What happens if you are trying to get all the workers on a tile to do something to make the active unit move away occurs if you move them all(or some) to the square individually on the turn you use them. You move worker A then you move worker B. Selecting worker B while A is active is equivalent to giving worker A a 'wait' command, so that unit is put at the end of the queue. So of you "wait" 3 of the workers in your stack, the focus will leave them and come back at the end, save any others you "wait". Anyway, this is IMO a retarded way to program it. You should only be able to "wait" a unit by pressing 'w', and I believe if it also always went to the nearest unit yet to move, everything would work smoothly.

[Jodo Kast]

A LOT of gamers are losing patience with the new Civilization! This is because they don't know what they are doing.

Good luck!

[HolyWarrior]

This is a nitpick, but when I'm cycling through my cities, they seem to be in order founded--as a result, they're scattered all over the place and I'm never sure if I already looked at that city.
I much prefer looking at the cities alphabetically as in SMAC.
My $.02

[Jodo Kast]

Try this instead:

Bring up a city. Make changes. Hit the Left Arrow or Right Arrow button at the top to go to the next or prev city.

Make changes, go to the next city. Repeat until you get to the first one.

Want your workers to clean up pollution automatically? Create 10 and set them on Automate and they'll clean up pollution automatically! They won't drop their current task but if they are free they will take the next railroad out to go clean it up.

For this reason, pollution doesn't effect me if I reserve Factories and production for the important cities (set the population to entertainers for growth cities and they won't create as much pollution). I'll up it to 15 workers if the work isn't getting done.

Wanna speed up the game? Create a new scenario with the editor and give everyone 4 free techs and 2000 gold to start with. With 15 civs on a Huge Pangea, the Space Race will be on before 2000AD.

Most important wonder? I think it's the Great Library for Science Win and Michelangelo's Workshop for Conquest Win...

just my 6 cents. Hahaha.

[Libertarian]

Activation: This can be solved by activating ALL the units you want to use by first right-clicking on the unit and then clicking on the unit- doing this multiple times will in effect stack up the activation list.

If only that were so.

Because of my gameplay style (empire building), I have to use a LOT of workers. I've been round and round this thing a million times. I know about the right-click-shift-select thing.

It just doesn't work.

Two or three of the nine units in a mountain brigade MIGHT activate as expected, but then the third or fourth unit — which SHOULD be the next mountain brigade worker — is just as likely to be a transport or tank or (worse yet) another worker somewhere else.

[Ralf]

In addition to Libertarian's 3 suggestions; I would suggest a special airplane and railroad-related grouping-method:

Activate several fighters/bombers and then relocate them all simultaneously to the appropriate target-city. The same could be done with ground-units, as soon as all your cities are railroad-connected with each other.

[Jodo Kast]

Ok smart alec.

Think about it: You have 75 units to control. You create them in a certain order.

The battles rage and your archer and horseman are fortified. Now you may have all of your workers queued up, but the archer is done repairing itself.

And since the Archer's Number is 'up', it gets ready to go.

This has ALWAYS been like this for ALL civilization games. And Call to Power. There are a lot of units and if you make a mistake and move a worker on to a mountain, live with it!!!

You have 70 more units to bother with, get on it. Again, instead of complaining, get over it. It's just a game.

[Libertarian]

Thanks for the, um, input, smartass. But nobody's talking about any such extended queueing. We're talking about bags of objects (units) contained in other objects (tiles), thus:

See Jane click stack.

See worker activate.

Go, worker, go!

See next worker in stack activate.

Work, worker, work!

See whole stack finish.

See Jane smile.

(edited to mollify censor)

[HalfLotus]

This game NEEDS stack movement.

[E_T]

In my current game, I have 90 workers, spread out over three continents, a war going against the French on one of the continents, with my main war production on my home continent. I have several ships moving supplies to the war, and captured Workers back home (I want them in my capital, so that I can trade them to someone else, the lazy bastards ). I have found this problem very frustrating too. Civ2 shifted around somewhat, but not as bad as this.

They have implemented some form of stacked movement, via the Army. Why can't they do something for the worker units too. [Sarcasm] Introducing the new Unit, The Supervisor. It allows you to stack Worker units and direct them at one time. It cost 200 shields and the Corporation Advance to build. If you have 6 Supervisors in the field, you can build the Management Small Wonder, so that you can build the Supervisor at half the cost. [/Sarcasm].

[Iceword]

Make the application work for the user, not the user for the application. What Libertarian mentioned here are not some ridiculously hard feature to implement; at least, not in the way I see it, and it will great enhance the game experience seemlessly. Why should I fight with the interface to play the game?

[Venger]

Originally posted by E_T
In my current game, I have 90 workers, spread out over three continents, a war going against the French on one of the continents, with my main war production on my home continent. I have several ships moving supplies to the war, and captured Workers back home (I want them in my capital, so that I can trade them to someone else, the lazy bastards ). I have found this problem very frustrating too. Civ2 shifted around somewhat, but not as bad as this.

Well, I just posted this pic in another thread, why not post it here to? Imagine the logistics on THIS map - I have 150 cities, 200+ workers, 300+ units, and a war to prosecute (also fighting the french, they won't give me the strategic resources of mayonaisse.)

They have implemented some form of stacked movement, via the Army.

But armies suck. Bad. They are actually less powerful that the units kept apart.

Why can't they do something for the worker units too. [Sarcasm] Introducing the new Unit, The Supervisor. It allows you to stack Worker units and direct them at one time. It cost 200 shields and the Corporation Advance to build. If you have 6 Supervisors in the field, you can build the Management Small Wonder, so that you can build the Supervisor at half the cost. [/Sarcasm].

I like it, Supervisor or Work Crew or something. Good idea. Personally, I'd like a container unit that pooled items but allowed them to be added/removed. I noticed CTP2 armies do this...

Yes, I had to do a fairly easy sealift from my home continent (far right) to the Aztec one to my left, and then a MAJOR sealift to get to the other one...

Late game tedium is like a psychic vampire sucking the will to live from me...

Venger

[LaRusso]

uh. is it any fun to play a game with 100+ cities. i mean, in ANY turn based strategy game. i admire your patience, venger....

[Heliodorus]

Libertarian - why spend so much time responding to the troll?

Venger - why would you even want such a vast empire to have to micromanage! One of the things I really appreciate in the game is the multiplication of the tech chart based on world size. Now I can play on Large maps and have the game I want. I'll have to experiment with even standard sizes yet. Oh, and on my P2-300 Mhz, I'm not having any problems with large maps (never tried huge, though).

[Venger]

Originally posted by LaRusso
uh. is it any fun to play a game with 100+ cities. i mean, in ANY turn based strategy game. i admire your patience, venger....

Sure it is - because I am conquering the world. Honestly, if you think about it, you likely only deal with 10 cities a turn, because the others are building that turn...

I am moving units on the big war map like the old WW2 command centers used...it's great. If they would only give me a FREAKING CHECKBOX TO DISABLE CULTURAL DEFECTION I might play it again.

Originally posted by Heliodorus
Venger - why would you even want such a vast empire to have to micromanage!

Nobody said empires were easy. Frankly, I cannot wonder why people even bother with Culture/UN/Spaceship wins. Talk about shooting fish in a barrel, I would have already won on any of these fronts...wanna see the histograph?

You can see in 191 where I began the conquest of my continent. Then you can see where I opened a can of whoopass on the Aztecs in 1655, then where I blitzed the Russians just a few turns ago...

Venger

[Leonidas]

quote by Venger:

Late game tedium is like a psychic vampire sucking the will to live from me...

Venger: LOL! I wish that Firaxis had fixed this - it's a real carry-over from Civ 2. I feel your pain, bro. . .


There is a lot to like in Civ 3 - but I'm waiting for the great scenarios from the talented creators here, before I will be able to truly enjoy this game. . .

[player1]

Cultural takeover can be nicely solved:

At first your units are of your nationality.

So if city with totaly your nat. popultaion culturaly revolts it should keep army. It revolted toghter with them.

But if city with for. nat. revolts it should not keep those armies. It should generate more resistance, or do some sort of battle, like automaticly making several enemy conscript to attack your city.

City with mixed nat. should have combination of both (some of your citizens & armies have switched sides).