Curious about a few of Civ 3's design decisions

[Hrnac]

Having finally found some time to play through a few games of Civ 3 (job and family prohibit those 12 hour gaming sessions), I am puzzled about a few of the design decisions in this game. I will try to keep this brief and to the point.

1. The exclusion of the sentry command.

This one puzzles me as it seems that it does not imbalance the game, require totally new code (could rework the Civ 2 code) and generally seemed like a common sense unit function. I wonder if the addition of cultural border creep somehow caused the game to stumble if a rival Civ's border enclosed a unit on sentry command. Perhaps the game could have treated this the same as when an enemy unit trespasses into another Civ's territory. I hope this option shows up down the road in a future patch.

2. The addition of having to complete an age where research is concerned before advancing to the next.

This feature really forces the player from racing ahead in the tech race. I think this is the one new feature that just doesn't belong in the game. I can understand the desire to segment the game into "ages" for the sake of pseudo-realism, but why does one have to research nearly every tech to advance? Perhaps in time I will see the light, but for now, this features makes no sense to me.

3. The removal of the farm tile improvement.

Since this version brought with it no new tile improvements, why remove one? There is very little to do now and to force the player to accept the belief that there is nothing better than irrigation is really stretching things. Perhaps this can be implemented through the editor if it is not going to make a return appearance.

4. The removal of the opposite gender Leaders.

I know that one can change the leaders info, but one of the neat things about Civ 2 was being able to occasionally get a different leader instead of the same old ones. This feature only requires some new artwork as the Civ traits could be kept the same. I just find it hard to play as the English knowing that their leader is a female when I am a male. I know its a bit weird, but that's the way I feel.

5. The removal of the unit losses statistics from the Military advisor screen.

This is another feature that was already done in Civ 2 and could have been implemented rather painlessly. The game could easily do this as shown by Civ 2. I really enjoyed looking at this information and miss it greatly.

6. Why spend so much time and effort to create the "animated" leader heads, when they really don't have much of an impact on the game?

Sure they look nice, but a static picture would have been just as nice and probably saved some of the games budget for other more needed items. I know that the same argument can be made for the other animations, but those add some atmosphere and realism to the game in my opinion.

Well this is enough for a first post to this forum.

I hope you all have a happy holiday season and a great new year. Perhaps 2002 will grace us with a second Civ 3 patch that will take the game closer to what many of us had hoped for.

-Hrnac

[Sze]

1. agreed; might have more to do with the new ZOC rules
2. this one I'm ok with; technology is more inter-related than the old way of handling tech advances allowed for; I think this way reflects growth as a species
3. yes it's a step backwards (I also miss leveling mountains), but if you've played then you realize large cities are a detriment now; gone are the days of maxing your population; workers >> specialists
4. yup, laziness
5. yup, laziness
6. agreed; instead of animated heads, give us male&female heads!

[Hurry]

I agree with most of your comments. I also can´t understand why they made those animated leader heads - I would much rather have some talking instead of very non-natural looking animations. The music in the game is fine, but I really miss some speech.

And, why, why, why? No wonder movies!!!! In Civ2 I happily built the Oracle even after it became obsolete just for the movie and the points (yes, you get no points either for wonders in Civ3).

[XPav]

Originally posted by Hrnac
1. The exclusion of the sentry command.

This one puzzles me as it seems that it does not imbalance the game, require totally new code (could rework the Civ 2 code) and generally seemed like a common sense unit function.

While I'm not going to argue with the exclusion of the sentry command, I'd just like to point out that

1) We do not know if Firaxis has the Civ 2 code. Civ2 was originally developed by Microprose. Yes, many of the developers from Microprose formed Firaxis, but it is very, very unlikely that they had permission to take the code with them. Microprose has since been folded into Infogrames, but none of us here have any information about if the code has survived intact throughout the years and if Firaxis had gotten ahold of it.

I doubt they have. They don't need it.

2) Just because the sentry code for was in Civ2 does not automatically make it easy to put into Civ3. I sincerely doubt code written over 5-6 years ago would have been written with an eye to further expansion and modularity, and since I doubt Civ3 has any shared ancestry with Civ2, I do not think the code could be "reworked."

[Mongoose]

SMAC (for which I'm relatively sure Firaxis still has intact code) had a sentry function (maybe two).

I'm inclined to think that Firaxis left it out for a reason, rather than sheer laziness. Perhaps something to do with the order icons, or the number of them.

It's also possible that there IS a sentry function accessible by shortcut only that hasn't been documented.