CIV3 Honest Review

[yoda]

I have a few serious comments and suggestions concerning CIV3. I hope a
patch can be made to improve on these problems. Also, I'm running the
1.16 patch when noticing these problems.

1) WORKERS: I find I spend 90% of my game time moving around workers. I
don't know if that is your intent, but it is rather boring and adds
nothing to the game. Capturing workers is a good concept, but the
effort of moving them around turn after turn after turn makes me wonder
if anyone seriously play tested the later stages of the game. On your
largest map, a large empire could easily have 60+ workers. And once you
get railway, you end up moving them back and forth, one unit at a time,
dragging them around the map looking for pollution to clean up. They
become the total focus of the game rather than a small component. Is
this really your intent? Wouldn't it have been better to have a "pool"
of workers (foreign and domestic) that could be "assigned" tasks rather
than have them move? And, when cities are taken, a portion of those
workers would become captured?

2) MOVING: There is no grouping of units so you have to move one at a
time. Why not make an option available to "grab" or "group" any number
of units for movement purposes so that you can mass transport them to a
desired area and then have them attack one at a time?

3) COMMUNISM: Why on earth is this government even included? It is
totally useless (except for while at war) regardless of how large your
empire is. I'm kind of glad in a way because it's more realistic,
but...

4) AI: They seem to swap tech like it has no value. There is no attempt
by the AI to gain technological superiority over other AI or over the
human opponent. Further, playing against a large number of AI is
totally pointless. They swap tech so frequently that it is like playing
against all of them at once (making the tougher levels of the game far
too difficult along the technology path). Overall, because of the "one
unit attacking at a time" rule, the AI is relatively challenging.
However, they need some serious work when it comes to naval units and
naval strategy.

5) LEADERS: They come around so infrequently that one wonders why they
are even a component of the game. Further, their "rush" ability for
wonders means that they should NEVER be used to create an army. Far too
powerful for rushing wonders.

6) ARMIES: They are an interesting concept, but are very rare in the
game. Organization of units is the backbone of any combat effort
throughout time. Why have you made them so limited in this game?
First, you need to be able to get a leader (which is extremely rare as
mentioned above), then you have to "waste" them on building an army
rather them use the awesome power for rushing a wonder. Then, you have
to successfully win a battle with them. Finally, you have to build a
wonder. Then, and only then can you start building more army units
which take FAR too long to build. One last comment about armies is that
there seems to be no way to remove units from an army. This means that
armies become obsolete and rather pointless.

7) RESOURCES: I enjoy what you've done for goods and resources for this
game. However, I played on a large map game which had ONE coal hex on
the entire map. Granted, much later in the game a few other hexes
showed up, but isn't that just a bit too restrictive given that coal is
such an important resource and so commonly found here on our 3rd rock
from the sun?

8) CORRUPTION: Corruption levels are far too restrictive when you have a
large empire. Yes, you build the forbidden wonder, but that only helps
in one area. If you have a very large empire, you basically get NOTHING
for production no matter how long the city has been around or how large
that city becomes. And COURTHOUSES don't seem to help at all in any
city.

9) BOMBING: You can't eliminate a unit with air power or naval
bombardment. I can understand this for ground units, but it's totally
unrealistic for naval units. WW2 saw most of the naval units sunk by
air power, not by surface combat. In addition, air power bombing raids
should be able to eliminate air units caught in airports. Have you
given any thought to being able to "select" a target to bombard, such as
Airports, rather than have it random?

Now, there are things I like about CIV3 and obviously your team has put
a lot of effort into making this game as enjoyable as possible.
However, I think you've missed the point of what has made your other
games such a great success. I know it's easy to be a critic, but here
is my honest assessment from someone who has played all the CIV type
games available:

The game engine itself is quite good. AI is probably the best I've seen
in all the CIV games. Combat isn't too bad, but Call to Power's effort
with organizing units into groups and having range attack as part of
combat is far superior. Diplomacy is excellent. Use of workers instead
of Public Works or a worker pool is a waste of time and quite frankly
makes the game almost unplayable because of the amount of effort they
take at the later stages of the game (boring). Pollution is handled ok
but tends to be far too excessive in the tougher levels. Terrain and
graphics are good. Unit design is good although the concept of armor is
missing. Tanks seem to be easily damaged by fortified pikemen and
muskets which seriously makes me have to wonder. The online
dictionary/tech tree, etc... is very good. Air power is unique and not
a bad idea. The inability of building air bases anywhere on the map is
a serious flaw, but otherwise I have enjoyed your design of these
units. I also enjoy the fact that air power has NO defensive abilities
when overrun by land units. Same with naval units caught in port.

Overall, the game is a good effort except for the worker component. It
is a nice advancement on CIV2. However, it is far inferior to Call to
Power and really a step backwards. Furthermore, the lack of a
multi-player option is seriously disappointing.

[zorbop]

i agree. ctp2 was better designed. exept for the city restrictions in it but thats not as bad as the corruption problem and the worker thing.

[Grumbold]

Many of these points have been discussed at length and are certainly issues that they ought to have considered when they were setting out to make the most user friendly game ever. Taking out wonder movies because they detracted from the flow of the game but leaving in lots of repetitious tasks seems very strange.

While capturing endless workers can lead to infinite worker tedium, as soon as you have a reasonable rail network it is quite possible to switch most of them over to automatic control. They may not be perfect but you have so many, who really cares? With toggles to hide automatic movement the disruption is minimised.

The AI will welcome a tech advantage if it gets one, but by making all countries willing to share tech if the price is right it makes the overall competence level of the AI much higher. No petty squabbles while the player secretly gains an unassailable tech lead. There will still be times when the AI will refuse to trade you (or others) certain key techs.

[Skanky Burns]

1) WORKERS: ... And once you
get railway, you end up moving them back and forth, one unit at a time,
dragging them around the map looking for pollution to clean up... Wouldn't it have been better to have a "pool"
of workers (foreign and domestic) that could be "assigned" tasks rather
than have them move? And, when cities are taken, a portion of those
workers would become captured?

Once all major improvements are done to your liking, just Shift-A your workers, and they will auto-improve. What this means is that if there is nothing to do, they will hide in the nearest city. If pollution occurs, they will automatically run out and clean it up. However since the patch, only 2 workers feel the need to clean up, so the 100 or so other workers still waiting in your city will just stay there. Must be a union thing.

2) MOVING:

EVERYONE wants group movement

3) COMMUNISM: Why on earth is this government even included? It is
totally useless (except for while at war)

Thats its point exactly... for wars.

4) AI: They seem to swap tech like it has no value.

At the start, this is necessary due to the long research times. However once you reach the middle ages, if you dont swap techs, then the AI will slow down their trading frenzy and you will notice the militeristic civs all falling behind in tech.

However, they need some serious work when it comes to naval units and
naval strategy.

Better than any previous Civ games, but they still do need work.

5) LEADERS:

Depends on the game, some you get 10, others you get none, despite the fact that in both games you took over the world.

6) ARMIES: ... This means that
armies become obsolete and rather pointless.

Agreed. They also lose their blitz ability, and cant retreat.

7) RESOURCES: However, I played on a large map game which had ONE coal hex on
the entire map. Granted, much later in the game a few other hexes
showed up, but isn't that just a bit too restrictive given that coal is
such an important resource and so commonly found here on our 3rd rock
from the sun?

Agreed again. Coal is way too rare compared to other resources. Given a choice between a goldmine and a coalmine, which would we choose?? Shouldnt it be the other way around?!?

8) CORRUPTION:

I hope they look at this too. Perhaps capping the corruption levels??

9) BOMBING: You can't eliminate a unit with air power or naval
bombardment. I can understand this for ground units, but it's totally
unrealistic for naval units. WW2 saw most of the naval units sunk by
air power, not by surface combat. In addition, air power bombing raids
should be able to eliminate air units caught in airports.

Agreed again.

Have you given any thought to being able to "select" a target to bombard, such as Airports, rather than have it random?

Precision Bombing

Id just like to thank Yoda for actually adding constructive criticism about the game to these forums. Long time no see

[Special_Olympic]

Couldn't agree more. Thanks for the excellent review.

[Ironikinit]

Your review was interesting to read. Since you posted it here, I assume you won't mind feedback.

Grumbold addressed the worker problems, so I won't.

A group movement feature would be nice, but I really haven't had a huge problem dealing with moving units. It would be very nice to have the feature for when I want to accompany a settler with a defensive unit, for example, but really, not a big deal IMO so far.

Your comment on communism only being useful during wartime (and I hope you don't mind me saying this) made me snicker a bit. That seems to be what it was made for (in Civ 3), after all. Communism also makes espionage work a bit better, so it's not totally worthless maybe even more worthy than it is in reality.

In my experience, the AI does place a value on technology. It won't trade it to me for free, anyway. Certain civs seem more willing to give more for tech than others, in my current game the Iroquois pay top dollar while the English and Russians are cheapskates. As Grumbold mentioned, certain strategic techs are hoarded by the AI, but they seem to be willing to trade them at a premium. This is a change from Civ 2 and SMAC where techs that allowed wonders wouldn't be traded at all until the wonder was complete in many cases, but not a bad change.

I'd disagree that leaders should never be used to make armies because victorious armies allow the Heroic Epic and Military Academy small wonders (I like the small wonder idea a lot, BTW) one of which increases the chances of getting leaders (and both increase culture scores of course), although it's had to tell how much exactly the probability is increased. I'm not sure if I agree or not on leaders being too powerful due to the wonder rushing ability given how rare they are.

Armies do seem a bit weak, I agree, but I've found them a good use for unupgradable units such as swordsmen.

I really like the resources idea, even if they can be annoyingly rare. I actually find the ability to locate them in other civ's territory odd, because it's not as if my civ could send out mining engineers to their territory to scout for coal, but hey, that's the way it is. One thing I wish for is a resource locator that I could click that would transfer the view to the resource area and highlight it, but not going to happen. Strategic resources are intentionally rare, I believe, which livens up the game by provoking wars.

Courthouses have provided some help with corruption in my games. I never bothered with them in Civ 2 because democracy ended corruption, and the new system makes them useful. It may be that your empire was so large that the courthouses were useless. It seems the idea with the current system of corruption was to force players to keep empires on the small side, an idea they hate. Seems a bit odd considering how much people have complained about "late game tedium" and the woes of worker management... do they really want more workers to shuffle and more cities and units to manage?

Your point about air power vs. navies is a good one so far as realism is concerned. Realism isn't everything, though.

As a final note, I don't know if anyone concerned with making the game reads these boards or not. They probably have an email address for feedback over at the official site, though, if you haven't sent it there already.