Which game is better? Civ3 or CtP2?

[Mr. Nice Guy]

I have Civ3 and hate the game's guts. But instead of taking it back, I decided to keep it and figure out what was wrong with it and let Firaxis know my opinions. I've never played CtP or CtP II but I am interested in seeing how Call To Power II compares to Civilization III.

So which game do you think is better? Are they both about the same? Do they both suck? Voice your opinion here!

[ALPHA WOLF 64]

If you had played CtP2, you'd see how much better Civ3 is. I spent 2 months trying to learn how to program a decent AI in CtP2, and finally gave up, even tho it was substantially better than as purchased, it was every civ city on its own. CtP2 was one of the biggest disappointments i've ever seen in a PC game, second only to Axis and Allies.

i hope the next generation of Civ games actually tries to program the AI to act as a civ instead of x number of independent cities. Determine what the civ as a whole needs and allocate cities to produce it. i think they attempted that this time by limiting each wonder to a single city so that an AI didnt have half its cities building the same wonder.

[Harovan]

Another Civ3 vs. CtP2 comparing thread... Oh well, nice try after your "official civ3 sucks thread".

I played CtP2 the whole 2001, till Civ3 came out. First I enjoyed it, but later... It's got no AI (not even a stupid one like Civ2, but none), the map generator is bad, the early game is tedious and the pollution sucks. It's moddable great style, but the better mods run lousy with localized versions, or produce an awful mix of languages. Tried to install Cradle 1.3 yesterday but it didn't run. Laughed, deleted, gone. Civ3 has got severe problems at the moment, but at least it's still supported. CtP2 is abandoned and without a mod it's worthless.

CtP2 is absolutely no match for Civ3 even in it's current state.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Oh well, nice try after your "official civ3 sucks thread".

[delfino]

CTP1 and 2 had many new and interesting features and allmost as many annoying ones. it is difficult to compare them. one thing is for sure if I could merge Civ3 and CTP2 in to one single game I am pretty sure the outcome with be better than just adding the two together. CTP2 had ocean and space colonization, had virtually unlimited city radius, stack movement, public works, nice graphics and imaginative units, specially the invisible ones. CTP2 would allow you to have a taste for some future technologies. Under these concepts Civ3 is shallow and a lot more down to earth. I might be wrong but I seem to be unable to shake the feeling that Civ3 was made by people that did not love the game and that it was a rush job.

[exeter0]

I agree with Sir Ralphs argument but not his conclusion.

Personally I find CTP + Mods (Cradle 1.3 works fine for me) to be a much more immersive and involved strategic game.

BUT... I agree that vanilla CTP2 is pretty lame. I must praise the power of the CTP2 customisability though. It is to CTP2's credit that it has become 300% the game it was due to enthusiast support.

I agree 200% with Sir Ralph that the Map generator in CTP2 is hopeless... but Maps in CIV III aren;t much better... you always get masses of Jungle, Mountain etc. which is not condusive to interesting or fair gameplay.

Things like Stacked combat and increased combat complexity + the greater degree of micro-management optionslends me to feel more immersed in a CTP2 game.

Having said all this I love the aesthtic shell of CIV 3 and I believe that all the essential (and non-essential) flaws of CIV 3 have been aired by loyal CIV 3 players in this and other forums.

Hopefully Infogames will allow Firaxis to further develop the game and we will end up with what we want CIV3 to be... and then CTP2 will be redundant.

Until then though... I think CTP2 is the better experience.

Cheers.

[exeter0]

Originally posted by delfino
CTP1 and 2 had many new and interesting features and allmost as many annoying ones. it is difficult to compare them. one thing is for sure if I could merge Civ3 and CTP2 in to one single game I am pretty sure the outcome with be better than just adding the two together. CTP2 had ocean and space colonization, had virtually unlimited city radius, stack movement, public works, nice graphics and imaginative units, specially the invisible ones. CTP2 would allow you to have a taste for some future technologies. Under these concepts Civ3 is shallow and a lot more down to earth. I might be wrong but I seem to be unable to shake the feeling that Civ3 was made by people that did not love the game and that it was a rush job.

Very succinct and accurate summary response!

[Harovan]

Not quite accurate, because CtP2 (unlike CivCtP) has no space colonization.

The other arguments are a matter of taste. Personally I don't like stealth units and futuristic stuff (I can play SMAC if I want) and I am glad they aren't in Civ3. Workers vs. PW is a tough question and I understand the PW supporters, although I think the Civ3 workers with their different nationalities add a nice element to the game.

[nbarclay]

I was really looking forward to CTP2, but it turned out to be a major disappointment.

(1) The limit on the number of cities drove me nuts, especially if circumstances called for war and I couldn't absorb additional cities.

(2) The AI's city placement contributed immensely to the "too many cities" problem since captured cities were usually too close together given how big cities in the game can get. Trying to build down cities to a point where I could disband them got rather tedious.

(3) If I slid the production slider way up to maximize production in smaller or newly conquered cities, I didn't dare build mines in my more productive cities because pollution was too much of a problem.

(4) The "cities work all the land in their radius" rule took away one of my key micromanagement tools (as well as the ability to control pollution by not working mines). It also significantly reduced the value of tile improvements in towns that were small enough they just NEEDED a couple tiles improved to have plenty of good land to keep everyone busy. And frankly, I consider it more realistic that people will work more useful and better improved areas a lot harder than they will unimproved desert.

(5) The final straw came when I was in an alliance with one country for almost purely commercial and scientific reasons, had finally gotten on reasonably good terms with another after some previous fighting, and had my ally ask me to go to war to help it out against the other country. I was THE world power, but the game didn't even give me the option to threaten war to try to get the other country to make peace with my ally. It was either get into an unwanted war or abandon an ally. I got annoyed enough that I didn't want to play any more that day, and I haven't touched the game since.

Nathan

[Harovan]

Originally posted by exeter0
... but Maps in CIV III aren;t much better... you always get masses of Jungle, Mountain etc. which is not condusive to interesting or fair gameplay.

You might try the 5 billion years setting, but the default is sound for me. The Earth has (or better, originally had...) huge forest and jungle areas, it has vast mountainous regions etc. It has also big deserts and plains. It has no octopus shaped continents with tentacles all around the World and it has much less forking rivers, and no checkerboard-like river monsters. The Civ3 map generator is quite good, it could be perfect if it would make more than just 2 continents on a huge map. Four would be good. No, that's not the same like archipelago.

[campmajor!]

I just had a rotten banana, so I had to choose something else!

This poll has been done before, but probably it will be done after this one as well.

I just happen to like polls....

[Alex]

Oh, no! Not another Civ3/CTP2 poll...

But the better game is Civ3, of course.

[Locutus]

The CtP series is IMHO by far superior to Civ3 and the reason is simple: innovation. Civ3 is just Civ2 with strategic resources, not much else has been added (culture has been emphasized somewhat more, but it's by no means an entirely new concept, even Civ1 had 'flipping cities'). I think even calling Civ3 'Civ2.5' would be flattery. CtP OTOH adds many new features and concepts that greatly improve the genre (the most important of them have been mentioned already) and, above all, is more customizable than Civ3 will ever be, allowing the fans to continue the process of innovation almost indefinitely, something commercial companies can never do for simple economical reasons. Contrary to Firaxis, Activision realized that here the true strenght and replayability of a game lies. (To make Civ3 as customizable as CtP2 would require major changes to the basic game engine, which Firaxis is never gonna do for Civ3 - and if they did the result would be called Civ4).

Although the basic (unmodded) game of CtP2 is not great (like Civ3, CtP2 was released a few months too early), all the new concepts make it very much worthwhile to play. There's a very basic mod out there, the Apolyton Pack, which (together with the patch) fixes most of the major problems of the unmodded game and brings it in a state in which it was supposed to be for release. This simple mod already makes the game much better and, thanks to all the innovative features that CtP2 already has out-of-the-box, superior to Civ3. The only thing that could have been even better in this mod is the AI (but AIs can *always* be better). I think the GoodMod takes this idea one step further and does the same thing as the Apolyton Pack but improves the AI even further.

But more interesting are the MedMod and Cradle of Civilizations mod. The latest versions of these mods are a complete remake of the game and really deserve to be renamed CtP3. They add tons of new features on top of the default game (militias, elite units, wonder units, wonder buildings, unit upgrading, city capture options, unit repair, natural disasters, prisoners of war, refugees, surrendering and merging civs, new victory options, etc, etc), with even more in the making (wonder visible on the map, strategic resources, religion, generals, more random events, etc). On top of the already diverse default game, they add many more new units, buildings, wonders, governments, civs, city styles, tile imps, etc; they radically improve the AI (if you haven't played CtP2 for a while you're probably not gonna be able to win Cradle v1.3 on the highest difficulty level) and do a complete revamp of diplomacy (if you played and liked Diplomod you're gonna be pleasantly surprised by New Diplomod).

In fact, with CtP2 we're now getting at a point where we have to be careful about adding new features and making more improvements. When it comes to features: more isn't always better ('less is more', as Brian Reynolds told us in a Gamespy column many months ago). And when it comes to AI: you don't want to make it *too* good, it still has to be possible to defeat it (one example is that we were able to make the AI ICS so well it makes Civ3's AI look like a sitting duck (40-50 cities in the first 100 turns) - but this would make the AI pretty much undefeatable so we didn't use this technique anywhere (yet )). Until recently there were really two standards for truly innovative CtP2 mods (MedMod and Cradle) but at the moment more and more 'smaller' mods are arising, giving people different sets of features, styles of play and time periods to play with, rather than just more, more, more...

Scenarios are now also really starting to kick off, strategy discussions and things like succession games are, due to the complexity and variety of the game, much more interesting than the ones for Civ3 and the MP community seems more alive than ever before as well.

In short, if you like Civ games and you're not looking for Civ2.5 but rather for a truly innovative game, CtP is the way to go. If you still want to continue to play something similar to Civ2 until the end of time, SMAC and Civ3 would be better choices.

[Locutus]

Alpha Wolf,
You learned adjusting the AI in a period when everyone was still learning, we knew very little back then. Had you continued to hang around for a little longer, you would have been present in the period when we truly started to make progress. Right now the AI of CtP2 is extremely strong and nothing compared to the AI from the early period. You are completely wrong about the city-focuss though: the biggest problem of CtP2's AI is not that it is too city-focussed but rather that it is too civ-focussed and is too busy with the big picture to manage individual cities carefully enough. This doesn't show how wrong you are per se, it rather shows how little we understood of the AI in the time you were still with us.

Sir Ralph,
The language issues are certainly a problem but if you install an English mod on a German system, what do you expect? There are two simple solutions for this though: either switch to an English version of the game (all the files you need are available if you ask for them on the forums) or translate the mods to English. Civ3 AFAIK has the exact same problem and so does any other game I've ever played, so you can't hold this against the game IMHO. If Cradle didn't run for you, explain your problem in the forum. It can be a bit tricky to get a mod to run if you've never done it before but so far I've never heard of anyone not being able to run mods at all, it's just a matter of asking for help and not giving up the minute it doesn't work perfectly. The support for CtP2 is quite frankly better than for Civ3, the designers of the mods are gamers themselves and always willing to aid new players and release improved versions, the people of Firaxis are often almost invisible (for good reasons, I'm sure). The map generator, like everything else in CtP2, can be customized, so if you really don't like it (which is a matter of taste)...

[Harovan]

Locutus: I'm aware that mixing languages between game and mod can lead to problems. I tried what was described in your FAQ (copy the english gamedata over the german after modding) but that didn't help. Cradle 1.2 ran after about 1 hour work, Cradle 1.3 not even after 2. Then I gave up and removed both, Cradle and the game (worthless without mod). Only the patch survived, for future use.

Generally I'd not mind to throw in a CtP2 game now and then. May be even a CivCTP. Just like I did not abandon Civ2 or SMAC. If there was a playable "no futuristic bullsh*t" mod for CtP2, now that would be awesome. And I would not at all mind to play the English version, at the countrary. So if somebody would send the English text files (or an appropriate link) to sirralph@gmx.com, who knows, may be I would even install them...

[ALPHA WOLF 64]

Hi Locutus,
Nice to hear from you again. I havent played CtP2 in about a year. I always figured some of you would figure out how to mod it into a playable game but unfortunately, 60 hour work weeks got in the way of my modding time, and I grew frustarated that for every improvement I'd make something else would break. One of these days, I'll have to d/l the cradle and see how you guys did

[Locutus]

AW,
Yes, good to talk to you again as well, it has indeed been a while. You definitely ought to d/l Cradle sometime and check out the results, you won't be disappointed

Sir Ralph,
I can understand an hour for Cradle v1.2 if that includes studying readmes and/or downloading files (and maybe modswapper and the patch and such), but 2 hours for Cradle v1.3? WTF? All it takes to install Cradle v1.3 once v1.2 is working is to download the victory.zip file from Dave's website and extract it (and manually copy the files to the correct folder if you don't have an english version of the game), that should be doable in 2-10 min. What exactly went wrong, if I may ask?

As for a no-future mod, that can very easily be taken care off. The easiest solution would probably to play a 1-person LAN or Internet game, that will give you a lot of options to set the starting and ending age, number of starting settlers, etc. If you don't want that or don't get that to work, you could quite easily go into advances.txt and find those advances which lead into the future age and give those themselves as prerequisite. Although I've never actually tried this myself, this should without much of a hassle allow you to disable the future game altogether. If this doesn't work for whatever reason, I'll gladly write you 10 lines of SLIC code which accomplish exactly the same thing.

Failing that, you could of course play with the Cradle mod (which *can* go into the future but it takes a *long* time to get there and most of the time the game should be over by then) or the WAW mod, which plays entirely in the modern age (1900-1950).


Anyway, to fix your language problems Martin's solution in the FAQ works but is perhaps not the best one. For one thing you'll get a mix between languages (which, I can understand, must be quite annoying) and it also means that with every mod (and every upgrade of a mod) you download, you have to manually copy the files to the correct folder. Personally I always do this myself anyway (to avoid conflicts with my own modifications), but if you're not a modmaker this is probably just annoying.

So I attached a zip file which contains 2 things. The first is the English language folder (ctp2_data\english\gamedata), which will allow you to play the entire game in English. Note that the English sounds are still missing, I don't know if this matters to you. I can give you the English sounds as well but they are in total 15MB large so if you're on a slow Internet connection this might be a big download, and it's just sound after all (the only English-specific sounds in the game that I know of are some of the unit sounds ("Blood shall run" and stuff) - I don't even know if this was translated for the German version). The UI and graphics files from the ctp2_data\english folder are also missing but I'm 99,9% certain that those don't contain any English phrases that are actually visible during the game, so this shouldn't matter. All you need to do to use these files is to unzip them in your main CtP2 folder (normally C:\Program Files\Activision\Call to Power 2\) and manually copy the files in the ctp2_data\english\gamedata folder over the files in your ctp2_data\german\gamedata folder (or not, see below).

The second part of the zip file is the civpaths.txt file from the ctp2_program\ctp folder. If you rename your 'german' folder to 'english' and overwrite your civpath.txt file with the one in this zip, the game will think you have an English version of the game. The advantage of this is that you can unzip the various mods automatically in the correct folders, so it eliminates the need to manually copy files to the correct language folder after downloading and unzipping. To make use of this (and be able to play the game in English), simply unzip the entire zip file as I described above and, when prompted if you want to overwrite civpath.txt, confirm (if you don't want this, don't unzip that file or don't confirm the overwrite). Then copy/move the other subfolders of the german folder (graphics, sound and uidata) to the english folder. An added advantage of this is that it will leave the german\gamedata folder intact so you can easily switch back to German if you want to.

When this is done, you can download and install mods in exactly the same manner as English players, without having to be concerned about having a German version of the game. The only difference with the current situation will of course be that all the text in the game will be in English.
Now, if for whatever reason this doesn't work, don't hesitate to let me know and ask for help, that's (among other things) what I'm here for.

Anyway, it's good to hear you haven't completely given up on this game yet...

[Harovan]

Locutus: First, thanks for your support , I will try it again next weekend. For today I'm tired and just want to have a nice Civ2 evening. The second way of installation seems better (faking an english version), so I will try it.

What went wrong, well, it kept to miss files in its asset tree. I did as was described, copied the english gamedata folder over the german one, allowing overwrites, but this time it didn't work. I still don't know why. The time ran by reading Readme files, trying to figure what's going on, searching files manually, trying to guess where they belong, checking game again, uninstalling game and reinstalling it (twice) including the 1.11 patch, modswapper and apolyton mod.

As to the sounds, oh well, they are annoying anyway.

Still would like to have a no-future mod, may be I make one myself. I don't want underwater cities, fusion tanks, gaia controllers and futuristic wonders. The lack of this and the lack of terraforming (there is NO grassland beneath the Alps) is particularly, what I like Civ3 for.

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Locutus: First, thanks for your support

Your welcome.

I will try it again next weekend. For today I'm tired and just want to have a nice Civ2 evening. The second way of installation seems better (faking an english version), so I will try it.

Let me know how it goes.

What went wrong, well, it kept to miss files in its asset tree.

Well, that sounds like a problem with the manual copying of the files somewhere, you may have missed a file somewhere or maybe there are some differences between the English and German version of the game that Martin may have forgotten about. When you fake an English version, this problem will hopefully not occur (and if it does, let me and/or Martin know exactly what error you're getting and we'll see if we can help).

Still would like to have a no-future mod, may be I make one myself. I don't want underwater cities, fusion tanks, gaia controllers and futuristic wonders. The lack of this and the lack of terraforming (there is NO grassland beneath the Alps) is particularly, what I like Civ3 for.

Well, the solutions I outlined should allow you to disable all that (if you choose the disable-advances wisely), but if you want to make a full-fledged mod out of it, by all means (and let us know if you need any help)... I actually think there would be some (but not much) interest in such a mod on the forums.

[Miznia]

What's wrong with CTP2's map generator?

And this is a little bit off topic, but, what does DiploMod actually do? Is it mostly just map trading? Because I don't think I've ever seen AI players make peace after starting a war, and I've never seen any alliances in the game outside of the ones I pay for.

[Harovan]

Locutus: I already installed it and mage a few test turns, this time it worked from the beginning. Thanks again.

Miznia: The maps are unrealistic and look awful. I don't like octopus shaped continents with tentacles screw-like winding around the World, would like to have sound clima zones, non-forking rivers and arid lee sides of mountains. And that is not the spring of a river:

[Dale]

Originally posted by Miznia
What's wrong with CTP2's map generator?

And this is a little bit off topic, but, what does DiploMod actually do? Is it mostly just map trading? Because I don't think I've ever seen AI players make peace after starting a war, and I've never seen any alliances in the game outside of the ones I pay for.

Straight from the creator's (me ) mouth:

Diplomod enhances and de-stupidfies AI diplomacy. It does enable some AI-AI diplomacy, but back when it was written, there was no solution known for getting AI-AI treaties. However, with Diplomod, the player would find the AI diplomacy much better, more intense, and just simply not so stupid as the vanilla version. Hope this answers the question.

[Locutus]

Miznia,
Dale is being modest, Diplomod is a complete overhaul of CtP2's diplomacy system. It makes the AIs behave in a very logical and 'human' way towards human players, the AI actively makes proposals and responds in a sensible way (among other things). New Diplomod also makes major improvements in the AI-AI relationships and adds a duration to treaties (among other things).

Sir Ralph,
Great to hear it worked

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
The maps are unrealistic and look awful.

Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Although I agree CtP2 is pushing it, Civ3's maps are plain boring, all the continents are square and linear, they all look like Africa. Ever had a good look at a map of Europe, Asia, Australia or North America? The mountains in Civ3 don't make any sense either, they often come out of nowhere (no hills or whatever surrounding them) and exeter made a good point too: although realistic, there's waaayy too much useless terrain in Civ3 maps (and unmodded CtP2 maps too). I radically increased the amount of grassland and plains in CtP2 myself, makes for a much more interesting game (AIs compete better too, one or two always start out in poor terrain and can't deal). Although neither map generator is great, at least CtP2's one can be tweaked to fit my personal taste...

I don't like octopus shaped continents with tentacles screw-like winding around the World

This at least can be fixed, I experimented a lot with this and have been able to get all sorts of continent shapes, from the ones you describe to almost perfectly square ones. Again, beauty is in the eye of the beholder so I can't do this for you but you really ought to play around with the settings in map.txt some time (there are one or two other files that affect the map generator but this is by far the most important one).

would like to have sound clima zones

What's wrong with the those? They look fine to me...

non-forking rivers and arid lee sides of mountains. And that is not the spring of a river:

Rivers are indeed a bit f*cked up - but they fork fine if you ask me...

[War4ever]

a combo of the two would be best

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by War4ever
a combo of the two would be best

Good point! This give me an idea for a new thread! Thanks!

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Locutus
What's wrong with the those? They look fine to me...

Well, things may have changed with the mods, I haven't checked that yet.

Rivers are indeed a bit f*cked up - but they fork fine if you ask me...

The point is, that they should not fork at all, because they don't do this in reality, or very very rarely. The Orinoco is an example. But it's the only one of importance I know. Now take a look at the CtP1/2 rivers (the map generator hasn't much changed). They fork at heart's content, or form total stupid rings (as shown above). Sometimes they even form checkerboard like monsters.

Maps aren't that important. It's a computerized board game, after all. They just look bad. A chess board looks worse.

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
The point is, that they should not fork at all, because they don't do this in reality, or very very rarely. The Orinoco is an example.

You have a point there, I guess it could be rarer. I was confused with rivers from multiple sources converging. But still, IIRC Civ3's rivers don't fork or converge at all, mosty the pretty much go in a straight line from a mountain to a sea, that's a little boring too.

[Dale]

I can't see any problems with river forking. In Australia, rivers fork ALL the time. River flow into other rivers making more major rivers. Take the Darling river which flows through New South Wales. It starts as a stream, numerous rivers/streams join it on it's travels southwards, then it joins the Murray River in Victoria and heads west to the coast near Adelaide. There's so many forks in Australia's rivers.

[War4ever]

river forking would be kewl

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Dale
I can't see any problems with river forking. In Australia, rivers fork ALL the time. River flow into other rivers making more major rivers. Take the Darling river which flows through New South Wales. It starts as a stream, numerous rivers/streams join it on it's travels southwards, then it joins the Murray River in Victoria and heads west to the coast near Adelaide. There's so many forks in Australia's rivers.

I think Sir Ralph's point is that that's exactly the opposite of forking (at first I was thrown off as well), which *would* be cool to have. In any case CtP2's system is closer to reality than Civ3's system, except that the forked/converged rivers flow in the wrong direction