I don't get why people hate Civ3. To me it was Civ2 with more features and functioning AI. All you needed to do it just lower the corruption and it became even better.
There's one of the major issues, right there. You needed to spam cities relentlessly in Civ 3 to stay competitive, but because of corruption, most of those cities were nonfunctioning crap. Building buildings in Civ 3 punished you far more than in Civ 5.
I'm not even going to touch Civ5 with all the bugs, 1upt, and no slider. It's even less of a Civ game then Rev.
See, and I wish I hadn't touched three with its lackluster diplomacy, broken unit upgrade paths, and design features that should have been considered bugs.
Wow, I never realized there was so much dislike for CivIII. I've seen it more and more lately, seemingly out of the blue. Somethings tells me it's a lot of those people who started with Civ4, and then tried CivIII.
No, it's also a lot of people who played a great game in Alpha Centauri and then saw Civ III take absolutely no design elements from that game. Weaker unit design, weaker tile improvement options, weaker air combat, crippled diplomacy, lackluster government options, etc.
Civ 3 had a LOT of holes in its design.
Corruption was insane and made getting cities rather pointless.
Diplomacy was completely broken (either you exploited it, playing the broker, and it was overpowered ; either you didn't exploit it and it was simply totally useless, the AI always wanting several times more than what they accepted to give).
Many concepts were badly implemented (the quoted "you have a stack of units in a city, it suddenly revolt and your stack vanish").
The ending was a joke (the same as Civ5 : just a pop-up saying "you win !", save for the Space Race that had a little movie).
No wonder movies.
This. There are very few complaints you can level at Civ 5 that Civ 3 did not surpass upon release.
But unlike Civ5, it had a lot of saving graces that made it a worthy addition to the series : it was very immersive (the whole interface was very neatly designed to drawn you into the game)
I found the interface rather boring, up to and including the font choice.
More than anything, it made the franchise go forward, adding new concepts that were so integral to the game that it made going backward very difficult - the whole culture and borders thing, units maintenance based on gold drawn from the whole budget rather than the weird "shield from home city" and the like.
Unfortunately, unit maintenance was also less burdensome based on number of cities, and so culture became rather hollow in Vanilla -- plop down the cities, don't bother expanding their borders because corruption will eat up most of what the tiles are producing anyway, then produce military units in one of your few cities with hammers after corruption and go beat on your nearest neighbor because they won't actually be friendly with you no matter what you're doing. You might even win if the essentially random combat resolution tosses a coin your way.
No, Civ3 had a bit of a troubled design process. The lead designer left Firaxis in the middle of the process, others had to take over, interesting concepts were introduced but weren't really thought out thoroughly, and Soren Johnson (as he admits himself) made several beginner's mistakes (he was a hugely talented, but not yet very experienced designer at this time). Prior to Civ5, I'd say that Civ3 was the least "well-rounded" game of the franchise. That didn't make is less enjoyable for me; for me, the new concepts it introduced shone through although the implementation was somewhat questionable. And while there were concepts that I simply regarded as unfixable design errors (corruption), they didn't keep me from enjoying the game. But I can understand why Civ3 ranks low for many players. Another factor is probably that Civ3 has a successor that obviously "fixed" many of its shortcomings, which may have made the existence of these shortcomings in Civ3 more salient.
The shortcomings were very salient to those that had played Alpha Centauri. Civ 4's concepts were a huge sigh of relief.
V and III were both wargames at heart and that's just not my bag with Civilization. I think V is worse than III in that regard... III, at least, introduced the concept of separate worker units and expanded, rather than curtailed, the tile improvement/resource variety.
Actually, I believe the worker improvement in Civ 3 was "mine green, farm brown, roads everywhere."
One could very well say that five has introduced the concept of city-states, and expanded the role of happiness. Whether you like the mechanics or not, we may have to wait just as long to see a working version of them as we did with Civ 3.
V, I think, is just too much of a wargame and WANTS DEARLY to be a wargame... If they actually made it a good wargame, I think I'd still hate it "as Civilization" because I don't think that's what the series is for.... but I'd be willing to judge it against wargames I do like such as the old SSI games or Hearts of Iron -- and it's got a long way to go before it catches up to them.
That was exactly my impression of 3. It's a wargame and nothing but -- diplomacy sucks, corruption makes buildings suck, and the combat system even makes combat suck.
I'm not sure if there's any complaint against Civ 5 that cannot be leveled against Civ 3 with far more accuracy.