CIV IV vs CIV III

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I like Civ4 better but if your machine is clunky there will be performance issues. On my P4 2.8 GHz / 6600 GT it did fine all the way up the large maps. Once I tried a huge map. There was a lot of lag time between turns.

If you can afford to upgrade to a better system it might help make the game play seem somewhat better. I think Civ III has more challenging gameplay but Civ4 has better graphics.
 
If you can afford to upgrade to a better system it might help make the game play seem somewhat better. I think Civ III has more challenging gameplay but Civ4 has better graphics.

Graphics have changed for Civ3 heres the playing turf I use ;)


See how it can be confusiong when you say Civ3 looks worse. I don't like the low-poly look of the new one, specially when it slows things down on mega maps.
 
If you are like me then don't expect to play large/Huge Maps >_<
The one thing they did worse in CIV was the amount of memory it takes
I cannot play many great maps because my Specs are too low while in Civ 3 I can go ahead and play with a giant map with tons of different Nations
I've notice more and more games are using huge amounts of memory so this doesn't just apply to Civ4. I wouldn't settle for anything less than 2gb of ram for today's games.
P.S. I love Civ4 3D graphics (Blue marble) with the ability to zoom in and out. I even got use to the size of Civ4 units compared to civ3 and civ2 which I find hard to go back to.
 
I've notice more and more games are using huge amounts of memory so this doesn't just apply to Civ4. I wouldn't settle for anything less than 2gb of ram for today's games.
P.S. I love Civ4 3D graphics (Blue marble) with the ability to zoom in and out. I even got use to the size of Civ4 units compared to civ3 and civ2 which I find hard to go back to.

STill what am saying is that turf above lets me play Real empire size maps without a glitch I want the same in Civ4 but people with higher spec computers then me tell me its not an option. Sure some guys who seem to be touting CIv4 heavily say it works flawlessly on any size map, then say its your computers fault if you got problems but no one believes that anymore

To many have wrote in saying their power stacks still can't hack Civ4's glitch galore makeup. Real size empires/maps arn't realistic in CIv4 period.
 
Civ 3 Graphics have changed much more.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4863067&postcount=15

And the next version of "Ares terrain" is around the corner. :D

BTW.: I could never play such an earth map with so many cities on my pc in Civ 4.

Ya I won't argue, the beaches and jungle are upgrades even the mountains are a touch more realistic but the rest is just preference if you like. a more realistic version agaisnt a nicer brighter green grassland. I know Ares is more cutting edge but mine makes me feel more happy when I play! :crazyeye:

Oh an check my trees out!(theres more on the link!!) look at all those great shapes sizes and colours. Theres tons of variety man!! Civ4 can not compare I say ! ;)
I guess proper creds are due now: Rhyes's Greener
 
STill what am saying is that turf above lets me play Real empire size maps without a glitch I want the same in Civ4 but people with higher spec computers then me tell me its not an option. Sure some guys who seem to be touting CIv4 heavily say it works flawlessly on any size map, then say its your computers fault if you got problems but no one believes that anymore
Since civ3 you throw out tons of cities all over the place then of course this makes civ3 maps seems to be more epic. Just look how many cities is in your example above.(you could even slap down more) One of the thing I like about civ4 is you can do more with less so there's no longer the need to slap out 100 of cities. Thus making each city placement seem more important. So if someone want hundreds of cities on a map like Europe civ3 is design that way while civ4 was designed to get away from all those less useful cities and actually win the game with less.

In PC gaming many times it is your PC that makes all the difference in how well games run especially here recently. I agree with the right PC civ4 can run pretty smooth but I wouldn't say it's run flawless as with any PC game. I was also surprise of how much hardware civ4 needs but I found recently other games using a lot of hardware as well. Of course this is bad news to those who only play civ but if you are a serious PC Gamer you need to face the fact you are going to have to upgrade your PC in order to run many PC games well. It the same with consoles (PS2 or Xbox) you are going to have to upgrade eventually ( PS3 or Xbox360). There is cases where those with a good PC have trouble running a PC game. (Even GalCiv2 at first had problems who gamers who powerful graphic cards which was later solved)
 
I will say it just one more time.

Firaxis surely made a marketing research about the requiriments. I'm studing business, and I found out that most of top game producers for the computer makes some kind of marketing research before release a great(big, or really modern or so) game. So I bet they found out that putting the computer requiriments some higher would be a valid choice when it comes to sales.

And as Smidlee already pointed out, computers with less than 1GB ram and less than 128 MB of a nice video card, are starting to get really obsolete when it comes to the new games(even strategy games). That is the sad thing about the computers, if you want to make everything runs good, you have to update your computer each 2 years or so.
 
Firaxis surely made a marketing research about the requiriments. I'm studing business, and I found out that most of top game producers for the computer makes some kind of marketing research before release a great(big, or really modern or so) game. So I bet they found out that putting the computer requiriments some higher would be a valid choice when it comes to sales.
Did their market survey also tell them it's wise to sell a half baked game that is unplayable for a lot of people :lol: Besides bluffing people by wrongly stating the required specs? The initial release last year was all shambles and put off a lot of people.

Smidlee, I played a lot of small C3C games, even OCC. In Civ3 you had a choice about the size of your empire, in CIV, you don't...
 
Smidlee, I played a lot of small C3C games, even OCC. In Civ3 you had a choice about the size of your empire, in CIV, you don't...
If size is everything then obviously civ3 is your game. I'm someone who still loves chess and see it one of the best strategy games of all time even though it has only 64 squares only 6 different types of pieces. Civ4 again makes city placement seem important while civ3 you try to throw out as many cities as you can and hog as much land as you can.

I usually end up playing civ3 on smaller maps a lot more often than huge ones.
 
Of course this is bad news to those who only play civ but if you are a serious PC Gamer you need to face the fact you are going to have to upgrade your PC in order to run many PC games well.

The problem is, that Civ 4 isn&#180;t a game,that triggers me to upgrade my pc. :shake:


@ Arlborn, please tell me: "What is a Roxor?"
 
Smidlee, I played a lot of small C3C games, even OCC. In Civ3 you had a choice about the size of your empire, in CIV, you don't...

Much like real life? And what about the cottages around the main cities that becomes a town if developed? :p


And every game has its bugd in its first release. Mostly hard bugs to find if there isnt thousands of people playing.

And the requiriments were Minimum requeriments. Enough to the game run and you play. Normally they also put a recommended requiriments label beside it, its better see for this one.

About the unplayble for a lot of people, what you mean exactely? The ones not stated in the minimum requeriments??


@Civinator: haha its just a joke with rox. It comes from a online RPG game. But its in my signature not in the thread hehe
 
The problem is, that Civ 4 isn&#180;t a game,that triggers me to upgrade my pc. :shake:
Why not? It was for me. Of course civ4 wasn't the first sign I needed a new PC but it was the final straw that decide it for me. I personally get a lot more hours playing civ games including Galciv2 than any shooter. So civ4 clearly was the game for me to upgrade.
 
If size is everything then obviously civ3 is your game. I'm someone who still loves chess and see it one of the best strategy games of all time even though it has only 64 squares only 6 different types of pieces. Civ4 again makes city placement seem important while civ3 you try to throw out as many cities as you can and hog as much land as you can.

I usually end up playing civ3 on smaller maps a lot more often than huge ones.

Hey I guess if you like the smaller turtle up approach then theres where we differ. I treat each city as a chip on the table I want o control all the chips. You say I take to many chips but I tell you so can the AI over yonder across the sea.
I admit I enjoy having many citys in a empire. Its not a bad thing to be largean in charge but it comes with having to deal with enemys with the same collossual powe (China vs AMerica). Basicly I can't steamroll over the giants like I used to on small maps in Civ4.

I can regurgate guys quoting their 3.0 proc 1000mem stacks suck at huge map with many Civs or huge map modern age when playing Civ4, I am officially one of them. Talk about killing your fan base, but playing Civ3 has never been better
 
leave it to T.A Jones to open up a thread like this in the civ4 forums :) well done fella :lol:

i remember how excited i was when i read about all of the new features that were planned for civ4. all of the supposed fixes and such. needless to say, i was very, very excited about it all. and then i bought the game and the illusion disipated :sad:

i actually put civ3 down for a while and tried to get into civ4. i played a few quick epic games and some of the stock scenarios. i was not impressed in the least. the epic game was just okay. i mean, the newly introduced concepts were neat. however, i was very turned off by the gfx, especially the unit gfx and their multi-figure configuration. the funny thing about this is that multi-figure units (most of them at least) in civ3 were nearly universally shunned by the community. so it was puzzling to me that the developers added in this sort of MU configuration for civ4. also of a disappointment to me was the new system for arty and naval guns (why scrap a decent working system? why not enhance an existing model instead of scrapping it in favor of what imo is a less realistic model?). i was also very, very disappointed in the game engine performance of civ4. now, i've got a pretty buff computer and the games were lagging significantly (way more than what large map scenarios for civ3 would do). so i was very disappointed about this. the stock scenarios for civ4 are garbage also. i certainly hope that firaxis or take2 did not pay someone to make them b/c quite frankly, i'd never even release those versions as betas if i were the creator. my gripes included the use of out-of-place gfx as 'placeholders', poor gfx for other units, and just a lack of attention to detail that is so important w/ themed scenarios.

although highly disappointed, i allowed for my displeasures of civ4 to recede a little before trying to pick it up again and give'er another go-round. i mean, the open source thing for modding is very, very enticing...at least to me it is. however, after playing some more after my self-imposed break from civ4, i found that i was left w/ that "soulless" feeling that a few here have already noted. i have not picked the game back up and as a matter of fact, i gave it to a friend of mine - for good. and last i was at his house, it was on his shelf collecting dust.

anyhow - my main problem lies exclusively in the un-user friendly nature of civ4 modding. some may say - whah :cry: whah - learn how to use Python you dummy! well, that's not the case. i mean, i can teach myself that stuff and learn how to do it all. after all, there are few, if any, civers out there who've spent as much time w/ the guts of the civ engine in front of them :) so the 'work' part of it is not the issue. what is the issues is that the war system for civ4 and its undeniable problems w/ larger maps/empires precludes me from making scenarios for civ4 b/c of performance reasons. of course, there's other things like the low-poly units, the lack of a true naval combat system, and the arty problems. however, these are all second to the performance issues imo. so i guess what i'm getting at is that civ4 just demands too much CPU usage. hell, why should i need to have the equivelant of a NASA computer to run a decent civ4 scenario?

i don't like to get involved (anymore at least) w/ the 'what's better? civ3 or civ4' debate any longer. i mean, to each their own i say. however, for all of the civ3 haters out there, i remind you all that civ3 creation is as good as it's been in quite a while. sure, it ain't what it was, say, 2 years ago. however, scenario creation for civ3 is still quite vibrant w/ new stuff coming out pretty regularly. the same can not be said of civ4 scenarios/mods. sure there's a few really popular ones out there. but my point is that the inherent downfall of civ4 is its game engine performance and until that issue can be rectified, i highly doubt any civ3 scenario will be able to be transferred over to a civ4 format. and that much is a shame, not for me perse but the community as a whole. :)
 
Talk about killing your fan base, but playing Civ3 has never been better

I do feel sorry for you if you don't enjoy Civ4, and I can relate to what you're describing, but honestly, "killing one's fanbase" is vastly exaggerating. Actually the opposite is true.

In several polls that have been made on these forums, about 15% of users preferred Civ3 over Civ4. This is an amazingly low number considering that this forum had a *huge* fanbase of Civ3 players, and some of them inevitably *had* to be disappointed by the changes made.

Actually, Civ4 is a very good example for a game series that develops and changes *while keeping* (or even increasing) its fanbase. To put the 15% of people who still prefer Civ3 into perspective, have a look at another very successful game, TES4: Oblivion. It's raking in massive sales, but in its froums, *half* of its fans still prefer to play TES3: Morrowind when asked. That's a very good example of a game series that did *not* manage to keep its fans while developing new game features.

So, as much as I feel for those that were disappointed in Civ4, there was really nothing at all going on that could be described as "killing its fanbase". Every game in a series will leave some fans of the previous installments disappointed, that's inevitable. And the rate of disappointed fans for Civ4 was amazingly low.
 
And the rate of disappointed fans for Civ4 was amazingly low.
well, i guess you hadn't seen all of the threads in the civ3 forums b/c i can tell you that the rate is not at all low. and i'd say that your 15&#37; figure is from people who frequent the civ4 forums (and play both 3 and 4), not civ3 peeps who don't go to the civ4 forums. iow, your polling data is terribly biased i'm afraid.
 
Firaxis surely made a marketing research about the requiriments. I'm studing business, and I found out that most of top game producers for the computer makes some kind of marketing research before release a great(big, or really modern or so) game. So I bet they found out that putting the computer requiriments some higher would be a valid choice when it comes to sales.

True, however I do think that their research, which they certainly did, apparently led to misleading results.

Developing a computer game is always a gamble with respect to hardware requirements. This is because in the 1-3 years it takes to develop a title, hardware will become better, and the "standard" gaming PC will have better specs than when you started development. So you have to *estimate* how fast the relevant hardware will develop in the next years, and this estimation can be way off.

Also - this is my personal opinion - I think that Firaxis underestmated the amount of players who used to play Civ, and not many games besides Civ, on relatively low-spec PCs. Any marketing analysis that focuses on gamers in general is unlikely to catch these people. For someone who uses his PC just for office purposes, and likes to play a TBS from time to time, there was little need to upgrade during the last years. Accordingly, many of these people *expected* to be able to play Civ4 even with specs way under the official minimum. Many people also expected to be able to play on huge maps with PCs that just met the minimum - they realized that they would have to turn off any glitz and bling, but they didn't expect to be limited to small maps only.

I do think that these expectations were understandable. On the other hand, I also think that Firaxis' failure to realize this is understandable.
 
well, i guess you hadn't seen all of the threads in the civ3 forums b/c i can tell you that the rate is not at all low. and i'd say that your 15% figure is from people who frequent the civ4 forums (and play both 3 and 4), not civ3 peeps who don't go to the civ4 forums. iow, your polling data is terribly biased i'm afraid.

Erm, in which way is it biased to compare polling data from Civ4 forums to polling data from TES4 forums? You don't mean that it would be less biased to compare Data from Civ3 Forums to data from TES4 forums, do you? *That* would be biased. I can show you data from TES3 forums that has TES3 preference well in the high 80s.

Feel free to show me a game of a popular series that has managed to get less than 15% preference for the previous installment in the respective forum section. I haven't found one. For all I see, Civ4 is one of the most successful efforts in developing a series while keeping its fans in the whole market. Look at how people bash HoMM5 (opr were bashing HoMM4 for that matter), or were bashing MoO3 ... etc. I know it doesn't feel that way for you, but personal feelings are always less reliable than polls with hundreds of voters.
 
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