Can you suggest the best mods (for me?) - Civ III - 2015?

J

Jyet

Chieftain
Joined
Sep 19, 2015
Messages
22
(I have Civ III - Complete - Steam)

What are the best mods that still hold up today? I've never played any of them. I would appreciate smarter AI, so that I don't have to let the AI cheat (give it free stuff) to make the game harder. Variety (more worker abilities, more civs, graphics, techs, buildings, etc.) as long as it's balanced and the AI can intelligently use any new cool things I could do, etc..

I'm a bit over-whelmed looking through the mod forum. I'm guessing Rise and Rule is the place to be, do I use the official one, or are one of the fan made revisions of RaR better (sorry to ask, I just want a great experience out of the gate with the first mod)?

Honestly any input appreciated, I have no idea.
 
Ok Nathiri, I will start with the first one that you linked, CCM, -thank you so much.
 
There's been some interesting work to make the AI less bad, if still not great. Storm Over Europe with its microzones for AI production, for instance, is a good example of an innovation leading to more diverse AI units (although unfortunately it's not currently available online, unless it's been reuploaded to civforum.de and the link hasn't been posted here yet). SOE, notably, is like CCM one of Civinator's creations.

I've personally been enjoying PinkTilapia's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire this year, which while old, is a goodie. Though its links went down with AtomicGamer, they've been reuploaded in post #4277 of that thread (currently on the last page).

There's a lot of other options too, depending on what you're looking for (new epic game, historical scenario, fantasy/sci-fi, etc.). I've actually spent more time making tools for mods than playing them, so others may have better suggestions, but if there's an area you're particularly interested in, there's a good chance there's a mod for it.
 
Personally, I like the Test of Time mod by TETurkhan, played under the Play the World version, but I am not sure if that works with Steam. The AI will actually build and use armies in that one, as I have learned to my cost. With the strong Barbarian Units, it can be quite a challenge, and it does have a wide range of units.
 
timerover51 said:
Personally, I like the Test of Time mod by TETurkhan, played under the Play the World version, but I am not sure if that works with Steam.
Click to expand...
AFAIK, the Steam version of Civ3'Complete' doesn't provide a PTW executable (I know for sure that my GamersGate version doesn't) -- so if that Mod requires one, then unfortunately it won't work under a Steam (or GG) installation.
The AI will actually build and use armies in that one, as I have learned to my cost. With the strong Barbarian Units, it can be quite a challenge, and it does have a wide range of units.
Click to expand...
FTR, the fully-patched Vanilla/PtW AI could fill and use Armies just fine -- which is why it can (also) do so in .bic/.bix mods for those executables. (And the Barbs also weren't bugged in those versions...)

Conversely, although the Conquests AI does (occasionally) use MGLs to build Armies, those Armies never (or at least very rarely) contain more than a single unit, and hence are never (or at least very rarely) used in combat...
Spoiler :
From what I've read on here, it seems be the +1 MP Army-bonus added in Conquests that cocked things up, because having loaded the first unit into an Army, the AI then can't find 'matching' units to add to it: e.g. if the first unit added was an ordinary 3.2.1 Sword, the AI then thinks it 'needs' 3.2.2 Swords to increase the Army size -- and of course it doesn't have them.

(I'd be interested to know if ACavs would get added to a single-Sword Army...?)

So the Conquests AI-Armies tend to stay small and therefore, prior to building the MilAcad, also get no A/D-bonus until the AI has strength-6 units (strength-bonus = +1) to load into them. However, from the Conquest algorithm's PoV, a single-unit Army is 'worth' a lot more relative to its A/D stats than a single unit of equivalent type+rank, because an Army has a [Regent-level] cost of 400 shields, plus whatever the first-loaded unit cost. That makes an Army far too 'valuable' to risk in nearly all combats, so the AI usually simply fortifies its Armies wherever they're built, and attacks with (much less valuable) individual units instead.

(To be fair, the Conquests algorithm is judging its Army-value accurately here -- unless they were desperate, no human player would send a single-unit Army into combat either! But if the Conquests-AI knew how to increase its Army-sizes to make them more effective in the first place, the high Army-cost would be much less of a barrier to usage.)
So from that PoV, it would be useful to know, which Conquests-mods allow the AI to use Armies...? Does CCM?
 
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