Test of Time for Education

I have finally gotten approval to use Civilization 3 in the summer historical gaming class that I teach, mainly as the center that I work with has sufficient laptops to try it. I will be using TETurkhan's Test of Time scenario, with some modifications, and I was wondering if anyone had experience with how fast the game runs with 12 or so players. I am anticipating about 5 or 6 students in the network along we me, and 5 or 6 AI played civilizations.

Any suggestions or feedback from someone who has done something similar would be greatly appreciated.

I think that I should give an update on what happened with the Test of Time session in my gaming class. Bottom line, it sort of worked, and did show enough promise that we will try it again next year.

The biggest problem was the time spent trying to connect a total of seven laptops using the school's wireless network. We managed to get 5 connected of the 6 identical laptops connected, while the last one simply would not pick the connection up. The laptop I was using was an older one, still running XP, never connected and that apparently was a hardware issue. Next year, we will use an EtherNet network to avoid these problems.

The second problem was the game was a bit too hard for newer players. I need to back off a bit on the Barbarians, as they caused massive problems for the students. The fact that I missed some of my boosted Dinosaurs did not help either. The Zulu player kept trying to head north, and kept running into lots of nasty Impis, alongs with a pack of 12 boosted Raptors. Not good at all. The Iroquois had similar problems, but that student had played Civ3, and took things in stride.

All of the students has some background in Civilization, mainly 4 and 5, although 2 had played Civ3. The consensus was that the scenario was interesting and challenging, and they wanted another chance at it next year. I did have one student decide that he absolutely had to get Civ3.


One possible bug report. One player kept having his game crash every time a Barbarian attacked one of his cities. The laptops were running Windows 8.1. Has anyone else encountered this?

That's cool! I wish someone had done this when I was in school. I played civ 2 for the first time back on 2002. I was in 10th I think.

ZergMazter said:

That's cool! I wish someone had done this when I was in school. I played civ 2 for the first time back on 2002. I was in 10th I think.

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I started with Civ3 shortly after you started with Civ2. You have some very creative ideas, and I hope that you keep working on them. I will be working on refining the Test of Time scenario for next year. I need to do some more play testing of it with the changes that I have made.

i would like to congratulate the civ team for such a great achievement - children can be easily tricked to learn a great deal of history, or anything else, by playing - a very important aspect of highly civilised societies!

Oooh, nice. I got into civ early in my life, and it definitely had an impact.