so much more than in Civ 3?
I never said that. :| what I meant was that these other games (being of the exact same theme, most of those mentioned ones even having been made by the same company people) allowed many other fun and elaborate means to play, edit, script, win and enjoy a few hours of 'civ-style' gaming. To mention just a few:
In Civ2 even a non-skilled one was able to make proper scenarios with customizeable scripts and triggers of which nothing really exists within Civ3 (at the moment I am tantalizing my brains about how to get the upcomming "Storm over the World" scenario to feature a European start of WWII in 1939- Germany/Russia vs. Poland, and combine it -then Germany vs. Russia- with the timing and nature of the WWII Pacific warfare (Japan vs. US/UK/Netherlands/Anzac) at its proper starting point in 1941... all without scripts makes it nearly impossible)
Alpha Centauri had proper 3d tiles (with real weather calculators and realy terraformable down to sea level) on a 2d map (ugly but quite inovative given the state of technology of "ageing" 2d). It featured customizeable units in a colonization-style way of equiping a certain unit with a variety of custom combos. Also was diplomacy more entertaining and atmospheric than ever before in a Sid Meier Game (allowing forum Votes about banning or un-banning Nuclear weapons or emissions- which would really lead to entire cities being swallowed by the seas with rising tides) and a variety of addins -like pleading for ending of wars between friendly civs (something I hadn't seen elsewhere- and I was dissapointed not to find in any later game of the same company team). While this a sci-fi franchise it still stands out as the Genre's highest development standard in these areas - so far all Firaxis team games (also the civics and religious aspects envisioned for Civ4) derive from this aged Civ3 predecessor.
CTP/CTP2's diplomacy system sucked (I'm sorry, but this needs to be mentioned- especialy since I just praised another game for being so marvelous at it). This game is clearly a clone and as such emulates many of the success stories of the civ2 line that far- we find units (animated for the first time in this Genre), cities, upgradeable terrain tiles and terrain buildings, etc. but we also find proper resources (i.e. tradeable ones with monopolies bringing an accumulating bonus. While this feature was again emulated by the Firaxians to re-appear in Civ3 (like civ borders, or enslavement as only one way of media-related alternate ways to win, CTP offers) one of the greatest novelties of CTP did not only not make it into implementation within Civ3, yet also fell back behind the standard achieved with follow-up Alpha Centauri: Namely the map system:
CTP had several map layers: Your submarines don't bump into ships anymore, merely because you are not restrained to leave your submarine on the surface but can really dive two layers down to the bottom of the sea, this making them gradualy harder to be tracked by ships, while needing to get to higher layers or surface to shoot of missiles or for torpedo attacks. Planes have their own layer and can fly exclusively above ground units, there were sea bottom cities and respective depth resource gathering and bridge building over open water spaces, even Armies and Eras appeared (another few things Civ3 copied, and better this time- IMO)... while Civ3 apparently entirelly lacks a workeable usage of planes, leave alone hybrids such as helicopters. Here it seems that due to wanting to change the way civ3 should handle these areas, and due to the fact the implementation was lacking, these points were scrapped almost entirely and replaced by pre-standard basics. Civ3 added 3 "types" of water tiles, yet made units sink in them in a gradual manner
this tells me: We'd have love to do it differently but we didn't really know how to so we settled for the lowest common denominator... this now makes Civ3 look like the Clone, while it should rather seem like the Original it really is!
Similarly, CTP had a macroeconomic approach to army readiness: You had a slider with which you could set your army to peace, prepared and war status, with the slider movement the army gradualy being set to full strength with the hitpoints we would later find (as a clone) in Civ3. Yet in civ 3 we only have some sort of "Normalcy" and "War" status- which has nothing to do with the Army itself, yet just gives a tiny bonus (with side effects) to your city improvements- again copied by Firaxis, but badly copied and unable to implement it into their engine in a proper manner.
Mind you, I consider the 1st of the CTP games as an entire ripp-off as I consider that the game was released when it was only half-way completed (to get a patch sized 70 mb to get a working game paid in full, in the 1990s, with all we had being our dial-ups was a slap in the face). But CTP overcame it by releasing CTP2 (in my opinion CTP 1 the way it should have been- with a crappy diplomatic scheme still, though). I must say, however, that I had not expected the team of legendary Sid Meier to deliver a similarly lacking game. Civ3 is still the better game over those mentioned, but it is not complete, especialy not in the light of what it could have been with knowledge available and technology accessible. Oh, well... I talk too much...
ps. Comparison between games, or
"what Civ3" lacked and Civ4 shouldn't as a consequence
! It was just too much to resist suggesting that we had missed the games' January release by talking about it too much 
!
