thinking of playing civ3

hello people,
i played and modded civ4 for that past 7-8 years,

recently, i thought about playing a game with civ3 for good old times.

since im a bit pissed on one of my mods for crashing,

ive tried civ5 bnw, and despite i gave it a chance, i got really bored and hated many things in it.


so, what do you think? is civ3 with some mod (recomendations anyone?)
will provide me with some exicte and challange? after being hooked by 4 for many years?

plus,
i always had the impresion that, wars, and ai wars, were better in civ 3.



thanks in advance.

I think everyone here will recommend Rhye's of Civilization Expanded 1.04, it's great accurate (as accurate as the Civ III engine can make it) representation of the human history - no more Statue of Liberty in Rome for example, horses in America only in later years (but there are Mustangs) and so many other features. It's not only Earth map, it is complete overhaul.

You can also try Civilization Rise and Rule - it includes a lot (I mean A LOT) of addition technologies, city improvements, units. If this is by your taste, you'll like it

There is also a "fan patch" - Path Suggestions that makes some cool fixes to the unit abilities and stats and I personally find it a lot more balanced than the original Conquests.

keldath said:

i always had the impresion that, wars, and ai wars, were better in civ 3.

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It's not only you - I have the same impression, they seem to me a lot more organized when making attacks.

hello friend,

well thanks for the reply.

rhye - i know it from civ4, never realy gave it a go not in 3 nor 4 , its a possibilty.

rnr - i know it - ive played it many years ago, on its first version.

the parch - i saw it - can it be combined with other mods??


*****
huh, nice to hear another confermation to this, i was hooked on civ4, still am, but every time when in war, i remebered, that in civ 3, a war was a war, there was excitment, challngem the ai would attack you and did wars better and more interesting, it wasnt that stupid.

i wonder if anyone else think like that.


funny, 10 years after i played civ3, i suddnly get an urge to play it, just another proof, that civ3 was beyond great.

Out of all of the Civilization games I've played, I still come back to 3, easy to mod, and still gets unit support after all these years, I've even played the civ clones(Call to Power, Call to Power II and I love both of those aswell)

but I still return to and always highly recommend Civ 3 to everyone.

Well of course I'm biased but some time back I posted a "CIV3, Better than the Rest?" rant. It goes:

"Actually, C3C > C4. Why? Here's a few reasons:

1) Expansion is simple and straightforward. No need to beeline for CoL 'cuz you're hemorrhaging gold with just a handful of cities. (True, ICS has been abused but it's possible to win at higher levels without resorting to it.)
2) As per Strong Reactions' comments above, the combat system is consistent and sensible.
a) Each unit has strengths and weaknesses reflected in their attack/defense values. No need to give grenadiers special advantages over riflemen (how come?), riflemen over mounted units, etc.
b) Mounted units can usually retreat from groundpounders (although apparently not so much with v1.22), which demonstrates their superior mobility. (Of course, they shouldn't have this advantage attacking cities, but hey, nothing's perfect, eh?)
c) Bombardment units are missile units. They do not engage in melee in real life, and they don't do it in C3C. Apparently, it's used in C4 to discourage SOD's. But wasn't there a better way?
d) City defenses are empirical, based on walls and settlement size. There are no "cultural defenses" that must be reduced before assaulting (like, were the Mongols baffled by Chinese arts and letters?).
e) Air bombardment can be lethal, as it should be. Some players think it makes bombers too powerful, but consider the impact real bombers--dive-, torpedo-, and level--had over land and sea during WWII, not to mention the present day.
f) Combat can spawn great military leaders. They can build powerful armies or inspire their subjects/citizens to heroic efforts at construction, features that echo what actually happened historically. Yet GML's are totally absent from vanilla C4, while the GML in Warlords just isn't the same (sorry, haven't played BTS or COL).
3)There are several practical ways of winning [deleted] on standard maps, especially domination, diplomatic, and space race. Unfortunately with C4 at, say, Noble or above, it's almost always space race, space race, or space race (I dunno about cultural, if you wanna play it).
4) Unit and combat animations are simple but neatly done (IMHO, anyway). They don't have the cartoonish looks and sounds of C4.
5) You can play warmonger during the modern age. With C4 you almost always have to knock it off around the end of industrial or face the risk of falling hopelessly behind tech-wise. In fact, it's hard to fight wars for long at any age for the same reason. At least in C3C you have the possibility of extorting techs from your victims (not nice, but the world just isn't fair!), even if nobody else trades with you.
6) Oh yeah, "...and no religion too."
Thanks for your kind attention, and don't let me stop you from playing your fave Civ version!"

Anyway that's just my opinion. Cheerio.

I enjoyed the CCM mod the most.

To get good war action and a challenge, you gotta play at a higher difficulty level than emperor. Below that, war is no more fun than "kill two spearmen to take a city, repeat". Unfortunately, at the higher difficulty levels you're not able to keep up in technology, build any wonders or claim iron/horses territory, as the AI starts with multiple settlers, workers and military units (why? it would've be enough that they get smaller food + shield boxes and extra unit support), so you have no possibility of war-rushing a close neighbour. Also, corruption gets ridiculous.

I like PTW better than Conquests for war games:

• You can beat the AI to great wonders if you're lucky and get military leaders.
• You can fight corruption with RCP.
• Unit upkeep for Republic is 1 gpt instead of 2.
• You actually have to sacrifice units to take a city, artillery doesn't do all the work.

I wish there was a way to make the AIs put more shields into military units and less into city improvements, especially when at war. Their cities always seem to have all of the improvements, and you always have to worry about cultural flipping even against military AIs like Germany or Mongolia.

hi all,
very nice replies,

more votes for civ3, huh, very cool.

i just got all my civs in the steam sales, got cIII complete aswell.

what i remember the most is the combat, i remember it being fun and enjoyable.
also - i liked the attack and defense powers - better then civ4.

im thinking of playing rhyes or c2c.

thanks all.

I'm not sure if I could pick a winner between civ 3 and civ4, they seem to be remarkably similar in reasons why I don't like them, with not much separating the issues in a literal as well as comparative sense. They both have appalling Diplomacy, Combat RNG, excessive Culture borders, excessive expansion penalties blah de blah de blah and lots more etc etc etc.

And they both have unique elements which make them as equally as good as each other but in different ways, such as different graphics, different music, different tech trees, different priorities. For example, in civ 3 your government type is crucial and it can be quite a big set-back to keep changing it, where as in civ 4 government types are broken down to sub-categories and are easily changeable. So in civ 3 there's a vast difference between beelining Monarchy and Republic, but in civ 4 beelining something often takes you through other choices automatically.

My favourite iteration was civ 2 though. For me, the civ franchise is supposed to be about playing a micro-management game. The main chunk of fun isn't really the end result but instead being allowed to utilise hundreds of different options in order to create the exact kind of empire I like looking at. I guess I treat them more like building games (where war is just a real estate tool) than purely war games. And for people like me there's a lot of truth in the statement that each new iteration 'seems' to reduce the micromanagement aspect, or, at least, remove some further element of full player control.

Civ 1 aught to be my favourite, but that was too micromanagementy, even for me, making civ 2 about right and 3 onwards too weak. And I think 'everyone' misses Civil Wars! In this regard civ3 certainly appeals to a micromanager more than civ 4.

They both have appalling Diplomacy, Combat RNG, excessive Culture borders, excessive expansion penalties blah de blah de blah and lots more etc etc etc.

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i dont remember - does civ3 have penalties for amount of cities and distance?

'everyone' misses Civil Wars!

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i dont remember that one what is it?

keldath said:

i dont remember - does civ3 have penalties for amount of cities and distance?

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Oh boy does it ever! There's a (moddable) limit on how many non-corrupted cities you can own, which varies with map size and difficulty level (the smaller the map/higher the difficulty, the lower the number of non-corrupt cities).

As I understand it, basically each 'non-corrupt' city is assigned a 'corruption rank' based on both its distance from the capital (Palace, Rank 1, distance 0) and founding date, and these ranks are recalculated as cities are built, captured or abandoned/razed (or the Palace is moved). Far-flung cities with the highest rank numbers will be highly corrupted until you've built courthouses in them (and police stations in the late game) -- and also tend to be more vulnerable to culture-flipping.

Any city with a corruption rank beyond the allowed number of non-corrupt cities will automatically get 90% corruption/waste of all trade and production, with no meaningful way to change that. Any more than 1 or 2 cheap (1GPT maintenance) improvements built in such cities will therefore be a net drain on the treasury, and most unit-builds will either take a ridiculous number of turns to complete (e.g. a 100s Tank will take 100T!), or cost a huge amount to cash-rush (if that Tank has 1s in the box, rushing it will cost 4*99s = 396g). So the only thing those 1-shield cities are really good for is 'specialist farming', where some/most of the population grow food to feed scientists/taxmen (whose beaker/gold output is uncorrupted).

Also, until you've built your Forbidden Palace, the corruption rank at which the 95% corruption/waste kicks in is halved -- but you don't get the option to build the FP until you've built/captured at least half your 'maximum uncorrupted cities'. Which means that you may be running quite a few highly-corrupt cities for a long time before you get your FP built (especially if you're trying to build the FP in one of the corrupt cities...)

i dont remember that one what is it?

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That was a great feature of the original Civ The game had 16 civs, and a maximum 8 civ-colours on the board at any one time (e.g. Zulus and Babylon were both 'green', so you would never get both of those Civs on the board at the same time) -- but if one civ was eliminated, its colour-partner would then become available to respawn. The 'Civil War' mechanic kicked in under a specific set of circumstances: if you managed to capture an enemy capital, and if that AICiv's empire was (significantly) larger than yours, and if a free civ-colour slot was still available, half of that AICiv's remaining cities would split off to form another AICiv (which would automatically be awarded around 50% of the 'currently known' techs, so it didn't start off at a disadvantage).

ahman said:

To get good war action and a challenge, you gotta play at a higher difficulty level than emperor. Below that, war is no more fun than "kill two spearmen to take a city, repeat".

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Well I dunno, haven't played below Emperor for awhile, but on Emperor I've run into enemy cities and stacks with 20 or more units inside. Especially if they haven't been at war for awhile, or been minding their own business on an isolated island for centuries (or millenia). On Demigod or above it gets ridiculous; you've really, really gotta grind it out. Gets tedious after awhile, which is probably why I've never won above Emperor.

Jivilov said:

Well I dunno, haven't played below Emperor for awhile, but on Emperor I've run into enemy cities and stacks with 20 or more units inside. Especially if they haven't been at war for awhile, or been minding their own business on an isolated island for centuries (or millenia).

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Sure, but that's only the initial wave. After that you can just march right in.

Jivilov said:

On Demigod or above it gets ridiculous; you've really, really gotta grind it out. Gets tedious after awhile, which is probably why I've never won above Emperor.

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It's not ridiculous, it's accurate. War costs a lot in the real world and shouldn't be entered without careful consideration (from the Democracy page in the Civilopedia ). Allies, types of military units and their placement, land vs. sea, how much to invest in the war, whether to attack or defend etc are all important.

I love the battle in Civ III. When I see an enemy with a lot of units marching towards me, it gets me to start planning my action - on the battlefield and in the democracy feel. It just feels great... getting your attacker into war with a civilization that he just crossed their territories to get you, and watch him get attacked in the back, ohohoh


On the other side, I somehow find the results from battles in the modern era frustrating. Losing modern units to old ones happens too often, I don't have problem with a "spearman killing my tank" but it happens more than the norm that I can take. Maybe the modern units needs a little bit increase in Attack in Defence, I don't know

Still, I love modern battles, bombers, nukes, paratroopers (with the "suggestions" patch because they are unusable in the unmodded game, someone please prove me wrong).. total craziness

eXalted said:

paratroopers (with the "suggestions" patch because they are unusable in the unmodded game

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I totally agree that they are unusable in the unmodded game. Therefore please tell me: what does this patch do and where do I get it?

Lanzelot said:

Therefore please tell me: what does this patch do and where do I get it?

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You can find it here and there is also a 'lite' version available,

Basically it changes some unit stats and costs, and a few other rules. The Paratrooper attack is increased from 4 (FOUR!? What was Firaxis thinking?) to 6 and the Modern Paratrooper from 6/11/1 to 10/13/1, it's not that powerful but still a lot more useful than the unmodded one.

Oh and in the non-lite version the cost of the Philosophy is increased (the cost of Republic in decreased in return).

Hmm, that really changes a lot of things, some of which I don't like that much... (Like the government changes, some of the unit changes, the changes to great wonders and most of all the fact that one can no longer build Armies... )

I can't compare Civ3 with other version because I've never played anything else. I too like the graphics/animation a lot. I like the fact the game is still way beyond being solved (for me) and that there remains, even after quite a few years of playing, much room for improvement. I also have to admit I like the pulling wings off flies part you get to when you establish your Civ as the number one and can start bullying everybody else. As explained on another thread, I don't expect to experience this for some time as I am trying to move up to demigod and such things are but a pleasing fantasy. Great game.

Lanzelot said:

Hmm, that really changes a lot of things, some of which I don't like that much... (Like the government changes, some of the unit changes, the changes to great wonders and most of all the fact that one can no longer build Armies... )

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You can try it anyway if you want. If not for anything else, it can freshen your game.

I personally have always looked at the building armies option as cheating as the AI can't do it. I never do it in the unmodded version. Than makes generated leaders a lot more awesome.

Well I've also never played higher than Monarch. I don't know if it's possible winning there without building armies.

eXalted said:

I think everyone here will recommend Rhye's of Civilization Expanded 1.04, it's great accurate (as accurate as the Civ III engine can make it) representation of the human history - no more Statue of Liberty in Rome for example, horses in America only in later years (but there are Mustangs) and so many other features. It's not only Earth map, it is complete overhaul.

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Wow, I've always played unmodded but this looks great. I like the increased settler cost and that the AI doesn't start with multiple settlers and an army of military units. I assume that this means that the world won't fill up with cities in a few turns. No constant worrying about cultural flipping early in the game. And with the higher worker cost and develop time, it's no longer a no-brainer if you're gonna fully develop your tiles right away. Slower game play

I just started playing as Scandinavia on a random map and I'm gonna try to go full military on longboats and take a colony. With the high settler cost and the reduced distance corruption this now seems to be an option