Thinking of playing CIV III due to slowness of CIV IV...

i have civ iv, and dont get me wrong, but i cant take the slowness and the bugginess anymore...i thought that my computer could handle it flawlessly, but i guess not. i have 1.7ghz amd 64x2, 2gb of ram, nvidia 7150m.
when playing large wwii europe scenarios with mods, it gets reallly laggy, and now the interface (ingame) is gone so i cant build anything or attack, etc...

how is civ III compared to civ IV? i really need my civ fix so would this suffice?
anyone else do these move back to civ iii?

I have never gone back. In fact, I play BTS exclusively.
In your situation, Civ II would be better than Civ III.

Welcome to the Forums handydandy.

7150m is the problem. Drivers might help. Civ3.. sucks. It precalculates most part of combat results at turn begin. Unit strength is also important, yes... If you attack with a really strong unit vs a pathetic one, it might even affect something. But not often. With a right timing you can win everything with every army. I have never seen so many tanks dying from pikemen. Especially frustrating when an elite great general panzer with 20hp is attacking some novice weakling, crushing him into red health the first round, and gradually losing all the health till death the following rounds, because the random generator just doesnt let him win. In the late game you will encounter such beautiful things as moving million workers to remove millions pollution fields, every turn. The best thing, vanilla civ3 doesnt let you move units in stacks iirc. The only thing worth playing in civ3 is a japan scenario in the second add-on. Its really cool, unique stylish music, and units. If Civ4 wouldnt work on my PC, i would play SMAC, in fact i have a game running there too. It is created by Civ2 author, but better. Also better than civ4 in many parts. But not graphics. Its color scheme is.. not for everyone. But what do you expect from a game played on another planet.(Alpha Centauri)

Try playing a normal game before making any judgements. The Road to War is a really slow scenario, no matter what computer you have. It has something called bitter winter, which is REALLY graphics intensive as civ basically has to redraw a large portion of the map every turn over part of the game year. It is also a huge map with LOTS of civs and units (the larger the map size, the more/larger civs, the more units, etc. = slower game).

Many players have gone back to Civ3 after Civ4. Many more have not. For myself, I would never go back to Civ2, for anything more than a quick 'fling'. Civ3 was so much better.

I also don't appreciate 'FUD' being disseminated, like "Civ3 ... precalculates most part of combat results at turn begin." It doesn't do so any more than Civ4 does. The PRNG (same as the one used in Civ4) starts with a 'seed' value at the beginning of the turn. For every time a new random number is required, it is generated / 'pulled from the stack', and a new seed is generated. Because it's a Psuedo-Random Number Generator, if you start from the same seed, all following 'random' numbers will always follow the same sequence. If you change the sequence of actions you take, the outcome will vary, because that sequence of random numbers will be applied to the different sequence of actions.

Personally, when I can't play Civ4 or CivRev, I find Civ3 satisifies my Civ appetite quite well, thank you.

Heck, I used to go back to SMAC when CivIV started to drag. I'd go back to CivIV, but it was nice to play something else.

Of course now the SMAC file isn't working...that's another story.

In Civ4 quite a few things were changed. I indeed do not want to spread FUD, but i heard something about unit firepower returned in Civ4, missing in Civ3. Also units have 100hp instead of 3, no more lucky runs. At the end in civ4 combat results are much more .. sane. At least thats my personal observation. With enough reloads i always could kill just about every stack in civ3. Not so in civ4. The only thing more frustrating than countless reloading was seeing a perfectly set stack of defenders killed by some random enemy units.

Also,please correct me if im wrong, units got 10% def bonus in grassland and plains. Basically attackers were disadvantaged just about everywhere. There was no reason to attack first.

i still prefere civ3 for the more epic game feeling
combat can be realy frustrating idd, i sometimes have the feeling the AI is cheating but then again i can't bare to lose

Welcome to the Forums echelon _4.

I would second the vote for either CivII or SMAC- if you do go with SMAC and have the expansion, try my datalinks update (see sig) to make the datalinks more useful.

Civ3 is and was a piece of crud, you would be better off going back to Civ1 over 3.

I also went back to playing CivIII, it's still better than Civ4 (just my opinion)

I think you'll find your opinion in the minority here.

And, welcome to posting genghiskhan.

For me if it ain't Civ4 then it is SMAC!

IMHO, SMAC is the Greatest Game of All Time.

No question that the game in general is less random in Civ IV than Civ III and I think combat is much more interesting.

Still doesn't mean that Civ III sucks. The units aren't taller than the buildings, for instance, and it runs well on my (pretty new) computer.