Some time ago I myself bought Civ 3. I played at first whole-heartedly, admiring the vividness which the animations brought to the game, enjoying the dynamics of borders and armies and mixed-rank units (reg./vet./elite), believing at first that these people, Sid Meyer to name one, had been playing civ 2 for YEARS and during that time, unless they are truly microwaved vegetables, had been constantly coming up with new ideas, as I myself often do when playing any game; such as how to improve it or make it funner, or, in the case of this, a strategy game, how to deepen the complexity of tactical gameplay and enrich the options one has with which to plot and weave his global designs.
This feeling quickly passed. For years I know I had certainly myself had many ideas playing civ 2, none of which were incorporated into civ 3 (except bombardment and strategic resources, though the resources are lacking in what i had in mind) and I then suddenly felt as though there was old Sid, sitting in some island resort not giving a care about games or anything at all, in some island resort, and i then imagined him giving away to some other hapless designer the unrestricted freedom to design any old thing he wanted, so long as it kept many of the"staples" of the series for consumer familiarity, and suddely i imagined a whole department full of newly hired graphics artists and a couple bearded fat guys in the corner designing their little perfect version of civ based on all the previous ones and a few little quaint but harmless ideas of their own; and I say all this, oh fellow people and avid listeners of good critique, because civ 3 seems to me to be but a wax-job surface-coated version of civ 2, but worse: with alot of the vital innards scooped out, left to rot, and not replaced with anything except flaws and inferior devices. Not only did they keep most of the exact same units from the previous version, but they took away alot, and TOOK AWAY hit points and firepower, the most dramatic changes to battle from civ1 to civ2, and the reason why civ2 worked so well. So now, we're back to tanks losing to warriors on mountains (those axes had better be uranium coated and explosive-tipped).
Lets speak of another issue as well: you see (for those of you have may not understand the finer concepts of the game), the reason in earlier civs why stacks are made to be vulnerable, no mere reasonless programming whim on their part, is because sid realised something. He understood that because of the general physics of the game, in which there is a simple and very broad and basic square grid with units that merely bump into each other and either lose or win or get injured, that there needed to be something to accomodate for this incredible lack of battlefield tactics (whole empires, after all, were decided by the local maneouvers in-battle by a general, such as the decisive defeat of Xerxes by Alexander the Great when the young greek had only a third of the troops but piercing tactics on the field, which allowed him to conquer all of Persia), and this device was to make stacks vulnerable. This way, you have to set up your armies in unique positions, given thought to your rear and flanks and movement and dispersion (you dont want too many stacks with too many units, but you dont want your army to be too spread out either when confronting an enemy force), simulating in a way, battlefield tactics, despite the unrealistic fact that this "battlefield" would actually be spread out over many squares, which in civ would equate to hundreds of square miles, whereas real battles take place only within a few square miles, but this is indeed a small price to pay. This, folks, is perhaps the only reason why the military physics of a square-mapped, turn-based game, might possibly allow for rich strategy and fun gameplay, the latter being the most important part.
Of course, leaving PTW alone, one cannot address the physics and concepts of civ 3 in general... it simply is not fair to criticize a game when you have not had the chance to play it in full! Ever try a 200x200 map (which may be big, but is not even close to the limit they boast to to be able to work) with a full 16 civs? I have a decently powerful computer, 512 RAM and a hefty graphics card, but that wasnt the problem apparently, since it was not graphics that bogged me down but the programming itself: apparetnly when playing on such settings (and this after the lastest patch) the game cant get even to gunpowder without some sort of inevitable crash. On the last game i had like this that i can remember, it was for trivial reasons such as trading maps or a city deposing: you reach a ceratin size in the game, you flick a random switch in the dark, and boom!...crash. I thought it mightve been a bad install or my funky computer, but my friends reported similar problems, and i have friends who play at work on entire server-supercomputers, so power cant be blamed because the settings are too massive.
Fun is the key ingredient, and in civ 3, with battle being nothing but huge, unhandicapped stacks going at each other without ANY control whatsoever over the actual strategy of that supposedly HUGE battle, it ceases to have any interest. After all, there is absolutely NO strategy, at all, in this; you merely build the units and move them, but when the stacks meet, at the point when bloodthirsty generals in history have gotten their fix and found the only meaning to their lives, when all those forces meet in a single acre of field to make for one intense and complex performance with all your pre-made plans and especially designed inventions all being tested all at once, and when it should be the most interesting and engaging part of the whole game, my friends, you take a step back from the theater's stage and become a mere specator, for at that point your only job is the pressing of the movement keys and hoping you have enough brute strength (tactics aside) to match your enemie's brute strength, like two bricks colliding, rigid and undynamic, as if you controlled your entire empire as if you were there, at every single point simultaneously, but suddenly, when the battle begins, you are whisked away back to your throne and must leave it up to your general. Lameness embodied.
Again, it almost seems as if they COMPLETELY ignored all that theyd ever compiled about the fundamentals of this type of game, which is their trademark alone to produce, and created some thoughtless product of immense stupidity which, it seems, was meant to indeed sell by its graphical appeal alone. Just the fact that hit points + firepower were removed and that the game lost its essential and ( i cant stress this enough ) vital-to-the-lifeblood-of-civ stack weakness, shows to me just how empty a game it really is.
To say the least, i found myself not playing the game after just a couple months, a meager amount considering i STILL play civ 2 MGE, though admittedly a heavily modified version of it which greatly enhances it, and even then only with many people on multiplayer, but the utterly boring sequel to it is highly significant, i think, of the general downfall of the genre.
This brings me to PTW, finally, which is not even a game, much less an expansion pack even, since even if it worked, which is it is FAR from being able to do, it would still only be worthy of the title "upgraded patch version" at best; it has a scanty handful of new features, a few new civs and units and a couple of multiplayer options which, if the almost unanimous opinions of all the reviews and opinions of people ive read for the game indicate, should have come with the original game, if not on a patch released soon thereafter. We all know, however, and are all fully aware that PTW is but some hideous birth defect reared out of the ass and nowhere else, to the putrid smell which irritates us all, generously smothered with mutational defects to boot, so i dont even have to go into it further. I will, though, use this chance to come to the end of this long debate, which i hope you dont hold against me given its length, seeing that i have composed it out of good will and using reasonable jugdement to carry across many points which couldnt have been said in just a few words and still have been easily understood, and which anyway i think many players share, even though they might begrudge at having to read so much of it all at once.
PTW, my patient fellow civvers, represents the decline of a game that has lost all ability to evolve and adapt itself to a new generation of games which are fully immersive, real-time, true-3D games which allow a player more flexibility and control than a flat game with few dynamics could. All types of game, after all, be they strategy or mindless action or RPG's or anything, are all adapting more the nature of a virtual environment, whereas the dynasty of civ seems to be a dinosaur wrapped up in an "electronic chess" format rather than a free and expansive virtual world where going to the battlefield would be a simple matter of taking the camera in close enough. PTW is not such an apocalyptic and prophetic signal of this particular industry's demise just by itself, except for the fact that it is essentially an attempt by its makers to reap profit from consumers not because it deserves it, given the innovative and modern new options in gaming it might allow, but supposing that there is a strong enough fan base to keep it going, since I can say this without hardly making an assumption: that if this was civ 1, and not civ 3, backed up by more than a decade's worth of strong civilizational following, that it would utterly and horribly, completely and in pink and purple supernovaic flames of destruction, crash and burn to the bankrupcy of its makers, because it is not an enhanced and upgraded game really, methinks, but more just like the plastic toy that is made and sold to children from a popular movie to make more money where none could be made without the movie itself.
What is civ 4 going to be like? Lets compare it to civ 3 considering how bad civ 3 is compared to civ2!! I think civ 4, then, will be nothing but civ 1 in all its primeival roughness but given fancy graphics!
I thank you for your patience, for those of you who have read this, and i want those who anger at this long almost essay-like argument to know that i have been playing civ for many years now, and that the custom version of civ 2 which i have made is still, in my eyes, the premier strategy game to be found today, out of all other games, and that all these words might as well have been just to console my deep grief, since i do indeed believe that this great series is on the verge of ruin, and it really gets to me and angers me and saddens me passionately all at once, but i wrote this also to convey honestly my opinions on the matter, which is not as simple as a couple sentences, and which is not anyway expressed anywhere else.
If you share similar ideas, or not, but are anyway curious to see what ive done to enhance the regular game for MGE (since my custom version is not some esoteric scenario but civ 2 PLUS, rather), then just post below your interest. I think you would be be pleased, if you would trust a veteran player/designer of the game, if not by the rules and gameply concepts then at least by the graphics, which have ALL been highly enhanced....
-The Gameplayer-
This feeling quickly passed. For years I know I had certainly myself had many ideas playing civ 2, none of which were incorporated into civ 3 (except bombardment and strategic resources, though the resources are lacking in what i had in mind) and I then suddenly felt as though there was old Sid, sitting in some island resort not giving a care about games or anything at all, in some island resort, and i then imagined him giving away to some other hapless designer the unrestricted freedom to design any old thing he wanted, so long as it kept many of the"staples" of the series for consumer familiarity, and suddely i imagined a whole department full of newly hired graphics artists and a couple bearded fat guys in the corner designing their little perfect version of civ based on all the previous ones and a few little quaint but harmless ideas of their own; and I say all this, oh fellow people and avid listeners of good critique, because civ 3 seems to me to be but a wax-job surface-coated version of civ 2, but worse: with alot of the vital innards scooped out, left to rot, and not replaced with anything except flaws and inferior devices. Not only did they keep most of the exact same units from the previous version, but they took away alot, and TOOK AWAY hit points and firepower, the most dramatic changes to battle from civ1 to civ2, and the reason why civ2 worked so well. So now, we're back to tanks losing to warriors on mountains (those axes had better be uranium coated and explosive-tipped).
Lets speak of another issue as well: you see (for those of you have may not understand the finer concepts of the game), the reason in earlier civs why stacks are made to be vulnerable, no mere reasonless programming whim on their part, is because sid realised something. He understood that because of the general physics of the game, in which there is a simple and very broad and basic square grid with units that merely bump into each other and either lose or win or get injured, that there needed to be something to accomodate for this incredible lack of battlefield tactics (whole empires, after all, were decided by the local maneouvers in-battle by a general, such as the decisive defeat of Xerxes by Alexander the Great when the young greek had only a third of the troops but piercing tactics on the field, which allowed him to conquer all of Persia), and this device was to make stacks vulnerable. This way, you have to set up your armies in unique positions, given thought to your rear and flanks and movement and dispersion (you dont want too many stacks with too many units, but you dont want your army to be too spread out either when confronting an enemy force), simulating in a way, battlefield tactics, despite the unrealistic fact that this "battlefield" would actually be spread out over many squares, which in civ would equate to hundreds of square miles, whereas real battles take place only within a few square miles, but this is indeed a small price to pay. This, folks, is perhaps the only reason why the military physics of a square-mapped, turn-based game, might possibly allow for rich strategy and fun gameplay, the latter being the most important part.
Of course, leaving PTW alone, one cannot address the physics and concepts of civ 3 in general... it simply is not fair to criticize a game when you have not had the chance to play it in full! Ever try a 200x200 map (which may be big, but is not even close to the limit they boast to to be able to work) with a full 16 civs? I have a decently powerful computer, 512 RAM and a hefty graphics card, but that wasnt the problem apparently, since it was not graphics that bogged me down but the programming itself: apparetnly when playing on such settings (and this after the lastest patch) the game cant get even to gunpowder without some sort of inevitable crash. On the last game i had like this that i can remember, it was for trivial reasons such as trading maps or a city deposing: you reach a ceratin size in the game, you flick a random switch in the dark, and boom!...crash. I thought it mightve been a bad install or my funky computer, but my friends reported similar problems, and i have friends who play at work on entire server-supercomputers, so power cant be blamed because the settings are too massive.
Fun is the key ingredient, and in civ 3, with battle being nothing but huge, unhandicapped stacks going at each other without ANY control whatsoever over the actual strategy of that supposedly HUGE battle, it ceases to have any interest. After all, there is absolutely NO strategy, at all, in this; you merely build the units and move them, but when the stacks meet, at the point when bloodthirsty generals in history have gotten their fix and found the only meaning to their lives, when all those forces meet in a single acre of field to make for one intense and complex performance with all your pre-made plans and especially designed inventions all being tested all at once, and when it should be the most interesting and engaging part of the whole game, my friends, you take a step back from the theater's stage and become a mere specator, for at that point your only job is the pressing of the movement keys and hoping you have enough brute strength (tactics aside) to match your enemie's brute strength, like two bricks colliding, rigid and undynamic, as if you controlled your entire empire as if you were there, at every single point simultaneously, but suddenly, when the battle begins, you are whisked away back to your throne and must leave it up to your general. Lameness embodied.
Again, it almost seems as if they COMPLETELY ignored all that theyd ever compiled about the fundamentals of this type of game, which is their trademark alone to produce, and created some thoughtless product of immense stupidity which, it seems, was meant to indeed sell by its graphical appeal alone. Just the fact that hit points + firepower were removed and that the game lost its essential and ( i cant stress this enough ) vital-to-the-lifeblood-of-civ stack weakness, shows to me just how empty a game it really is.
To say the least, i found myself not playing the game after just a couple months, a meager amount considering i STILL play civ 2 MGE, though admittedly a heavily modified version of it which greatly enhances it, and even then only with many people on multiplayer, but the utterly boring sequel to it is highly significant, i think, of the general downfall of the genre.
This brings me to PTW, finally, which is not even a game, much less an expansion pack even, since even if it worked, which is it is FAR from being able to do, it would still only be worthy of the title "upgraded patch version" at best; it has a scanty handful of new features, a few new civs and units and a couple of multiplayer options which, if the almost unanimous opinions of all the reviews and opinions of people ive read for the game indicate, should have come with the original game, if not on a patch released soon thereafter. We all know, however, and are all fully aware that PTW is but some hideous birth defect reared out of the ass and nowhere else, to the putrid smell which irritates us all, generously smothered with mutational defects to boot, so i dont even have to go into it further. I will, though, use this chance to come to the end of this long debate, which i hope you dont hold against me given its length, seeing that i have composed it out of good will and using reasonable jugdement to carry across many points which couldnt have been said in just a few words and still have been easily understood, and which anyway i think many players share, even though they might begrudge at having to read so much of it all at once.
PTW, my patient fellow civvers, represents the decline of a game that has lost all ability to evolve and adapt itself to a new generation of games which are fully immersive, real-time, true-3D games which allow a player more flexibility and control than a flat game with few dynamics could. All types of game, after all, be they strategy or mindless action or RPG's or anything, are all adapting more the nature of a virtual environment, whereas the dynasty of civ seems to be a dinosaur wrapped up in an "electronic chess" format rather than a free and expansive virtual world where going to the battlefield would be a simple matter of taking the camera in close enough. PTW is not such an apocalyptic and prophetic signal of this particular industry's demise just by itself, except for the fact that it is essentially an attempt by its makers to reap profit from consumers not because it deserves it, given the innovative and modern new options in gaming it might allow, but supposing that there is a strong enough fan base to keep it going, since I can say this without hardly making an assumption: that if this was civ 1, and not civ 3, backed up by more than a decade's worth of strong civilizational following, that it would utterly and horribly, completely and in pink and purple supernovaic flames of destruction, crash and burn to the bankrupcy of its makers, because it is not an enhanced and upgraded game really, methinks, but more just like the plastic toy that is made and sold to children from a popular movie to make more money where none could be made without the movie itself.
What is civ 4 going to be like? Lets compare it to civ 3 considering how bad civ 3 is compared to civ2!! I think civ 4, then, will be nothing but civ 1 in all its primeival roughness but given fancy graphics!
I thank you for your patience, for those of you who have read this, and i want those who anger at this long almost essay-like argument to know that i have been playing civ for many years now, and that the custom version of civ 2 which i have made is still, in my eyes, the premier strategy game to be found today, out of all other games, and that all these words might as well have been just to console my deep grief, since i do indeed believe that this great series is on the verge of ruin, and it really gets to me and angers me and saddens me passionately all at once, but i wrote this also to convey honestly my opinions on the matter, which is not as simple as a couple sentences, and which is not anyway expressed anywhere else.
If you share similar ideas, or not, but are anyway curious to see what ive done to enhance the regular game for MGE (since my custom version is not some esoteric scenario but civ 2 PLUS, rather), then just post below your interest. I think you would be be pleased, if you would trust a veteran player/designer of the game, if not by the rules and gameply concepts then at least by the graphics, which have ALL been highly enhanced....
-The Gameplayer-
