Back to the Future: 10 Problems with Civ3

[CivFanaticMan]

I personally loved civ3. When civ4 came out I of course could never go back. Maybe this means I will like civ5.

 

[rujikin]

I really enjoyed Civ 3 because of how unique it was, however I did not like MANY things about it. Civ 4 Fixed those problems and I enjoy that version the most. Civ V is really fun and has a lot of potential, however after playing the demo it seems like its still in Beta with rebalancing.

 

[markantony]

Yes, plus the fact that historically speaking empires built on vast military conquests have not lasted very long - think about the Mongols, Alexander the Great, the Ottomans, Imperial Japan, even the Roman Empire. IRL the path of military conquest often leads to imperial overstretch (particularly in the form of excessive maintenance costs and political instability) and eventual collapse.

True to a point, but you need to remove Rome from that list.

 

[Gatsby]

True to a point, but you need to remove Rome from that list.

Rome expanded for a few centuries (i.e. through military conquest) but once it stopped expanding it underwent a protracted and difficult process of collapse from the 3rd century CE onwards. It's military expansion was, in large part, the ultimate cause of it's eventual collapse. Rome is among the most long-lived of the empires I mentioned, but relative to the timescale of recorded history - or to the timescale of a civ game - it was still fairly short-lived.

 

[LordTC]

I think the problem Civ has is that unit upkeeps are cheap and the value of pillaging is completely wrong, and the cost of units is way off. Units cost way too much production to make (often 300 years of work for a city) and way too little gold to maintain (at least in the ancient era, one population point in 1 city can pay for 2-3 units with a trading post and a unit maintenance cost is similar to 1 tile of road). Most armies historically were run at deficits paid for by plunder, when the territories stop expanding the plunder goes away and maintaining large armies is difficult. When the armies shrink, occupied territories become hard to defend, public dissent takes over, and is usually helped along by foreign powers who opportunistically invade.

In Civ, units are dirt cheap in most eras, it costs 1 gold a turn to support a swordsmen no matter how far away they are around the world. How much taxes do you think it takes Rome to pay for 40 years of legion operations even just a hop across the mediterranean near Carthage.

Of course if militaries were actually that expensive Civ breaks as a game. It's more fun to have cheap units, and no cost for having them far away from your cities. After all not paying for exploration is part of what makes the game fun, but it makes it really difficult to accurately represent rise and fall.. you don't need plunder to keep paying for what you got.

 

[Gatsby]

Of course if militaries were actually that expensive Civ breaks as a game. It's more fun to have cheap units, and no cost for having them far away from your cities. After all not paying for exploration is part of what makes the game fun, but it makes it really difficult to accurately represent rise and fall.. you don't need plunder to keep paying for what you got.

Perhaps it would break the game if you made this one change on its own. But if such a change was part of a well thought-out and integrated set of changes to the gameplay mechanics and the overall goal-orientation of the game (i.e. more emphasis on actually "standing the test of time"), then the result would probably be a much more realistic and enjoyable Civ game.

 

[Iranon]

The good thing about the maintenance costs in civ4 was that they stopped ICS from being abusive but left you a lot of room to play with. On default size and speed at Immortal level, peaceful expansion to 6 cities at 1AD was enough, 10-12 was easy but might slow one down, 15+ was often possible but rarely worth running your economy on the verge of collapse for extended periods of time.

Both civ3 and civ5 make use of failsafes that appear heavy-handed and restrictive with intuitive play and can be defeated entirely by adjusting one's playstyle.

 

[Alan McG]

Helmling, that was Civ1. If your capital is seized in Civ2, you must simply build a Palace elsewhere (if possible).

Large empires would randomly split in Civ2 when their capital was conquered. I never managed to find a rule behind it, it looked quite random, but it was cool! Although weird in some cases, I remember a message like "when the dust settles, the chinese civilization has declared its independence from the germans".

 

[Surgeon]

It is pretty sad isn't it.

I remember the 165 page or so list of fan suggestions for cIV

and how the designers really listened to their fans. It's glaringly obvious that Shafer

and company thought that they knew better.

Hopefully we can start a similar thread for Civ VI to ensure that we get a quality

game. If the developers will actually listen again.

We all deserve better.

Here's the thing. They are game designers, they DO know better than you . You think you could make an awesome game , maybe you can but its more likely that it would be a complete mess.

 

[markantony]

Rome expanded for a few centuries (i.e. through military conquest) but once it stopped expanding it underwent a protracted and difficult process of collapse from the 3rd century CE onwards. It's military expansion was, in large part, the ultimate cause of it's eventual collapse. Rome is among the most long-lived of the empires I mentioned, but relative to the timescale of recorded history - or to the timescale of a civ game - it was still fairly short-lived.

Short lived? The Roman Empire didn`t fall until the fifteenth century, from its inception, the state of Rome lasted over 2000 years.

 

[Horizons]

The trade route system in Civ4 was worth a bit of system slow-down. I loved the fact that signing open borders agreements was meaningful because your cities would then be able to trade with foreign cities. This simulated free enterprise, as your citizens were able to trade without you directly influencing how they did it. But now in Civ5, open borders agreements are worthless unless in extremely specific circumstances, such as when you need to move an army through a neutral country.

 

[zonk]

Large empires would randomly split in Civ2 when their capital was conquered. I never managed to find a rule behind it, it looked quite random, but it was cool! Although weird in some cases, I remember a message like "when the dust settles, the chinese civilization has declared its independence from the germans".

It's still beyond me why Jon and company didn't snag the Revolutions (the mod, not the console abomination) idea.

I absolutely agree that IV - of all the series - had the best ICS control system. Revolutions damn near perfected it. Expand too fast and you'd be lucky if your huge Civilization wasn't broken into multiple pieces - at the very best, you were going to be too busy fighting partisans and rebels to do much else.

As to III generally -- I'll say this... there was a lot I didn't like about III, but beyond a few games here and there, I never went back to II after installing III. There was enough new stuff I liked in III that caused me to overlook its faults.

No such luck with V - I've given up and gone fully back to IV.

 

[bryanw1995]

In Civ4 you had an obscure maintenance system that was a kind of lottery. But, ay the and, more land meant more cottage and more gold/research also...

In 5, we have an happiness limit. In most of my games I was far to occupy all the land at the end of my games. That makes a big difference...

The only thing i reproach to Civ5 is precisely that having land unoccuiped in 2050 is not realistic and seems... pretty odd. I would have liked some revolutionary migration/new civ creation during the game system instead.

not odd at all, look at our world today. how many people live in the amazon? a few but not many. same for many other sprawling jungles/desert's around the world. even if you're going for a small-ish empire you're typically going to settle good city sites at some point.

 

[bryanw1995]

The snowball effect among the AI is the biggest problem in the game, it never happens that civs rise and fall then rise again. they simply grow and swallow their neighbours. a massive sprawling empire should have stability issues. and if you aren't careful it should collapse.

there are two major problems I think
1. snowball effect, civ A attacks civ B because they are nearby and a bit weaker. Civ A wipes Civ B off the map and now has more land, gold, military and research than anyone else so they all get stomped.
2. the AI civs are completely unable to regroup. they attack you, if you can survive the initial wave of attackers there will be nothing left of their army and you will be able to roll through them no problem. the devs tried to fix this by making cities able to attack but they are far too weak, a city should bombard with similar strength to the current best siege unit.

a couple of easy fixes for cities:
1. increase bombard str as you recommended
2. increase hp to 30
3. heal 2hp/turn or at least have option of building with bonus to city regen.
4. increase str of walls/castle/etc

any combination of the above will make a huge difference, and with all of those improvements you could literally just use 1-2 horsemen to take care of barbs with no other army at all in many cases.

 

[Gatsby]

Short lived? The Roman Empire didn`t fall until the fifteenth century, from its inception, the state of Rome lasted over 2000 years.

Depends how you look at it. Rome (the empire) is conventionally regarded as having fallen in the 5th century because that's when the last Emperor of the western Roman empire was deposed. Technically/politically Byzantium was the Roman Empire....it just happened to have a different capital, and eventually a different official language, religion and culture from Rome proper. Imo it's not that hard to see why both Civ3 and Civ4 treated Rome and Byzantium as separate civilisations; Byzantium was more of a medieval Greek empire rather than a continuation of the Roman Empire.

But lets say for argument sake that the Byzantine and Roman Empires were absolutely one and the same thing. When you look at the latter part of the 2000 year-odd history of this Roman-Byzantine empire, what do you see? Basically you see a protracted and turbulent process of collapse extending from about the time of Emperor Commodus all the way to the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium. By the time the city of Byzantium fell to the Ottomans, the Byzantine Empire was little more than a struggling city-state, hardly worthy of being called an "empire". So yes you could say the Roman Empire lasted for 2000 years if you really wanted to, but the last 1200 years or so of that period was a time of collapse and decline, in which the Empire was whittled down to a mere rump-state and the city of Rome itself well and truly ceased to be part of it's eponymous Empire. One of the primary causes of this long collapse was ancient Rome's imperial overstretch.

 

[Peregrine]

No. Civil war upon seizure of a capital occurred only in CivI. I played CivI for several years post-release, and CivII until after the release of IV, believe it or not. Designed a dozen or so mods/scenarios for II. I KNOW both those systems too well. I also still own both games, I's 3" disks and II normal-sized disk.

Wanna make a bet who's right?

 

[Alan McG]

Well I have never played nor owned Civ1, and spent most of my high school days playing Civ2 during which time I saw the empire splitting effect.. Like I said, it was a random effect that did not happen at regular intervals. It is possible it has never happened to you (I had friends in high school who had never seen it either, despite playing a lot).
But it was certainly Civ2 (maybe also happens in Civ1, but again, never played that).

 

[KMRblue1027]

Civ2 was the game with schisms from capital loss. It happened all the time in the WWII scenario from the classic game.

 

[Alan McG]

Wanna make a bet who's right?

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=332330

I rest my case.. What have I won?

 

[Peregrine]

The posters in the thread are speculating. I have never seen it happen in II, and played it for years. I really do think that there is memory conflation regarding I and II here. Believe or not, the CivII disk is in my drive at this very moment--I still play around with II. I'll check the rules booklets of both to see what is said.