CIV IV vs CIV III

[Stuck in Pi]

Civ 3: balanced heavily towards warmonger

Civ 4: more evenly spread so peaceful leaders and builders have a better shot at winning.

That's all I have to say

 

[TheRyk]

@Jones: Thx a lot, I'll check that Army-Thing out. AIs stupid army handling in lower and average difficulty levels was one of the few things that I did NOT like in Civ3.

@Aussie: As I said, I have not decided whether I like Civ4 or not. But what you said about Civ3 is simply not true. At least Culture was something new compared with Civ2. And Civ4-Vanilla is to some degree a disappointment for me too. Many of the new features seem somewhat immature. Many of the improvements actually are inspired from Civ3-Conq-RaR-Mod (Great People beyond Military Leaders, National Wonders...) But so far (as I observed above) I think spreading religion (for me one of the most striking changes in gameplay) in Vanilla-Civ4 is of very limited use as measured by the spended productivity and time. Might be, BTS exploits the really new features like religion in a more game-relevant way. But - as far as I can judge it yet after playing Civ4 3 times or so - I think the changes are less fundamental then Civ4-faction or Civ3-faction claim (see above)

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

@TheRyk. The nature of Civ4, as others have already said, is that one approach is never the best one in every game. In Civ3 I found myself just spewing out settlers, building lots of mines & farms & cheating the AI silly (due to it's gullibility). Sure culture & resources added something new, but they were promising an entirely new game experience in the early days. Truth is SMAC was a more enjoyable game to play than Civ3, even though it came earlier in the development sequence. In Civ3, Corruption, of course, was a total nightmare & made some cities utterly useless for the majority of the game. Oh & lets not forget Whack a Mole pollution & cities which became totally useless once unhappiness reached a specific threshold. All of these "features" of Civ3-along with a totally irrational AI-helped to greatly diminish my Civ3 experience, an experience which was only moderately improved by Conquests.

In Civ4, as a case in point, I often try & get an early religion. Other times, however, if I have a close neighbour who beats me to it then I will just redirect my resources & wait for my neighbour's religion to come my way.

In my Civ4 games, my early game decisions are usually driven by access to resources. If I have stone, then I will aim for Stonehenge-but if I have marble I instead go for Temple of Artemis. My game decisions are also driven by what Civ I am, my general terrain & my proximity to other civs. The promotion system & terrain improvements help to make my early game much more interesting than in Civ3.

At days end, though, these are all merely my opinion. Civ4 does NOT appeal to everyone, & to them I would suggest they stick with Civ3 (whilst secretly believing they are MISSING OUT ).

Aussie_Lurker.

 

[Civinator]

Best of all, the whole thing is so darned MODDABLE. If there is something you don't like about the game-or something you think is missing-go & look in the C&C forum-you are BOUND to find something you are looking for. If not, then ask & it will probably be created for you. Civ III never had that flexibility!

Is there a mod for Civ 4 with real empires (not district size with only a handful of cities), an easy option to import every 2d graphic I like and where kings can be kings again? A mod that makes Civ 4 play like Civ 3 with all the advantages of Civ 3 and Civ 4 combined?

If this mod doesn´t exist, I ask here for this mod, that is probably been created very soon for me.

So much to the unlimited flexibility of modding with Civ 4. In my eyes modding in Civ 4 also has its limits as it has them in Civ 3, but the limits are sometimes on different fields.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Oh OK, so I might have exaggerated that last point a little, but Civ4 is still much more flexible in its moddability than Civ3. I have no computer programming experience at all, but you can see from my sig that I have made a number of related mods which required SDK changes. Though I haven't tried it, Python is supposed to be even easier than SDK, though a little less flexible. XML is far easier to use than the Civ3 editor & also has greater flexibility. BTW, I tried modding Civ3 on numerous occasions but gave up due to sheer frustration.

In truth, half the examples you inquire about make no sense. How are Civ4 empires different from 'real empires' (they are certainly more like empires than Civ3 ever gave you-where outlying cities were just unproductive dead-weights used to claim land). In what way can you not be "a king" in Civ4-any more than in Civ3? Seriously, Civinator it sounds like your irrational hatred of Civ4 has actually unhinged you & made you completely ignore many of the obvious flaws of Civ3. Now I played & enjoyed Civ3 a great deal but-after playing Civ4 for just a few months-I had no desire to ever return to Civ3.

 

[Civinator]

Seriously, Civinator it sounds like your irrational hatred of Civ4 has actually unhinged you & made you completely ignore many of the obvious flaws of Civ3.

Irrational hatred of Civ4? Funny idea to hate a game. I´m dissapointed with Civ 4, that´s true. May be I expected too much for Civ 4 and some important changes of Civ 4 in my eyes went in the completely wrong direction. And I´m troubled by the feeling, that Firaxis follows the -in my eyes- wrong path of Civ 4 for future versions of civ and so I have to live with the flaws of Civ3, as possibly nothing better will follow. So I think I´m quite aware of the flaws of Civ 3 (some of them can be softened down by modding)- but I´m also aware of flaws of Civ 4 and some of these flaws in Civ 4 are so heavy for me, that Civ 4 is not the game I have a lot of fun with.
So I think dissapointment and frustration with Civ 4 that´s o.k. - but hatred of a game? - no.

And irrational? It´s interesting how less must be written to get such an attribute in a Civ 4 forum. I saw this -in my eyes- exaggerated homage to the modability of Civ 4 and thought I write some short sentences to show the limits of that homage. I don´t think this is irrational.


For the rest (the mini-empires of Civ 4, the lost governements, the graphics, the missing editor, the corruption in Civ 3, the missing event-triggers and so on ... and so on) a lot was written in the past . I could repeat it here or simply draw links to these postings. But it´s a waste of time. I hope this is rational too.


The question stays: Is such a reaction as it was done to some small sentences, that show some of the limits of Civ 4, still rational?

 

[T.A JONES]

In Civ3, Corruption, of course, was a total nightmare & made some cities utterly useless for the majority of the game. Oh & lets not forget Whack a Mole pollution & cities which became totally useless once unhappiness reached a specific threshold. All of these "features" of Civ3-along with a totally irrational AI-helped to greatly diminish my Civ3 experience, an experience which was only moderately improved by Conquests.
Aussie_Lurker.

Aussie hes playin Rise nRule so the corruption bug has been patched
Code that made possable large empires like a England at its height was refined more life-like with the 2007 debute of the Vassel patch for civ3. Another wonder by respected modder Embyrodead that can be added in early to mid game and phased out for late where 3rd 'FP type' corruption reducer smwonders like "Interpol" can be built to pick up the task.

The whack a mole is more like "knock the mole out cold" with added pollution reducing implimention Yes pollution will still 'come around' but on a closer scale of occurance in accordance to todays enviroment issues and the amount of time they rear their ugly heads in massive industrial nations of today is much more proportionate then civ3 of old.
Sure in old days when rules where lax pollutoin was worse. so untill you have built up a large modern infrasture you should expect more pollution. However, pullution like corrupiton, is now something you can work at eradicating so it makes great gameplay value and of course time saving

The loss of production in terms of cost from to over-time saturation damage to the landscape, toxic spills and dredging cleanup has now been better represented while at the same time improving the quality of the game by reducing repeatitvness

IN civ4 workers sit around idle doing nothing near end game. Thank goodness In civ3's "Improved pollution patch" Pollution is still there but not always popping up every 2nd turn!. Still, workers must be ready so are portioned out of the population plus unit costs are factered in depending which Gov you have.
To make it more accurate, the cost to Gov infrastructure like the "sewers" improvements the patch applies, are a large maintence cost over time
Even though its rare event now, the cost of being prepared for pollution when it does occur is better reflected.
Whats especially cool with the "improved pollution mod" is by adding these few improvements and rules changes you are detracting the amount needless micromangement!.

Also key, it adds more choice to lategame. Ether use a herd of workers with a Democracy giving unlimited unit support hece low cost or, build up a super clean infrasture that relies on high maintence to prevent most accidents from happening thus keepin fewer workers onhand and a higher population as result!
Like I say, Having Pollution and corrupiton still availble yet in a more balanced way compliments gameplay and adds challenge without resorting to cheasy upper difficulites that force the player to pertake in even more ridiculously unreal behavior in order to "win".

For HOF (game of the month) online posters, Winning with points meant everything and having more points then not just other civs but anyone else around the world was the objective of this very vocal group
The rules were simple. They couldn't add any "unofficial patches". No matter how glaring a mistake they saw and how easy it was to impliment a fix, they choose to raise the AI's handicap to comensate for the players god like units. they choose to build a city in every tile available to ring out a single coin when high corruption did reign. Now you see where civ3's biggest and loudest critics came from. CAn you blame them for rejoice s CIv4's offical handcuffs? )

Sadly the best of these guys (or worst however you see it) was assigned the task of improving the next chapter. Can you imagine why all these things that were fixable in the editer but considered cheating by these few tormented minds, were taken out of civ4? hmm not that hard is it?. The ironic thing was not using the editer made them the biggest cheaters of all time

 

[T.A JONES]

I could repeat it here or simply draw links to these postings. But it´s a waste of time. I hope this is rational too.

Good post. I can relate to this little line taken. Having a arsonel of proper past posting on the topic in relation saves you considerable amounts of time and refreshes the mind so your able to dive into new material quickly.

Sure the same people are always here so you think why repeat for one new guy but so many new members are always arriving. They deserve to know the same info you laid out 3 monthes ago mybe now buried yet still pertaining to the topic at hand . If it was important to the discussion sometimes I'll link back like yesterday (most word for word )

Your polite way of expressing opinion is always a good read man!

 

[TheRyk]

Aussie hes playin Rise nRule so the corruption bug has been patched ...

True! With altogether 3 National Wonders of the Forbidden Palace kind (Winter Palace, Summer Palace) and Federalism as a fairly-low-corruption-government-type corruption ain't an unsolvable problem anymore in RaR.

And what Jones said about workers and pollution is something I observed too. In Civ3 you can let the workers you don't need anymore join any settlement you wish (counting 1 citizens instead of 3 when a settler joins a city) and keep a small bunch per region for pollution handling. In Civ4 - even at huge map - there was not much need for workers in the last stage of game. You cannot klick "auto-improve", for they make too much nonsense then, so I let them built roads and rails everywhere, built watermills in the desert (yippie-ay-yeah) and other trash and sent most of them to my colonies. But still at the begin of any turn I asked myself what to do with'em. Half of my turn I thought what the heck I could improve. Had the feeling half of my turn I had to deal with my workers. "Micromanagement" problem as Civ4-lovers criticise Civ3.

The total abolishment of pollution is something that may contribute to make the game easier or - as Fireaxis puts it - removing an "unfun" element. I did not experience "Fallout" in Civ4 so far, so I cannout judge in which way pollution occurs at all. Keeping > has not been such a challenging task for me so far.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

The point I was making is that you seem deliberately blind to what I feel are some blinding flaws in Civ3-& I mean Civ3 Conquests as it came out of the box & after its last official patch.

Now, I know that there are some flaws about Civ4-religions could be more different (though this is best achieved via the use of Civics IMHO), cottages are too powerful, some of the Civics do seem a bit pointless &-until BtS-the late game was still a bit dull (an accusation I could level at Civ3 too). I do also feel that the game could have been....bolder! Yet for me these are all minor annoyances &-I confess-are more down to my own personal preferences than they are an attack on something that is broken.

Someone mentioned Governments being gone, but I do NOT see this as a bad thing. Governments-& societies-are far, far more complex than the set in stone "Governments" offered by Civ3. I like having my Police State with Freedom of Speech-it means people are free to speak out about things they dislike, but my government is free to imprison them for the littlest crimes .
The point is that it gives me greater flexibility & freedom-something Civ3 never gave-kind of like Promotions for units.

Still, at the end of the day, it really does come down to personal preference. If you don't like Civ4, but love Civ3, then nothing I can ever say is going to change your mind. I just get annoyed when people deliberately overlook glaring flaws in the game-something I certainly don't do when it comes to Civ4. Heck, though, if those flaws don't impact your enjoyment of the game, or if you have found some ways around it, then good luck to you. I will stick to what I believe it the pinnacle of the genre.

Aussie_Lurker.

 

[TheRyk]

Of course, in the end it's a matter of personal taste.

STILL I - personally - have not ultimately come to a judgement on Civ4. But maybe the fact that for me Civ3-Conq-RaR was at least close to perfection - in spite of some "flaws" that have not completely been solved by the Mod - might result in the decision that I will turn back to Civ3.

I went into this thread to learn arguments of both Civ3 and Civ4 faction and at least this turned out to be quite informative for me. I guess I will experiment a little more with Civ4 and then check out to what extent BTS could be worthwile for me.

 

[Dubai Vol]

Without reading 12 pages, I'm going to stick my oar in:

I played the original Civ and loved it, loved civ2 even more, got civ3 and absolutely hated it. Found this forum and really, really TRIED to learn to love civ3, but frankly I don't think I ever finished a game. The worst part was that all the good things about civ3 made it impossible to go back to civ2.

Civ4 is great, IMO, and BTS, with 3.13 and Bhruic's 3.13 fix (the only way I've played) is absolutely brilliant. Can't wait to start my second game! But first I have some butt to kick....

In my browsing of this forum, a pattern appears: people who started with Civ and Civ2 hate Civ3. People who started with Civ3 hate Civ4. At the end of the day, play the game you enjoy. Mrs Dubai comes home from her job as a senior executive in a major international corporation and plays games about being a waitress. I don't even TRY to figure that out....

 

[Abegweit]

In my browsing of this forum, a pattern appears: people who started with Civ and Civ2 hate Civ3. People who started with Civ3 hate Civ4.

That's simply not true. I, for one, came up the ranks and wasted hundreds of hours on each of them.

The one which gave me that true Just One More Turn fanaticism was the original. But when Civ2 came along I immediately fell in love with it. Why not? It was the same game, just better in every way. Better graphics. Better combat model. Better AI. More units. More buildings.

When Civ3 came along it was different. I had huge problems adapting. The same was true of Civ4. I think the reason was the same in both cases. The developers decided, for whatever reason, that they were going to put the cabosh to huge powerful empires In Civ2, there were three different governments with minimal to no corruption.

In Civ3 there is only one such government and it turns out it is basically unusable for other reasons. Eventually players learned to adapt. Science farms came into use and huge empires came back.

In Civ4, the developers struck even harder. They finally dealt a death blow to the demon they had tried to exorcise from the game. Now empires with hundreds of cities are simply impossible because of the utterly unrealistic concept of city maintenance. I'm not sure why the developers hated it so much but they clearly did and, on the second try, they succeeded.

This is what the die-hard Civ3 players complain about when they that the game has lost its epic feel. The simple truth of the matter is Civ4 is no longer Civ. Civ1 one Civ2, to all intents were the same game. Civ3 was a variant.

Civ4 is something different. It has many merits of its own but it is not Civ. It is a different game. I think that those Civ2 players who left the game because they hated Civ3 would have left it if they had been confronted with Civ4 instead - and they would have hated it for the same reason. Instead, they left altogether.

Years later they discovered a new and interesting game which simply happened to have the same label put on it for marketing purposes. Civ4 and Civ2 have virtually nothing to do with each other.

Oh. And I really really miss WLTK day. There was nothing greater than watching your empire grow ten or a hundred times over in the space of a few turns. What a rush.

 

[Dubai Vol]

Civ4 and Civ2 have virtually nothing to do with each other.

True. And yeah, I miss WLTKD too. But the fact is that civ3 forced a player to follow a narrow, effectively scripted, path. Civ4 gave back the freedom to do things differently, and that's the link back to the original civ.

JMO, YMMV, and by all means, play the game you like, even if it's not civ!

 

[Abegweit]

But the fact is that civ3 forced a player to follow a narrow, effectively scripted, path. Civ4 gave back the freedom to do things differently, and that's the link back to the original civ.

They're all pretty scripted at the highest levels, although the AI was so bad in Civ1 and Civ2 that it was easy even to beat Diety. In Civ1, I remember that my objective was Railroads by 1000BC. Not very realistic.

JMO, YMMV, and by all means, play the game you like, even if it's not civ!

Agreed. I was never a fan of that "epic feel" anyways. I'm gradually warming to the latest, just like I did to the previous one.

 

[towishimp]

True. And yeah, I miss WLTKD too. But the fact is that civ3 forced a player to follow a narrow, effectively scripted, path. Civ4 gave back the freedom to do things differently, and that's the link back to the original civ.

JMO, YMMV, and by all means, play the game you like, even if it's not civ!

I agree. I started with Civ 1, kinda liked it. Civ 2 I loved, and it was the first Civ game that really ate up hours and hours of my time. Civ 3 was different than 2, but once I learned it, it was lots of fun, too. But the base game got old pretty quick...very repetative. The mods kept me playing, but not very often. I just recently got Civ 4 working, and I'm officially obsessed. They got rid of the "must fight all the time" aspect of Civ 3 that bothered me, and overhauled combat and governments, which I felt really needed it. Religion and the more flexible tech tree are both nice elements, too.

I really don't see, though, why people get so up in arms about which version is better, up to and including saying things like "Civ 4 ain't Civ anymore, man." That statement is ridiculous. The core elements are all the same: workers, settlers, units, a tech tree, wonders, city improvements, diplomacy. Civ 4 is quite different, but saying it's not Civ anymore is hyperbole.

If you like constant warfare and micromanaging loads of cities, keep playing Civ 3. If you don't, play Civ 4. It's great that we have two great games.

 

[White Elk]

They got rid of the "must fight all the time" aspect of Civ 3 that bothered me,...

If you like constant warfare and micromanaging loads of cities, keep playing Civ 3. If you don't, play Civ 4.

I find this "must fight all the time" scenario within Civ4. I think BTS made it worse. I also find large amounts of micro-managing within Civ4. BTS also made that worse with its overzealous AI spies, lazy auto-workers, bugged trade, and more. Despite my love for Civ4s FfH2 mod; I may just UPgrade back to Civ3 to explore all the new mods which incorporate the best of Civ4 into a game that runs quick and smooth. I miss that dearly.

There are many reasons I have grown to outright despise Civ4 and its expansions. Beyond the poor patching policy, the biggest reason is that blasted MAF error I consistently get when playing mods or playing large maps. Once I started getting MAFs on my new computer with 2gigs RAM, 2.66ghz dual processor, improved graphics card,... it was all over for me and Civ4. With Civ4 I was reduced to playing standard and smaller sized maps. I find those small maps boring for I seek a more expansive game. And even with smaller maps and playing with the lowest graphics settings I could not finish a game with a mod like ViSa due to that blasted MAF. firaxis said they fixed it in their pre-BTS marketing release. But that was BS. It still haunts me even on a new system which is far beyond the recommended specs.

So if I should delve back into the world of Civ it will be Civ3 since that game runs smooth and I can play the largest map available. I won't have to wait very long between turns and combat occurs in a flash. Civ3 is sleek and stable. Civ4 is clunky and bugged.

 

[Slip de Garcon]

I agree on the increase in warlikeness. In my experience:

Civ 4 BtS is more warlike than Civ 4 (Vanilla)
Civ 4 (Vanilla) is more warlike than Civ 3
Civ 3 is more warlike than Civ 2

Civ 5 will probably be more like turn-based Command & Conquer than a empire-building game at this rate, which is a shame.

Not everyone plays Civ to build military units & fight all the time, in fact IIRC you could get through Civ 2 without fighting at all if you had the right wonders (Great Wall/UN?)

 

[warpstorm]

I disagree, Slip. Civ2 was by far the most warlike for me (at least warfare was the easiest to pull off).

 

[White Elk]

I've only played Civ2 on the PSOne. In the console version every unit in a stack would be killed if a combat was lost (unless it was in a fort or city). Is that the case with the PC version?