A return to CivIII?

[Kyriakos]

I noticed that these days it is not impossible to have 100 people in the civIII c&c forum.
This was not the case for a while now, and in fact we had around half that for the last three years.
So i think there might be some hope for this game, with people playing it still. I hope i contributed something to keeping it alive as well

 

[Ataxerxes]

I noticed that these days it is not impossible to have 100 people in the civIII c&c forum.
This was not the case for a while now, and in fact we had around half that for the last three years.
So i think there might be some hope for this game, with people playing it still. I hope i contributed something to keeping it alive as well

I've noticed increased activity in the forum myself. Maybe after the Civ5 fiasco, some of the players who played 4 to death were looking for another game. Also, the 2 recent polls in OT showed a pretty good showing for Civ 3, so some people in OT probably wanted to give it a try if they came in with 4 or 5. Civ4 still won, but 3 did better than 5 so some new players probably wanted to try it out.

 

[Puppeteer]

I pulled the game out after a long period of not playing. I was a bit (pleasantly) surprised at the activity on the forum. I'm not sure what made me start playing, but perhaps the Civ5 release was a subliminal suggestion to play Civ gain.

I've been wondering if the war academy, strategy articles, tech support and forum index posts (index of TDGs, index of notable SGs or stories, etc) could be updated and supplemented with fresh content like instructional videos and dynamic web interfaces.

I made a YouTube video on installing on Win7 (in my sig), and I have the screen capture recording to add video on some basic edits, mods and add-on programs I use.

It has since occurred to me that short videos on micromanaging, opening moves, settler pumps, etc. might be of use to new or returning Civ3 players.

It also occurred to me in reading the forums that it would be nice to dynamically organize and sort index lists by version, mod, length, etc..

Is this an old game not worthy of such efforts? Or would such materials be useful for many?

 

[CommandoBob]

I made a YouTube video on installing on Win7 (in my sig), and I have the screen capture recording to add video on some basic edits, mods and add-on programs I use.

It has since occurred to me that short videos on micromanaging, opening moves, settler pumps, etc. might be of use to new or returning Civ3 players.

I like that idea. Sometimes I need to see something in order to understand it. Your Smiley Pop Heads are a good example of that. To talk about what they do is not the best way to show how effective they are. Before and after images are much better.

A few months back I spotted a video on Alpha Centauri here on the forum that renewed my interest in that game. I even dug out the old CD and browsed eBay looking the expansion pack. I haven't had a chance to play it yet, so maybe I am not a good test case. But having seen the video I am more likely to play it.

(Now a video Succession Game. That could be interesting or mind-numbingly boring!)

 

[AnthonyIII]

I would very much enjoy some videos focusing on different aspects of the game. There are already some good "Let's play CIV3" on youtube, but if someone could make some videos that are shorter and informative that would have been awesome. I agree with CommandoBob, I learned a lot from for exampel Cracker's opening turns article(http://www.civfanatics.com/content/civ3/strategy/cracker/civ3_starts/index.htm), but it would be even better to actually watch it and have someone comment on why do you this and what is the benefit of that. That could make the game easier to learn and therefore maybe get more players. CIV3 is also a very timeless game, so I think it's definitely worth to do some upgrading in the WA and add some videos, because I think people will discover this game over and over again. I watched your video and it was very good, Puppeteer! A lot of the articles in the WA are for vanilla and ptw versions, maybe someone could update some of the articles to conquest as well. I also would like to see a walkthrough/overview of each civ in conquest, similar to the article that exist for vanilla. That would have been great!

 

[web25]

civ 3 is awesome

never played 5, but tried 4 once.

 

[Bluebags]

I've been playing a bit of Civ IV recently, particularly embryodead's RFC - Sword of Islam Modmod. I came across Yoda Power's Twillight of Byzantium scenario on my external hard drive the other day and decided to extract it and give it a go - very quickly got me back into the mood for Civ III

 

[Fiddlin Nero]

I've been wondering if the war academy, strategy articles, tech support and forum index posts (index of TDGs, index of notable SGs or stories, etc) could be updated and supplemented with fresh content like instructional videos and dynamic web interfaces.

I've often thought that some indexing would be very useful. If there could be some kind of group effort and given 'Sticky' status I could contribute some hours to it.

 

[Puppeteer]

I've often thought that some indexing would be very useful. If there could be some kind of group effort and given 'Sticky' status I could contribute some hours to it.

My first thought was to add tags to threads, so for example training day games could all be tagged with one or more of "tdg", "trainingdaygame", "civ3tdg", "emperor", "diety", "celts", "allwar", etc.. Then you could click on the tag and see a thread list with ratings, location, number of replies, etc.. But there are at least two problems with that idea. The biggie is that I don't see that it's possible to add a tag after the thread is started. The second is that I don't see a way to search with more than one tag. Say we were able to tag everything and I wanted to see all Civ3 Emperor TDG's. Even if the tags are there, I don't think we can use two or three tags at a time in this manner.

So my second thought is an off-site tabular index that is filterable and sortable by a number of attributes. So if I want to find all Civ3 SGs played at Emperor on an archipelago I can with a few clicks.

 

[Fiddlin Nero]

Not sure how we can get together on this. I'm in for throwing it around a bit and seeing if its worth working on.

Attached is a text file I did a couple years ago, its a start on the indexing of the rather long 'Short Strategy Tips' thread.

Saw your thread on the video project. Difficult call to know how useful I would find it, there's so many opinions on how to do things in the game. Interest and usefulness can be difficult to gage around here.

How to handle the 3 versions of the game, I suppose would be the first challenge. I only have PTW, though I would be willing to get C3C if this develops into something worth doing. The other thing that concerns me is scope. I would like to see something small started that can grow organically with usefulness up at the top of the priorities.

 

[CommandoBob]

Interest and usefulness can be difficult to gage around here.

So start with a topic that you had a Eureka! moment with. It doesn't have to elaborate. Perhaps something as basic as how big each world size is, with overlapping rectangles to show the relationship of each size. Maybe combined with the three water percentages for each size.



@Puppeteer: What video capture software did you use and what was your screen resolution set to?

 

[Puppeteer]

Not sure how we can get together on this. I'm in for throwing it around a bit and seeing if its worth working on.

Attached is a text file I did a couple years ago, its a start on the indexing of the rather long 'Short Strategy Tips' thread.

Ah, good work on the index text file! I was thinking of indexing threads, but indexing posts in the "quick" threads would be very handy indeed. I'm sure there's good stuff in there, but I avoid them because they are too hard to slog through.

Have you shopped on NewEgg or Amazon and filtered by brand, price range or other attributes? That is the sort of control I'd like over the indexes. And while shopping the results are sortable by price, rating, best-selling, etc.. In our off-site index (don't think it's possible in-forum, at least by us) we'd be able to filter and sort by various attributes in a similar manner. I expect there is a premade reporting tool that does this kind of thing, but I haven't found or thought of it yet.

The other thing that concerns me is scope. I would like to see something small started that can grow organically with usefulness up at the top of the priorities.

I do have a tendency to come up with an idea, over-plan and under-produce. I have a working model in my head, I need to pick a tool to implement it and throw up a working implementation.

 

[Fiddlin Nero]

Threads rarely stay on topic and some of the best info is buried in threads with Titles not related to the good stuff.

Not sure where the content for your filtering index would come from?

My thought was to insert sticky posts where appropriate containing a simple text index of the contents. Some kind of uber index might be useful with links once we had a large enough base to work from.

Unless some others sign on for at least looking at things from the perspective of each version I don't see us getting far.

 

[Puppeteer]

Threads rarely stay on topic and some of the best info is buried in threads with Titles not related to the good stuff.

Not sure where the content for your filtering index would come from?

It would have to be human-generated, or possibly a human-made list of topics and some automated data collection.

Ok, off-site indexing has a lot of problems, and an inconsistently-maintained index is not an improvement over the forums alone.

My thought was to insert sticky posts where appropriate containing a simple text index of the contents. Some kind of uber index might be useful with links once we had a large enough base to work from.

Unless some others sign on for at least looking at things from the perspective of each version I don't see us getting far.

Here is a somewhat new (for me) thought, and it could be done on CivFan if administrators approve: Civ III wiki. There is already a modding wiki. And now that I'm browsing through it, at least some of it is indexes of forum threads:

• Civ3 Modding Tutorials
• Civ3 Modding Tools

On the other hand this starts creating the question of would the wiki be an index, or would it reinvent the Civ 3 War Academy and a few sticky threads?

 

[Fiddlin Nero]

My preference would be to stay within Civfanatics, but wiki is a possiblility.

It would be really great to work with a small group and create a useful index. My interest is really about working thru the content of this site and finding stuff I don't know and hopefully giving some of these newbies a means of seeing what the site has to offer.

Is what I have in the text file the kind of index your thinking of? Having a set of categories to put things in and adding categories as we expand should make for some interesting discussions.

I've seen indexes that were just word searches like Acrobat does, I don't find them useful at all!

 

[GamezRule]

I haven't been around these parts for a while, but I figured I would drop in.

 

[jtb1127]

I still play it because ti can be very fun in it's own way. Many people probably came here after civ v.

 

[darski]

I noticed that these days it is not impossible to have 100 people in the civIII c&c forum.
This was not the case for a while now, and in fact we had around half that for the last three years.
So i think there might be some hope for this game, with people playing it still. I hope i contributed something to keeping it alive as well

You have certainly kept me coming back to the C&C forums.

I would like to see more form and order for our users but I'm not the one to help - barely past technopeasant. I am posting both to thank Kyriakos and to sub to this thread. Will follow with interest and encouragement.

 

[Kyriakos]

Thanks

 

[Makinus]

I play CIV since the first one and i own the Civ1, CIV2 (Test of Time version), CIV3 (Complete) and CIV4 (basic - no expansions)...

I played some Civ4 but found it boring and cumbersome, so i returned to 3 and never bothered to buy Civ4 expansions or, recently, Civ5...

In my opinion CIV3 is the best civ game yet, with the perfect balance of functional graphics, good mechanics and good moddability... i´m playing Civ3 for several years and pretend to play it a lot more years yet...

Another reason for the upswing in civ3 recently may be the current fad on netbooks that have not enough hardware to run Civ4 (or 5) confortably, but that run Civ3 fast and reliably... i myself have been seeing a lot of netbooks around lately, much more than traditional notebooks/laptops and several netbooks owners seek games that can be run in the little machines.... i myself own a netbook (HP Pavillion DM1) and do the majority of my gaming, including Civ3, on the machine...