To be honest, even today with Civ 3 you can have long turn times. SOE (Storm over Europe) has turn times of about 18 minutes today. That´s why it is not published at present. That mod starts with more than 8.000 named units on the map. And at some time when there are reached about 12000+ units sometimes mysterious crashes did happen. We called that effect "MUA" (maximum units allowed), but may be we even run with Civ 3 in the limitations of 32-bit machines, Smidlee did post. Another Civ 3 mod, TCW II (The Cold War II) by El Justo was retransferred from a 362x 362 map to a 180 x 180 map as present turn times of about 8 minutes were considered too long.
But it seems, Civ 3, with all of its setbacks, was the last "classic civ-game" that was produced. In former games of the civ series, there was always a possibility to transfer the graphics of the older version to the newer version without big problems. Here Civ 4 broke with that tradition. And for me (subjective standing point) these 3d graphics of Civ 4 are ugly as hell and a possibilty to transfer the thousands of well made and -in my eyes- much better looking civ 3 units would have been more than needed. And in my eyes much worse, these ugly 3d graphics make no sense for gameplay and additionally sometimes confuse me.
The new civ games are getting a more and more cartoonish styling, what I really don´t like. This started after Civ 2 (which tried to be more historical)with some units in Civ 3 (tank, transport) and became much worse with Civ 4 and the statement of Firaxis senior producer Barry Caudill, that they found with Civ Revolution "the essence of civ which can make its way even to to a pc version" (
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=6070857&postcount=1) is really alarming in my eyes about the future of the civ series.
In my eyes some of these 3d graphics in Civ Revolution look like an exploded toilett brush and the leaders are even much more cartoonish. May be a possible Civ 5 will look like "Mickey Mouse Complete". I see no real chance to replace these -in my eyes-more than ugly 3d graphics in Civ 4.
And it seems Firaxis in new versions of the civ series always cuts out the features I did like. The Civ 2 feature to easily do events was cut out in civ 3 and the same for the handling of helicopters, caravans and spies. The idea to be more historical of Civ 2 was abandoned as cartoonish graphics were introduced with Civ 3 (and this was badly maximised with Civ 4). What I mostly liked in Civ 3, the units graphics, was cut out in Civ 4, the same with the idea how artillery should work (what Firaxis was only able to solve properly for sea artillery in Civ 3). I liked to have seawarfare and instead of improving it, it was simplified. The statement that "sea is only another kind of desert" doesn´t make any hope for getting things better in the future. Hey Firaxis do you know, that more than 80 % of the world is sea and sea isn´t an other kind of a desert?
In the earlier versions of the Civ series (Civ 2 and Civ 3) a lot of these shortcomings could be corrected by modding. The shortcoming of the 3d engine in Civ 4 (and as brickheaded as Firaxis is in this point, in future versions too) can´t be corrected with modding. So for me it´s not alarming, that there is no new patch for Civ 4 BTS, as Civ 4 -in my eyes- is unhealable spoiled with that 3d engine. With the statements of Firaxis senior producer Barry Caudill above, Firaxis still is thinking about a new version of Civ and it seems Civ 4 will dissapear out of the head of that software company much more quickly as all other versions, that did preceed it. Alarming in my eyes is -with the statements of Barry Caudill above - that there won´t be any more satisfying versions of Civ for me. This means, I have to stay with Civ 3 and Civ 2 ToT, until another company tries to fill that gap.
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)) is not really suitable for this since only few people actually post complete records of their hardware and drivers.
