Back to the Future: 10 Problems with Civ3

[Alan McG]

They are speculating on the exact rule, not the fact that it happens.

If the text displayed in the announcement boxes is available somewhere in the game files, you can probably look for the message as well. I am almost sure it included the terms "civil war" and "dust settles".

 

[Peregrine]

Just went through the I booklet scanning quick, used the index, and found no mention whatever of Civil War upon seizure of capital. Results unclear.

Went through the II program itself, pulling down all the customizing and scenario menus, and still didn't find any mention of Civil War. Can't locate the manual at the moment, but don't think it'll shed any more light. Alan, good idea, I'll go through the Rules.txt file and see if it's in there. Might take a few minutes though. Not finding ANY references to it anywhere has me puzzled. I distinctly recall I doing this and II never doing this. But someone else remembers otherwise. Hmmmm. Gotta solve this one.

You're right. Way down in the Game.txt file I found it in II. It's called "Schism" and here's the text;

@SCHISM
@width=400
@title=Defense Minister
The %STRING0 empire is swept by
Civil War triggered by the fall
of their capital! When the dust
settles the empire has been split
into loyal (%STRING0) and
rebel (%STRING1) factions

I stand corrected.

 

[Martin Alvito]

It is absolutely fair to take the dev team to task for the issues the OP identifies. There were valid reasons for Civ 3's comparatively lackluster sales.

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.

Your point that it's easier to be a critic than an artist is well taken, but the devs made numerous design decisions that clearly run counter to their pre-release assertions about gameplay. One is left with only two possible explanations:

- The devs knew they had made numerous balance errors, knew that they didn't have sufficient development time to fix it, and chose to make a series of blatantly false assertions to hype the game up and generate initial sales.

- The devs don't understand their game.

Since most of the balance fixes in the upcoming patch would not have been time consuming to implement, and since even those fixes still aren't going to resolve the ICS problem, it appears that the latter proposition is true. Therefore, they don't know better than us.

 

[pi-r8]

This is interesting. It seems like all these problems were solved pretty well in civ 4, but returned with a vengeance in civ 5.

 

[jagdtigerciv]

I still have a tough time hearing that people don't like Civ3.

 

[Me,myself,and,I]

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.

735BC to the fifth century AD is still over a thousand years. Rome was not a quick and sudden conquest, they were almost constantly at war for a few centuries while they slowly conquered Italy, after Italy they absorbed, Gaul, Britannia, Iberia, Carthage, Greece, Egypt, and much of the near east, in another few centuries of warfare.

Rome was weaker than the Etruscans, and roughly equal to the Carthaginians, and they still beat both of them. If Rome had maintained the grand strategy they had at the beginning of the empire, I think they would have lasted longer.

 

[LordTC]

I remember Civ3 had massive issues with how corruption worked, it was initially way too high and they had to patch it down several times. It also wasn't well calibrated to map size, I remember for months huge maps were unplayable because you needed to have larger empires to make up for the higher technology costs etc that the bigger maps had, but the corruption scaled very similarly, and distance was treated identically (points per number of tiles). The multiplayer was also really gamey, with clear imbalances and best units beyond that problem.

I also hated how colonial expansion was usually completely messed up because you needed to be able to rush an FP on the other side of the world to have any chance of those colonies being viable.

That being said, happiness as bureaucracy is even less fun than corruption was. At least with corruption it would make the new city completely unviable. Happiness as bureaucracy tanks large portions of your empire, and on slower speeds its completely unfun sitting around and waiting for the techs to be able to expand. It's also a massive problem for multiplayer unless you use a symmetric start map. With the difficulty set fairly high there are some luxuries (gems, gold, silver) that are insanely good in start positions because you don't have to go out of your way on the tech tree to get them (they come for free on the way to iron working).

Most of the time Civ V feels like I'm not playing against the AI, I'm playing against a little smiley face at the top of my screen that is so close to frowning that it restricts most of my options.

 

[apotheoser]

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

Whether or not it was in Civ2, schism from capital loss was ABSOLUTELY in Civ1. It was nothing new in 2, assuming it was there.

 

[apotheoser]

I remember Civ3 had massive issues with how corruption worked, it was initially way too high and they had to patch it down several times. It also wasn't well calibrated to map size, I remember for months huge maps were unplayable because you needed to have larger empires to make up for the higher technology costs etc that the bigger maps had, but the corruption scaled very similarly, and distance was treated identically (points per number of tiles). The multiplayer was also really gamey, with clear imbalances and best units beyond that problem.

I also hated how colonial expansion was usually completely messed up because you needed to be able to rush an FP on the other side of the world to have any chance of those colonies being viable.

That being said, happiness as bureaucracy is even less fun than corruption was. At least with corruption it would make the new city completely unviable. Happiness as bureaucracy tanks large portions of your empire, and on slower speeds its completely unfun sitting around and waiting for the techs to be able to expand. It's also a massive problem for multiplayer unless you use a symmetric start map. With the difficulty set fairly high there are some luxuries (gems, gold, silver) that are insanely good in start positions because you don't have to go out of your way on the tech tree to get them (they come for free on the way to iron working).

Most of the time Civ V feels like I'm not playing against the AI, I'm playing against a little smiley face at the top of my screen that is so close to frowning that it restricts most of my options.

I completely agree with this. Happiness is a poor mechanic, is way too easy to "game", and it swings way too far from one end to the other: I pick a civic and suddenly my empire goes from -10 to +10, with -10 being COMPLETELY CRIPPLING, you lose battles you should win, and +10 being totally great, INCOMING GOLDEN AGE.

Totally stupid, unbalanced mechanic. Civ 4 had the best system with maintenance costs.

 

[LegioCorvus]

735BC to the fifth century AD is still over a thousand years. Rome was not a quick and sudden conquest, they were almost constantly at war for a few centuries while they slowly conquered Italy, after Italy they absorbed, Gaul, Britannia, Iberia, Carthage, Greece, Egypt, and much of the near east, in another few centuries of warfare.

Rome was weaker than the Etruscans, and roughly equal to the Carthaginians, and they still beat both of them. If Rome had maintained the grand strategy they had at the beginning of the empire, I think they would have lasted longer.

Rome didn't really expand past Italy until 202 BCE when they finally took the Iberian peninsula (parts of modern Spain) from the Carthaginians after the 2nd Punic War. That could be argued to be the beginning of the "empire," though it was still a republic at the time. Even then, that really remained a frontier land that wasn't fully conquered until the time of Augustus.

---Removed a bunch of history not relevant to discussion---

They only really expanded into non-Mediterranean Europe with Julius Caesar, and had reached their ultimate expansion with Trajan circa 100 CE. That's roughly 300 years of expansion that started to crumble with the Roman Crisis of 235-284 CE, the first of Rome's many deaths, just ~130 years later.

Funnily enough, the greatest advantage of the Romans defensively was their fortifications. Hannibal had free reign of the entire Italian peninsula during the 2nd Punic War, and killed an unprecedented number of Italic citizens... but he didn't have the ability to siege and do anything with his victories. Same with the Germanic tribes that would often cross into Gaul centuries later, when the Rhine Legions would make one of their annual marches on Rome to make their leader emperor. The Germanic tribes would kill and maim, but have no idea how to siege a city. It's also how they managed to hold onto Asia Minor for so long, and... whoops. Getting lost on a tangent again.

Also, the Romans really weren't equal to the Carthaginians. At least not when it originally came to naval warfare. During the first Punic War, the Romans built something like 700 ships. Many never made it out of the harbor, as the Romans had little idea of what they were doing. Like so many of their early wars, they won on pure determination. They just did not stop building ships until they defeated Carthage.

 

[Drakarska]

It also didn't help Rome by having successive Pyschopaths on the throne.

 

[Zydor]

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.

Here's the thing. Thats totally irrelevant. Most dont claim to be a car mechanic or car designer, but as a Consumer I know what I want to buy, what I want to experience, and am prepared to try out new things to enhance all that.

You see, here's the thing. Nobody can read my mind, despite claims by some to know better than I what I am thinking, as thought transference is still in the realms of Sci-Fi and a possible Civ Future Tech.

The thing is .... if it works, and I like it, I'll buy it. If it doesnt, and I dont, I wont. Tends to be the thing with most of the commercial world, consumers are fickle that way.

You see, here's the thing. In the games world demos cut off before gaining depth. and little is known about real quality until you buy it

Its an annoying thing really, real world stuff does get in the way of theoretical ..... things.

 

[Azazell]

How to enter city view screen in the mod of Rhye??

 

[Me,myself,and,I]

How to enter city view screen in the mod of Rhye??

Um... By entering the view screen, like just like it normally is. Double click the city.

Well LegioCorvus, I was sorta simplifying to cut down on the length of my off topic.
I would say that Overall the Romans were Carthage's equals, but no they really had no clue what they were doing, they needed to take apart a wrecked Carthaginian ship, just to figure out how to build the darn things. Because ya' know, the Greek colonies in southern Italy had nothing worth learning. after all the Greeks are the worlds greatest swimmers.

I think that the document the OP has kindly dug up for us is quite interesting.

 

[Azazell]

Um... By entering the view screen, like just like it normally is. Double click the city.

.

I mean this city view ---> http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/software/detail-page/civ3-2-lg.jpg Please look

 

[Drakarska]

I mean this city view ---> http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/software/detail-page/civ3-2-lg.jpg Please look

you click on the eyeball. I believe it's in the city screen.

 

[Samez]

it's not possible to view the cityscreen in C3 mods, but I guess it's a bit OT

 

[Drakarska]

it's not possible to view the cityscreen in C3 mods, but I guess it's a bit OT

Really? Interesting. Which mod? I haven't had a problem with Rhys, haven't tried in the Star Trek mod though. May have to experiment.

 

[Dun Malg]

One thing I did like about Civ III was the colonies. No need to build a city in the middle of Arctic tundra just to get access to a strategic resource

Yeah, that's pretty good. It made Single_City games much more reasonable. I believe there's a Civ IV mod that allows you to "claim" a square outside your normal cultural boundaries by standing a unit on it and clicking a "claim" button. You can then build a road to it plus whatever improvement is necessary to exploit the resource, and it remains yours so long as you camp the claiming unit on it and no other civ builds a city nearby.

I can't recall the mod.... it's rolled in with "Rise of Mankind-A New Dawn" mod package....

A similar mod surely could be implemented in Civ V. Sadly, I just don't think it's worth the effort until the game is done updating.

 

[Horizons]

Most of the time Civ V feels like I'm not playing against the AI, I'm playing against a little smiley face at the top of my screen that is so close to frowning that it restricts most of my options.