civ 3 players will not move on

[Swein Forkbeard]

Cartoonish Graphics? If they're there than IGN and Gamespot sure didn't detect them. Empire Earth III, now that game has cartoonish graphics.

Reasons why you would move on to Civ4
1. You saw your main pet peeves addressed by Civ4.
2. You saw a game feature that you really wanted in Civ in Civ4.
3. You'd have played Civ3 for 3-5 years and got bored with it.
4. IGN and Gamespot both think Civ4 is better than Civ3. You want to play Civ3; just go and play Grim Fandango, Battlefield 2, Age of Mythology, or Rise of Nations instead.
5. You thought Civ3 was too easy and wanted more of a challenge.

Resons why you would stay with Civ3
1. You'd only played Civ3 for 2 years at maximum and thought "this is the best game ever made; there's no way anything could be added in and made better."
2. You saw your favorite game feature taken out in Civ4.
3. You felt way too overwhelmed by Civ4.

 

[Mirc]

Cartoonish Graphics? If they're there than IGN and Gamespot sure didn't detect them. Empire Earth III, now that game has cartoonish graphics.

Reasons why you would move on to Civ4
1. You saw your main pet peeves addressed by Civ4.
2. You saw a game feature that you really wanted in Civ in Civ4.
3. You'd have played Civ3 for 3-5 years and got bored with it.
4. IGN and Gamespot both think Civ4 is better than Civ3. You want to play Civ3; just go and play Grim Fandango, Battlefield 2, Age of Mythology, or Rise of Nations instead.
5. You thought Civ3 was too easy and wanted more of a challenge.

Resons why you would stay with Civ3
1. You'd only played Civ3 for 2 years at maximum and thought "this is the best game ever made; there's no way anything could be added in and made better."
2. You saw your favorite game feature taken out in Civ4.
3. You felt way too overwhelmed by Civ4.

Now let's see how this applies to me:

1. I've played Civ for over 8 years, starting with Civ1. I got Civ3 in 2002, continued playing both 1 and 3 for years.
2. I have no favorite feature, but I agree a huge number of good features were taken out
3. Haha. I played Civ4 for months (and not exactly few months), desperately trying to enjoy it. I got a very good knowledge of it; I was simply bored with it, in no way overwhelmed.

What I notice in your post however is that:

1. You seem to be unable to comprehend the fact that some people don't like Civ4 more than Civ3.
2. You seem to be unable to comprehend the fact that some people don't like Civ4 at all.
3. You blindly believe all experienced Civ players like Civ4 more than Civ3.
4. You like lists.

 

[T.A JONES]

I'd like to slip in a little quote from him I somehow found fitting in this context, taken from his Rhye's and Fall for Civ IV:

"Fortunately Civ4 is a much better game than Civ3, so it won't need as much rebalancing. But as it offers amazing modability, it would be a shame not to take advantage of it to add new aspects to the game. As a result, some "expanded" fetures are always in the works at any given time..."

You think you can use one great modder and part of the Fireaxis team to promote his opinion " CIv4 is better then civ3 as the end all to this debate, then walk away with the rest of the facts we posted unrefuted?

Wouldn't you first like to Hear other great modders veiws on the same topic? How bout from the makers of Rise of Rule (published in Civ3 Complete) What happen to their anticpated sequal done ont the 'greater mod version' Civ4 ? Ever wondered? Then theirs Rob from Anno Domini(company contacted him to include his work in Chronics) or Balancer Reloaded's Kingpin(published in Civ3 complete) and Embyodead's Middle age mod, a modern civ3 triumph that added things on a level Rhyes came nowwhere near replicating in Editer depth (Ex; vassels cor elimation system )

Can anyone say Rhyes mod was better then these works? ONe thing differant though is Rhyes connection to the company. Something he should be proud but by know means does he feel this makes his opinion trump other great modders in this same feild( or so I presume ) . Many of these guys left civ4 to make mods for a well received audience in the civ3.

Allready figured out that newer Processor are usually a lot faster than older ones, or are there still doubts??? I started with 3,5 MHz some 25 years ago, my latest one has 1,7 GHz. There seem to have been some minor inprovements over the years...

NOt sure where you going with this?
Heres reason some computer specs don' t mean anything with CIv4

32-bit gaming is going to come to an end. Not today. Not tomorrow, but a lot sooner than most people think.

That's because no matter how much memory your PC has, no matter how much virtual memory you have, a given process on a 32-bit Windows machine only gets 2 gigabytes of memory (if the OS had been better designed, it would have been 4 gigs but that's another story).

Occasionally you run into people in the forums who say "I got an out of memory error". And for months we couldn't figure it out. We don't have any memory leaks that we know of and the people who reported it had plenty of virtual memory. So what was the deal?

The problem was a basic misunderstanding on how memory in Windows is managed. We (myself included) thought that each process in Windows may only get 2 gigabytes of memory but if it ran out of that memory, it would simply swap to the disk drive. Thus, if a user had a large enough page file, no problem. But that's not how it works. After 2 gigabytes of memory, the system simply won't allocate the process any more memory. It simply fails and you will end up with a crashed game.

 

[ainwood]

The problem was a basic misunderstanding on how memory in Windows is managed. We (myself included) thought that each process in Windows may only get 2 gigabytes of memory but if it ran out of that memory, it would simply swap to the disk drive. Thus, if a user had a large enough page file, no problem. But that's not how it works. After 2 gigabytes of memory, the system simply won't allocate the process any more memory. It simply fails and you will end up with a crashed game.

Yep. And even in 64-bit OS's, some of the memory addresses between 2 GB & 4GB are reserved for device drivers, so you don't get the full benefit of all 4 GB anyway.

 

[Civinator]

And it seems, that Civ 4 is reaching these limits much faster then Civ 3 and therefore at least in this -important- point Civ 3 is the technical more advanced game (so this wasn´t planned by its creators).

These were the results of a discussion in the Civ 3 forums. In that discussion I made the speculation, that the "philosophy of small empires" in Civ 4 could be only an excuse by the creators of Civ 4, as they couldn´t deal with that problem above. A selling arguement, why they were not able to transport the core element of really empires, that is essential for the civ series, to Civ 4.

Of course as long as the civ series exist, there were games to see, if one can win the game while only holding one, three or five cities. But this always was an optional decision about gameplay the player could do. No preset limitation of the game as it seems it was necessairy for Civ 4 cause of the technical problems above.

The other selling arguement to deal with that technical problem is, that with the concept of a smaller world a lot of micromanagement for a player has fallen away. If this philosophy would be true, the best game of the civ series would be a game where I don´t have to switch on my pc. This would be really zero-micromanagement of Civ if you follow that -in my eyes wrong -theory consequently. Instead of improving the city governer (which would have caused Civ 4 to reach the technical limits even faster) it could be, that the creators of Civ 4 had to give up the central element of big empires to keep Civ 4 playable.

The fact, that I can play Civ 3 with really empires and that I´m not limited to a small handful of cities (may be caused in reallity by technical problems of Civ 4) is one of the points why I prefer Civ 3 over Civ 4.

 

[CyberChrist]

The fact, that I can play Civ 3 with really empires and that I´m not limited to a small handful of cities (may be caused in reallity by technical problems of Civ 4) is one of the points why I prefer Civ 3 over Civ 4.

I think you need to give cIV a more serious chance. Large empires (with a lot of cities) is quite possible in cIV, but you need to build up your trade, cities and improvements properly, as well as implement the right civics - and choose a leader with the right mix of traits to support your expansive nature.

Of course if you absoutely must have the very unrealistic massive stone age empires caused by the classic Civ III syndrome of "Settler Diarrhea" - then you are right that wont happen in cIV.

 

[mrt144]

changing the game for technical considerations and making it enjoyable to many people is actually really impressive. it's actually pretty innovative to come up with something good with constraints like that.

 

[Antilogic]

2. I have no favorite feature, but I agree a huge number of good features were taken out...

I have searched in this thread for a concise listing of the great features of Civ3 that were removed, but I can't seem to find them without references to spelling errors and apparent verbal brawls.

I got tired of Civ3's annoying micromanagement (with workers), and like Civ4's new health system over the old pollution system. The combat system for Civ4 is much more varied (and I think interesting) than the old Civ3 system. Religions were a big plus for Civ4, as were multiple leaders, and I think the trait design is better in Civ4 than Civ3. I vastly prefer the slower early expansion than the settler rushing of Civ3, because it gives me more time to do other things in the ancient era. Civics is another big improvement in Civ3...I was wondering why they didn't take that idea from SMAC and implement it in Civ3. But I'm glad they put it in 4...this feature allows you so much built-in customization with your government, and is relatively easy to use.

I'm not coming up with a single "good" feature of Civ3 that was removed in Civ4. As far as I see, it's a vast improvement.

 

[Civinator]

I think you need to give cIV a more serious chance. Large empires (with a lot of cities) is quite possible in cIV, but you need to build up your trade, cities and improvements properly, as well as implement the right civics - and choose a leader with the right mix of traits to support your expansive nature.

Of course if you absoutely must have the very unrealistic massive stone age empires caused by the classic Civ III syndrome of "Settler Diarrhea" - then you are right that wont happen in cIV.

Under lots of cities I understand 512 Cities on a map and a big part of them belonging to me at the end of a game. 512 cities on a Civ 4 map with an Athlon 3400 and 2 MB ram. Is this possible and if possible is this playable?

Nevertheless I give Civ 4 always a new serious chance. Yesterday I downloaded the Wolfsschanze mod for Civ 4 (from a very slow server) to see the newer modded Civ 4 ships in action. I want to see the things myself before speaking over them.

And I´m no fan of a "Civ III syndrome of Settler Diarrhea", as you call it. In my Civ 3 epic mod a settler is spawned out by the Palace all 20 turns but you start with two settlers. No massive stoneage empires and a very nice gameplay. Corruption is set to the lowest level for all governements and there are enough additional buildings to press corruption even deeper. Pollution is next to eleminated. Only pollution by nuclear bombs and volcanoes is remaining. One thing I cannot fix for random maps in Civ 3 is the unlimited railway movement.

 

[Napalm102]

And I´m no fan of a "Civ III syndrome of Settler Diarrhea", as you call it. In my Civ 3 epic mod a settler is spawned out by the Palace all 20 turns but you start with two settlers. No massive stoneage empires and a very nice gameplay. Corruption is set to the lowest level for all governements and there are enough additional buildings to press corruption even deeper. Pollution is next to eleminated. Only pollution by nuclear bombs and volcanoes is remaining. One thing I cannot fix for random maps in Civ 3 is the unlimited railway movement.

Nah, see thats not really Civ III anymore, since that mod takes out things that were there to limit your empire growth. It's like me taking out maintenance costs and helth out of the Civ IV. Mods make drastic changes to gameplay, often unbalanced changes, so lets stick to comparing "vanila" versions.

 

[azzaman333]

Nah, see thats not really Civ III anymore, since that mod takes out things that were there to limit your empire growth. It's like me taking out maintenance costs and helth out of the Civ IV. Mods make drastic changes to gameplay, often unbalanced changes, so lets stick to comparing "vanila" versions.

You don't even know what you're talking about. Taking health out won't do crap to Civ 4 until the Modern Era, and corruption never limited empires unlike maintainance, it just limited the outer cities ability to produce anything.

Also, you're actually helping the argument for Civ 3 because for many people the main reason they like Civ 4 is its complete moddability.

I'm not coming up with a single "good" feature of Civ3 that was removed in Civ4. As far as I see, it's a vast improvement.

I have three I can instantly think of that were changed significantly for the worse, excluding the graphics.

1) Artillery.

First of all, artillery shouldn't be able to defend against anything from up to 2 eras previous to it's level. Trebuchets would be destroyed easily by a bunch of warriors, since the people operating the trebuchet are trained to do that, not use a sword/spear/axe/whatever to fight off a squad of warriors.
Secondly, they should never have been able to kill a unit. This has finally been changed in BtS fortunately, but before then it was feasable to have an army comprised 80% of catapults, 20% assorted units to cover all bases on defense.
Thirdly, they are too strong in the context of the game. Halving both collateral and regular damage by all seige units (excluding the Machine Gun) would keep them vital for battle to weaken enemy stack, but prevent situations were you could rely on large numbers of them to win the game. This was also a problem in Civ 3, but they went the wrong way in trying to fix it.

2) The Army unit.

The AI can't use it properly, so let's remove it completely! Terrible decision on Firaxis' part, and was made worse when in Warlords they introduced the Great General, who turned units in the rather pathetic Warlord which is basically only ever used to make a Medic 3 unit and unlock West Point.

3) Lack of an editor.

Don't bother mentioning the World Builder, that thing is massive pile of crap.

What is desperately needed in Civ 4 is a Civ 3 style editor where you can edit the game (and create maps) without having to dig through pages and pages of code. As it is, Civ 4 has a couple of excellent mods which are much better than any Civ 3 mod, but there are more very good mods for Civ 3 than there are mods for Civ 4 in total because of the need to know a number of programming languages to make changes.

 

[jessiecat]

Nah, see thats not really Civ III anymore, since that mod takes out things that were there to limit your empire growth. It's like me taking out maintenance costs and helth out of the Civ IV. Mods make drastic changes to gameplay, often unbalanced changes, so lets stick to comparing "vanila" versions.

Seems to be two types of player in this thread (at least). Those who like
to mod (be it Civ 3 or Civ 4) and those who take the game as it is and
play within those set parameters. I've nothing against those who want
to tweak the game in every way to suit themselves, but there is a real
danger with alterring the game too far. At what point does making the
game perform to your specs fall over the line of cheating?
I totally agree with modding if you're trying to reflect some historical
reality as in a scenario. Changes to building, units, tehnologies etc. is
sometimes inevitable. By why would you want to, in a random game?
I suspect that the vast majority of players approach any game, whether
it's Civ or not, by saying "these are the rules", "this what you have to
do to win" and "how can I achieve that goal?". The last thing which would
occur to them would be "How can I shift the goalposts to suit myself?".
I'm not suggesting people shouldn't do any of these things, but If I wanted
a game where I designed everything to my likes, I'd choose Sim City or
the Sims. Just my opinion. Agree or disagree at your leisure.

 

[gps]

You think you can use one great modder and part of the Fireaxis team to promote his opinion " CIv4 is better then civ3 as the end all to this debate, then walk away with the rest of the facts we posted unrefuted?

You were advertising Rhye's mod here. So I thought his work and his opinions were of importance to you to you. But then again, he also got blinded by the stunning but unbearable 3ds of Civ IV and totally overlook the game mechanics. What a moron...
Sorry Rhye - should you ever read this, really no offence intended.

P.S.: Facts? Really don't want to lecture you, but I guess some quotes are necessary again, this time taken from Wikipedia:

"Generally, a fact is something that is the case, something that actually exists, or something that can be verified according to an established standard of evaluation."

"An opinion is a person's ideas and thoughts towards something. It is an assessment, judgment or evaluation of something. An opinion is not a fact, because opinions are either not falsifiable, or the opinion has not been proven or verified."

Me liking Civ IV better than Civ III or you prefering Civ III over Civ IV are OPINIONS. Neiter is a FACT. And here we are back again at my assumption of a 'pointless but weirdly entertaining bickering'. Enjoy! I still do...
And btw.: I really don't have any want or need to refute any or some or all of your so called 'facts'. I don't have a problem with people prefering Civ III. To some extend I can even understand them. The only thing where I sometimes raise my voice is if people come up with strange 'facts' about Civ IV. But only because of the entertainment (and you sure are an entertaining poster here), not because I have any ambition to prove anything. I don't know you, I don't care about you or your gaming habits. Do whatever you want, have whatever opinion you want, that sure wont keep me awake at night...
Still there is one thing I'd like to know - just for the sake of entertainment: someone posted (marciv, 2 posts further down), you'd be a great asset regarding Civ V. Do you guys really think, Firaxis will make a 180 degree turn, throw out all the 'b*llsh*t' they invented for Civ IV and give you the Über-Civ III you missed out on Civ IV? Because they finally realize reading all your entertaining posts, T.A. Jones was right and they were wrong??? Yeah? Incredible...

NOt sure where you going with this?
Heres reason some computer specs don' t mean anything with CIv4

Yes. I got that. My daily work consists to some extend of database design for a big car producing companay. So the only thing you could Civ IV blame for is, that it has to store away much more information regarding culture and religions and corporations for EACH SINGLE TILE of the game and also has to use all these informations when calculating the moves of each nation in the game. In database terms that creates a huge n-dimensional heap of data that at a given point blows the memory limit of 32 bit operating systems when raising the x-, y- and z-axis (map-heigt, map-width and nations) to ridiculous values - because growth is exponential. If you don't have that sophisticated gameplay (as for example in the predecessor of any given up to date computer game) you don't need as much data and so you probably can stuff a bigger map with more nations into the limited memory. And btw. 3d graphics usally needs even less memory than 2d because it consists to a large part of point coordinates and some textures. Animated bitmaps are usually much more memory consuming. Don't bother me to prove. Anyone who has some programming background will tell you, just ask them.
But then again, I am one of those dumbwits in the bondage of Civ IV and it's nothingness of polished 3ds - and I am clearly not a technical person either, so how could I possibly know anything???

P.S.: Another quick though regarding large empires. I often hear that complaint that Civ IV does not allow large empires. I also hear the complaint Civ IV to be a backstep in reality. Both do not go together. Earths history proves that no Civilization EVER was able to achive a domination victory. It's possible and sometimes rather easy to achive domination in Civ IV on SMALLER maps representing limited areas like the mediterranen. That's fun and gives you lots of points. On huge multinationed globes it's hard, nearly impossible. Anyone see the big picture? No??? I give you a hint: Realism!!!
Btw. no one ever mentioned one of my favourite improvements of Civ IV: the multitude of map scripts. Inland sea, plains, high plateau, dessert, continents, hemispheres, terra... I really LOVE that kind of stuff.

P.S.S.: I hate it to dizz Civ III, which I really liked to play. But sometimes you have to stand up to your believes.

 

[Civinator]

I have searched in this thread for a concise listing of the great features of Civ3 that were removed, but I can't seem to find them without references to spelling errors and apparent verbal brawls.

I got tired of Civ3's annoying micromanagement (with workers), and like Civ4's new health system over the old pollution system. The combat system for Civ4 is much more varied (and I think interesting) than the old Civ3 system. Religions were a big plus for Civ4, as were multiple leaders, and I think the trait design is better in Civ4 than Civ3. I vastly prefer the slower early expansion than the settler rushing of Civ3, because it gives me more time to do other things in the ancient era. Civics is another big improvement in Civ3...I was wondering why they didn't take that idea from SMAC and implement it in Civ3. But I'm glad they put it in 4...this feature allows you so much built-in customization with your government, and is relatively easy to use.

I'm not coming up with a single "good" feature of Civ3 that was removed in Civ4. As far as I see, it's a vast improvement.

Antilogic, for your first sentence you are risking a ban. Why must some people who speak for Civ 4 always start such .... statements?

For the rest of your post:

I think about ICS and pollution I have posted enough in my last post. If you want to get more detailed information about the fix of pollution in Civ 3 you can get it. All this fixings can be done easily with the Civ 3 editor.

The combat system of Civ 4 in my eyes is very unrealistic for an epic game. It´s better suited for a RPG. The return of the "Civ 2-pikeman-flag" is a good feature in Civ 4 but to to use it in that extension as it was done in Civ 4 is bad, as it is a huge advantage for the defender if you always must attack the best defender in a stack. Catapults and artillery are working completely wrong. The way they are working is nearly exact the same way as a fix I did suggest for AI land-artillery in Civ 3. In my eyes this is o.k. if a modder has to fix the wrong AI behaviour of landarty with an editor, but this easy solution isn´t worthy for programmers who have the code for that program.

The way religions in Civ 4 are set is really boring for me. I think I have a much better setting for them in my Civ 3epic mod. Here even the christianization of South American civs on random maps is possible. Here I can only speak about the religion in Civ 4 and its expansions, not about it in mods.

Multiple leaders are a feature of Civ 3. In my Civ 3 epic mod you also have great artists (units produced by academies that have a high shield value that can´t be disbanded but can be sacrificed), great engineers (units that can complete buildings and small wonders) and great generals (units that can build armies). Great generals at present are disabled in my mod as armies in Civ 3 are broken (what is no big loss in my eyes).

I don´t like these traits, at least not as part of a governement. I know here I´m a minority, but it´s my game I want to play. Let the kings be kings again.

And now to some features that are cut out in Civ 4:

Easy modding was cut out. There is no editor in Civ 4. With that in my eyes completely unnecessairy 3d-engine, Civ 4 became a modding-utopia. I need a modding reality. SDK in Civ 4 is nice but it has no use for me, when I can´t do the graphics I need for my mod/scenario. If I need a special building for a Civ 3 scenario I can go to the internet, take one of mostly hundreds of pictures that suit the 128x128 and 32x32 format and have exactly that building for my scenario or mod without big problems. The same with other graphics. With Civ 4 I have lost my freedom of modding and can only hope what others are doing. The loss of freedom and independence is a lot in my eyes.

True bombardement was cut out. In Civ 3 the AI for landarty was spoiled. But seaartillery and bombers did work well. There is much more fun with these units in Civ 3 as in Civ 4, so for landarty I have to use a fix that is similar to the setting in Civ 4 (what in my eyes is o.k. for a simple modder, but a shame for programmers). War in my eyes is handled better in Civ 3.

In Civ 4 you don´t have a working merchand marine. Transport ships only exist to carry troops. There is no use for them to carry tradegoods to their homecities. In Civ 3 this is possible with the "revers-capture-the-flag- setting" in the editor.

The next point is very subjective: Tons of existing nice Civ 3 graphics were cut out and I got only a handful of -in my eyes- mostly not very well looking Civ 4 units.

Civ 4 looks much more cartoonish as Civ 3, so the start of this in my eyes bad feature was in Civ 3.

These are only some points while trying to give you a spontaneous answer.

 

[marciv]

I do hope that King Flevance and T.A JONES continue to support the game should we have a Civ 5, as their depth of experience of the game and contributions to this site can only add to it.

 

[Civinator]

Nah, see thats not really Civ III anymore, since that mod takes out things that were there to limit your empire growth. It's like me taking out maintenance costs and helth out of the Civ IV. Mods make drastic changes to gameplay, often unbalanced changes, so lets stick to comparing "vanila" versions.

What is bad to replace a not so good working element to limit empire growth by a much better element that gives a better gameplay? In Civ 3 this is easily possible.

About gamemechanics and gamebalance: In the epilogue of the Civ 4 handbook there stands a short and sharp analyses of the gamemechanics of Civ 3 and Civ 4 by Soren Johnson. When I did read it, I mostly could say, "this can be done with the existing Civ 3 too". For me the epilogue in that handbook was the best part of Civ 4.

As the theme of this thread is "Why Civ 3 players will not move on", I think it´s legitim to compare my mod with Civ 4. You can also name me one good mod for Civ 4, which gets rid of these 3d-graphics that limit me so much in Civ 4 and where I can use my Civ 3-graphics.

 

[Napalm102]

You don't even know what you're talking about. Taking health out won't do crap to Civ 4 until the Modern Era, and corruption never limited empires unlike maintainance, it just limited the outer cities ability to produce anything.

Um.....I'm gonna have to disagree with you on this point. When you build cities that are uselless becasue they will never ever produce anything, in my book it means that the empire is limited. I mean in the end the only really productive cities in Civ II were the ones in the first two rings around your capital. The other were there basically to run an occasional specialist and to count towards free unit support. Nah I much prefer Civ IV way, where evry city has a very specific role to play in your empire.

 

[azzaman333]

Um.....I'm gonna have to disagree with you on this point. When you build cities that are uselless becasue they will never ever produce anything, in my book it means that the empire is limited. I mean in the end the only really productive cities in Civ II were the ones in the first two rings around your capital. The other were there basically to run an occasional specialist and to count towards free unit support. Nah I much prefer Civ IV way, where evry city has a very specific role to play in your empire.

Then you should've specified that.

FWIW, every city in Civ 3 could be made useful with fresh water, just irrigate around the city and hire specialists on the extra food made.

 

[CyberChrist]

You don't even know what you're talking about. Taking health out won't do crap to Civ 4 until the Modern Era

Eh? Unless there is a point here I am unable to spot then you seem to be the one not knowing what you are talking about here. Health can actually be a fairly big growth preventer until you got all those health bonuses and buildings up and running. In the later parts of the game health is less of a problem - least of all in the Modern Era.

 

[azzaman333]

Eh? Unless there is a point here I am unable to spot then you seem to be the one not knowing what you are talking about here. Health can actually be a fairly big growth preventer until you got all those health bonuses and buildings up and running. In the later parts of the game health is less of a problem - least of all in the Modern Era.

Fine, change Modern to Industrial. I just consider any time after Factories the modern era.