Some issues I've noticed playing the 1.29f patch. Clean install of Civ3, never modded, running on a P2-350, Win98, DirectX 8.1a, Voodoo3 card with 3rd party drivers, AudioPCI 64V soundcard, 192 megs ram.
1. Game is quite stable considering the age of my hardware, it only crashes once every 15-20 hours of gameplay. But my last crash I went to reload from autosave and the game wouldn't load. Turns out every autosave file was at 0 bytes. Autosave was working earlier during this same game, and has been working ever since on new games, no clue why this happened.
2. Diplomacy screen shows I can make a trade deal with a civ, upon entering diplomatic negotiations no possible trade deal is shown.
3. A trade item (like Dyes) can show as 0 free to trade in the diplomacy screen and yet you can select on it and trade dyes. In this case the 0 is the incorrect part, as I knew I had free Dyes to trade (which is why I tried it even though it said 0).
4. There is a bug with some diplomatic negotiations with the computer (I've noticed it with peace negotiations). What happens is that you get a deal that is almost acceptable (or even acceptable) then you add something to it on -your- side and the status jumps to 'would probably be insulted'. I read a few posts back that this is the computer being uncertain about GPT offers from the player, well, this happens with -any- offer: tech, cities, lump sums of cash, it doesn't matter. Here is a specific example: I'm going for a peace treaty with England, their side has Peace Treaty and 2 of their cities on it, my side has Peace Treaty. The deal will probably be accepted. I then add 500 gold to my side (not GPT, cash), and the deal is rejected as insulting. Adding anything at all to my side, in fact, results in the deal being considered insulting. This is a repeatable issue, every peace treaty I negotiate always displays this behaviour.
5. I was in a war as a democracy and war weariness started causing unhappiness in about 10 of my cities. Got the popups, choose 'give them some entertainment'. Next turn, 2 of the cities were in continued riots. Did some checking, it seems that the 'give them some entertainment' function doesn't work if more than one new entertainer is needed. So this function is currently unreliable under war weariness (normal city growth can't produce 2 unhappiness in a turn as far as I know of, so either war weariness can or those cities grew by 1 -and- hit war weariness in the same turn).
6. Got a divide by zero error once when trying to bring up the Histogram screen, only seen this once, didn't show up again when I reloaded from autosave.
7. Not sure whether this is a bug or lack of a feature, but thought I'd mention it: when your workers clean up a pollution square that previously had workers on it, those workers aren't reassigned. Which means every single time you clean up pollution you have to open up the relevant city screen and manually reassign the workers. Considering the vast number of times you have to do this over the course of a game when you have even a middlin' number of cities this is pretty annoying. Whenever pollution is cleaned up inside a city's radius the computer should automatically check to see if a citizen should be reassigned to work there.
8. This one isn't a bug, but since I haven't complained about culture flipping, editor diplomacy, or modding I figure I'm due this one little indulgence: I'd like an option setting in Preferences for 'always reassign entertainers that are no longer needed'. It's irritating and inefficient to constantly have to check each and every city you have in order to manually reassign entertainers after war weariness (or any other unhappiness factor) wears off. I mentioned imping this as a Preference, because even though I can't think of a reason for doing so there might be people who want to have more entertainers assigned than needed at a given time (possibly as a preemptive strike against soon-to-be-occurring unhappiness).
This last is mostly just a comment: the AIs do still seem a little too friendly when it comes to trading with each other (this is on Regent difficulty), but they definitely aren't just giving away things left and right. The top AI civs all have the same techs 99% of the time (i.e. they trade everything with each other on a constant basis), but the 1 or 2 trailing AI civs won't tend to have all of them, which indicates that the AIs are asking -something- for their trades. Since this can be adjusted by the user it shouldn't be a big deal.
Combat resolution is horrible in this game, my God, did you cut and paste in the combat resolution code from Colonization?
I've got to try what one person mentioned and doubling (or even tripling) the unit hitpoints, maybe that way the constant statistical aberrations I see can be weeded out (and yes, I see them both for and against me, the AI gets screwed/benefited as well). If I never see a unit with an 80% chance of victory lose 5 times in a row again (theoretically a .03% chance of happening) it will be fine with me.
Kudos to the Firaxis team for doing so much patch work on this game, I appreciate it. And the game is -much- better for that work, too. So once again, thanks for the continuing effort to make this game better and better.
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