Civ3 with call to power

[fwfessly]

I don't know how many of you liked civilization Call To Power(CTP) by Activision.
I wasn't a big fan of it myself but i thought their ideas of diplomacy in CTP2 were good and how you save time by having one big battle (all units attacking vs all unit defending) instead of moving your troops to attack one at a time.

 

[Philips beard]

Terrible!
Terrible!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[AdHHH]

There were a few good ideas in the CTP series, but that wasn't one of them Im afraid

 

[Shirastro]

CTP was ok.
It would be great if they resolved the interface isue.....but they did not so...

 

[sampedestal]

admittedly, i never played the game. stackable units sounds cool though, as long as defensive units r cheaper so u can stack them too. other games have gotten unit stacks right, so its not just a ctp issue

 

[Duke_of_BOOM!]

No more workers! Public Works was a great idea, and should have made it into Civ3.
That and I like how the game dealt with slavery.
I did not like the gameplay in future eras, and the super terraforming.

CTP 2, IMHO was a much better game than Civ3 w/o Conquests.

 

[vesuvius_prime]

I haven't played CTP, so I cannot comment on it, I'm afraid, but I have played other games (MOO2, HMM4) where battles can be "zoomed" (i.e. tactical combat). I like that MUCH better than the current battles on Civ3. I find no fun in bumping my units into the enemy units and having a random number generator resolve the battles for me. Sadly, though, tactical combat doesn't seem to resonate well with a number of posters in this forum.

 

[ComradeDavo]

What does annoy me in civ 3 is when I stack loads of units and then have to attack one by one and end up having loads die without actually conquering the city. So I would like to see a way where having superior numbers would/could benifit when attacking.

 

[AdHHH]

Yes Comrade, but in fact if you chose what was in your stack better you probably would take the city

 

[sampedestal]

hmm4? again, defensive units must be cheap... i rarely build more than 2 cause i'm focusing on the attack army

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Must agree that I liked some elements of CtP, but by no means all of them!

1) Stacked combat was a big plus in my opinion, and is what I'd like to see in civ4. Even if you don't have a seperate screen like CtP, it should be possible to conduct combat at 'stack level', with some very basic 'maneuvers' thrown in. One good way of doing things would be the 'Birth of Federation' approach, where you could choose to go to the tactical combat screen, or simply allow the computer to resolve the battle for you!

2) Trade Routes: Oh YES!! For pirates to actually be useful, this would be a great addition to the game! However, pirating trade routes should NOT be automatic, as it would make it much too easy. This is where CtP got it wrong, IMHO!

3) Public Works: Definitely would like to see this in Civ4. However, I think that workers should be in the game too. My idea is that workers would be 'immobile', but attached to a particular city. The number of workers you assign to a 'terraforming' project would determine how quickly it got done. The PW budget would determine how many jobs you could do (as each task would have a given cost). Under this system, any unused workers could be allocated to any PW project outside its borders. Also, there would still be a chance for an enemy to 'capture' your workers and make them into slaves!

Personally, I could do without the whole lawyer and corporate unit, as well as the cleric and evangalist unit. Not only did they look silly, but many of their functions could have been done through a more abstract system!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

IMO, CTP should mainly be used as a cautionary tale of what goes wrong with the "more is better" idea. I much prefer the Civ3 design goal of keeping the game elements rather limited but making them work well together.

 

[Ballazic]

how about no and say we did.

 

[Duke_of_BOOM!]

IMO, CTP should mainly be used as a cautionary tale of what goes wrong with the "more is better" idea. I much prefer the Civ3 design goal of keeping the game elements rather limited but making them work well together.

Meh, the hellish micromanagement of workers, and the window dressing slavery gets (all good, no bad) drives me batty.

I want a more in depth game, not more of a simplistic one.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Meh, the hellish micromanagement of workers, and the window dressing slavery gets (all good, no bad) drives me batty.

I want a more in depth game, not more of a simplistic one.

I said I preferred the Civ3 design goal, not necessarily the execution. The execution could be improved upon, without straying from that design.

That said, "deep" and "simple" aren't opposites. CtP made things more complex with the apparently widespread misunderstanding that this was the only/best way to add depth. For example, the CtP trade route idea wasn't horrible in theory. But in practice, it made Civ3 worker management look like a picnic. Or at least it provided very little fun in return for the micromanagement. Public works suffered from a similar problem. I'm not saying CtP trade routes and public works might not provide the germ of an idea for a better Civ4. I am saying that CtP seems to have big on adding things but weak on executing them in an elegant and fun way.

Ideally, a cool idea not only is executed well, but interacts well with the other elements of the game. The CtP designers seemed to think that it was ok to just tack on elements. In short, the sum was less than the parts.

 

[Duke_of_BOOM!]

What problems with PW would you be referring to? I thought it worked well and sped up gameplay and compares very favorably to the way terrain modification is done in Civ1-3. Trade routes did need more development, yet it did bring something more to the game, it could have been fixed given time.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Public works did add an interesting element to the game. In some ways, it was even superior to worker units. However, IMO, it wasn't superior enough compare to moving the worker around and building something to justify a totally different system. It was its own kind of hassle. Now maybe if there had been a similar system in place for some other element of the game, the UI could have been streamlined a bit. As it was, it just didn't do it for me. It's not enough for an element to be good in itself. It has to add something to other elements in the game. (For example, culture affects warfare directly.)

I did think PW was one of the better elements of CtP. Heck, I thought trade routes weren't completely awful. But all the new CtP elements were just a hodgepodge that didn't really affect each other very much in a strategic sense. It's not as if PW made trade routes more interesting or vice versa. I'm not even saying that those two should have affected each other. But nothing was added that permeated the game like culture permeated Civ3.

That's why I say CtP is a bad model for Civ4, especially given the very conscious and obvious design intent with Civ3 to go for a few great elements that permeate rather than a few tacked on elements. I don't know what those few elements should be for Civ4--maybe civics and religion as first-class elements. But I suspect that if PW or trade routes is the germ of the idea, the implementation of it in Civ4 will be so different as to make the CtP relation almost hidden.

 

[embitteredpoet]

What I liked about CTP2, was the fact you could have three footings for your units. They could be set to 'Peacetime' 'A Middle One whose name I've forgotten' and 'Wartime'
It took several turns to switch between them. In peacetime your units had low hitpoints, but cost less to support and at war time cos loads but had their full hitpoints. I think this is a great system as you can still have loads of units, and don't get caught quite so badly with your pants down quite so badly, as you can be peaceful and still have a reasonable sized army.

 

[Pariah]

I agree with Aussie Lurker & Crazy jerome that the public works budget was a better idea than Civ3's workers. For one thing, you weren't limited by the number of workers you have time to build - only by the amount of money you could set aside. What I liked best was saving up a huge PW sum in anticipation of discovering railroad: then assembling an entire nationwide rail network in one go! Plus, it made it easier to clear land for agriculture and clean up pollution - the latter being very important when capturing industrialised AI cities, which had often ruined most of their terrain.

If religion is to be more significant in Civ4 than in its predecessors, then a Cleric-type unit (Prophet?) might be appropriate.

Collective combat with a pop-up battle view was also a big advantage. Stacking up to 12 units and sending them into battle together is more realistic than attacking (or defending) piecemeal. Having a retreat option in the battle view is also important. Has anyone checked out the thread on integrated FPS?

 

[Joey_Ramone]

Civ I and Civ II were my favorite games of all time, and when CTP came out I mistakenly thought it was Civ III and rushed to buy it. I've never been so disappointed in a game in my life; the game really sucked IMO, not only was it worse than the previous games, but I didn't like it at all.

I love Civ III. They didn't change too much but what they did change they made better. The whole idea of territory I really like, because I really hated having AI troops on my territory and not being able to do anything about it in the previous Civs.