After Heretic_Catas hard work on this mod, I figured he deserved some praise and feedback. Believe it or not, this post started off as just a This mod is great, thanks for it! note. But it metastasized. (Oh boy, did it get long.) I guess its now a full-blown review; I hope this is the right place to put it.
First, another disclaimer: Im new to Civ 3 mods, so if I said This is the best C3C mod Ive ever played, it would be pretty meaningless. Instead, heres a more meaningful line: Im going to be playing Heretic_Catas mod far more often than the standard engine. The mod is that good. Heres what I love about it, point by point:
It has a high replayability. Lets face it: The civilizations in Civ I and Civ II were pretty interchangeable. Sure, the Zulus were pushier neighbors than the Egyptians, and God help you if the Mongols camped just over the next mountain range. But for the player himself there wasnt anything to choose from between the civs. Civ III went a long way toward fixing that with the civ traits, but there was a downside: If your play style depends heavily on tactics that are enhanced by one or two traits, you tend to get locked into playing the same few civs over and over again. So all my Civ III adventures have mostly been an endless round of Egyptians, Persians, and Americans. (Yes, I dig the Industrious trait.) But Heretic_Cata enhances civ idiosyncrasies with added civ-specific wonders and improvements, which makes it far more tempting to jump out of the old ruts, just so you can see what amazing stuff your usual competitors get to play with.
It has ingenious new wonders, improvements, and resources. Besides being clever and useful, such new civ-specific wonders as The Golden Horde or The Temple of Shiva show a fine appreciation for what makes real-world civilizations distinctive. But the mod goes further with a whole host of new city improvementsmost of them keyed to specific resources. This makes city production decisions a lot more fun; every citys queue is not an identical run of
Temple Marketplace Barracks Courthouse Library Aqueduct Bank Cathedral University Colosseum Factory, punctuated only by the occasional unit or settler/worker build. This device also makes resourcesespecially the luxury resourcesmore important. Yeah, in the standard game its great to have five Fur or six Incense; or, rather, its great to have the surplus if the other civs will give you something good for them, and if they dont then that surplus is just wasted. Now, however, if that surplus is spread out among several cities, you can at least get some neat improvements out of them. It also gives you more incentive to trade with other civs in order to get access to
their resources.
The mod also shows ingenuity with the negative bonuses attached to wonders and improvements. Some of these can put you in a real dilemma. The Slave Market, for instance, gives a nice production boost. But, aside from any moral qualms you might feeland, truth to tell, I dont think Ill ever be able to build the Anti-Semitism small wonder!can your city really handle the unhappiness it generates? And what if Leonardos Workshop goes kaboom? (It did that to me. Yeah, I got kinda pissed, but I cheerfully admit that this very powerful Wonder needs a downside, and thats a brilliant downside to give it.) Its also nice that most of these negative bonuses come in the form of increased unhappiness rather than pollution. The mod has sufficient improvements to let you offset higher unhappiness ratings in the long run. Pollution (my number one bete noir in
all the Civ games) is always with you.
(BTW, I dont mean my crack about Anti-Semitism as a criticism of the mod. Its a brilliant addition, and I was ROTFL when I first found out I could build it. Besides, Im really glad this mod eschews the Roddenberry-esque Gee, humanity is just wonderful vibe radiated by the standard game. I also love such playful additions as the Holy Hand Grenade and other quasi-magical intrusions in the early ages.)
The new negative resources, like Oil Spills and Shipwrecks, are more of a nuisance than a hindrance, and I think more could be done with themmore on that later. But theyve got a real sparkle to them conceptually. I mean, say what you will about the production loss, but I think
every landscape is improved by the presence of some Haunted Ruins.
Also welcome are more Wonders that put standard city improvements in all cities. I rejoice in the Forum and Supreme Court of Justice wonders, for instance. By putting courthouses in every city, they solve a Civ weakness that has bugged me for a long time: the cities that need courthouses the most are the ones it is most difficult and expensive to build them in. The Eiffel Tower is another welcome addition, though its late placement means its most useful when youre playing world-conqueror in the games late stages.
More Wonders and improvements auto-build units. Civ III, especially in its middle stages, raises the old guns-vs.-butter dilemma, but this mod solves it. I love the fact that, if youre lucky enough to have or secure the right resources, you can build a respectable (though not overwhelming) army just by having one or two cities invest in some reasonably priced small wonders.
Now, I can hear the objections already:
The guns-vs.-butter dilemma is an inescapable part of the Civ experience; you have to balance between them and sometimes make difficult choices. Thats true, and its a valid point. But the concept of an auto-producing city improvement is too good to pass up; and C3C opened the door with the Statue of Zeus and Knights Templar. Having only two such wonders in the game, however, can itself be unbalancing. I had the misfortune in my last C3C game to be next door to a civ that built both the Statue and the Knights, and lemme tell you, it was
damned unpleasant. If I hadnt seen the problem coming and nearly throttled my own economic and scientific progress by throwing every city into Knights and Trebuchet production for about 30 turns, I would have been overwhelmed. So adding many more unit-producing wonders (most of which are small wonders) actually brings back some balance. But I should also admit that my liking this change goes back to my play style. As a builder/perfectionist, I like being able to concentrate on city development without worrying that my civ is, militarily speaking, swinging naked in the breeze.
Ships are improved. Giving industrial-age ships more movement points may be a consequence of Heretic_Catas preference for Large or Huge maps, but its nice to have even on smaller maps. I mean,
anything is better than a screw-driven warship that can only manage 6 squares in a turn. It reflects my biases more than anything else, but this change still gets a big thumbs up from me. Im also glad to see Privateers getting more hit points, which makes them more useful.
The graphics are gorgeous. I guess the credit here properly goes to Ares de Borg, but all praise to Heretic_Cata for using his package. The game-provided graphics have always been more functional than beautiful; the graphics gathered for this mod make each game look like a truly miniature world. This is probably less important for hard-core Civ warriors who only look at grasslands as a place to mine shields. But for builders like me, who like to see desert wastes blossom into gardens, the graphic pack makes the sometimes tedious middle stages of the game, when I concentrate on land improvement, extremely rewarding.
Granted, you can change the graphics for the standard game with a graphics package; the point is that this mod makes the dynamite changes for you.
(Full disclosure: I have since customized my own copy of this mod by substituting
ahenobarb/
Cilpots suburb mines, tweaking the pollution graphic, and making my own railroads. Again, I dont mean this as an implicit criticism of Heretic_Catas choices; they inspired me.)
Okay, thats a lot of praise. Is there anything that doesnt work or that needs improvement?
Not really, though I did stumble over a few issues that seem like glitches rather than problems. Ill talk about them at the end. For now Ill only mention two issues that give me pause.
The Conjuror. Its a neat idea, but Im slightly skeptical of its military utility. In the three games Ive played, Ive only built the Conjuror in one and didnt get much use out of him; my other military units were quite sufficient, thank you, for handling my ancient/medieval enemies. And by the time Tanks and Artillery came along, I could brush aside enemy Conjurors almost as though they were Spearmen.
Now, that probably has something to do with my play style; I usually go on the warpath only late in the game, and I do my best to stay friendly with my neighbors until Im ready to Rommelize their asses with an armored blitz. Other players might get more use out of it; Ill only note that players of my sensibility can sidestep the Conjuror with all the
élan of Bugs Bunny dodging a maddened bull.
More serious is the hole the Conjuror opens for Wonder production.
In Civ III, Sid Meiers team went out of their way to stop us from using runaway production to save shields spent on Wonders that rivals got to first. If you had spent 300 shields for the Sun Tzu wonder but the Hittites built it first, that was tough: you either shifted it to another Wonder or (more likely) you lost it by building a granary or something almost equally pointless. But the Conjuror costs 1000 shields, more than any wonder in the regular game or (I believe) in this mod. This means that when someone else grabs the only wonder you can build, you can save your investment by switching it to a Conjuror and trying to get the next Wonder-bestowing tech advance pronto. Again, you might lose shields if youve built a stockpile of 700 or 800 shields in the meantime. But being able to build JS Bachs Cathedral or Adam Smiths Trading Post in one turn is psychically salving for the wastage. And if you dont get that new tech in time? Well, at least youve got a Conjuror out of the deal.
Now, I actually
like this hole. But Im not certain whether it is intended, and I have to admit that Im not sure its in the spirit of the game. But Ill make a suggestion: It might be best to lower the Conjuror cost to, say, 300 shields in order to close off this cheat. This might also have the effect of making the Conjuror more militarily significant by making it more plentiful.
Settlers and Serfs/Workers/Colonists/Engineers. These are more expensive than in the regular game; Engineers, in particular, are hideously expensive, both in terms of population and shield production.
Our mod author has explained his reasoning behind this choice:
Heretic_Cata said:
The main reason for the upgrade is to slow the production of workers. (it's one of Rhye's dirty tricks for slowing the settler&worker overcrowding of the map)
I really hate it when the computer/player has a 20+ stack of workers that he uses to make anything in 1 turn.
Similar to this, there is no logic to upgrading a settler to a colonist. The colonist simply costs more.
I did because i hate the "settler factories" strategy.
It's really annoying when at the second half of the 2nd age, the huge-pangeea map is FULL of cities.
I won't have that crap in my mod.
I applaud this intent; I have the same
furious hatred of city-heavy continents early in the game. In fact, Id prefer to have a map with large empty spaces as late as the Industrial era, so that you could get a Colonization-type era going. But if Heretic_Catas device has slowed urban sprawl, Ive not noticed it. Or maybe the effect is less subtle than I would like: I mean, I would
really like to see it slowed. The problem, I suspect, is that the handicap can be too quickly overcome with improvements; if you irrigate the land around your original core cities and build granaries, its almost as easy for cities to get up to the 4-pop level as to the 3-pop level.
Raising the bar on Engineers so prohibitively high also doesnt seem to do much; by the time the game has advanced to the point Engineers are available, most of the land is already settled. This means that Engineers are useful only as terrain-improvers. Why is it so important to keep terrain improvement on a tight leash?
Making Engineers super-expensive has three consequences, none of which I suspect Heretic_Cata intends. First, while this might slow the computer civs terrain improvement down, the player himself is not handicapped if he anticipates this cost; he has only to invest
heavily in Serfs early in the game. For instance, Ive always tried for at least 1 worker per city, and usually more like 2 workers for every 3 cities. In this mod, Ive been trying for a serf-to-city ratio of 2:1, knowing that Ill be grateful in the late stages for the redundancy. Second, the real penalty comes
not by slowing down your ability to build railroads or irrigate marginal land, but by not being able to keep pollution under control. And third, captured Serfs (especially those from extinct civs) are tremendously valuable for building up cities. Being slow, theyre useless for working terrain, but if you upgrade them to Engineers and add them to an existing city, you can pop its population by 9 points.
These arent crippling problems. At worst, as Ive mentioned, they force you to adapt by churning out Serfs early in the game; and the last point is actually an advantage, though one probably not intended. Since Im not certain of how far Heretic_Cata intends to ****** the old infinite city sprawl problem, Im reluctant to offer suggested remedies. But Ill take my courage in both hands and toss out two modest suggestions and one
radical one.
The first modest suggestion is to add a fifth, late-in-the-game, worker-only unit (Construction Crew, or something like that). Its Engineer-like shield cost would make it expensive to produce; its low population cost (1 or 2) would make it insignificant as a population-enhancer; and it couldnt contribute to urban sprawl because it couldnt build cities. If you really need the terrain-enhancers, you could get them as long as youre willing to suck it up and pay the shield or treasury cost, but you wouldnt cripple your late-stage cities.
I have no idea if my second modest suggestion is doable, but I have seen mods and scenarios with this property, so here it is: Make jungles and mountains impassable terrain. Currently, the mod makes it impossible to build cities in a jungle square, which keeps jungles clean until late in the game. Making the terrain actually impassable would be an even stronger constraint that might close off whole sections of continents. Of course, it has other effects, too: it can trap a civ as effectively as if it were on another continent.
The really radical suggestion: Raise the population cost on Settlers early in the game to 5 or 6, not 3. This would slow things down to the point where even massive irrigation couldnt make a real difference. To be really evil, you might even raise the population cost to 7, so that only cities bordering a river or possessing an aqueduct could build Settlers. This would be historically accurate, as riverine civilizations were the ones that first really showed urban development on a widespread basis. To correct the extreme bias this would create against civs without a river by their starting location, you might introduce a very early and very cheap small wonder that would auto-produce Settlers at a rate that would keep them competitive with the river-based civs. Ill speculate shamelessly that such a steppe civ would fix on a strategy not so different from that of the historical Magyars, Bulgars, Franks, etc., and crank out nomadic military units until it had a Settler base large enough to support a settled existence. But, of course, whether the AI would be smart enough to build this wonder in its cities is not mine to guess, since I dont know what tricks you can do with the C3C editor.
(Oh, and why do I not know what you can do in a mod? Because Im playing on a Mac. Our old Civ3 editor sucks, and if our edition of C3C comes with an editor, I havent been able to find it.)
While Im offering the suggestions of a frustrated mod-maker, here are a few random lightbulbs that went off over my head while playing the game.
1. Civilizations can actually be stimulated by adversity, so how about adding improvements that actually make use of negative resources? Off the top of my head, just to illustrate the suggestion: (a) cities with Haunted Ruins could (with Free Artistry) build happiness-producing Poetry Cafes catering to all those Romantic poets who like swooning around moonlit ruins; (b) cities with Shipwrecks could (with Magnetism) build the Francis Drake small wonder that auto-produces Privateers (that prey on shipwreck victims); (c) cities with Oil Spills could (with Recycling) build pollution-combating Sewage Plants.
2. I
hate pollution, and would really like to see a small wonder that puts Mass Transit or Recycling in every city.
3. Id be curious to see how
Phall1007s Colonialism mod would interact with this one. Both seem to rely on the idea being able to build new cities late in the game, while recognizing that such cities, which are often very distant from the capital, are often pretty useless. It would also mirror the historically accurate fact that distant cities (especially those settled on far-off continents or annexed from other civs) have been treated as milch cows. You also wouldnt have to look after them so closely.
Finally, there are a couple of problems that might only be glitches. At least, Id be surprised if they were intended.
The Civpedia says that the Dora Railgun, the Fireball, and the Cruise Missile can move. However, I cannot get them to move in my games. The railgun is completely rooted to the city that builds it; it cannot move; it cannot be airlifted; it cannot be loaded into a ship. Being expensive, its likely only to be built in core cities; and if Im ever in enough trouble that my core cities need to use their railguns, then Im in enough trouble that railguns wont save me. Meanwhile, cruise missiles can be airlifted or carried in boats. But if they cant move by land, theyre almost too tedious to build and use. And that makes the otherwise delightful Aerospace Industry improvement just as useless. Fireballs arent the most useful unit, either, but at least their long range makes them useful unless your Altar of Fire wonder in a city maximally distant from your nearest enemiesas it was with me in my latest game.
The Civpedia also says that the Cannon Foundry can only be built in the capital. However, like every other auto-producing artillery improvement, it can actually be built in any city. I gather that the Civpedia is still a work in progress; I suspect the Civpedia is in error here.
In none of the games Ive played have I tried building the spaceship. However, I have noticed that SS parts become available in the production queue as their techs are researched, even without building the Space Program wonder. It seems to me that this is either a glitch, or the Space Program is redundant.
There are a several typos that pop up in the game. Im a former copyeditor by profession, so these bother me more than theyll bother most people. To tell the truth, I can live with preety for pretty (in the Civpedia entry for the Terrorist unit) and almost every other typo Ive spotted. But theres one that just sticks in my eyeball every time I open the production queue: the city improvement Artillery Foundry is spelled Artilery Foundry. Also, the Leonardos Workshop has exploded message actually refers to the Nuclear Power Plant. I dont know if this can be fixed, but Ill point it out in case it can be. If I hadnt noticed the warning in the Civpedia about the Workshops tendency to become violently airborne, Id have been baffled and enraged when it went kablooey.
Okay, this has been way too long, so Ill shut up now. So Ill just close again by saying what an awesome mod this is. Its almost like having a completely new edition of C3C. Thanks so much for the work and ingenuity.
![[party]](/images/smilies/partytime.gif "Party [party]")
And what a fine place to have your first post. 
mischief
(but several good things in the game weren't intended 
)
I don't get this part. 
. I am talking about the AI who seems to build them. I was cursing the rail gun repeatedly when a surgical-capital-blitzkrieg-wondercapturing-strike was severely halted by the railguns ... but not those in the capital, their range made it easy for those in neighbouring cities to bombard me relentlessly. My offensive was halted because my units were to battered to last the 2 turns i calculated it took to conquer the capital.
? I checked in the editor, and everything seems fine. (i didn't even change stuff for Apollo except the name kuz it was to americano-centric) 
He developed quite a reputation. 
