If you play Civ3 and Civ1, which is harder? more fun? less involved?

[stwils]

Well, I play Civ1 and Civ 3. And sometimes I wonder why I don't just stick with Civ1, as there seem less details to learn, less micromanagement - it seems more straightforward.

On the other hand, I love the graphics of Civ3 and choices of map size etc.

To be really honest with you, I don't play either game very well. I don't seem to stick with a long game. I'd love it if there were some short term game goals so you could play shorter games.

I tried two SG games. They were fun because I had team mates and we talked about the game as it went along.

Sometimes I think I ought to play either Civ1 OR Civ3 - spend a few months truly mastering ONE of them. But I love them both.

So am I shooting myself in the foot trying to play both? Can you manage to play both until you really master one or the other? Or can playing both enhance your learning experience?

It seems maybe Civ1 has the basics of the game and maybe I'd be better off working on that game alone. On the other hand, Civ3 is so beautiful and so much fun...

Advice please?

stwils

 

[Alex Johnson]

I can't advise you. I'm in the same boat. I play both. I used to be a master of 1 and couldn't even start with 3. Then I stopped playing for years. Came back last year and did okay, but not great, at both.

For me, Civ1 is better because it is small, fast, and not rife with time wasting animations. The game is simple and straightforward. If you want a war, that's almost all you can do with 1, so it is really good for that. I can build an empire of a dozen cities and conquer the world, and those cities don't take long to maintain. But Civ1 is kind of ugly and the sound is terrible (I can only get IBM sounds to work in Windows). The maps are too big. And diplomacy is pointless except as a cheat to stop the enemy from attacking you for a turn or two before you get your armies ready to conquer.

For me, Civ3 is better because it is so much more refined. Graphics are perfect, as is sound. I can change my world size and chose between pangea or islands instead of just random mess. Culture is interesting and I love seeing it on the map and the occasional city flip. And diplomacy is necessary and worthwhile as you can get maps, money per turn, luxuries, and REAL treaties. But the game is much more complicated and masters have shown the best strategies for high levels are really stupid (cities every other square, no culture, no large cities, stacks of 30/50/100+ units). Managing a large empire takes ages and the work needed to get a large city planned and organized is way too much. Corruption is unmanagable in the unpatched game (which I prefer over the later versions where they changed many of the rules and wonders). And the jump in difficulty levels is very fast and irregular, unlike Civ1 which is very gradual from level to level.

I love both games. If I had to chose between them, I'd probably chose Civ3. If I could build the perfect mutant, I'd start with Civ3 and provide options to make it more like Civ1: some way to simplify and speed up city and empire management, smooth out the difficulty level progression, cut corruption in half, and introduce a fast-game mode where I could sit down and play a whole game instead of taking a month for each game.

 

[hydraulics]

If you really want to master one of them I would stick with Civ1, since it's much easier than Civ3. There are less rules, diplomacy is non-existent, the combat system is basic.

I'm currently playing on Civ4 for most of the time, but I still play Civ1, 2, 3 and even SMAC! I haven't enough time to try hard and master any of them, so I just have fun at a medium-high level, even though it does get a bit confusing sometimes with five different tech trees in my mind...

 

[tomsnowman123]

Civ1 is simple goodness, Civ 3 had too many micro-management issues for me. Civ 1 is simple, straightforward, and very enjoyable to me.

 

[trada]

I play civ1 because it's the only one I have time for. Civ3 is much too long to play and even if I took up my entire 40 minutes on the family computer a night quota it would be an age before I finished a game. Plus I want to save that 40 minutes for things such as email, MSN and forums.

I love the way you can play little goals for yourself in civ1. That really keeps me going. Thinking: Okay, I'm going to try and colonise that land but I might need an army or two with my settlers to fend off any naitives or Once I research Metalurgy I will be able to take on the Egyptians. and such. It's fun like that. Little steps make an epic game more epic.

And I do have civ2 and civ3 but I haven't been able to break into them. Mostly because of time. However, with civ1, I can snuggle up in bed, plonk my 1993 laptop on my lap and forget the real world for a night. It's magical.

 

[trada]

(double post)... yeah..

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

It would be great if they took our comments to heart when designing the new civ games, a mix of 1 and 3 would be ideal, it seems that they tried to do that with IV, but alas, the newest addition to the civ stage sucks big monkey cahone's.

 

[stwils]

It would be great if they took our comments to heart when designing the new civ games, a mix of 1 and 3 would be ideal,

A beautiful thought, Cheezy.

stwils