I just picked up the 'complete' civ3 pack that comes with the expansion over the weekend.
I'd first like to say that while I've heard of Civ for a while, I actually cut my teeth on Alpha Centuri and then later Call to Power 2 (which I enjoy very much).
Now I get the impression that Call to Power is somewhat looked down upon by civ players so don't hold that against me.
Anyway. I started my first Civ game on Monarchy, thinking it was the medium difficulty level in the beginning (after all, it's in the middle). Suffice to say by the time I got to around 1400AD I was sufficiently trailing the computer players and not really in a position to win the game.
I also had exceptionally poor luck during that game with rampant barbarian uprisings hindering my progress and so forth.
My second game I started as the Romans on "regeant", and it's so far considerably better.
I do not have the highest population (damn Chinese) but I am coming third overall and leading in tech. With Rome I powered straight through to Republic quickly (getting philosphy first and then instantly getting code of laws). I'm around 1100AD and I feel I am in an easy position to win this game.
Anyhow, I enjoy this game a lot. I played the original civ for a while but I got frustrated at it. The civ3 worker system isn't too different from the terraformers in Alpha Centuri, and I don't really miss the 'public works' system in Call to Power 2 (although I enjoyed that too).
However the combat system in the civ games (including AC) is really lacking. The whole Call to Power system is so far superior here I find combat in Civ bland and unenjoyable.
The whole army manager system in Call to Power made it exceptionally easy to build and manage large armies that you could organize into stacks.
Also the war readiness stances and so forth in CTP2 made the combat aspect something I miss.
Overall however Civ3 seems to have a much deeper 'strategy' element and diplomacy is very good.
It seems very buggy and unstable however for a game of such a calibre(a lot of my fonts are an aweful pinkish colour, civ3 vanilla crashes when loading scenarios, etc etc etc). Reading through these people 'resintalling' seems to be the common fix for everything.
Did this game ship with something like safedisc? (copy protection that causes the legit users grief and never stops piracy anyway, almost all games with something like safedisc never install properly among other problems)
After about a good 12 hours of my weekend being dedicated to playing this game I can safetly say it was a great purchase.
Now, onto wasting valuable company hours browsing this forum.
I'd first like to say that while I've heard of Civ for a while, I actually cut my teeth on Alpha Centuri and then later Call to Power 2 (which I enjoy very much).
Now I get the impression that Call to Power is somewhat looked down upon by civ players so don't hold that against me.
Anyway. I started my first Civ game on Monarchy, thinking it was the medium difficulty level in the beginning (after all, it's in the middle). Suffice to say by the time I got to around 1400AD I was sufficiently trailing the computer players and not really in a position to win the game.
I also had exceptionally poor luck during that game with rampant barbarian uprisings hindering my progress and so forth.
My second game I started as the Romans on "regeant", and it's so far considerably better.
I do not have the highest population (damn Chinese) but I am coming third overall and leading in tech. With Rome I powered straight through to Republic quickly (getting philosphy first and then instantly getting code of laws). I'm around 1100AD and I feel I am in an easy position to win this game.
Anyhow, I enjoy this game a lot. I played the original civ for a while but I got frustrated at it. The civ3 worker system isn't too different from the terraformers in Alpha Centuri, and I don't really miss the 'public works' system in Call to Power 2 (although I enjoyed that too).
However the combat system in the civ games (including AC) is really lacking. The whole Call to Power system is so far superior here I find combat in Civ bland and unenjoyable.
The whole army manager system in Call to Power made it exceptionally easy to build and manage large armies that you could organize into stacks.
Also the war readiness stances and so forth in CTP2 made the combat aspect something I miss.
Overall however Civ3 seems to have a much deeper 'strategy' element and diplomacy is very good.
It seems very buggy and unstable however for a game of such a calibre(a lot of my fonts are an aweful pinkish colour, civ3 vanilla crashes when loading scenarios, etc etc etc). Reading through these people 'resintalling' seems to be the common fix for everything.
Did this game ship with something like safedisc? (copy protection that causes the legit users grief and never stops piracy anyway, almost all games with something like safedisc never install properly among other problems)
After about a good 12 hours of my weekend being dedicated to playing this game I can safetly say it was a great purchase.
Now, onto wasting valuable company hours browsing this forum.
