Okay, after a long absence from Civ3 I went back to it a week or so ago to try it again. After half a dozen aborted games, I got a game with a great start position, on a continent all my own, which turned out to have plenty of luxuries and almost all resources. The other civs were all lacking some vital resource or another, chiefly coal which was almost all on my continent, and I figured I had it made.
Managed to settle most of my own continent and the bits I didn't I later got hold of in minor wars. Pretty soon I had so much gold I could afford to buy most techs, and by halfway through the modern era I had hit the front in the tech game.
But it was pretty much at this point in the game that I remembered all the things I hate about Civ3 that drove me away from it in the first place. I think they can mostly be summed up in one phrase: the user interface.
Basically, the action just gets buried beneath mountains of fiddly actions you have to take to complete your turn. Here's a few that come to mind:
(1) City production. When you get to the end game, you can churn out units in just one or two turns. This means you get the "shall we build this next?" query maybe 20 times per turn. The trouble is, the AI always asks you to build the wrong thing, meaning you have to manually select the thing you want to build.
Now you have to go into the city to do that, because the build queue is so long it's the only effective way to go about it. And even when you've done that, it's often hard to find the unit you want because there are so darned many to choose from by the end of the game. And it's not made any easier by the fact that the AI chooses to list the units you're least likely to want to build at the top (ie ships), and those you're most likely to want to build (buildings not yet done) at the bottom. In the middle somewhere are the land units which you most want to build in completed cities. So just selecting the next unit you want to build in each city becomes a big time consuming chore.
Of course, you can make a build queue, but because each time you complete a new tech you usually get a new building along with it, it means you have to keep going around changing your build queue every few turns. So the whole shebang is just a pain in the bum. And it could mostly have been avoided just by the game asking if you wanted to build the same unit you built last time!
(2) Big stacks. I'm trying to organize an amphibious invasion. There are so many units in the stack, they scroll right off the bottom of the screen. So you have to select the "more options" button at the bottom to get to stuff further down. But because this "more options" thing doesn't autorepeat, you have to click on it, again and again, to move the menu up one at a time.
Now this might be merely annoying except for one obvious problem, which is that the collective commands "wake all" and "fortify all" are right at the bottom of the menu!!! Which means that either you have to laboriously click through one item at a time to get to the bottom each time you want to wake or fortify the stack, or else you have to put up with doing it with individual units.
Again, most of this problem could have been easily rectified just by putting the collective commands at the TOP of the menu, where they are always available!
(3) Workers. Now I don't know if I've missed something, but I've yet to find a way to collectively give workers a command. That means I have to click on each individual worker, every turn, to command it. With maybe 40 or 50 workers, it becomes another huge chore.
Of course, you can automate workers, but then I find they always go and do something I don't want them to. For example, I have two spare coal tiles I don't want connected up to my economy, because I know as soon as I do that one of the big civs that doesn't have coal is going to demand it from me, and declare war if I refuse to hand it over. If I automate workers, the first thing they try to do is connect up all my unconnected resources. This means that I end up having to give individual commands to all my workers, every turn. Unless of course I just fortify them, but then there is always something else for them to do isn't there?
(4) Moving units as a stack. I've got a big stack of ships I want to move, so I hit the "move stack" command. I have to do this a couple of times at least because you don't want to move further than you can see. Okay, that's acceptable.
But some of the ships have a longer movement factor than others. So I have to be sure not to move the stack further than the slowest ship can go, or the stack will break up. But even if I do this I'm not out of the woods, because at the end of the move, there are still the ships with a longer movement factor asking to be moved further. Now I can fortify these, but then I am back at problem (2). Or I can leave them, but then the game will keep taking me back to the unmoved units in the stack, tempting me to forget that I've already moved this stack as far as I want to this turn.
Again, this problem - and the problem with workers - could have been easily fixed just by allowing you to create stacks that take commands as a single unit. The lack of such a feature ends up creating another nightmare of micromanagement for you to deal with.
(5) Autoselection of units. Now, I don't know if there's a way to turn this off, but the way the game yanks you from one unit/choice to another drives me nuts. You fortify a combat unit in a stack. Now you are yanked back to your homeland to a worker unit. Give it a command, now you are looking at a stack of boats to move. Then you are back at the next unit in the original combat stack. Repeat ad nauseam.
It would be nice if the game would stick with one stack at a time, or at least if you could stick with one type of unit at a time. I haven't been able to find a way to do this.
Now maybe there are solutions to some of these problems that I don't know about. But what I do know is that all these little problems add up to becoming a micromanagement nightmare. It took me several hours last night to make just half a dozen turns!
Civ3 is lots of fun early, but the deeper you get into the game, the more unplayable the whole thing becomes, until it just ends up being a mountain of micromanagement to wade through every turn. And all because of some appallingly bad UI features that could have been so easily fixed!
BTW, In reviewing the manuals for both Civ3 and Conquests I see that there are ways to partially avoid at least some of these problems - for example, I'd forgotten you can use city governors to build certain types of units. But overall, I don't think there really are fixes for many of the control problems the game presents you with. It's just a horribly badly designed UI, that's all there is to it. But if anyone knows of any fixes, or has any suggestions on how to cut down on all this mm, I'm interested to hear them.
Managed to settle most of my own continent and the bits I didn't I later got hold of in minor wars. Pretty soon I had so much gold I could afford to buy most techs, and by halfway through the modern era I had hit the front in the tech game.
But it was pretty much at this point in the game that I remembered all the things I hate about Civ3 that drove me away from it in the first place. I think they can mostly be summed up in one phrase: the user interface.
Basically, the action just gets buried beneath mountains of fiddly actions you have to take to complete your turn. Here's a few that come to mind:
(1) City production. When you get to the end game, you can churn out units in just one or two turns. This means you get the "shall we build this next?" query maybe 20 times per turn. The trouble is, the AI always asks you to build the wrong thing, meaning you have to manually select the thing you want to build.
Now you have to go into the city to do that, because the build queue is so long it's the only effective way to go about it. And even when you've done that, it's often hard to find the unit you want because there are so darned many to choose from by the end of the game. And it's not made any easier by the fact that the AI chooses to list the units you're least likely to want to build at the top (ie ships), and those you're most likely to want to build (buildings not yet done) at the bottom. In the middle somewhere are the land units which you most want to build in completed cities. So just selecting the next unit you want to build in each city becomes a big time consuming chore.
Of course, you can make a build queue, but because each time you complete a new tech you usually get a new building along with it, it means you have to keep going around changing your build queue every few turns. So the whole shebang is just a pain in the bum. And it could mostly have been avoided just by the game asking if you wanted to build the same unit you built last time!
(2) Big stacks. I'm trying to organize an amphibious invasion. There are so many units in the stack, they scroll right off the bottom of the screen. So you have to select the "more options" button at the bottom to get to stuff further down. But because this "more options" thing doesn't autorepeat, you have to click on it, again and again, to move the menu up one at a time.
Now this might be merely annoying except for one obvious problem, which is that the collective commands "wake all" and "fortify all" are right at the bottom of the menu!!! Which means that either you have to laboriously click through one item at a time to get to the bottom each time you want to wake or fortify the stack, or else you have to put up with doing it with individual units.
Again, most of this problem could have been easily rectified just by putting the collective commands at the TOP of the menu, where they are always available!
(3) Workers. Now I don't know if I've missed something, but I've yet to find a way to collectively give workers a command. That means I have to click on each individual worker, every turn, to command it. With maybe 40 or 50 workers, it becomes another huge chore.
Of course, you can automate workers, but then I find they always go and do something I don't want them to. For example, I have two spare coal tiles I don't want connected up to my economy, because I know as soon as I do that one of the big civs that doesn't have coal is going to demand it from me, and declare war if I refuse to hand it over. If I automate workers, the first thing they try to do is connect up all my unconnected resources. This means that I end up having to give individual commands to all my workers, every turn. Unless of course I just fortify them, but then there is always something else for them to do isn't there?
(4) Moving units as a stack. I've got a big stack of ships I want to move, so I hit the "move stack" command. I have to do this a couple of times at least because you don't want to move further than you can see. Okay, that's acceptable.
But some of the ships have a longer movement factor than others. So I have to be sure not to move the stack further than the slowest ship can go, or the stack will break up. But even if I do this I'm not out of the woods, because at the end of the move, there are still the ships with a longer movement factor asking to be moved further. Now I can fortify these, but then I am back at problem (2). Or I can leave them, but then the game will keep taking me back to the unmoved units in the stack, tempting me to forget that I've already moved this stack as far as I want to this turn.
Again, this problem - and the problem with workers - could have been easily fixed just by allowing you to create stacks that take commands as a single unit. The lack of such a feature ends up creating another nightmare of micromanagement for you to deal with.
(5) Autoselection of units. Now, I don't know if there's a way to turn this off, but the way the game yanks you from one unit/choice to another drives me nuts. You fortify a combat unit in a stack. Now you are yanked back to your homeland to a worker unit. Give it a command, now you are looking at a stack of boats to move. Then you are back at the next unit in the original combat stack. Repeat ad nauseam.
It would be nice if the game would stick with one stack at a time, or at least if you could stick with one type of unit at a time. I haven't been able to find a way to do this.
Now maybe there are solutions to some of these problems that I don't know about. But what I do know is that all these little problems add up to becoming a micromanagement nightmare. It took me several hours last night to make just half a dozen turns!
Civ3 is lots of fun early, but the deeper you get into the game, the more unplayable the whole thing becomes, until it just ends up being a mountain of micromanagement to wade through every turn. And all because of some appallingly bad UI features that could have been so easily fixed!
BTW, In reviewing the manuals for both Civ3 and Conquests I see that there are ways to partially avoid at least some of these problems - for example, I'd forgotten you can use city governors to build certain types of units. But overall, I don't think there really are fixes for many of the control problems the game presents you with. It's just a horribly badly designed UI, that's all there is to it. But if anyone knows of any fixes, or has any suggestions on how to cut down on all this mm, I'm interested to hear them.