Which Civ Version You Like Best? Civ 2 still ranks higher than Civ 4

[Armorydave]

My rankings:

Civ 4
Civ 2
Civ 1
Civ 3

Three had too much maintence work for my tastes and the end game dragged. I still thought it was a great game but for me the least enjoyable of the franchise. Armies were absurdly over-powered as were artillery. Basically any game could be won on the back of an early army so the incentive to war-monger was overwhelming. Also Civics were overly simplistic and religion was effectively not a part of the game. Spy "exploits" and other "tricks" (being able to store production for two great wonders under the palace and forbidden palace being a great example) made it even cheesier.

I really loved 2 but it is hard to ignore how much inclusive and better thought out Civ 4 is than any of its predecessors. I am still not completely warmed up to the game (tech advances too fast in relation to production IMO making space race trivial and lame) but with a few more tweeks it will probably rate as my favorite strategy game of all time (well until Civ 5 at least).

 

[Sir John]

I voted Civ3 It was the game that got me into turn based strategy games and I didnt like civ 4 to much.. I think it was the graphics that scared me off tough.. Im not a big fan of putting to much effort into graphics in games like this and I think it lost much of the simple style that civ 3 had

 

[boneys26]

My rankings:

Civ 4
Civ 2
Civ 1
Civ 3


I really loved 2 but it is hard to ignore how much inclusive and better thought out Civ 4 is than any of its predecessors. I am still not completely warmed up to the game (tech advances too fast in relation to production IMO making space race trivial and lame) but with a few more tweeks it will probably rate as my favorite strategy game of all time (well until Civ 5 at least).

Lets hope with civ5 they don't rush it to the shops and spend alot more time testing it

 

[Exel]

Civ3 still ranks higher in my books until Civ4 gets its problems patched out. Civ4 is a great concept, but it doesn't feel (yet) as finalized as Conquests did. Hopefully that will change in the near future.

 

[ReccaSquirrel]

I never played Civ III. I went straight from Civ II - Test of Time into Civ IV. I was frustrated with the game for about five minutes. The first thing I did was found my city in a Settler game of Earth. The recommendation was for a Warrior and Barracks and I did a Warrior (Barracks suck in Civ II). Once I had a population of 2 I knew I could build a Settler for the population drop. Wait... Settlers and Workers... that's odd.

I first realized how much better this game was when my culture border grew. I saw it toss the evil Romans away and saw it gave me more squares to improve. Beyond that, here are the things I saw that I really liked in Civ IV that Civ II lacked:

City Bombardment
Great People
Religion
Diplomacy
Unique Units
Resource Requirements
No Caravans
No Diplomats
Air Units*

Here is the list of things I dislike about Civ IV that Civ II did better:
Air Units*
Space Race**

* Air Units are improved and not at the same time. I love how I don't need to worry about landing them at the end of my turn... it is automatic. I hate how they can't attack other air units and that bombers can't airstrike tanks and the like.

** I am having heck of a time winning by Space Race but I'm sure that will come to me with time.

Overall, it is a major improvement in my mind.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

I'm surprised to read so many negative opinions of Civ 3. I've only played 3 and 4, not discovering Civilization until 2001.

What was wrong with 3?

1. Corruption [nice idea but really badly implemented in Civ 3. The Civ 4 model on corruption is much better in fun terms]

2. Too much geared towards military - if you wanted to win you basically had to be aggressive and conquer your neighbours.

The thing I most disliked about Civ 3 was that if you wanted cities away from your capital you needed the forbidden palace. But the production hit from the corruption made the forbidden palace next to impossible to build anywhere where it would actually be useful - unless of course you got a great leader to build it. How do you get great leaders? You have to do lots and lots of wars. Thus is the military strategy forced on you whether you like it or not.

 

[RoboPig]

my ranking:
2 and 3
4
1
close between 2 or 3, i voted 2. 4 is overrated and too much RTS interface 2 is great because it has such a simple style and IMO a great modern age, 3 is cool, better diplomacy and all, but the game is too long and it takes more work to get to the modern age

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Civ3 still ranks higher in my books until Civ4 gets its problems patched out. Civ4 is a great concept, but it doesn't feel (yet) as finalized as Conquests did. Hopefully that will change in the near future.

Agreed. Remember though that Civ 3 also took several patches to fix various bugs too. My (very unscientific) general impression is that while there are a lot of complaints about bugs etc. in Civ 4, that's still not as many as there were about bugs in Civ 3 when that first came out.

Most annoying thing for Civ bugs I recall [may have some facts slightly wrong as this is a long way in the past - correct me anyone if you think I've misremembered] was in Civ 2 when they brought out multiplayer and I upgraded. For some reason they changed the graphics to use DirectX. The DirectX graphics looked completely unchanged from original Civ 2 graphics, so I have no idea why they put all the effort in to upgrade [1] - but they didn't work nearly as well and a some tendency to crash.

[1] Actually I do have a suspicion. I bet it was the developer team saying 'let's do this coz it's cool and groovy and up to date and it means we can play with the latest packages.' I know that sort of thing happens coz I'm a developer myself

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Corruption in Civ 3 is nothing unmanageable. I never took it as a majr drawback, but as one of the many apsects of the game.

I agree that the corruption was managable once you knew how to deal with it, but I think there was a real problem that it
(a) wasn't fun because the way corruption destroyed your production meant that it was very hard to deal with immediately.
(b) wasn't documented adequately.
(c) until Firaxis released the patches that lessened corruption, it was just too severe.

I deeply remember the first few Civ 3 games I played - I just couldn't understand why cities more than a few squares from my capital had only 1 shield production, no matter what I did. The manual did say corruption would damage your production but didn't give any idea that it was to such a big extent. Also - crucial omission - the manual said that courthouses reduced corruption, but it didn't say that they were changed from Civ 2 (where they worked immediately) and now only worked slowly over time. So I was building courthouses, seeing that they, a couple of turns later, had no visible effect whatsoever, and was - well - stuck. It was only these CivFanatics forums that saved my interest in the game - I discovered a post in which someone explained how he'd built courthouses, left the cities and then come back some time later to find they were now producing - and hence it seemed courthouses needed time to work. Without that knowledge I think I would have completely given up on Civ 3 as being unplayable.

 

[Smidlee]

I didn't like civ3 corruption since this basicly had you piling all your city tightly around your capital. So place cites in formation like cxxcxxc became more important than strategicly placing your city as in civ4. As someone point out civ3 was too heavily geared toward war more than any civ with armies and artillery being overpowering. So I ranked them as:
Civ4
Civ2
Civ3 (close to second only with Conquest)
civ1

 

[Lord_all_Mighty]

Civilization 4. Followed by Civ 2 and then Civ 3 (Have never played the first one). Civ 3, while introducing some good concepts (borders, culture, a less clunky diplomacy system and bombardment) was too much management (I remember having to open up diplomacy with every AI leader every turn, just to see if they had new technology, not fun on maps with more than a handful of nations) and it also simpliefied too much (combat and espionage to name a few). Civ 2 and civ 4 go along at a faster pace.

To me, Civilization 4 seems to be a combination of the good aspects from civ2 and civ3 without most of the problems.