I LOVED Gettysburg. I still love it and will occasionally play it still. I rank it higher than Alpha Centauri
And I thought Civ3 was a big disappointment. In hindsight I treat it as the designers doing prep work for the masterpiece that is Civ4.
Civ 3 does have quirks that seem alot bigger after coming back to after playing Civ 4. the default terrain art is too dark for my taste, there is no way to know battle odds in advance other than running a separate calc program, and the graphic display of resources in a tile can not be turned off and on to rapidly decide on settlement spots. on the other hand Civ 3 is much less CPU and graphics intensive and I personally feel it is easier to introduce folks to the Civ series using this one. (Civ 2 is too outdated.)
Surprisingly Civ 3 can be modded to behave "kind of like" Civ 4 substituting various gov choices for the Civ 4 civics (see Civ 3 Test IV Time mod link in my sig)
I had no playability problem with the new Sid Meier's RR game, it just lacks any real strategy. it does create pretty pictures of railroads
I like the old 1994 Colonization, but the clunky outdated interface finally got me to give up on it. (I did not start playing it until about 2005.)
the new Colonization is not so much "broken" as a "why bother?" type of concept. the Civ 4 interface promises a similar exp to Civ 4, but the objective of achieving victory in the WoI means gameplay is vastly different from Civ 4 - no tech tree, no advantage to large number of settlements or rewards to careful planning of tile use or defense. Civ 4 Col is all about "gaming" the rules to find out to successfully win the WoI as soon as possible, even if this leads to nonsense such as settling one square away from an Indian port, disarming yourself to sell the natives your guns and muskets, and putting off military purchases so as to reduce the size of the REF
to meld Civ 4 and the original Col would have meant adding a tech tree to Col and having an active reason to conquer the other Europeans other than recycling their stuff into your own. I also find the whole concept of the REF outdated. I look forward to a mod of Civ 4 Col that uses its engine to create a more satisfying update to the original 1994 Col. as it stands it takes way to much resources to make the dragoon unit (basic advanced unit) considering it is not disarmed as in the 1994 Col, but killed if it loses a battle (as in the Civ series)
I am NOT however prepared to say this is "Sid's worst game ever". it is quite playable out of the box, but I am sure quite confusing to a Civ 4 player unless they have played the 1994 Col at some point in the past
the game is not so broken that it is a no brainer to win, even with general guidelines on how to do this. I tried to follow the instructions of the poster who said he won in 40 turns on the hardest setting, but that post assumes you are intimately familiar with all the gameplay details - which apparently I was not. (at least I beat the French!)
