YouTube CivIII Superstars

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The title is semi-tongue-in-cheek. But at the end of this rambling post is a question related to the title.

CivIII is nearly a 20-year-old game and seemed to be trending downward in interest for years. But now with Steam, GoG, interest in retro games, new Civ titles reminding people of old (and cheap) ones, CivIII has an audience. (And probably the pandemic has something to do with it, with hordes of people having reasons to stay at home more.)

I've put up a handful of YouTube videos on two different channels over the past decade or so, and for several years I've on-and-off worked on various utilities to read or help with game files. But I never imagined that could lead to enough interest to make any money.

@SuedecivIII has published a lot of great and helpful CivIII content on YouTube, and he just announced on his channel a couple of days ago he was going to enable monetization. Mind. Blown. I don't mean based on him, I mean I'm just surprised there's that much interest in CivIII out there. (Although he does seem to think he'll need to branch out to other games to continue to grow.)

And now that I think of it, of all the random videos I've tossed up on YouTube over the years, my CivIII ones are consistently the most popular. Last year I toyed with CivIII on both Twitch and YouTube. I don't think anyone noticed on Twitch, but there are people out there eager for more CivIII play. (I didn't continue publishing because I was recording my facecam/voice and game/sound separately, and the framerates didn't exactly match and I got frustrated as hell trying to edit the increasingly-out-of-sync clips.)

Anyway, so I find this mini resurgence interesting. I think if anyone out there is interested in publishing gameplay on YouTube, now is a great time to try. I don't think YouTube is a zero-sum game, so you wouldn't be competing with SuedeCivIII; in fact I think having several new CivIII publishers would boost everyone.

So my question is: are there other regular CivIII YouTubers out there that you know of? I did a search and saw quite a few "let's play"s and reviews, but I can't tell that anyone has done it regularly over time. Heck, I might be the second most prolific CivIII YouTuber. (But probably and hopefully not.)
 
A few that rarely put out civ3, but it is part of their set of games. Suede I only found a couple of months ago. I agree it is not a zero sum and in fact can trigger more interest for all.
 
Lucien Maloney (a regular on CFC) had some incredibly creative Civ 3 videos. He's well known around here for the logic gate video (
), but he did some AI vs AI battles too which I liked. I think he might have taken some of them down. He also made the spectator tool for casting multiplayer games, so I am forever in his debt.

BigMoneyJim had a tutorial on starting settler placement that I thought was very good, and didn't get the appreciation it deserved. You can find it here.
Checking now, it seems he just started again posting videos again, and beat me to the punch in regards to my idea of cornering the Alpha Centauri market. If you're interested in SMAC definitely check him out.

Aside from those, most of the Civ 3 content is either plain gameplay footage with no commentary, or done by people who aren't very good at the game. Also a lot of people with low microphone/video quality. Although that's how I got my start so I'm not in position to complain hahah.

I should also say that the market for (single player) civ 3 streamers on youtube is totally open! If anyone is interested in streaming civ 3, I'd be happy to plug you and host your channel.
 
Thanks! Subscribed to two of them. (One of them is me.)

SuedecivIII said:
BigMoneyJim had a tutorial on starting settler placement that I thought was very good, and didn't get the appreciation it deserved. [...] Checking now, it seems he just started again posting videos again, and beat me to the punch in regards to my idea of cornering the Alpha Centauri market. If you're interested in SMAC definitely check him out.
Click to expand...

It me! Literally. Although I just changed the channel name from BigMoneyJim to JimOfLeisure. Yeah, I totally jumped the gun inspired by your channel update Friday.

I've always liked SMAC, and I think about it every now and then but judging by my save files on PC backups I hadn't actually played it in 15+ years. So I'm not beating you as much as jumping on your bandwagon a bit early.

My "how to install CivIII on Win7" video series is on my Jim Nelson channel, but I figure on all future gaming content going on JimOfLeisure. Actually I have a silly number of channels because of the way YouTube & Google have smushed accounts together over the years and because I tend to over-compartmentalize everything I do. But the vast majority of my content is on these two channels, and that's what I'm going to limit myself to going forward. JimOfLeisure for CivIII/SMAC/whatever, and my other channel for other interests.

I should also say that the market for (single player) civ 3 streamers on youtube is totally open! If anyone is interested in streaming civ 3, I'd be happy to plug you and host your channel.
Click to expand...

Agree! (And SMAC is open, too.)

I have a really bad track record on consistency, but at least for the moment the following you've built around a 20-year-old game that can often be bought for a couple of bucks has me a little more motivated.
 
No I am not, I am 74 and he is maybe 40. IIRC he is in Panama or some place in SA and I am in Florida.
 
It's ok, definitely for the better because I've never actually played alpha centauri in my life, it'd take a while to get good enough to feel confident giving advice. I checked some other games, Rise Of Nations has a surprising amount of content. Civ II actually seems to be completely wide open. So if someone is interested in making content for Civ 2, the niche is wide open.

In terms of Civ 3 content, I agree with you guys, it's positive sum. There's so many topics that I can't cover, mod reviews would be a great channel feature. One of my most viewed videos is my cultural victory speedrun. The game was mostly dead for speedrunning before I did mine, and it seems 4-5 other people have started submitting times. More recent runs have changed the cultural victory parameters to the absolute minimum, so I think that takes out a lot of the skill expression. But the diplomatic victory category seems interesting. If someone wanted to race versus me, I'd link you channel and we could make it a competition.
 
SuedecivIII said:
It's ok, definitely for the better because I've never actually played alpha centauri in my life, it'd take a while to get good enough to feel confident giving advice.
Click to expand...

For the record, I absolutely want and encourage you to play SMAC/SMACX if you're branching out from CivIII. I'd really hate to think my making videos discouraged you in any way.

I know a lot more about CivIII than SMAC, so I'm sort-of starting over myself. I didn't find CivFanatics and Apolyton until I started playing CivIII, so I just never had a deep-dive intro into SMAC.

Besides, I'm only playing SMAC now for nostalgia, not SMACX which I never had until now. That'd be like making videos on Vanilla CivIII 18 years after Conquests was out.

And anyway, I need to prove to myself that I can consistently create content over time, a thing I've not really ever kept up with.

When I bought SMAC on GoG, I also bought CTPII and MOO 1-3 (all on sale for silly cheap). I've never played them, but back in the days of CivIII and SMAC they were highly regarded by many. But again, I'll try to get some YouTube consistency on CivIII and maybe SMAC before considering trying "new" stuff.
 
Well I loved SMAC, but never got to the add on. I love Moo even more, to the point I even played moo3 with the Strawberry mod. Hated CTP though. So for sure I will watch content for both SMAC and Moo.
 
The youtube videos of SeudeCiv3 are what brought me back to this site. I've known about this forum for a long time but don't know if I ever got a membership (don't think I did).

Weird question, but I wonder if anybody has done an "Idiocracy" mod for CIV 3? I think that would be hilarious. Somewhere between Despotism/Anarchy, lol.
 
A 'Civ3 Antman' has been posting recently some funny vids on the lighter side of multiplayer. He seems to get himself into some unusual situations.

 
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