Hi there!
I've been watching this forum for quite a while, but I never had the will to write something
However, this has just changed since (thank the all mighty One!!), I received Civ3 yesterday!!!!
So, I'll try to give an opinion as unbiased as possible... Of course, the key word being "try"
First, my background: I've been playing Civ since the very first release, and I also played Civ2 SMAC. Also played CTP1&2.
I usually play at king or emperor level, so I don't have the deity guys skills and micro management skills. I do however finish above 100% ratings.
Ok, now the review. first, I kind of chickened while reading the forums, so I decided to start at warlord level (a little help is nice). Played for about 12 hours straight and did not finish yet.
Oh, and I have an original copy of the normal edition (those UPs guys are relatively quick, but the customs really f**ed me!
)
- The manual: beautiful, but I find it lacking some info. I didn't have a lot of time to read it, but the index and the references were no help at all: Information about how to stop a trade agreement or load units in an army are either well hidden or non existent (or I didn't read the manual well enough)
- where is my Dan Quayle screen!?!?
When you finish you get a Civ2 like screen. Replay and stats are cool.
- Corruption: not as crippling as some said, BUT, it was quite an annoyance with 50% losses in my medium sized empire, in republic, with courthouses and with me being the French (ie: commercial trait). So I guess we'll have to pray someone finds a good way to deal with corruption. (btw, with democracy and the forb. palace, I REALLY reduces corr.)
- Cossacks are deadly... what can I say more... try attacking them with your cavalry, you suffer some huge losses.
- Industrious trait is a blessing... I don't know what I would have done without it... so many jungles in my area!
- Diplomacy: a little dissapointment here. I never felt really threatened, and I found it easy to abuse the AI. Maybe it's the level. ex: X comes and ask for Industrialisation and world map angainst his world map. My advisor says he is much stronger than me. All I have to do in fact to avoid war is to give him any other acceptable deal. So I give him world map angainst territory map and maybe 5 gold/ turn (gold is really abundant). I think the programmer should have made the bargainning table to always include the important stuff (here Industrialisation). I never gave up something, refused only once a proposal (they were much weaker than me), and went to war twice because I wanted it and they were trespassing on my land. I also always got what I wanted for just a few gold/turn
-trespassing: AI respects your borders unless he doesn't like you and has an "evil" personality (in my case: Catherine)
-combat: quite nice, realistic in the ancient and middle ages(had my wars in the middle ages), but I was quite annoyed when I got my first tanks. Just before finally going to sleep, I saved then declared war to test my little babies
. Unfortunately, they did kill a lot of enemies, but most of them fell against cavalry attacks. I'd understand if they suffered heavy casualties, but utterly destroyed? My understanding is that those are WWII tanks. They shouldn't be so vulnerable to cavalry (ask the Poles who regreted their charge against the worst tansk of WWII). And also, tanks have a movement of 2 against 3 for cavalery!!! Anyhow, I'll find out soon how modern war turns out.
-AI is good, though I didn't feel a big difference with Civ2. Sends a swarm of units at the beginning of a war, then a few at a time. Avoids attacking strongly entrenched units, and goes for your worker. Nice. Until you realise that he has a cavalery in the middle of your territory and that he's gonna die. Hell, he sent dozens of those suicide missions! in the end, i still had my workers, and he had a dozen less cavalry. A human would have amassed those cavalry, and then sent it past the forts to attack cities or units or whatever instead of relying on the defense of cavalry!
-AI respects the deals: they do attack your ennemies, and you see quite a few bloddy wars. I however noticed no Civ2 sneak attacks, which leads me to think you can stay at peace forever (as long as you abuse the diplomatic AI).
-Culture. Great! It's always a nice feeling to see your borders become continous and assimilate ennemy cities. I relyied heavilly on culture at the beginning. Cultural assimilation seems a lot more difficult at later ages. (I have 2 of the most cultural cities in the world next to an egyptian city producing less than 10 cultural point/ turn, and they couldn't assimilate it in a few thousand years!)
Ok, I'm still a little bit tired, didn't sleep a lot
, so I'll conclude for now.
Civ3 is great. It is NOT however as utopian as I thought it would. Lots of stuff were below what I expected, others on par. BUT, it's an improvement on Civ2. So in my logic, if Civ2 = greatest and Civ3>Civ2, then Civ3 = new greatest.
From my small experience with the game, I THINK nobody should live without playing this game. It is however quite far from the dreams we had about it.
I'll maybe continue this review later, if I can get away from Civ, my gf and my exam preparation for monday. life is tough.... at least I'm happy I paied a fortune on gamestop.com for getting the game this early in europe.
See ya
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