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my only-one-whine review
I've been enjoying reading your reviews / whines / ideas over the past week or so, so I thought I'd give a little back by posting my own civ 3 review. But when I started thinking about it, I found that one sentence *almost* said it all.
It's Civ, the game I've been playing religiously for the last ten years, with new features, so I love it, even though things such as firepower and dragoons and the Statue of Liberty and fundamentalism and performing espionage while framing someone else and my favorite civ the Carthaginians and Stalin and the Eiffel Tower and the fun of destorying a rival capital and the invention of television and Napoleon and the Spanish and cruisers are annoyingly missing.
In fact, there's only one thing worth getting into, and that's something that's struck me so many times in the first 6 full games that I've played that I'm quite surprised at the lack of *****ing about it. Namely - the AI seems to have to idea just how important strategic resources are.
An example - In the Emperor level game I'm playing right now, I decided that the immediate future of the iron-deficient Republic of Greece rode on capturing the Babylonian city of Ur and the iron rich hills to the north of it before the advent of Feudalism and the pikemen which would render my horsemen impotent. My generals massed their horse-and-hoplite armies at our end of the ithsmus that separated Greece from Babylon. A slight diplomatic blunder over the expulsion of some roving Babylonian workers was all the impetus we needed to cross the frontier and capture the town of Nineveh, which was defended by two spearmen units and a unit of swordsmen. Lacking horses, the Babylonians tried to counterattack with a combined force of swordsmen and bowmen, but the swordsmen were repulsed by my hoplites and the bowmen were run down and cut to pieces my Greek heavy horse. After a quick respite of lootin' rapin' and pillagin' in Nineveh, my armies marched north and prepared to take the city of Ur. On reaching the city, however, my advance scouts forwarded the following shocking news -
1) Even though the Babylonians had workers to spare for sending on scouting missions into my territiory, they still hadn't connected one of the three iron sources to a road!
2) Worse, though Babylon had built the Great Wall, the town of Ur lacked city walls.
3) Even worse, though they had the swordsmen and bowmen to spare senselessly counterattacking me at Nineveh, Ur, their most important city, the Gamebreaker that if I took it would mean the sure defeat of their civ, was only defended by two spearmen.
Such behavior does not seem at all unusual, rather it seems to be the rule for all the AI controlled civs, regardless of civ, difficulty level, or era. The AI just doesn't know how important strategic resources are. I guess the good news is that it *should* all boil down to a simple AI fix, one that hopefully will get done. The rules then for the AI -
1) If I have resources in my cultural boundaries which don't have roads, I need to send workers to build roads.
2) If I've built the Great Wall, I need to build walls in my cities.
3) If I've got cities with resources in their territory, I need to build city walls in those cities and defend them with more units than an ordinary city.
With this fixed, I'll be playing civ 3 well until civ 4 comes out in 2006 (With 4D reali-virtual graphics, but still no warning that a city is about to grow into civil disorder next turn, and the Arabs somehow still missing from the mix, I'm sure)
Oh, and that Air Superiority bug really sucks, doesn't it?
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