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Charles:
If what I am saying is just "common sense" to you, then I appologise, but I felt the need to explain it sense you were making statements like "there are no limits to how a game can be designed", which I know to be untrue, and therefore I went into more detail about software development processes than I might have.
The crux of what I'm saying is that no, civ 3 is not perfect. But so far nobody has been able to hold up a better example of a RTS and explain why, in detail, it is better. Therefore I find it very hard to accept blanket criticisms of a product that is, as far as I'm aware, the best of its genre.
It's very easily to criticise something when compared to a hypothetical game that doesn't exist. But until someone implements a better game and proves it can work, then we really don't know whether it's practical to make a game with feature x, y and z.
I think comparing civ 3 to some concept of what civ 3 could have been is a strawman argument, since reality will always fall short of the utopian vision - especially since this imaginary game can't be played to see its flaws!
I'm not saying civ 3 is perfect, and if you really think it matters I can offer many things I don't like about it. But these things have (mostly) been stated by others already, and so I see no point repeating them. The real issue is that, unlike some people, I don't feel these ruin the game. I also don't understand how, if people think they ruin civ 3, they don't think they ruin every other TBS game out there.
As to your idea of a generic editable game, making generic code is hard. Not only does it require really top notch designers and programmers to pull it off, but it also takes a lot of time to do. The generaly accepted figure is that it takes around 3 times as many "man hours" to write something generic as writing something concrete. Frankly I don't think Firaxis can afford to take that long to get to market, or alternatively, hire that many extra people. This is why I believe that civ 3 is not fully generic - the effort required would be immense.
Two of the people who I consider to be amoung the best game programmers (although in a different field of gaming to TBS), John Carmack of id software, and Tim Sweeny of Epic, have both said that in order to make a generic game engire (such as the quake and unreal engines have become), it's vital to first make someting concrete, a game. Only then, once one has proven technology, can one hope to salvage something abstract. It's probably also worth noting that although both games have mods, all the highly changed commercial products you see based on those engines are made by making large modifications to the entire source base, a luxury we're never going to have as hobyists and civ 3...
You can say that you don't care about the reasons behind it, you just care that you didn't get what you wanted, and I accept your point on some level. However, I think it's important to understand the reasons why most games are not going to live up to these kind of expectations is because on the whole, the expectations you are expressing are not easy to meet, and just because Firaxis have failed to meet them for you doesn't mean that Firaxis haven't been trying hard or have released a bad product!
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