My first experience with Civ3

[NeoBlade]

Was bad and good. I had to fight most of the day to get ahold of it. I'm not very well of money wise. I had pawned off my N64 which I realized in the nick of time before takeing it apart for amusement that it was worth money. That got me 30 dollars. With a lil donation from my dad I got it for 40$ at Wal-Mart.

Then I got it home an it didn't work!! >.< Nooo..

Wal-Mart is evil, they do NOT take back computer games after they've been opened. Which is probably the stupidest policy a store chould possibly take up. Also, seeing as how Firaxis STILL hasn't released a demo, I was buying this game soley on a wing an a prayer that it'd be good.

But, the entire day had been full of obstacles and frustrations big and small. i hadn ot given up yet, and I wasn't about to, either. I immediately began to try and find out what kind of ATI chip I had in my comp. I didn't know for sure as I got conflicting reports from everything..*naturally* Eventually I discovered I had a ATI IIC video chip on my motherboard. I went online ,dled the drivers and tryed my game again. Still no good. I was getting kinda desperate now. I switched my resolution to what hte game ran, thinking maybe it didn't want to automaticly redo the setting for the game. Still no go, so then I went into the CD and got the OpenGL files out. According to the DOS it didn't install. Bah, it was a shot in the dark anyway. THen I went into the folder and clicked on the executable itself, driven by a psychic feeling. HOORAY! It worked.

Now I get to playing. It went a lil slow. But nothing near as bad as I thought it'd be since my comp only has a 300MHZ AMD-12k processor but DID have 160 MB RAM thanks to a lil extra investment. I got into the game and played for awhile. Ok, so here are my problems with this game so far:

Technologys take to long to research. C'mon, It takes 40 d@mn turns to get to writeing. AN since each turn gos rather slowly due to both interfece clunkyness and general slowness all around, it took 4 hours just to get to construction and Republic techs.

This game whould be ALOT more fun if the early techs were reduced in cost and that the general lag between turns was fixed. THe combat system seems a lil freaky to me as well. It kinda made me nonstalgic for Alpha Centauri's system. AC did things right with hitpoints being deterined by technology level and various percentile bonuses being accesed for every concieveable aspect of combat from terrain, to unit type, to veterancy and weather they were defending their home or not.

However, the combat system isn't my biggest deal. I don't really like it, but my big problem is I wanna be able to get to the modern age sometime before I'm 20!! >.<

[notyoueither]

Check the strategy forum. Lot's of good stuff.

[Raion]

First of all my new ATI drivers did not and do not work with the game. I have not checked lately for any newer drivers, but they were the newest ones a few months back. I bought a Nvidia GeForce 2 MX400 type card and updated the Nvidia drivers. They did not corrupt files (gdi32.dll and something else) when playing Civ III. Only problem is restarting the computer after playing the game everytime. With the new patch, one can still mod the Civ3mod.bic file for the rules and down corruption, but save the old file in a different folder, because your new version will still be the same file name. (if editing the rules of the game and making maps larger and whatever - hit points of units of defense say).
Still, another patch than probably 1.17f will come out and one can download it at www.civ3.com . Some people just don't like the game because it is different and plays different, but hey, there is one or up to five ways to win, so it will take a while to figure out all of Civ III.

I just don't think some people actually remember CivII and the changes made to it over a period of a couple of years (yes, years).
As for SMAC, fine game if you can get past Planet in the first place.

Civ III is just different, but for some reason, some people seem to think that everything should be perfect in the first place.

It was not that way with Civ II, nor with SMAC/Alien Crossfire, and it is not that way with Civ III.

And some people will still love the game, its the same type of game, the leaders in the computer want to 'bug' you.



Has there ever been another game you can say that about?

Probably not. (wants to 'bug' one) I mean, make you emotional when playing the game, instead of just going through routine motions to play any game.
After a couple of years, Civ III will be more automatic also, and additional patches and additions will probably come out.

[Raion]

The game will be slow on a 300mHz computer. It needs about a 2 or 3 gigahertz computer, but hey, the other games were about the same way.

It's Civilization, but now even I could zip through Civ II or SMAC, but my earlier computer could not.

Your computer will be slow with Civ III. But mine is only a 500mHz so I have to expect that mine will be slow also with this game.

[da_jaymz]

Originally posted by Raion
The game will be slow on a 300mHz computer. It needs about a 2 or 3 gigahertz computer, but hey, the other games were about the same way.

It's Civilization, but now even I could zip through Civ II or SMAC, but my earlier computer could not.

Your computer will be slow with Civ III. But mine is only a 500mHz so I have to expect that mine will be slow also with this game.

Actually Civ3 runs fine on a P166, just turn off music and animations, but the game is a major slowdown when playing huge maps, waiting times are unbelievable even on a 1Ghz machines...

So stay off huge maps and you'll do fine..

[Raion]

Oh, if you have Windows98SE like OS and updates to IE5.5 like IE5.5 Microsoft will fix it someday all the way, do not forget to use the bink file in the Windows 2000 folder, or else the game will lock-up on the opening movie.

Must be time for another Critical Update from Microsoft.

Bye!