02-11-2001 15:14									#1
	Civ 3 what is this the beta version?! Suffering from ads?

Seriously, is this just the beta version or something? I saw about 10 things that were not right in the first 5 minutes of play.....My reply texts are below the box they are supose to be in, random start on the world map and many others, not very professional to release a product with this many problems....i would have rather waited longer than feeling the dissapointment i felt today....seems like a fun game but it won't truly be great till about the 3rd or 4th patch, thats a shame....but that seems to be the hallmark of the videogame industry....

	03-11-2001 13:48									#2
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

Yeah the only bug I kinda noticed is that the game freezes my computer (total crash- not recoverable) before I even get to see the starting movie.

Just a small bug though...

	03-11-2001 14:27									#3
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

straight up man.... I bought the game... and it's running pretty well, but there are just so many things that the game doesn't explain well enough, or small errors that just annoy you... they need to put out the 1.01 patch SOON.

	03-11-2001 15:15									#4
	1.01 patch? Support Apolyton, pre-order Civilization IV

Actually, this is version 1.07f

It almost seems like someone screwed up and sent a build that wasn't the actual gold version. Several game balances and complete bugs are here, not to mention some of the latest things Firaxis stated as changes (such as The Manhantan Project being a small wonder; and the 100,000 point cultural victory being lowered to 80,000) aren't in the release version.



I am just more interested in how long it will take them to get us the first patch.

	03-11-2001 23:36									#5
	Inflate your Upload Space

The "Text-Below-the-screen" Bug , is WinXP only as it seems, the text works fine in Win2000 and Win98SE with me

Same problem, with text turning purple, WinXP only problem.

	04-11-2001 05:09									#6
	Tired of ads?

Yeah, this definitely feels like a Beta version. It's pathetic to read all the bugs reports posted here already, when the game's been out less than a week!

Guess we know what the "f" in "1.07f" stands for!

There are some great concepts introduced in Civ3 that I really enjoy, but I am sorely disappointed at the release of such a buggy product. After waiting six years for Civ3 to improve on Civ2, I would have been content to wait a little longer for a decent game.

And I wouldn't have spent the extra money on the limited edition either, given the chance to do it over!

The text-below-the-screen is not a WinXP issue for me. It happened on my computer with WinME and WinXP, and I believe it's the Intel 82810 chipset that's responsible. Playable, but it's a pain to read the Civilopedia or get through deals in the Diplomacy screens (all the response options aren't visible).

Right now, I'd settle for Civ2 re-released with better graphics and improved AI.

Dar Steckelberg

	05-11-2001 00:19									#7
	Full PM-box? Change here!

This shouldn't be rocket science.

The game should be playable out of the box on any machine bought in the last 3 years or so, without the user having to make any system modifications.

The current situation is unacceptable and Infogrames should apologize for rushing out a product that so many people seem to be having so many different problems with.

	05-11-2001 01:16									#8
	Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

I disagree with EVERYTHING you guys say. If you worked in the software industry (as I do), you'd understand. These guys worked to a deadline and released what they understood to be bug free. I don't believe for a minute that Firaxis would release Civ 3 with ANY KNOWN bugs in it. I fully support Firaxises decision to keep the beta in house, otherwise we'd have this situation 100 fold.

Saying that this is "unprofessional" and "unacceptable" is a rude slap in the face for these Firaxis guys who have worked long and hard to bring you a top product. Stop looking at the little things, and have a bit of understanding until the first patch is released!

Rock on Firaxis guys! Keep up the good work, I know you're trying hard!

	05-11-2001 01:44									#9
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

Excuse me, samsmithnz, but I *do* work in the software industry as a developer and tester.

Keeping the beta in-house, if that's what they did, was a huge mistake in my opinion. They should have contacted some of their more rabid SMAC fans, had them sign an NDA, and sent them a beta copy. A lot of these bugs may have been caught and fixed, or at least documented, well before release.

I've just started posting bugs as I find them to this forum, and I hope everyone else does as well. Civ3 is a great and ambitious design, but the current implementation is poor, and after spending $60 on the Limited Edition solely based on my previous experiences with Sid's games I am disappointed.

Your statement that Firaxis would release Civ3 without any known bugs in it makes your claim to be in the software industry highly suspect. Every program of any complexity has bugs in it, and any developer or tester worth his salt knows that.

Which leads me to assume you're either a manager or in marketing.

Just kidding. But seriously, many of these bugs should have been caught and addressed. I find it hard to believe that none of their playtesters played without building fortresses or without attempting air superiority missions.

The tester's job is to identify as many bugs as possible, ensure the more annoying or severe ones are fixed and triage the others as time permits. The tester is the customer's best friend, and right now I feel like the guy whose best friend just stole his girl!

Dar Steckelberg

Last edited by dsteckel on 05-11-2001 at 01:59

	05-11-2001 02:08									#10
	Inflate your Upload Space

quote: Originally posted by dsteckel Excuse me, samsmithnz, but I *do* work in the software industry as a developer and tester.

Ah, so you'll know what I'm talking about then.

quote: Your statement that Firaxis would release Civ3 without any known bugs in it makes your claim to be in the software industry highly suspect. Every program of any complexity has bugs in it, and any developer or tester worth his salt knows that.

I still disagree. Any developer with interity would not release a project with known bugs in it (without at least documenting them as you mentioned earlier, I admit this is acceptable). I've always tryed to produce quality solutions, and although I've been in the industry for a relatively short time (2 years), I feel this is achievable. I'm sure that the Firaxis developers fixed all the bugs that the testers found, so perhaps the testers were not independent enough.

quote: Which leads me to assume you're either a manager or in marketing.

Hahaha, neither and I'll never be in marketing, I'm a programmer through and through.

quote: But seriously, many of these bugs should have been caught and addressed. I find it hard to believe that none of their playtesters played without building fortresses or without attempting air superiority missions.

I still think having a closed beta is the best practise, but I agree that having a couple of 3rd party players come in (I mean they wouldn't even have to pay them!) under a non-disclosure contract would have been acceptable.

	05-11-2001 02:19									#11
	Suffering from ads?

Well, then we'll agree to disagree.

I believe a good programmer can write bug-free code that passes unit testing, but once all the parts are integrated there is bound to be a whole slew of issues. Especially when it comes to something as complicated and ambitious as Civ3.

I hope Firaxis will revise their beta policy if it's strictly in-house. I really believe giving up a couple dozen free copies to volunteer testers under NDA would have saved them a lot of flak.

Happy coding!

Dar Steckelberg

	05-11-2001 02:33									#12
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

I'd just like to say that it seems to me that 75% of the bugs reported seem less like bugs and more like changes to the gameplay dynamics. Let's face it folks, this game is a redesign and a rewrite. Civ 3 has its own subtle qualities. I feel like people should spend more time with the game before complaining so vigorously. Within hours of its release, these boards, and others, were filled with wailing and nashing of teeth. I, on the other hand, have just chosen to play the game and learn its new dynamics. I have a few complaints, but not many.

And for those that can't get past the opening movie, or have other catastropic errors, obviously my comments are not directed toward you. It sounds like Firaxis is working hard on a patch and your proplems should be addressed.

I love this game!

CheeseWhistle

	05-11-2001 06:04									#13
	Well, Get a bigger avatar today!

Maybe some people actually wants to give a "rude slap in the face for these Firaxis guys" as samsmithnz so nicely put it. I'm a programmer myself (not in the entertainment field) And after seeing Civ3 I really don't know if I should laugh or cry. The installation was a breeze (A bit chubby relative to previous versions but no big deal) Then the fun part begins. The intro movie plays fine, and when the app tries to switch video mode again the screen gets all scrambled due to Civ3 ignoring any valid refresh rates set for the screen. The application ignores all common key combinations for exit (such as Alt-F4, ESC etc) so where it should've been perfectly possible to restore the screen
I have to reboot. Half an hour and two reboots later I manage to get it working (some editing of .ini files and the registry were necessary which leaves Joe User in the cold.) The wonderful main menu shows up with all of its labels out of sync with the buttons, leaving some labels invisible and others in the middle of two buttons. This combined with the excelent "paint button blue on first click and do something useful on the second mouseclick" adds to the general feeling of using great quality software (tm).
I choose all normal settings on a regular world map and begin playing. The graphics looks all slick and I get in a little better mood, until I move the mouse to the right edge of the screen ...tick....tick...tick....tick, two seconds later the map scrolls. (Dual 550Mhz Celeron, Gf2 MX and plenty of RAM)
Extreme sluggish UI is the melody of the day and every dialog, even the minimal terrain info window is pestered with a good 2 second overhead. The UI has more pitfalls than the slowness however, many things seems to only be accessible via hotkeys (I like it that way actually, dunno about Joe User) The great library however is a real ***** to open, no hotkeys here. If you want to know what to build next for example you have to exit the city manager, open the great library, search for your thing, return to city manager and then build it. With every action taking seconds (even browsing about in the great library is this slow) just waiting for dialogs in this little operation can weight in at 20 seconds. There's more about the UI however, how about not being able to see all nations in the foreign manager, just some random 8 nations, totally empty advisor dialogs etc., etc.)
Where there's smoke there's fire. I've only scratched the surface and already seen more crap than a man can take in a day. I really don't want to see how messy this is deeper below (I bet $1000 that the source is real nasty).
I create my first couple of cities and all is well. Glancing over at my neighbours I notice that they're expanding like the best ICS (weren't they supposed to stop this, not make it part of every game). I also notice that the computer are cheating in this stage, less pop. penalty for building settlers etc. During this phase I also notice that the starting locations are all wrong and that the world map is very inaccurate.
Tired of micromanagement I later switch some of my workers to Automatic mode. Bad thing to do, in two turns they've managed to destroy 5 irrigrated tiles and begun building mines. There were equally good uninproved tiles to mine, but they had to choose the already irrigrated tiles. Later games confirm that this is always their behavior. I turn the automatic feature back off and start controlling them manually again. (The manual labor this implies in empires with 20+ workers is great fun!) Meanwhile the AI's are busy producing excessive military units whose sole purpose is to walk in and out of my nations borders, excusing themselves once in a while, when
I order them to leave my territory. What's even more annoying is that once most of the land is already taken, the AI had to build colonies in totally wortless jungle areas in the middle of my nation (Extremely annoying!!).
However this didn't matter all that much because maybe half an hour later when the new meet Babylonians invite me for a diplomatic chat the whole game crashes.
After trying three games more I've come to the conclusion not to play this game
anymore until it's out of "beta" and is playable (in half a year or so).
This is really a shame. I've loved the whole Civ series and this game could have been so much more, now it stands in my bookshelf as a reminder not to ever buy anything branded Firaxis or Sid Meier anymore. It's time to leave Civ and find something else to play.

*sigh*

	05-11-2001 07:52									#14
	Suffering from ads?

Yow! Man, that hurts, Slunko! Sorry to hear about the bad experiences.

I have to wonder if this and other peoples' technical difficulties are a consequence of their in-house beta testing (samsmithnz, do you remember your source for that info?). With a more diverse beta tester group they would have had a more diverse hardware base to test on.

Best of luck, Slunko! I hope Firaxis releases a patch soon to alleviate some of that.

Dar Steckelberg

	05-11-2001 13:59									#15
	Enter the AD-FREE zone

Yes, the testing was in-house. I raised all living hell about it months ago when there was still time to fix it. The answer was:

"Public Betas/Alphas are really only helpful for compatability testing since we can't filter all the feedback efficiently."

"Just because you can't Blue Sky everything doesn't mean you should give up."

I will make no comments beyond that ... as I already have 1,000,000 times.

	05-11-2001 19:21									#16
	Re: Well, Full PM-box? Change here!

quote: Originally posted by Slunko The UI has more pitfalls than the slowness however, many things seems to only be accessible via hotkeys (I like it that way actually, dunno about Joe User)

Er -- have you tried using the buttons at the bottom of the screen?

And just to spout my $0.02, since I'm posting anyway: I haven't had any gameplay issues or crashes (well, one), but I'm in full annoyedness about the random starting locations and disappointment about things like the diplomacy screen.

	06-11-2001 04:46									#17
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

quote: Yeah the only bug I kinda noticed is that the game freezes my computer (total crash- not recoverable) before I even get to see the starting movie.

I have a problem like this. The movie starts and then crashes about when it says either infogames or firaxis. It is recoverable, but civ3 woun't start anymore.

Solution: hit escape quickly when the game starts, their probobly is way to auto-skip the opening movie also. Maybe by editing the .ini file.

	06-11-2001 06:09									#18
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

quote: Yeah the only bug I kinda noticed is that the game freezes my computer (total crash- not recoverable) before I even get to see the starting movie.

I have a problem like this. The movie starts and then crashes about when it says either infogames or firaxis. It is recoverable, but civ3 woun't start anymore.

Solution: hit escape quickly when the game starts, their probobly is way to auto-skip the opening movie also. Maybe by editing the .ini file.

	06-11-2001 10:46									#19
	Suffering from ads?

Whoa! I had no idea so many ppl were having so many more problems than me! I suppose i'm lucky to have been able to play it at all...Technically the only problems i see is the off center texts and a few other minor problems. My main gripes are with a lot of the layout and interface choices they made. The game is simply a pain in the arse to navigate through. The screens load slow (even with all sound, animation and music off). I really don't like how they've made the advisors so important in this game, everything you need to do is done through some silly advisor and it takes forever to load, give me the days when i could switch between screens instantly and everything was do-able from a pull down window!!! The biggest mistake they've made though has to be the descion to allow "govenors" to decide what to build for you. Why is it mandirory?! If I tell them to make a tank I want tanks! Not a tank then a temple or some other garbage, this is almost like a sim-civ type game. I know you can tell the govoners to make almost anything but it is tedious and boring and that is the last thing this game needs. All in all the game doesn't look finished, game mechanics and concepts aside, the game is almost unplayable. Today i found myself unable to play more than 5 minutes untill i got bored with all the screen lag and ugly menus and layouts. For me to play this game there are going to have to be a hell of a lot of changes, and i'm not talking about stuff that can be covered in some 2mb patch either and i seriously hope firaxis will take the time and listen to the public this time. I always though sid meier was the best game designer in the industry...but now i'm not so sure, I hope he is able to restore my (and many others) cofidence in him and his company.

	06-11-2001 11:46									#20
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

You know, I can't help but wonder if their testers were simply too cowed to say anything about the bugs and awkward UI since the testing was kept in-house. The game has not been out a week, and so many people are posting bugs and annoyances to this forum, and their testers *had* to have experienced the same thing as we have.

I find it hard to believe that their testers didn't discover that the fortresses didn't work as advertised, or that "air superiority" missions didn't work, or that the governors were a pain and didn't pay any heed to the user's preferences. I can't help but feel that they either were too afraid of taking a stand to get these things fixed, or that they were just ignored in order to meet the release date.

At the *least*, letting a few beta testers outside the company under NDA might have caught some of the hardware/graphics issues. At best, they would have raised hell and forced some corrections to be documented if not corrected.

The more I play this game, the more I *want* to love it! I am really impressed at some of the new features they've added to make this still feel like good ol' Civ yet be different and challenging in new ways. However, the awkward UI and the painfully obvious bugs they've left in are like a wet blanket.

Dar Steckelberg

	06-11-2001 21:12									#21
	Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

Feels like a beta version to me too. Couple game play issues, music is awful, no wonder videos, and it comes out all warped on win2k.

They should have released it next year.

	07-11-2001 18:46									#22
	Re: Well, Inflate your Upload Space

quote: Originally posted by Slunko Tired of micromanagement I later switch some of my workers to Automatic mode. Bad thing to do, in two turns they've managed to destroy 5 irrigrated tiles and begun building mines. There were equally good uninproved tiles to mine, but they had to choose the already irrigrated tiles. Later games confirm that this is always their behavior. I turn the automatic feature back off and start controlling them manually again. (The manual labor this implies in empires with 20+ workers is great fun!) Meanwhile the AI's are busy producing excessive military units whose sole purpose is to walk in and out of my nations borders, excusing themselves once in a while, when

consulting your manual might enlighten you highness so as to notice that there is a command for settlers NOT to destroy previuos improvements while automated.