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drmofe
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...I have.
I haven't played any of the previous versions so I got this one with some expectations of an interesting, challenging strategy game. I am very disappointed. I'd go so far to say that for me, Firaxis have damaged their reputation with this release. The more cynical amongst us might look at the release date, do some calculations and reckon that the patched version will be on the shelves for the Christmas rush, having been play-tested by the few thousand early adopters...
The game is flawed. It's not just the bugs that knock SOUND.DLL over every so often, or the fatal redraw errors with the (admittedly very pretty) graphics or even the cheap and cheesy comments the game puts into the mouths of the other leaders.
I believe the random number generator implementation to be flawed. This particularly affects combat. The way the random seeding works, entire portions of the game are predetermined. I also believe this implementation leads to a phenomena of long stringsof outcomes that would be statistically unlikely in the real world (think 50 heads out of 50 coin tosses). Such a claim is obviously difficult to prove, so I have to leave that in the realms of faith.
But the final straws were in a game on a huge map. I was engaged in an interesting war with the Romans; fairly evenly matched but I was making progress...then the following occurred (not in sequence)
A legionary wandered onto my saltpetre resource. I imagine that he was going to pillage the improvement to cut me off from it. It was on a mountain square. I moved 3 artillery units by rail into a nearby city and started a bombard. First unit: -2HP; second unit -1HP. The Roman unit has 1 red bar left. My 3rd bombard does not damage the Roman unit; instead it destroys the improvment on the square, thus cutting myself off from my saltpetre resource...I believe this is a bug. I have noted also that when bombarding naval units, you CANNOT bombard a unit that only has a single HP left. Artillery does 0, 1 or 2 HP damage in a turn so the Roman unit should have gone first. I can live with the idea that bombardment can damage territory, but not when there is an enemy unit on the square.
In fact, this legionary would have been impregnable if it had stayed where it was - fortified on a mountain. The only way I could touch it was with artillery and that wouldn't work to eliminate the unit. But the AI seems to want to move severly damaged units out of enemy territory...
Then...my Army of ELITE infantry (3 units) moved against a veteran cavalry unit. My army went from green to red in one turn. On the next turn, the cavalry unit, also with 1 HP attacked and defeated my army. This is a nonsense.
The Indians then invented a time machine. I kid you not. On one turn, a Roman elite cavalry unity took 2 artillery from me. On the next turn, my elite infantry took it back. As soon as I won the battle, screen focus shifted from my unit to the middle of the Indian empire (where I had no units or interest), then shifted back. On the next turn, guess what? My two artillery units had gone back to Roman control and the elite cavalry was back on the scene. It was deja vu all over again.
Then just for the hell of it, I threw my veteran immortal unit against an elite roman legionary in a size 2 city. And won the city. This is also a nonsense (although one that I prefer...)
The AI is not logical. I offered to settle with Rome for peace and they told me to get lost. On the next turn, Rome offered me a peace deal.
These were the last straws. Someone from Firaxis commented on "emergent behaviour". I'd like to point out that bugs are an emergent property of software and not all emergent behaviour is good or correct.
For a game of strategy to be enjoyable, it must be logical and consistent. If the game, as Civ III does with its references to history, technology and natural resources, claims to reflect some aspects of the real world, the player must be able to transfer what they know about the real world into the game. Battleships should defeat frigates; wounded cavalry should not be able to take out armies etc etc. If the player cannot make a logical transferrence in this way, the game reduces to the random manipulation of numbers, albeit with a fancy graphical portrayal of the results. That is the worst of gameplay - an attempt to seduce the player into some artificial reality where the way to succeed is to exploit the quirks of the implementation.
DRM
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Dev
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If I needed the space for other things I would....
/dev
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G Spot Tornado
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Sweden
Nov 2001
time: 06:16
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I kinda agree with you, drmofe, even though I enjoy Civ 3. Itīs a pretty good game but the AI ainīt logical or consistent. Itīs just as bad as in Civ1/Civ2. But I really donīt think you should whine just because you got whacked in a war. :-)
The main reason for why I wonīt be playing this game for much longer is that itīs so damn slow. I enjoy long games but Iīm not interested in waiting for a couple of minutes for the AI to finish itīs turn. This is a fact and I canīt see how anyone would do it just for fun.
Iīll play Civ3 until the release of Europa Universalis 2 - most likely a by far better game!
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Mike4879
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I wish you could find the enjoyment in the game that I have found, but you are getting stuck on very small details here. About the preset conditions: A military victory is not always necessary to win, and neither are resources. I think the important part you are missing from Civ3 is that if you do not have one thing, you have to supplement for the other. If you don't have the resources to make your civilization better, you may have to launch a war or spend more time dealing with diplomacy to gain technological supremacy. If your civilization is founded on a large stretch of desert, perhaps you should have moved your settler to a better location before founding your starting city, although this too could be a setback.
About the units:
War is unpredictable in the real world. Throughout history many crazy things have happened. The game is not totally perfect either, but not all games ship perfect on release. The bombardment not killing off units was to make sure artillery units were not overpowered. If you could kill off units with artillery you would never need to produce attack units, and could simply use defensive units and a massive army of artillery to win.
Just because your units are modern does not mean you can count on them to win every single time. You may need to do surgical strikes with artillery and flight when dealing with a vast army of obsolete units.
The bug with sound may be related to your sound card drivers or operating system. I am using WindowsXP and a soundblaster live and have experienced no error.
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Special_Olympic
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Sounds to me like you're pissed because you got owned by the AI, lol.
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Grumbold
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London, UK
Mar 2000
time: 05:16
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quote:
Originally posted by drmofe
...I have.
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I haven't, but played something else the last 2 days to keep Civ from going stale.
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The game is flawed. It's not just the bugs that knock SOUND.DLL over every so often, or the fatal redraw errors with the (admittedly very pretty) graphics |
those are hardware specific and are exactly the sort of things that the patch will be aiming to fix.
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or even the cheap and cheesy comments the game puts into the mouths of the other leaders. |
I agree 
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I believe the random number generator implementation to be flawed. This particularly affects combat. The way the random seeding works, entire portions of the game are predetermined. I also believe this implementation leads to a phenomena of long stringsof outcomes that would be statistically unlikely in the real world (think 50 heads out of 50 coin tosses). Such a claim is obviously difficult to prove, so I have to leave that in the realms of faith. |
Some people report crazy streaks in the generator. Others like me have seen unlucky results like one elite tank losing to a 1hp conscript rifleman per game but never streaks that go beyond all bounds of chance. Perhaps again this may be partly hardware dependant. The random number tables aren't held inthe game code, after all.
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A legionary wandered onto my saltpetre resource. I imagine that he was going to pillage the improvement to cut me off from it. It was on a mountain square. I moved 3 artillery units by rail into a nearby city and started a bombard. First unit: -2HP; second unit -1HP. The Roman unit has 1 red bar left. My 3rd bombard does not damage the Roman unit; instead it destroys the improvment on the square, thus cutting myself off from my saltpetre resource...I believe this is a bug. I have noted also that when bombarding naval units, you CANNOT bombard a unit that only has a single HP left. Artillery does 0, 1 or 2 HP damage in a turn so the Roman unit should have gone first. I can live with the idea that bombardment can damage territory, but not when there is an enemy unit on the square. |
The game is functioning as designed. Artillery cannot remove the last hit point of any unit. So when, and only when, the unit has reached 1hp, the damage can pass through and destroy tile improvements. If it is not your intention to destroy the improvement, you should just stop bombing at the appropriate point.
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In fact, this legionary would have been impregnable if it had stayed where it was - fortified on a mountain. The only way I could touch it was with artillery and that wouldn't work to eliminate the unit. |
Well 1hp is not impossible to remove but he sure picked a good spot to defend.
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Then...my Army of ELITE infantry (3 units) moved against a veteran cavalry unit. My army went from green to red in one turn. On the next turn, the cavalry unit, also with 1 HP attacked and defeated my army. This is a nonsense. |
It is certainly unlikely. If you specified what terrain the cav was on we could figure out how unlikely.
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The Indians then invented a time machine. I kid you not. On one turn, a Roman elite cavalry unity took 2 artillery from me. On the next turn, my elite infantry took it back. As soon as I won the battle, screen focus shifted from my unit to the middle of the Indian empire (where I had no units or interest), then shifted back. On the next turn, guess what? My two artillery units had gone back to Roman control and the elite cavalry was back on the scene. It was deja vu all over again. |
looks like a rare bug
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Then just for the hell of it, I threw my veteran immortal unit against an elite roman legionary in a size 2 city. And won the city. This is also a nonsense (although one that I prefer...) |
The odds in favour of the legionary are not great. I fail to understand why you think this was so nonsensical.
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The AI is not logical. I offered to settle with Rome for peace and they told me to get lost. On the next turn, Rome offered me a peace deal. |
If you ask for peace "because you have overstretched yourself" you often get a deal when the same one "because we are about to crush you" will be angrily refused. It is about the leaders saving face and very reminiscent of real world politics.
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For a game of strategy to be enjoyable, it must be logical and consistent. If the game, as Civ III does with its references to history, technology and natural resources, claims to reflect some aspects of the real world, the player must be able to transfer what they know about the real world into the game. Battleships should defeat frigates; wounded cavalry should not be able to take out armies etc etc. If the player cannot make a logical transferrence in this way, the game reduces to the random manipulation of numbers, albeit with a fancy graphical portrayal of the results. That is the worst of gameplay - an attempt to seduce the player into some artificial reality where the way to succeed is to exploit the quirks of the implementation.
DRM |
Hmm. All boardgames and computer games are about numbers. Almost all of them involve elements of chance. I can understand why you might not like it but the only reason Civ is different to any other is it atempts to portray 6000 years of history with a broad brush so the disparities are sometimes more evident.
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drmofe
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quote:
Originally posted by Mike4879
the preset conditions: A military victory is not always necessary to win, and neither are resources. I think the important part you are missing from Civ3 is that if you do not have one thing, you have to supplement for the other. If you don't have the resources to make your civilization better, you may have to launch a war or
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I'm aware of those points. I've won the game in various ways, including military campaigns.
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bombardment not killing off units was to make sure artillery units were not overpowered. If you could kill off units with artillery you would never need to produce attack units, and could simply use defensive units and a massive army of artillery to win.
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I wonder why they didn't keep consistency with WWI that they started with the Battleship and Tank capabilities then :-) That's precisely that scenario.
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Just because your units are modern does not mean you can count on them to win every single time. You may need to do surgical strikes with artillery and flight when dealing with a vast army of obsolete units.
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After reading this forum in depth over recent weeks, that's exactly what I was doing. Bombard with artillery, advance attack units, attack with Veterans, finish off with Elites.
DRM
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CyberGnu
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of the Virtual Serengeti
Apr 1999
time: 05:16
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Yep. Uninstalled it twice, actually... I reinstalled it to see if some of the mods would make the game more interesting, since I really do want to like it... But I just couldn't take it.
Grumbold, if all there is to a boardgame is the manupulation of numbers, why bother with a graphical interface? Indeed, why bother with any historical terms at all? Why not just call the game 'Excel spreadsheet war 2001', and the first person to sum up 500 random numbers win?
I'm sure this is not what you meant, though. But you propably misunderstood the original poster.
The point is that if you have a unit called 'tank' it is supposed to defeat a unit called 'spearman', based on everything you know about history. If this is not the case, you have used a bad model.
Now, if you want the unit called 'spearman' to defeat the unit called 'tank' you;d better rename them to something logically consistent. Like '1', '2', etc...
But a regiment of spearmen does not defeat a tank battalion. Period.
Regarding the problems with the random number generator, I think this is a 'feature, not a bug'. Soren from Firaxis alluded to 'a unit always has a change to defeat another unit, regardless of odds'. This explains how my 12hp army of modern armor got killed by a defending spearman... Without the spearman getting a scratch, mind you.
If this is indeed a 'feature, not a bug' then it just again points out another horribly bad gameplay feature included in Civ3...
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Bubba_B
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Without flaming anyone I will just say; The BS is getting awful deep here.
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Grumbold
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London, UK
Mar 2000
time: 05:16
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quote:
Originally posted by CyberGnu
Grumbold, if all there is to a boardgame is the manupulation of numbers, why bother with a graphical interface? Indeed, why bother with any historical terms at all? Why not just call the game 'Excel spreadsheet war 2001', and the first person to sum up 500 random numbers win?
I'm sure this is not what you meant, though. But you propably misunderstood the original poster. |
Nope, I just have an extremely capable mathematician as a friend who will often point out after I assaulted the enemy with my "tank" and "stuka" counters that I had a 7.8% better chance of achieving the desired result if I has organised my attack in the optimum way. Assign any values to the units and the game can be played in a mathematical way should you choose to do so to maximise your chance of victory. Its not how I play, but I weaken my chances by not doing so.
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The point is that if you have a unit called 'tank' it is supposed to defeat a unit called 'spearman', based on everything you know about history. If this is not the case, you have used a bad model.
Now, if you want the unit called 'spearman' to defeat the unit called 'tank' you;d better rename them to something logically consistent. Like '1', '2', etc...
But a regiment of spearmen does not defeat a tank battalion. Period. |
We've got a whole other thread about that and I've argued my standpoint in exhaustive detail over there. A recent post also alluded to the other strategic events that could cause a tank battalion to lose almost irrespective of the opposition it faced, e.g. incompetence, disease, weather, faulty equipment, lack of supply and so on. If you take the strategic overview that over the course of a considerable period of time the tank unit had become useless but the "pikemen" bandits were still holding out in the hills, rather than one day the pikes charged the tanks in formation and won, it makes a lot more sense.
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Regarding the problems with the random number generator, I think this is a 'feature, not a bug'. Soren from Firaxis alluded to 'a unit always has a change to defeat another unit, regardless of odds'. This explains how my 12hp army of modern armor got killed by a defending spearman... Without the spearman getting a scratch, mind you. |
I'd be interested to see that post. If a unit always had a minimum 10% chance to win a round of combat it would certainly explain the most extreme results people claim to have seen.
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CyberGnu
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of the Virtual Serengeti
Apr 1999
time: 05:16
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Grumbold,
quote:
Nope, I just have an extremely capable mathematician as a friend who will often point out after I assaulted the enemy with my "tank" and "stuka" counters that I had a 7.8% better chance of achieving the desired result if I has organised my attack in the optimum way. Assign any values to the units and the game can be played in a mathematical way should you choose to do so to maximise your chance of victory. Its not how I play, but I weaken my chances by not doing so. |
The propabilities aren't that hard to calculate. Besides, there is a civ-calculator posted at http://www.columbia.edu/~sdc2002/civulator.html that calculates the odds for you.
But I still think you've imsunderstood the post.
Playing a historical game should eliminate the need to actually know the stats and propability of an attack. Your common sense should tell you that attacking an infantry unit in the mountains should hurt, badly. Your common sense should tell you that attacking a hoplite in the open with cavalry should slaugher the hoplites. Your common sense also tells you that attacking a tank with a knight is thoroughly Don Quixotian.
Unfortunately, in Civ3 all common sense does is to give you false information.
How would you feel if the stats for 'spearman' was 28/16/3, and 'tank' was 1/2/1? Would it confuse you? Would you be annoyed? And arguing that 'you have to learn to use your tank to defend your cities and your spearmen for blitzkrieg' doesn't really help, does it?
I certainly would feel annoyed by a 1/2/1 tank, and I feel the same way to a lesser extent about the current combat system.
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We've got a whole other thread about that and I've argued my standpoint in exhaustive detail over there. |
I haven't read it, and I only posted here because you seem to have misunderstood the original posters point... I've argued the same points exhaustively as well, and suggested a fix as well.
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A recent post also alluded to the other strategic events that could cause a tank battalion to lose almost irrespective of the opposition it faced, e.g. incompetence, disease, weather, faulty equipment, lack of supply and so on. If you take the strategic overview that over the course of a considerable period of time the tank unit had become useless but the "pikemen" bandits were still holding out in the hills, rather than one day the pikes charged the tanks in formation and won, it makes a lot more sense. |
Well, if my tank unit was that badly out of supply I would hardly decide to use it to attack when I have other units around, would I? I think it is a flawed argument, only used to defend one of Firaxis idiotic gameplay decisions. As for why... Well, I think n.c. said it best in a earlier thread.
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I'd be interested to see that post. If a unit always had a minimum 10% chance to win a round of combat it would certainly explain the most extreme results people claim to have seen.
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I think it is a lot less than 10%... Maybe 1 or 2%. Still enough to make an impact, however. I can't remember where I saw this.... Could be in the chat with Soren.
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yin26
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This space reserved for Darkstar.
Apr 1999
time: 14:16
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quote:
Yin26 - Your opinion of CIV III seems to have fallen since your review thread (which was somewhat 'less harsh' toward the game, since it was based upon expectations). What has caused this? |
Well, I can say the first few games were fun, but by the 4th game, I was just horribly bored by all the senseless --click, move unit-- --click, move worker-- multiplied by over a hundred at times IN ONE TURN!
The combat is overly simplified and dull.
Diplomacy is overly simplified and unchallenging.
The economics are stale and sleep-enducing.
Even 'great things' like culture reveal themselves to be implemented in some form of unexplained rookie-like manner.
Then there are the bugs (notice this is only a very small part of my equation).
Basically, I now realize Civ3 is *not* for the serious gamer, for if it were, the challenges would have been much deeper and the game itself designed to make all the tedium much, much easier to handle.
Yes, please buy Europa Universalis instead. Curiously, that's a game I did *not* like the first few games but have since to regard as one of the best strategy games ever made.
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29-11-2001 15:33
May be this is a little too much on the desperate side, isn't it?
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