|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
Review: Civilization IIIReviewed By: Bill Stiteler Review Date: March 11, 2002
Civilization possesses me. I'm not being glib when I say I mailed my Civ 2 CD to a friend in Saint Paul so I could get some work done. She still has it, in fact, and recently asked if I wanted it back. I had just gotten Civ 3, and told her to hang on to it for a while. I may have changed my mind.
Most games try to maintain the status quo, adding features and graphics to give gamers a bigger power trip and more eye candy. Diablo 2 had more gear and more character classes. Lord of Destruction, likewise; you're playing the same game with new weapons and spells. The Civ games, however, add more detail with each new generation. There are new military units, sure. But even basic game mechanics have been completely overhauled. Units are no longer supported by individual cities, but by the civ as a whole. To produce units that use iron or horses or gunpowder, you have to locate those resources (or their components), and link them via road to your city. They also have to be within your area of "culture," which is another new element. Your nation's territory is no longer just determined by the placement of your cities. Depending on the development you've done to the city (improvements like temples, factories, and other elements of infrastructure), your borders will expand. This becomes especially important when your border collides with another civ. If your city is culturally impoverished while another thrives, the people of your city will revolt and go over to the other culture. And dig this: it's not an act of war.
Certain games you play for the sheer fun of it: arcade games, goofy games like Zork: Grand Inquisitor. Civilization 3 is a game you play if you enjoy being challenged. It seems as if the Firaxis team sat down and said, "We'll make the graphics better, sure. But what can we do to make the game harder?" They succeeded. For one thing, fighting a war is much more difficult, especially early in the game. A one-point difference in the strength of two units was usually all it took. Not so now. The days of rampaging across enemy territory with a single superior unit are over. Victory will almost always go to superior numbers of evenly matched units. Diplomacy is more layered than ever before. Rather than simply being insulting or obsequious, other civs can take on a variety of attitudes, and your negotiations can take on more than one aspect. You can put together deal packages of not just technology, but also money, trade resources, communications, and diplomatic offerings--all in one package, mind you, so that you could offer Ghandi the secret of Chariots, 100 gold, and communications with the Russians in exchange for going to war with the Russians. This is probably what you'll have to offer him; the AIs have become far more stingy in their offers. The days of simply trading a tech for a tech are over.
Also, no trade caravans means no "hurrying" the production of Wonders. A Wonder, if you don't know, is a unique improvement like the pyramids or the colossus, which gives your city unique benefits but takes a looooooong time to build. Now the only way to hurry their production is to sacrifice a leader. And what is a leader? Welcome to another Civ 3 change! Rarely (and I mean rarely; I've only seen it once in weeks of play) one of your combat units will produce a leader character, who has no combat skills himself, but has two unique abilities. One, he can be sacrificed to hurry a Wonder. Two, he can form an army, which allows several units to fight as one. I'm just hitting the tip of the iceberg here in terms of changes. Some players will have to make major adjustments in their style of play. Others will have to scrap them completely. If you made a habit of bribing other units, guess what? Spies are gone. Espionage is a diplomatic action now.
Civ 3 is the flight simulator of strategy games. They put everything in there in an attempt to make things as accurate as possible, and they succeed. The sheer breadth of information and options is incredibly daunting and more than occasionally aggravating, but--if you're after that kind of experience--extremely rewarding. I was going to take off a point because the game wasn't working the way I remembered. Then I realized the game had taken on another level to which I wasn't responding. So, I give Civ 3 a rating of five out of five, and would probably give it six out of five if Kirk wouldn't complain about having to make a new graphic. For challenge, depth, and replayablity, there is simply no game to compare with any Civilization game which has the sacred name of Sid in it.
 5 out of 5 [an error occurred while processing this directive]
|
. |
|
||||
The Civilization games (the ones with titles that begin "Sid Meier's," mind you) are the greatest strategy games ever. In them, you begin with a single tribe of villagers, and from there attempt to expand into a world-conquering civilization. You control just about every aspect of your civ that you'd care to: taxes, research, military, trade, diplomacy, expansion...the whole schmeer.
There are a thousand little changes like that, so much so that even an experienced Civ player should play the demo game a few times to catch on to the subtleties. They all add up to a game on a different order of magnitude. It's like being an expert in trigonometry, and finding a textbook on calculus. The language is there, but it takes on a different level.
The good news is that resources are more valuable than ever, and for good reason; they can make citizens in every connected city (by road or harbor) happy. Trade caravans are gone, however. You get the resources simply by building a road to it. This is good because it prevents you from having to build caravans and get them from location to location safely, but don't break out the champagne just yet. This means the enemy can now cut your supply lines by breaking a road or by a naval blockade of your harbor. Yeah, sure, no big deal if you can't get silk to a frontier city during a battle...until you remember that iron for swordsmen is a resource. So is saltpeter for gunpowder. Are you ready to replace your fallen riflemen with spearmen? Didn't think so.
If I may descend into deep, deep geekery here, going from Civ 2 to Civ 3 is like going from The Hobbit to Lord of the Rings. Checkers to Go. Or going from a Nora Ephron movie to...well, pretty much any other movie (I don't care for Meg Ryan all that much).