OT: Civ3 rant from MoO3 v GalCiv topic

[Cyrien]

SM never made good games. Brain Reynolds did. SM just put his name on them.

[oleg]

Originally posted by Cyrien:
SM never made good games. Brain Reynolds did. SM just put his name on them.

Just to "smooth" down my previous post - SM did make good games : Pirates (One of the best games ever IMHO) and Civ-1 (even better !). But then he either lost the plot or decided to live on royalties (the later would be my explanation) :{

[Instar]

When you talk about the stealth being either "1 or 0" I have to interject and say that I remember seeing modifiers in the the editor that allowed you to chnage how it worked.
I liked Civ3, but there are flaws that I hated.

[Cyrien]

I never played pirates... but Civ1 was indeed a good game.

As for stealth. I remember trying to find ways to do that and I never saw anything other than "stealth" and "Detect stealth" etc. Unless you are talking about the setting that modifies how stealth fighters and bombers work? All that does is change the chance of intercepting one of those and it is a universal setting that affects all stealth aircraft. What I was talking about was more the invisible setting such as used by submarines etc. As far as I know Civ3 only ever allowed that and detecting that no settings for it.
I would love to be proved wrong.

[Xiodos]

Pirates was great... Im not sure if Brian was on for Colonization, but that was a fantastic game as well.

As for Stealth, I think it was either "on" or "off" and then had sperate values for likely hood of detecting it... not sure, but Fyron will correct me on it later.

[Fyron]

As for Stealth, I think it was either "on" or "off" and then had sperate values for likely hood of detecting it... not sure, but Fyron will correct me on it later.

I stopped playing the game long before I ever developed stealth technology. It was too awful to play that long...

[Shadarr]

I didn't realize Brian Reynolds left before Civ 3. That explains a lot. My main problem with it wasn't anything specific, I just seemed to get bogged down in the later stages, and I would lose interest. Not like Alpha Centaur where by the late game I would be rolling over people with my deathspheres and planet-bustering entire continents off the map.

[Fyron]

Here is another problem with Civ3: Bombardment. How realistic is it that 30 bomber units (which would be 30 bomber wings) bombing a size 20 city with 10 defenders only manage to do 1 point of damage to a single unit, and nothing else? Keep in mind that these defenders are musketmen. In the real world, that level of bombardment would be enough to reduce Mexico City, New York, Beijing, Tokyo, or any other huge city with no air defense (as the cities I was bombarding had no units capable of fighting bombers) to rubble in no time flat.

[Cyrien]

My favorite part was when I engaged in nuclear warfare and used a nuke against a stack of 20 cavalry and the nuke killed about 5 of them.

Oh joy.

[Shadarr]

How realistic is it that 30 bomber units (which would be 30 bomber wings) bombing a size 20 city with 10 defenders only manage to do 1 point of damage to a single unit, and nothing else?

Too true. With that kind of firepower, you ought to be able to recreate the bombing of Dresden.

Plus the whole culture thing is stupid. Supposedly people are influenced by my culture, yet all the nations are so similar that everyone's culture is effectively the same. Are cities really going to defect from one democracy to another? It would've been really cool if there were actual cultures in the game which were different without being inferior. Maybe a techno-warrior society like the clans in Battletech, or a megacorporation like in Shadowrun. Instead, culture is just another number you have to increase.

The main flaw in Civ, though, is that it isn't fun. When I finish a game of SEIV I immediately start a new one. When I finish a game of Civ 3, if I ever have, I shelve the game for a couple months.