There are two things, I think, that made the Activision games bad:

1. Too many bugs/no tech support or patches

2. Lack of balance! (tanks take forever in cities younger than 3500 years)

However, I am sure that these problems won't appear in Civ III, due to the diligence and experience of the team and the precedent that has been set with Civ, Civ II, and Alpha Centauri.

I also think that, where the Acivision games were difficult to play, they were easy to macromanage. They both included easy tools for saving/loading build queues, manipulating build orders of many cities at once, fairly good pathfinding (could be improved), and click-sortable lists of city statistics (food, shields, arrows, people, happiness, etc.) Though happiness was a numeric quantity in the aforesaid games, it shouldn't be too hard to sort by it using 0 for content, +1 for happy, -1 for unhappy.

It would be a shame if these tools were ignored by the Civ III team. In my opinion, the ease of macromanagement was the only positive part about the CTP's, and, at least to me, it seems such a triviality to include but can add so much speed to the late game, like when you want all your big cities to produce factories.

Any thoughts? Anything to add or refute?

Also, it became stupidly, horribly abstract. Crabs and Squids flying back and forth between Jamaicans and Ethiopians...?!

Players need to be engaged in building mines, roads, bridges, etc in short 'building an empire'. All the automation strips the game down to its worst aspect, a simple wargame.

I say LESS automation, MORE sophistication!!

I hear a lot of people here say that they thought Civ2 was too militaristic, and I am surprised nobody has really suggested that this could be alleviated without de-emphasizing military units by adding non-military ones! I thought that for all its flaws, the one thing that saved CTP were it's special units. I loved using the clerics, corporate branches, slavers, etc. and I think that Firaxis should definitly take a look at the realm of non-combat units.

2)MAD from CTP2, you were allowed to pick targets for your nukes, and they launch automatically if you're nuked by a civ they're pointed at.

3)Mouse Control, I found it was much better to use the mouse to direct movement than the keypad.

4)Feats of wonder...I used to always see if I had the ability to complete Magellan's Expedition the REAL way before the computer would build the wonder back in Civ1...I always wished I'd gotten something for it too.

5)Of course the loads of things incorporated into the Medieval Mods...those are truly amazing

6) A differentiation between a riot and a rebellion in a city if it isnt' quelled soon enough

quote: Originally posted by Gammaray fan on 04-25-2001 11:09 PM Non-conventional warfare (not including spies and nukes because they are military units), such as Corporations and Religious units should NOT be included in CIV3, because of the ridiculous nature of the units. Corporations and Religions are not entities that soley benefit the instigating civ at the expense of the recipient civ. In other words they are 'non-conventional', but are not 'warfare' units, and thus don't make sense.

Actually, the non-conventionals were not warfare units, but they worked as a means of boosting your production and gold at the expense of another civ without going to war. Granted, they were very hard to defend against in CTP1 - and the AI did not use them properly, but CTP2 toned down their abilities by giving the non-conventionals the ability to see all the others.

I liked them...

quote: Originally posted by Gammaray fan on 04-25-2001 11:09 PM The way to go is NOT to increase the number of units clogging up the map.

...unlike the use of settlers to build tile improvements but that argument has already been decided.