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My Civ III shipped today! (1 Viewer)

Kenneth

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Electronic's Boutique shipped my Civ III copy today. I should have it on Wednesday. I will try and post my thoughts on the weekend. Looking forward to spending lots of time on this sucker :)
Kenneth
 

Jay H

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Cool, I preordered mine from Outpost 2nd day air, so far no notice, but I might call the local EB and if they have it on the shelf, I'll just cancel the order and pick it up locally. It's roughly the same price either way. I just spend $300 to upgrade to a 1gig Athlon Thunderbird too.. *sigh* the things one does to enjoy a great game. It looks really interesting after reading the boards at civfanatics.com some interesting stuff that's alot different from when I played the orginal Civ many years ago.
I used to remember being catapult crazy and using the Great Wall wonder to be really sneeky. And the use of diplomats to wreak havoc was always humorous and fun...
Jay
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Jay H

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Hey, I just picked up Civ III, just now. I went down to the local mall where there is an EB, a Software, Etc (aka gamestop aka Babbages) and also a Funcoland. EB had a ton of LEs sitting on the shelfs but I couldn't find any regular editions and the sales crew seemed way to intent on playing GTA3 so I moseyed up to Software Etc and saw they had some regular editions out so I picked one up and just cancelled my order from outpost.com. Yippee, I'm flipping through the manual and checking things out, I've already found out alot from the various Civ fan sites out there. It's another one of those big box with a jewel case and thin manual deals and alot of dead air in the box. I didn't feel like springing $10 for a tin can and a tech tree that you can download online and printout anyway. But in either case, hopefully I'll see how slow it runs on my old PC. The game recommends a PII-500 whereas I have the bare minimum PII-300, at least for now...
Can't wait.. gotta last 4 more hours... Must resist tempation. *cough* *cough*. :)
Jay
 

Wolf Jenkins

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Call me a sucker...
I went to Compusa first today - they didn't have it yet!!! So, I went to EB - and they only had the tin (sold out of the regular) so I went ahead and plopped down the 60 bucks for it... Sigh..
now to install it.. See y'all in a month or two...
:)
Or when I get my Xbox. what to do??
 

Jay H

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Kelley: Damn Straight!!!
biggrin.gif
I don't mind supporting the economy too.
[update] I just found out my new mobo and stuff shipped the day I ordered it. Quite impressive, especially when their order status implied that it shipped 10/30, the FedEx tracking number indicates it was picked up on 10/29, so their order status at newegg.com is actually slow! They seem to be a good site, thanks for the rec.
Ahhh, my first Civ III game.. there's alot of stuff I have to refresh my mind and this is one dang hard game. the AI is sooo much better than the original Civ. I started a Pangaea world (one big continent, I figure I'll learn seapower later) with 5 other random civs on it, warm temperature and young earth. Started at Warlord level (2nd easiest) and started the game. I realized that I've completely forgotten most of the things from Civ 1, like manipulating your resources to get the most production while producing enough food and keeping your citizens happy. And taxes and stuff. For awhile, my capitol city was in civil disorder cause the citizens weren't happy. Took my awhile to figure out how to rectify that and by that time, all the other civs were making small wonders and advancing while I'm stuck here in the poorhouse. Anyway, for the hell of it, I'm just goofing off really, trying to figure out stuff and eventually the pesky Japanese piss me off enough that I decide to attack one of their swordsman near my city. Ha, off to war, now the fun begins. Combat is cool as usual, alot more animated than the original (looking at screenshots from the original now makes you wonder at how different 10 years is in graphics ability!) The ability to retreat is a cool feature for city defense. Makes horsemen a little better than cannon fodder even though their defense is a puny 1, they can at least escape battle to repair.
Well, after 2.5 hours of fooling around and my imminent death was soon to come anyway, the game crashed so I had to kill the process and decided rather than subjugate myself to another ass-whipping, I decided to actually look at the manual, which was hard because I started to watch Alias on TV since I never saw the pilot episode. Damm that girl is yummy
yum.gif
Especially with that Fifth Element, do-me-red hair that she had for half the episode.
Jay
[Edited last by Jay H on October 31, 2001 at 08:33 AM]
 

Jay H

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My second silly game of Civ III.. this time I started with a small world, 2 other civs and at the easiest Chieftain level. I was playing the mighty Germans this time.. Just still learning the ropes.. Got further than I did last game, didn't crash, and now I'm getting better at keeping my civies happy and out of civil unrest. Enough so that I have found the Golden Age and fireworks and We Love The King Days and cool stuff. My capitol has about 6 Great Wonders cause I just started building them one after another for the hell of it. I can build my first ship and I recently just setup trade with the Russkies with Iron so I can build those cool Swordsmen (ADM or 3/2/1!!!). I actually had so much culture that I took over an adjacent city from the Russians who liked my culture alot better... COOL!!!!!
Jay
 

Kenneth

Supporting Actor
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My shipment is MIA
frown.gif
EB is usually pretty reliable, but they dropped the ball on this one. If mine doesn't come in by tomorrow I might buy a separate copy for myself locally and just give this one to my friend, who is also a diehard Civ fan, for Christmas. Grrrrr. I really want to play this sucker this weekend.
Kenneth
 

Jay H

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Yes, it's cool game, very tough though so far. The AI is turning out to be one serious hardass. Diplomacy is difficult as the computer always seems to demand way too much for stuff from you and being agressive towards a nation can backfire as there are alliances and allies. Attacking the puny French can unleash it's huge and mighty Russian allies, so you kind of have to tread carefully.
I need to do some more fortification and make some more swordsmen as my neighbors have more military than I do and they seem to be up to something! I need to expand a bit too so now that my citizens are all happy, I'll make some settlers and grow some more..
Jay
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Jay H

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After even more playing last night (interupted by Survivor 3) some things are becoming obvious. If you're playing for a military conqueur, the strategic resources are sooooooo important. i.e. if you have no access to horses or iron in the early game, you're stuck without any horsemen or stuff like Swordsmen (3/2/1) and anything that needs iron. Plus, until you research Horseback Riding or Iron Working, you do NOT know where the resources are, so it's almost luck and of course expansionism that you get a resource for them. I have traded for iron but I think the French now have the only source of horses so I might really consider going to war to get access to horses. I really interesting and great concept of Civ 3, the idea of going to war over resources, which happens all the time.
Jay
 

Kenneth

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I couldn't stand waiting for my missing package so I bought a copy last night (hopefully my missing one will show up next week so I can stash it for Christmas). I loaded it and played a few turns just to see the lay of the land. I like the look of the interface. I am still reading the manual before I dive in on Saturday for some serious playing. If it turns out to be as engrossing as Civ II I am "Doomed"
wink.gif
By the time I finally beat Civ II at Diety level I had invested more than a year in gameplaying and about a month on that particular game. From what I am reading in the manual and internet I expect the same from Civ III :)
Kenneth
 

Kelley_B

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Man this game sounds awesome....kinda like Age of Empires and sim city....might just have to pick this up later on.
 

Jay H

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Hey Kelley, yes it's a really great series! Civilization got me hooked about 10 years ago and although I didn't have the time to play most of the sequels, when I heard about Civ 3 on this forum, it immediately brought back memories. It is not Multiplayer yet because Firaxis decided that the timeframe they wanted to release the game at didn't allow for them to do a good job so they concentrated on a single player game (almost unheard of these days .sic. ) and will release later a multiplayer version. many of the Civ diehards are ready to lynch Firaxis because of it. Personally, I'd much rather get a great SP version than get a crappy SP version with MP support.
Also, there are no scenarios on it yet, but again, there's probably going to be an expansion pack containing this stuff. BTW, it runs in Windows XP which I know you have but there are some problems with some NVidia drivers for some GeForce cards, some of the newer drivers have problems with slow scrolling and the fix to this was to roll back the drivers to an older version. Not sure if you have that video card but you can find the info at
http://www.apolyton.com/civ3/
If you check out the forums, you'll find alot of people bashing Civ 3, (kind of like if you mentioned BOSE in the hardware section here...) but IMO, they are diehard Civ 2 players and when they find that Civ 3 has changed, they go ape and think that the world is going to end.
P.S. My case arrived last night from Newegg and my guts should arrive today. The case is nice, the PSU is real tiny compared to my old one and the case is removed by taking the front cover off and sliding the sides out. Many pieces but hopefully wont have to play with it too much.. Has another fan mount in the front just in case I want to add another fan there..
Jay
 

Wolf Jenkins

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On my 2nd game now - been playing the greeks. Both the lowest difficulty; just trying to relearn the game.
had to go kick the ecrap out of the russians last night - kept running their scout through my territory and 'saying' they will withdraw. Bad move on their part - whomped 'em. bad part is that I'm setting up a confrontation w/ the Brits, as I'm on their northern border...
Likes:
* the research tree tweaks - like the 'ages' setup
* animations are nice (just eye candy I guess
* foreign affairs is way more robust - haven't figured out the trade stuff yet
dislikes
* lack of sleep
* it's a deep game, but find myself missing some elements of alpha centauri (like customizable units!)
* wish I had more terraforming options
* I liked the 'borehole cluster' and stuff from AC - wish they had that here.
Overall, quite awesome. Sleep deprivation sucks though.
 

Wolf Jenkins

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more:
Likes:
* stratgic resources idea is cool. I went kicking the egyptians around - went after cities w/ Saltpeter first to stop them for building more muskets (or whatever they now are) had to make many plans to get coal, etc.
* I like the fact that you get workers when you destroy and enemy city - pretty cool. Been using my conquests to supply my cities w/ workers.
* colonies rock
Dislikes:
* don't like that chariots suck so bad now..
* I wish I could hurry wonder production - leaders are a little hard to come by (just built an army, so I can get hero's epic.)
* forbidden palace is cool - but corruption is KILLER. I had cities that were 15 wasted shield w/one uncorrupted. didn't realize what was going on at first. so I had to wait 50 turns until the wonder was built because I couldn't hurry it (in a republic still.)
* barbarians are set to roaming on my current game, but they keep cropping up and pillaging my colonies. Pain!
* can't seem to sentry my army units - that option seems to have disappeared... is fortifying the same thing (wake up when someone is near by?)
* I don't like the zone of control w/ units to be so narrow - enemy can pass right by my guys (which doesn't really make that much sense) uncontested and steal workers...
Suggestions:
* workers cannot be fortified for defense... I wish there was an option for them to be 'militia' or something - low defense but still usable in an emergency...
* a 'spy satellite' wonder... Since apollo no longer allows you to view the whole map, I wish I could see where the enemy was at will. I figure it should cost something, but that _is_ the way the world works now...
 

Matty B

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Does your guys Civ 3 not run INCREDIBLY slow?????? Im on my first game, in about AD 680 and it takes more than a minute per turn. I am also playing with like 15 other civs though on a huge map, but STILL this game doesn't have good graphics, and I have a 1200mhz athlon with 384 megs of RAM!
 

Jay H

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Yes, the Sleep function is gone and I really hope Firaxis puts that back in. Fortify is not the same function. Although the unit will defend itself when attacked and probably gets a little bonus, it will not activate itself when an enemy unit is one hex over.
frown.gif

You can always fortify a bored pikeman or something on a colony, the barbarians are pretty week, except for when they plop down like 10 horsemen in one stack and then barely kill off a swordsman with a defense of 2.
wink.gif

Corruption is big, from what I hear. Although my first game I was avoiding World Wars and just trying to relearn everything from Civ 1. I was kind of doing the cultural thing and found that luxurys and happy citizens help, the verdict is out on courthouses, some people say they help, others say their worthless.
Matty, can't help ya there, haven't tried anything larger than small world with 6 total civs. I only have a Pii-300 and my stinkin Athlon 1.0gig is on hold until I can get a good motherboard. :angry:
Errrhh, now I can't even play.
What's your guys opinion on bombardment, say catapults. They're easy to produce but they're certainly not as powerful as the original civ. I used to solely product attack 6 catapults and rule that way. Seems like Civ 3 catapults are semi week. I am currently researching gunpower so we'll see how cannons are.
Jya
 

Dave Smith

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Don't forget you'll also need Chemistry and Metallurgy for those cannons!
I agree about catapults. They pretty much suck. I had a prolonged war against the Greeks yesterday, and my siege of Thermopylae took 80 years
rolleyes.gif
I had four catapults sitting outside bombarding the whole damn time, with horsemen and archers to attack. Most of the time the bombardments fail outright, sometimes a city improvement or population gets destroyed, occasionally you'll knock a point off the defending units. If I'd had six or eight catapults I might have had a better time of it but that's ridiculous.
Then the Egyptians pretty much rolled right over me so it didn't matter anyway
laugh.gif

Also, I haven't checked the documentation for this version too closely, but in Civ when you fortified a unit, you didn't get a small bonus, the defense value TRIPLED. From my Thermopylae experiences I'd guess this is still in effect.
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Jay H

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Hey, I just read that Fortified is a 25% bonus from the Defense mod. What's hard about bombardment in a city is that cities with barracks I think heal any unit in it to full in 1 turn so damaging a unit is fruitless unless you kill it in one turn. So I think that you're best to bombard a unit and attack the city in the same turn. Kind of like using faster units to attack smaller units. You're guaranteed not to die cause it seems the faster units will retreat. I wish it was a percentage based value where the unit could retreat X% of the time. In that case, faster units are probably better than using catapults as long as you have a bunch of good defensive units in the same stack.
Jay
 

Jay H

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ARrrrghhh, I am going to have to put my old PII-system to a frankenstein mode. I am exchanging my motherboard and memory for a new one. In the meantime, I'll have to hook up my old PC so I can play. I don't think I can wait that long cause I have to ship the stuff back to newegg before they overnight the replacements.. arrrgggghhh, the horror! Fortunately, the new minitower uses rails that slide in and out of the case so I'll just take them out and put them on top of my old minitower and use that just to play...
...I read this morning there's a patch to make Elvis appear as your Domestic Advisor!!
laugh.gif

Jay
 

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