Civilization III vs. Civilization II

I have not yet seen Civ.III in action, but Civ.II is one of the best PC games ever. Did they top it with Civ.III?

Any help would be appreciated, thanxs.

 

Gameplay wise yes. The graphics are good, but they're not jaw dropping. The combat system is not accurate at all. I've seen full health modern tanks loose to a barbarian or other melee weapon unit multiple times. Sorry, but it's not going to happen. Plus the effectiveness of planes, ships and other unit bombers is not that great

Another thing that annoyed me was that they took out the wonder cut-scenes. I always enjoyed those, espcially in Alpha Centari. Plus while you can edit the paramaters, corruption is unbelieveably high, and the difficulty unedited jumps from too easy to, smack upside the head difficult.

Overall the central gameplay is solid, as is the AI and is superior to all other versions, combat wise alpha centari takes the cake, plus I liked AC's unit creation. So it's a hit and miss, compared with AC but aside from the cut-scenes, it's vastly superior to Civ II. If you're a fan of Sid's work, get it, but be prepared for the shortfalls it has.

 

Civ III is in my opinion slightly better in every aspect than Civ II but it's not nearly as good as it should be. There's couple of things that very much annoy me. First is diplomacy which doesn't work half as well as it did in Alpha Centauri. Second thing is that if you happen to play with huge map you have to be crazy if you even consider going to war before you have tanks. I remember my campaign where it took my archer or whatever it was about three hundred years to travel to enemy city and of course it died next round.

But I really like the idea of resources which is actually the main difference to earlier Civs. The idea of resources is of course that you can't for example build cavalry unless you have horses on your nation. Theoretically you can purchase resources from other nations but there's usually too limited number of resources available. Too much depends from your starting location. If you're lucky you start from big isolated island where's every available resource in which case game is way too easy even on hardest difficulty. But if you're not lucky you start in the middle of three other nations with not a single resource available in which case game is very much impossible even on easiest difficulty.

 

So it sounds like Civ.III is a mixture of Age of the Empires/Kings and Civilization II?

 

The diplomacy is another shortfall. The computer, without fail, always wants the better deal, and won't give you something unless you give them something better, yet it'll trade tech between each other freely. I gets worse on harder difficulty levels too. Once I was on a rather large island on one of the highest difficulty. I took over the neighboring civilizations very quickly, and soon I was the largest nation. I populated the entire large island and got everything perfect and I was advancing as quickly as possible (4 turns, editable by the game editor) yet when I'd try to build a wonder the computer would beat me to it. Soon the computer was building wonders that weren't even available to me (and I had the great library but you have to have contact for it to work) The damn computer was having each civ research different techs and trading them so they could advance 5 times faster than I could and I couldn't go any faster. By the time I had Navigation to get contact with them over the open seas they had tanks. Too much isolation is a baaad thing on higher levels.

 

Yup it is

Civ3 is still fun as hell, cept when you use a super duper big map by the 1800's I have almost finished my space ship (on the 2nd hardest difficulty)

How the diffrent levels work is , the computer's units get a extra move and they need less shields to build something the harder the difficulty.


And best way to prevent them from trading tech's is to get them yourself for 100 gold(usualy good enough) then sell em all indvidualy to each one for 5 gold per turn... till they have no more money to trade, and you still got half the tech's.