Coded blue.

Monday 19 November 2001

Screenshot Civ3

Pic of the day: The city picture is back with a vengeance. In natural size, it fills the whole screen. The surrounding landscape is modelled on the surrounding map area. In this case for instance, a river runs through it.

Civ3, day 3

OK, one more day of Civ3, because I am lazy. I won't go on like this. But hey, this is what I'd like others to do unto me when I didn't have the game yet. So here you go.

The game interface – the graphics, controls and such. As I've mentioned, the graphics are updated. They are still recognizable for old Civ players, but they are generally prettier and more immersive. Apart from the restlessly moving units, the most striking change may be the mountains. They are now a dark red and very steep and forbidding. You get an idea why you can no longer build cities on them. (Which is a shame, really, since some people did just that. The defensive bonus would however have made a city on a mountain almost invincible until the late 20th century.)

In Civ2 and its predecessor, the multiplayer CivNet, you could zoom in and out over wide range of magnifications. Outside a middle range of sizes, the pictures looked weird. Zoom out too much, and the maps became illegible. Zoom in too close, and the landscape dissolved into blocky shapes. Still, there were situations when an overview in particular came in handy, to get the greater picture. And zooming in, especially early in the game, made the whole thing more personal. You got a feeling for how they would see their world, rather limited. In Civ3, there are only two levels, a normal and an overview. On the bright side, the overview (zoom out) level is fully playable.

***

The most important change to the game screen, however, is that the menus are gone. The separate windows are gone, though the world map is still visible, tucked away in the lower left corner of the screen. (I mean tucked away. Right handed people at least are generally more likely notice things that are in the right half of their field of vision.) But mostly, the game map fills the whole screen. A few small buttons are all you have to help you control the game, unless you remember the many keyboard shortcuts. On the other hand, you can right-click on any unit or city and get a list of possible actions, in genuine Windows fashion. This is very handy. You can now manage your cities a lot more without opening the city window. Indeed, I find that I see this window much less than I'm used to.

Another reason for this is more irritating. The game does not always stop when a city has finished building an improvement, such as a temple. It pops up a small, shadowy rectangle with a message in small letters. The message disappears after a moment, so even if you notice it, you better be a fast reader. (I don't know if this is customizable, if so it is certainly not obvious.) In Civ2 you were asked whether you wanted to zoom to the city screen. Now you are just thrown onward to the next city or other event. When you have a large number of cities, you may have forgotten the first message when the screen finally stops. And if you don't do anything, the city will blithely continue doing its own things. It may start building another city improvement, or a military unit, depending on its own guess of what you want.

Each city has a governor, an artificial intelligence that handles the matters of running the city day to day. It assigns the workers to land squares for best production, as it did in Civ2. But it also handles the building queue, something you had to allow explicitly in earlier games. It learns from the commands you give it and other cities. I can testify that this seems to be the case: In my second game, I tried to build temples and libraries as early as possible. In the beginning, the governor tried to build military units and I had to overrule it manually, as I had built a barracks in one of the cities and made all military units there while developing the others with culture first. After quite a while, the governors started to catch on, and finally started on a temple as soon as I founded a new city.

You can interact with the governors in great detail. By right-clicking on the city and selecting governor, you can give orders to one city or to all at the same time. You can tell for instance to never build naval units automatically (something it otherwise loves to do) and to build culture improvements often. You can also tell it particularly to concentrate on happiness buildings (like temple, colosseum and cathedral) or education buildings (library, university and research lab). You can allow it to build Wonders of the World, or not. Or you can let it build economy improvements. These and many other choices can be set to Never, Sometimes or Often. If you have only a few choices set to Often, it is a good bet that the governors will start on these as soon as they are available. There are also other ways in which you can instruct the governors. You can tell them to emphasize growth, economy or production, or a combination of some of the above. All in all there are two pages packed with things you can tell your governors. The net effect would be that you sit down and have a long talk with the governor at the founding of the city, and then you can forget about it and concentrate on the big picture.

But in practice, I doubt most players want to do this. Civ3 is a very dynamic game. For instance, once you discover who your neighbors are, your priorities may change drastically. Or you may find new city locations that give a lot of one particular resource (one of my cities was neighboring 3 mountains with gold – once I had a road and a mine in each of those, it became a powerhouse of production and money). This may affect your plans for some of the other cities, and you would have to go back and talk to the governors again. In practice, it seems just as easy to keep an eye on the production and adjust it manually, leaving the governors to learn by example. Indeed they do, but it does take some time and they are not very smart. Artificial mediocrity?

***

Speaking of artificial personalities, the rival factions are too greedy for their own good. They will refuse a fair deal or even one slightly tilted in their favor, and act offended for good measure. For instance, a civilization will offer to trade its world map for my world map + a technology they don't have yet. I offer a map for a map, even though my map is larger. They refuse, and sulk. (Though in both games, Joan of Arc has been more willing than the rest to deal fairly.) You'd certainly think they would be eager to trade in luxuries: The more different luxuries you have, the more people will get happy in each city connected to the resource somehow. But typically each civilization has access to only one or at best 2 luxuries. If another civilization traded luxuries with me, they would increase their productivity and their status at no cost, except the fact that I got a benefit too. With 16 players, as I have in my second game, this would still improve their situation compared to 14 other players, but they still whine and sulk and refuse. I think this is taking realism too far.

(A much cited American study a bit over a decade ago showed that American students generally would prefer no economic growth over a scenario where America had economic growth and Japan slightly higher economic growth. Now that these guys are grown up, they may just be getting what they asked for. History is a fun, fun, fun science. Those who do not learn from history, are condemned to do badly in Civ3, I guess.)


Yesterday <-- This month --> Tomorrow?
One year ago
Two years ago
Three years ago

Visit the Diary Farm for the older diaries I've put out to pasture.


I welcome e-mail: itlandm@online.no
Back to my home page.