Saturday 17 November 2001

Pic of the day: This nice picture illustrates the start of the middle ages. It was definitely nicer than the one for industrialization, with its smokestacks and gray clouds.

Civ3, day 1

I slept in till past 10 in the morning, ate a couple yoghurt and went to town. Hoping against hope, I went to the Shop of Angels, even though I had been there yesterday and looked. There was still no Civ3 in sight, but I addressed a young man and asked plaintively for Civ3. He told me that they would get it next week. But then he must have seen the "kicked puppy" look in my eyes, for he told me that Playzone had it already. I walked briskly, but did not run, to Playzone. The shop was packed with customers, mostly prepubescent kids and small kids with parents. They were clustered around the Harry Potter section of the shop. There was a demo machine running Harry Potter, as well as shelves of Potter games for the PC and some kind of game machine. There were also Harry Potter Lego, and Harry Potter Trading Cards. Probably more. But in a fairly quiet part of the shop I finally saw the famous Tower of Bable painting.

This will probably do horrible thing to my Culture rating, but I don't really know who made that painting in the first place. I'm pretty sure he was Dutch, though. Huygens? I'm afraid I know very few Dutch artists. The funny thing is that Firaxis has completed the picture in the intro movie. They have added layers in gradually higher tech, until the top is a present day workplace and is eclipsed by a jet plane. Nifty! Decidedly replete with nift.

My heart beat with joy at the sight of the long searched for game. (Insert comparisons to falling in love, or merchants and pearls of great value etc, at your discretion.) I felt like "Wheeeeee!" but I managed to restrain myself to a loud "Yesss!" which the locals probably heard as "Jøss", the local pronounciation of Jesus. Be that as it may, I lined up in the queue with the Potter kids, and clutching my prized game I finally stepped out in the bright November day.

***

On the bus home, I managed to read some essential parts of the manual. I strongly recommend a glance in the manual even if you have played Civ2. Perhaps especially if you have played Civ2. The learning curve is moderate, but the unlearning curve for Civ2 players is steep and you could easily break a leg or even a neck.

I continued to read while installing the game, this took a while. Civ3 is on only one CD, but it must be jam packed. There was certainly a lot of copying going on. Or perhaps extracting packed files. The game is certainly detailed. There is a lot more ambient detail than in the previous games, and the animated units make for a new level of immersion. You get actual duel scenes in a battle, for instance, and you see your worker units hacking out a new road. Nifty.

I played a tutorial game. Actually, I still do. I was surprised at how soon the hand-holding dropped down to general advice. For instance, there was no particular warning that the tutorial game was infested with barbarians. Before I knew it, there was a steady stream of them advancing on my cities. Luckily a barbarian warrior is hardly able to scratch a fortified spearman, and will even give them valuable combat experience that make them veteran and eventually elite soldiers. Still, I had expected a kinder, gentler world for the neophyte player.

***

In more technical news, I was surprised to find that the Civilopaedia entries ended in the middle of the text, or at least well before the end. I realized that a bit more playtesting might have benefited the game. But I did not recognize it as the Font Bug, not until I came to the diplomacy screens and saw the answer alternatives far down below the frames and seeming to extend off the screen.

One benefit of getting the game a few days later is that I have had time to read the Usenet posts and message boards. So I had already heard of the Font Bug. Evidently, this hits you if you have too many fonts. One heroic player removed fonts one by one until he pinpointed the guilty ones. Benefiting from his advice, I moved the broader Lucida Sans fonts (demibold and oblique) out of the windows fonts and over in a separate folder. (I may need them later, perhaps.) Now the game ran just fine.

Civ3 is indeed delightfully stable. It is common these days to release games with plenty of bugs and quirks, but so far I have not found any show stoppers. (So far is to the point where I have factories in most of my cities, AD 1934.) But the game evidently keeps a lot of stuff in memory at any one time: When I retired a bit after midnight, the PC spent quite a while whirring around on the hard disk, presumably clearing up caches and normalizing virtual memory and such.

***

Gameplay is, as expected, different from Civ2. The single most irritating part is probably the wonders of the world. There is no way to save up for them, and no way to rush them (except supposedly by sacrificing Leaders, which you gain through military experience and blind luck. Doesn't make sense to me). So there is no way your entire civilization can cooperate in building a wonder: It is strictly a one city thing. This favors civilizations that have one or two "wonder cities". You can no longer move food from one city to another, so you need a city that has a good food supply and a good mineral supply. Grasslands with resources and a couple hills with iron is ideal. By sheer luck I had one such city, the capital. (Well, luck ... it was a tutorial game. I may have been favored.)

The single niftiest thing is probably the culture aspect. Buildings of religion or education contribute with culture points. These accumulate over time. They help decide your city borders and eventually your national borders. But best of all: If a lower culture builds their cities too close to yours, their cities will revolt and join your empire. I absorbed about half of the cities of the neighboring Egyptian empire. This totally kills off the swarm strategy from Civ2, where you just built more and more and more cities. Here, unless you build up culture, the cities will up and leave. A pretty powerful deterrent to barbarism.

The corruption and waste seems worse than in Civ2, too. This makes it hard to build large sprawling empires, or empires with lots of small cities. Once more a stomping foot on the "Mongol horde" strategy.

The higher governments, republic and democracy, are powered up compared to Civ2. You no longer support military units with shields from their home city. In Civ2, Monarchy suppoerted 3 units for free while Republic and Democracy paid 1 shield for each of these units. This made it hard for small cities to defend themselves. Now support is paid in cash, and cash is where the higher governments shine. Also you don't get the unrest if your miliary units are away from home. Instead you get war weariness. (Recent events seem to powerfully support this model.) The longer a war drags on, the less happy the people are. Especially if you are the attacker, says the book. I have not tried that. I don't live out my dark side when I play Civilization. But I'm glad to see the game has got an ethical improvement.