Civilization III

"Strategically limited, frustrating interface"

I have spent many hours playing the original Civilization, as well as Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. For me, the most entertaining part of these games are the early years of development: colonizing choice spots on the map, getting ahead in the technology race, and exploring the map. The midgame is where you boom or bust - you have the technology and the might to defeat the computer, or you don't. Very rarely do I complete the endgame - mopping up the enemy or building the spaceship / ascent to transcendence.

That said, I find little that is new or compelling about the design of Civ III. In fact, some of the more enjoyable aspects of the previous games have been castrated in this new version. Two examples:

Towns/cities must follow a fairly rigid development. The production costs are heavily skewed towards large cities with disproportionate production. Add to this the loss of production to corruption and you end up with size 6 towns producing 1 shield - it will take you some 60 turns (several centuries) to build that needed aqueduct.

Only two terrain types are truly viable - plains and grasslands. Try building a city in a hilly / desert area (especially frustrating as a starting location), you will simply be unable to compete with the mindless propagation of the computer AI. A tip to the Firaxis guys: humans have developed ways to grow food and thrive in all sorts of environments. Have you forgotten the flexibility you put into Alpha Centauri? Do I really have to chop down the jungle?

I find the game to be strategically limited in that you have to devote most of your early game resources to grabbing as much land as possible - leading to lots of paranoid doublechecking later on, as the computer tries to build an aqueduct in a city with no extra food.

The technology tree is quite dull, and the effect of research improvements is rather paltry. The only viable option is to trade techs with the computer.

As far as combat goes, the main strategy seems to be: build an excessive number of units, just like the computer does. You'll never take an enemy town with 2 horsemen - but you can with 16. And since a despotic government can support 4 units per town, go crazy! You might as well build an army, there isn't much else to do with your towns.

I am sure other folks have found interesting strategies for this game, I just have to say it doesn't cater to my tastes. Now for the other half of this review: the interface.

My copy came with just a book and a CD - no keystroke quick-reference, no technology poster. This would have been useful because the only other docmentation is in the Civilopedia, which is a nuisance. (Maybe you are only supposed to play this game if you are familiar with Civ II, which I am not.) Among the many frustrations the interface offers:

From the city screen, you can right-click on luxuries and already built structures for help, but there is no direct way to get context help on current production. Duh.

Unit actions: all possible unit actions are presented as tiny little icons at the bottom of the screen, with keyboard shortcuts. If you try to use a command that isn't available (yet), you get no feedback (e.g. ''You can't build railroads until you discover Steam Power.''). These options are not reflected in the right-click context menus for your units (ala SMAC).

Building an army requires a leader in a CITY and at least FOUR CITIES. Again, actually building an army requires you to click a little icon at the bottom of the screen - since the icon does not appear until you can actually use it, there is no way to get FEEDBACK about why you can't do it. Thanks, guys.

For some reason Firaxis decided to not build off of the SMAC engine, or even take that interface into account with Civ III. I had to deal with some minor glitches (possibly due to hardware) in Civ III that were never a problem in SMAC, particularly audio glitches and keystroke buffering. Also the install configuration appears quite rushed - you cannot upgrade the partial install (500MB) to the full install (700MB) without uninstalling, and it ignores your Start menu settings.

Finally, there are two new concepts in this game that are interesting: culture and strategic resources. Unfortunately the culture concept is too abstract, and while your cultural influence expands outwards, you are still stuck with the ''fat X'' model for city management. Strategic resources allow for some potential strategy, but the accelerated tech development (due to the computer's fondness for trading techs) limits resources to a short term advantage.

I do not recommend this game, even if you think it is funny to see Queen Elizabeth taunt you with ''All your base are belong to us'' when you quit a game. (For some reason, ctrl-Q means ''retire'' while ESC means ''quit''. The difference is about 6 superfluous screens.)

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 11/10/01, Updated 11/10/01