21st November 2004, 12:12 AM
A Black Falcon Wrote:Some way of making it easier... making sure rivers are always within decent reach of your starting town really is needed as long as you have to go to one. Most of the time it's okay, but not always...
All games have intro movies, so of course Civ III would have one... intresting that they changed it for the second expo, though. Didn't do that in Civ II.
I haven't either. Just go into the movies folder of the art folder and watch it... that is, as long you have the Bink player (Civ II also had a open file tree like that with everything accessible)... it's pretty cool.
I'm not sure about the quantity thing, actually. I think Civ III actually has more. But it's not nearly as good, so that doesn't matter much... it's just 'there'. Civ II's is also somewhat ambient, but it's better music...
Oh, with Civ II it's got some tracks with the original game and then each of the expansion CDs added about the same amount more music. It's Redbook audio too -- runs in a CD player. 9 tracks for the classic, then 8 in the first expansion and 6 in the second. Only one problem: for some bizarre reason the Gold edition drops most of it. It's perfect otherwise, but all it's got are two of the original tracks (the 'win' and 'loss' ones) and then the six from Fantastic Worlds... utterly bizarre, but it's why I have Civ II fully copied to my HDD and I use the Fantastic Worlds CD to play it. Only disk with all the music.
It definitely should be like Civ I or II where you can choose your gender and name both. It's stupid to be stuck with that one if you want to play as someone else... saves them time, but surprisingly lazy for a big game like this.
It should at least be able to kill things.
They still do annoying things like building cities RIGHT outside of your influence range on the edges of your continent, though... And I know I heard all about the great new diplomacy system in Civ III, but maybe I haven't played it enough but I fail to see the great improvement. Sure, in some ways it lets you do more (like being able to offer a specific offer for some specific request with resources and stuff), but the simpler Civ II system works well enough... yes, I guess Civ III is an improvement, but it's not as big as it was claimed, I think, and like other aspects it takes quite a bit of getting used to.
On the subject of 'getting used to', I still frequently seem to accidentally choose technologies... that box where you choose them has an annoying tendency to choose them when you want to open the civilopedia window, it seems.
But the map editor has the stupid error of not having a minimap! Inexplicable...
It takes longer to make CG movies now so games have less of them (see SC vs WC3), but they definitely have them. What has gone out is FMV -- having live actors on video in games. The High Council was live actors, so I'm not surprised that they dropped it as that... but they have new councillors so I think that they should have had a High Council you could call that would have videos and speech about what they want and stuff! I liked it, and it was simpler than going to all their screens to look up what they wanted... also they responded to eachother to say what they thought of the other's ideas (like Economy and Science don't want you rasing the luxury rate while Luxury complains about it if it's low, Military wants troops while Diplomacy wants alliances, etc)
The Heralds (animated CG figures representing the nation that sent them) went because they cut the diplomacy screen from fullscreen. Too bad, as they weren't replaced with anything (there was already a picture of the leader of the other nation as well).
As for the Wonder Movies, I don't know why they removed them but they were great and helped make the wonders more worth all that time it takes to make them, so removing those was really dissapointing. I really liked them!
To me they need a new exspansion to add they stuff they didnt put in.
I remeber that High council thing , If they got into a fight you click a button and shout order order! I guess it would have taken alot of time to do and didnt really help the player much.
The luxury advisor isnt in it anymore , its now domestic advisor its a mix between economic and Luxury.
The Trade advisor I have no idea why I need it, Since the foreign advisor is the one doing all the trade agreements, The Trade advisor just tells you what you have and what he thinks you should be getting or weither a town is connected or not.
To me they should add a Inteligence Advisor , Its annoying that I always have to go the capital city to get into it,Having it as a advisor saves time and could offer more.It could warn you about sercurity risks and internal sercurity status, Tell you about foreign plots, Tell you were enemy esponage has taken place , Also gives the options of your own esponiage and sabotage missions.