Is Civ3 worth buying at this stage?

[LKendter]

3 is still better then 5.

[Rowain]

3 is still better then 5.

In some ways indeed or maybe it are just the fond memories of the SGs .
But honestly the set token scientist+wait 40 turns + check every turn if the AI has a tech to sell + do a trading round is like playing as an automaton.

[Sirian]

In some ways indeed or maybe it are just the fond memories of the SGs .
But honestly the set token scientist+wait 40 turns + check every turn if the AI has a tech to sell + do a trading round is like playing as an automaton.

That's a perspective looking back with full knowledge of the mechanics, and it's an accurate one. But the perspective looking FORWARD to Civ3 is a lot brighter. The franchise-slog of paying per-turn production maintenance for each unit out of its "home" city was gone for good. The franchise had a rebirth, and it was an exciting time to be playing Civ. The AIs were not packing against the strongest civ every single game. They were not getting free wonders off dice rolls. They were actually able to expand like a player and have a competitive civ size. And the late game was so much less nasty, with fewer techs and less mop-up to reach an official conclusion.

Civ3 fixed all the worst problems known about in its time. Then it revealed a bunch of new ones, but that is going to happen. It happened to Civ4 and 5, and it will happen again to Civ6. Civ5 probably spent the most energy trying to learn from the past and eliminate annoyances and improve quality of life. Civ4 did a lot on that front too, but it spent more energy on MP -- enough that a bunch of folks here are still playing it at a high competitive level more than a decade later.

Fussing about Civ3's broker economy is about on par with fussing about Civ5's global happiness. They are both flawed systems that were being tried for the first time ever, but until they were tried, nobody knew exactly how they would play out.


- Sirian

[Rowain]

You are quite right Civ3 was a huge step forward at the time of its release. And it gave me a lot of fun hours.

[Bobchillingworth]

You don't even have to turn off tech to win up to the Demigod level anyway. My typical high-level play is to start a Palace build to stockpile shields, beeline Philo (which the AI neglects), use the free tech bonus to land CoL, broker Philo to backfill cheap techs, tech Literature (which the AI also neglects), build the Great Library via stored shields, tech Republic, and then reassess from there.

Or just pick Germany, cripple a neighbor with ultra early Archers, and then take the ludicrously good peace deal an AI will offer if you can poach one of their first expansions off them.

Deity and Sid are essentially exams in exploit knowledge, so it's unfair to judge the rest of the game by the hoops you have to jump through to win on them.

[ljubljana]

Quite honestly, I've found that, even on Deity, C3C in the state that is sold on Steam favors self-research most of the time, in that the AI finally charges you more to trade for a tech than the research cost. It is still worth trading GPT for tech if you can get a significant broker out of it, but on Deity, most of the game is typically spent either too far behind for that or close enough to the tech lead that you can research at monopoly, which is usually at least viable when possible. The Philosophy freebee indeed seems to encourage this in the AA by leading to crazy whole-era broker chains, which are impossible without self-researching Philo and usually Writing before it.

[haiduk]

Call me crazy but I like Civ 2 the best. Crappy graphics and everything. Even despite the dumb AI that one still has the funnest gameplay and endgame IMO.

I still play Civ2 all the time.

Civ 3 is a close 2nd. Way better graphics but little bit less fun to play, esp in the modern ages.

[Fluffball]

Civ 3 does feel broken and unpolished.  (But I'm sensitive to such things.  Civ 4 even feels that way now after enough Civ 5.)  But sure, it's worth $1.24 to see it firsthand for yourself.

I own vanilla civ5, and although the AI and 1UPT is game-destroying for me, by far the worst is that they never patched the problem with workers being in perpetual combat alert when improving conquered cities. Did they ever do anything about that in the expacs? Talk about unpolished, you literally can't play the game without microing every single worker every single turn for the entire game.
Then again I suppose most people don't play civ5 to fight, but rather to do a 3 city "challenge"