I always thought that garrison units that were in a city that flipped should get bumped one tile away from the city in a random direction, and incur some amount of damage that may or may not kill them. That way, you get a chance to retreat and save your units, but also your opponent has an opportunity to chase them down and finish them off.
I don't like how science and shields aren't carried over to the next tech/unit/building. It encourages micro-managing of science budgets and shield output to avoid waste, but micro-managing these is not fun.
In single player it sucks. In multiplayer, you have limited time so you can't endlessly optimize, and there are some interesting trade-offs that you run into. "Do I build the thing I need most and waste some shields, or the thing that's normally more expensive, but isn't because I don't waste any shields here?"
You pointed out some interesting points, about the: 1) Despotism penalty: My main gripe is not with the penalty itself, but the other goverments come way later and techs like Monarchy and The Republic, unlike Feudalism or Communism, don't give too much so a beeline to either of them is just a goverment switch. Not bad, but not too good either. 2) Unit balance in Modern Era: I agree with you on the paratrooper thing. Funny that paratroopers in Civ 2 could move the turn they paradrop, I wonder why they changed it. And also fortress, from being overused in the previous title (at least by the AI) to vanishing into nothingness. I wonder what would be better: nerfing bombers or buffing the other units? 3) Cultural conversions: I agree with you in this one too. It makes fights between huge empires a chore. Another countermeasure is to starve the city to 1, but starving a 20 pop city? yeah, real fun. The main issue here I think is the loss of units in conquered cities. 4) Great Leaders: Many Great Wonders in Civ 3 are gamechanging. As you said, The Pyramids on turn 20 is absurd, but it also has to do with the wonder being available so early in the game. Maybe add some restrictions to wonder rushing like tagging (or flagging) them as 'Can't be build by Leaders'. Wonders grant golden age to civilizations with certain traits, another restriction to wonder rushing could be that only civilizations capable of obtaining a golden age through those wonders could rush them. About your solution of Military Leaders, that's Great Generals in later games and they have that meter you talked about but it could be bad for Scientific Leaders because in harder difficulties, your chances for obtaining even one would be very slim and in some cases not even worthy at that point. For building the Forbidden Palace in heavily corrupted cities: a possible solution could be being able to 'pack' it, that is, to being able to build let's say a Governor unit (just one) which costs the same as the FP and functioning the same as the Military Leader for rushing it but it will only apply to the FP. One question: are you ok with the amount of resources generated in different map iterations? I used to play huge maps, having in some of them half the map but even on those I got cut off from oil resources on one, rubber on another and so on. It feels so random at times and to top it all off, they can get used up. Awesome videos Suede, keep up the good work. Gameplay in the background is great in these type of videos.
I like how despotism is arranged, such that even if you could switch out of it turn 1, you probably wouldn't want to due to low unit support. I don't have a problem with resource distribution on standard size maps. But I'm really good at managing my reputation so that the AI will still trade with me. If you can't reliably get resources through trade, it becomes a chore.
Republic doesn't give much? How 'bout the Commerce bonus? It's huuuuge. Enough to pay for extra unit support provided you disband obsolete units and grow town into cities.
Oh, these features are really annoying! But what about: 1. Broken randomizer. You may lose 4-5-6 fights in a row against a weaker unit, a weaker or an equal unit may suddenly stop losing it's health at all (I call this "terminator mode") in defense in 4-5-6 fights in a row (so many invasion armies have been broken just because of a chance, not because of maths), a pikeman sitting in the defense on a mountain may crash your industrial-era tank. Your fighters or AA units may skip 4-5-6 enemy aircrafts in a row (I've built my AA not for sitting and watching my city losing its buildings). Yes, it works for the AI as well, but it's so annoying anyway. The "chance" mechanic is a good idea but seems quite unbalanced to me. 2. Retreating. The game lies to you when telling you that a unit "will withdraw" instead of "has a chance to withdraw". By the way, the unit never withdraws if both units being involved in the fight lose their health during the fight and each gets 1 hp left. The game tells you nothing about that. That's totally confusing. 3. Zone of control. The game says the fortress gives your units the zone of control, but it doesn't. I've never seen any unit without the built-in zone of control shooting any enemy passing the fortress. No animation, no health lost by the enemy, nothing. The coastal fortress, according to the description, "attacks" all enemy naval units passing nearby, but it doesn't. 4. Air Superiority mechanic. The fighter ignores any aircraft bombing the tile the fighter is located at. The game tells you nothing about it.
Steal techs is useful, especially if you savescum. Inspect city is useful. Steal plans is useful, or at least, a great inclusion. Everything else is not useful as far as I know. IDK, maybe someone has some 200 IQ strats that I don't know about.
@@suedeciviii7142 I know this is a bit of a late reply, but the propaganda can be very useful. It only consistently works on cities with the first level of culture, and on cities size 6 or below. Doesn't sound too useful, but if there's civs duking it out on another continent, and a city gets conquered you can propaganda flip it with some luck. When I do that I rush a worker or an airport and airdrop my whole army there for an easy invasion of the continent without a navy
Bombers in the original civ3 were much better balanced: 8 bombard strength, 2 ROF, no lethal bombardement, no craters. This meant that ground artillery was stronger than bombers, but bombers instead had the range advantage (by far). In C3C they went completely overboard by strengthening bombers in every single regard, and lethal land bombardement is the worst design decision in the entirety of Civ 3 and its expansions. And artillery itself was able to do destroy buildings instead of units (like aircraft in C3C still can), making them a little bit worse when attacking cities than they are in C3C as well.
But you can shoot down bombers, and they have to be based in fixed locations that are more difficult to manage. I think they were undertuned initially.
I like to have a stack of modern armor, mech infantry, and radar artillery when attacking cities. With obviously and overpowering bomber/jet fighter stack. But the radar artillery kills the enemy units without damaging the enemy city improvements like the bombers would, so I take out the enemy stack right away with bombers.
I don't know if it was really efficient (it was certainly not ethical) but when I was still playing Civ III I used to starve conquered cities that would flip (the best way was to make every citizen a tax collector to help financing the war) and replace the population by my own settlers or workers... When I think back Civ III could really be a totalitarism simulator and the next games in the franchise has been a lot soften (no more forced labour or anything like that)
I used to be fully on team doom-stack, but being forced to actually position your units in choke points and think critically about where each unit needs to be is actually much more fun than just monotonously sending an un-killable death ball to each city one at a time. I remember a situation in Civ 5 or 6 where the defending city was surrounded on several sides by mountains, making it really difficult to position an attacking military for a decisive strike. These types of situations incentivize strategic positioning of your cities and your defenses and add a layer of engagement to the combat that just wasn't possible in civ 3.
Rails allowing units to move unlimited is unbalanced for a turn based game. An offensive can now concentrate everything into 1 square while the other side can't do anything but watch.
I love the game, but have some complaints. Although real history has chariots being a major unit for centuries, here they are most likely obsolete before you get hooked up to horses. Civs with special chariots should at least start with the wheel so they can see where horses are. Later units; cruise missle, helicopters, paratroopers...the most cool units are somewhat worthless. I would like to see helicopters be able to "rescue" units and bring them home among other things. I like your idea of paratroopers still have their turn after an air drop. Spy missions are a complete waste. How about terrorist units that have invisiblility and hidden nationality that can bombard 2 spaces away. You have to have intelligence units that can detect them within 1 space...expensive units.
Most spy missions are a waste but some are actually quite strong. I've just recorded a part of my India Sid game that makes strong use of technology theft.
The despotism penalty is a thing since... I think it was even in the board game. It's such integral part of Civ format, even SMAC had its version of it (where you require bunch of technologies to increase output of your tiles, unless they have resource bonus). I know how and why it's annoying, but that's just part of the game. Dropping it in later entries dropped the ball, since there is no real hurry or urgency to your actions. And if anything, it's a GOOD thing this penalty exists, or else it would be just absurd snowball from the turn one. I do get why it's confusing to new players, but to quote the truism: "it's a feature, not a bug". Nor a lie. What Civ 3 did wrong with despotism AI unable to work with it (a carry-over from Civ 2) was the introduction of half-hearthed resource mechanics (as opposed to just bonus tiles like in Civ 2 or SMAC), creating the illusion that there is really something big going on and not just an early game production limit to force players to research governmental techs or suffer the consequences. PS The situation with really bad modern units comes from the ridiculous crunch time and openly ignoring play-test reports for both expansions. This isn't "the devs wanted this" or "the devs didn't understand what they are doing". It's "the publisher demanded new units and the devs didn't care one bit about them working properly". Rework on airforce is part of that. The vanilla, release state of Civ 3 plays significantly different than the patched/complete edition. Especially in modern era. You lose control of resources? You're scewed, because you can't build new units, and this was intentional, preventing either player or the AI from mounting endless defensive forces and cutting wars short.
I agree that you need to hamstring tile yields early on somehow, to stop early megacities. But there are different more visually clear ways of doing it. I think something more gradual, like individual civics or techs that give slight bonuses to tile yields, would have been preferable. Instead of a massive tile yield boost when switching into rep, and another when you get rails, and that's pretty much it. Were you involved in the development at all? I've heard similar things from one of the playtesters (Sulla wrote a bit about his experiences). It's a miracle the game turned out as well as it did. I suppose we should be thankful in a way. With modding we were able to balance all the features for multiplayer play, but this wouldn't have been possible if they were more judicious about what features to include.
I hate to admit it, but if I really want a certain wonder, and I know for sure that I'm the first civ to research that tech, I have, on rare occasions, just reloaded that last turn over and over until I spawn a great leader. If I'm playing as a scientific civ, this usually takes less than 10 minutes. Normally, I resist the temptation to do this, but sometimes...
Damn, I used to think the worst thing about Chris Watts was him murdering his wife and stuffing kids into oil barrels, but you've somehow managed to top that :P.
The one thing I would change about the game is how railroads give you infinite movement. Make it 9 tiles for all units regardless if its infantry or cavalry. Infinite movement robs the game of it's strategic element as you don't have to plan for troop placement nearly as thoroughly as you normally would.
Infinite move railways are simultaneously the funnest thing in the game but also kind of a bad idea. It sucks that as soon as someone rails, you have kill every unit in their army if you want to kill them. It's just fun for the human player because the AI doesn't know where to put their units. They made the change you mentioned in civ 4
Robs it of strategy? Clearly you don't pave the way with artillery and bombers to make a "no-man's land" of sorts to disrupt that "infinite movement." 😅🤷♂️ Moreover, I'd pick a part of land mass, like a narrow peninsula, to funnel AI units into 2-3 road/railless tiles for artillery/bombers to ravage along the way while a worker builds an instant airport to funnel forces from every city of the homefront to reinforce. Hours of fun!
YES YES YES, ive said this before. 9 is perfect. BUT: what i have found is this: the infite movement does change the strategic element in an interesting way: you can use bombers to pillage a good chunk of their roads. Then land your units. This catches them by suprise and they wont be able to deploy all their units at once. This creates a beautifull dynamic: do you want to use your bombers to kill the units inside the city, take the city with 0 loses and then defend the city against the entire enemy force? Or do you want to pillage everything to islote the city, using your ground units as a brute attack force and probably lose a lot of them in the attack, but then not face the entire enemy force? If ur at this face of the game you have fought a long time using the same tactics. Now the railroads throw everything in a complete 180 from the rest of the game. This is a lot of fun. You could go either way. I would love to be able to test out a 9 tile railroad game. But i sure as hell dont dislike the infinte railroads
Speaking of unit balance, there is another thing that really bothered me and I have never seen it adressed - the lack of slow, offensive units from middle ages onwards. Basically, in early middle ages, you get medieval infantry, then nothing for a long time, and then they get upgraded to guerilla in mid to late industrial (basically rendering med infantry useless for almost an era) - but guerilla is only 6/6, which is the same offense as Infantry! IMO, what they should have done - introduce another unit with Military Tradition, that would be strong but slow. My suggestion is 7/4/1. 7 offense is IMO adequate, since in most eras, offensive units usually have a 1 point advantage over defenders (swordsman-spearman, med infantry/knight-pikeman), and rifleman is only 1-2 techs away. Not sure though, maybe 6/5/1 would be more balanced... After that, make guerilla stronger, at least 8/6/1 or 9/6/1, so that it actually makes sense to build them instead of just stacking up infantry (they even cost the same... like what? The bombard is so not worth the additional 4 defense points).
I agree the guerilla is borderline useless. But if I remember right, it doesn't require any resources, just like the rifleman. So if you don't have rubber for whatever reason, you now have something with balanced mediocre attack and defense. I feel like it should have some sort of mobility bonus; it is a "guerilla" fighter after all. Maybe if they made it 6/6/2, then it might be worth considering. Or maybe even give the same kind of attack a submarine has where it can target something specific within a stack through an ambush, also playing on the role of a guerilla fighter. I always felt like there should have been a land unit that can target enemies in a stack like that or a land version of the privateer in the base gameplay, not just in the conquest scenarios.
Unfortunately art imitates life in this instance, we hate it in the real world but it must be done. I think the newer games introduced more options for sustainability that reduce the need to deal with pollution, which makes sense.
@@ethanpayne4116 takes so damn long to clear, a non industrial civ before replaceable parts would waste I think 16(!!!) turns clearing pollution on a flat tile, which is the same cost as clearing a jungle. Add the rng factor in and you could have a worker waste 30 turns clearing a mountain tile. Improvements like mass transit and recycling centers do basically nothing so you're stuck managing your workers every time pollution crops up. At this point in the game thankfully you can mass workers to clear them in one turn since you have railroads everywhere.... But the city itself is too stupid to start working your cleared tile again! Meaning you have to go into the city screen and manually click on the tile you just cleared!!! If you have like 30+ cities you can easily forget and have a crapton of useless tax collectors because the city never works the tile again!! So you gotta have a good mental system where you clear the tile in the cities big fat cross, open the city screen, click on the cleared tile, then move on to the next pollution square. This is what I mean by frustrating micro, because you *need* *those* *tiles* *worked* , there's nothing more important that pops working tiles in this game. Oh and let's not forget when you have cities with overlapping big fat crosses and you're left scratching your head over which city should get what tile. I love this civ, it's probably my favourite one, but man do I hate pollution.
@@AGenericAccount oh they should definitely have added an automated pollution clearing algorithm for workers that makes more sense which restores the tile and it's citizen assignment status to the way it was before it got polluted. I feel like the city shouldn't even stop working the polluted tile, and like maybe the city itself just automatically clears the pollution at the cost of a couple turns worth of production from that tile/citizen. I get that clearing pollution gives workers something to do in the late game besides building railroads, but there has to be a better solution than forcing that level of micromanagement.
1) A spearman can kill far superior unit f.e. a tank (same for galley). 2) Some civs are weak. (imho Spain, Russia) 3) 9 turns of Anarchy 4) Some periods of history are not covered in game. (No WWI tanks and aircraft f.e.)
Its enraging when single Hoplite murders your Knights and Crusaders left right and centre. But when you're playing as greece good luck getting him to stand up to 2-3 attackers
Why a state or culture being "religious" makes any difference to the length of anarchy is beyond me. From history, internal religious differences have often prolonged "anarchy" rather than reduced it.
One that you forgot IMHO is beakers - there has to be a better way to both show the relative cost of techs in the civilopedia (which isn't the case) and guesstimate tech duration based on current commerce without clicking everywhere on the science advisor screen? :-)
Oh my literal god. I played this game to _death_ as a kid and I never knew about the Despotism penalty! It's like I can see the matrix now for the first time. Boom.
My mind is constantly being blown learning about all these mechanics, like I also had no idea how important the bonus grassland tiles were but I technically could have figured that one out on my own if I'd paid enough attention to tile yields.
This seems to be a problem in every Civ game though. They are always good about implementing changes that people want to see but oftentimes that comes at the price of other potentially bigger problems. Unit stacking was taken out in Civ 5 but clean movement, especially in the late game, suffered dramatically. In Civ 6 most haven't noticed, but they have just been slowly implementing mechanics and features from Civ 3. From introducing armies and city flipping in Rise & Fall to bringing back volcanoes and floodplains mechanics in Gathering Storm. The biggest problem I see is that Civ 6 isn't friendly to beginners if you're not used to the series. Console gamers especially complain that they can't even win on Settler difficulty because there is just too much to manage and not enough time to manage it. Usually when I play on Diety, by the time I am comfortably able to build musketmen at a decent rate (15 turns or less), I'm in the middle of the Renaissance Era and outclassed by calvary and curaissers. TLDR These problems are often what define the next game but unfortunately the devs seem to solve problems with problems. On thing is I can say is thank god for the modding community.
I would disagree that modern armor or mech infantry is fine because they can be killed with a fucking horse. Modern naval units are the same way. Overall, the natural border between generations of "old" and "new" tech does not existl. And bombers are OP. In fact, the entire concept of unit attack/defense force need to completely reworked. Still a fun game to play if you know the tricks.
Paratroopers are deathly overpowered with nukes. I had a big war with a civ and my front line wasn’t moving so I built up paratroopers in all my cities except my highest production cities to build ICBM. Nuked his middle cities where he had little units and dropped in with paratroopers which captured them instantly, in which he took troops from the front line to take back the cities and was able to push and win
The gold harvest. I can play Monarchy and exceeding my unit support by twice and still earning plenty of gold, because my corruption gold waste is almost zero. Micromanaging production makes it in cases possible to use the squares for more than one city in the same turn, if a production has been completed, as you get the option to alter the citizens in all cities after each production has been completed, and the game goes through your cities in the same order every single turn. Having this in mind you can harvest gold form all cities in the chain after the first production in each turn, based on the city-order.
Regicide isn't something I'd play with in single player but I like its inclusion in the game. It works well in one multiplayer scenario I play regularly (future start) and some single player scenarios too. It's pretty trivial to turn it off, and turning it off won't affect the game balance in any way, unlike turning off cultural conversions or scientific great leaders.
The number 1 problem with this game is random combat results. I hate random combat mechanics, absolutely despite it. Don't we all? There's no reason to do it that way in the first place. So you want a damage of 5 with a 3/5ths chance of hitting uphill? Then just make it a damage of 3 CONSTANTLY... It's a no-brainer. Three other things i don't like: - Too much mechanics of "immaterial" like morale, culture, corruption, etc. making it overly complicated. - Great wonders can be obtained by only 1 player and then locked out...really? So now in my archipelago game, whoever gets the Great Lighthouse is almost guaranteed to win...unless you trust random chances of safely moving thru deep water squares...more randomness... - Each civ has a fixed set of traits, and wildly imbalanced. If ur gonna have that many different civs and be unbalanced, you should just let the player pick any two traits they want for ANY race at the start of a game. Again, no-brainer.
I always thought corruption was one of the game's poorer features. The math for calculating corruption and for how structures which reduce it do so is rather opaque, and I hate when game mechanics aren't transparent. After everyone figured out the best way to play Civ II was ICS, it makes sense that they would want to nerf that strategy, but since you can just convert all your 100% corrupt cities into specialist farms ICS is still viable and corruption becomes more of a speed bump that wastes your time than anything. I think it would have made more sense to simply establish a hard cap for the number of cities you can plant rather make a certain number useless except as farms and for rushing. From what I've read, the corruption mechanic was so widely misunderstood and disliked when the game was new, the game was actually referred to as "Corruption III" rather than "Civ III."
I actually really like the corruption mechanic. You need something to prevent civs from snowballing too hard when they get big, and I like the corruption system much better than global happiness (Civ 5) or maintenance (civ 4). I wish the formula was less opaque, they could have rounded it to the nearest 10% and displayed that in the city menu, that would have been helpful. It also makes sense to me conceptually. Far away cities are less centrally controlled, and don't contribute as much to the national treasury and the army. To bring these cities under central control, you need to change your government, or use make costly efforts to do so, represented by corruption buildings. You can also use forced labour. But the cities won't be happy about that. I like the trade off between distance and rank corruption. Plant close for less distance corruption in the short term, but you get punished with more rank corruption in the long term. I think you're right that ICS isn't much fun, at least in single player, because it's too much stuff to micromanage. That being said I don't think ICS is strictly the best way of playing, so it's far from mandatory.
@@suedeciviii7142 I definitely agree that it is a better mechanic than the other restrictions on growth. Although I'm not in love with it, it at least only makes cities past the OCN relatively unhelpful rather than actively detrimental. Speaking of specialist farms, that could be an idea for one of your "how to" videos. I didn't know anything about them until I picked the game back up earlier this year.
@@suedeciviii7142 I'm not sure distance from capital is the best way to implement the corruption penalty, I agree that the systems in civ 4 and 5 are not perfect but it seems ridiculous that an entire half of your empire can be almost useless when it comes to production just because it happens to be on a different continent than the original capital (as if capitals themselves can't be super corrupt in real life). I think there should maybe be some uniform formula applied to all cities that takes into account anti-corruption buildings (courthouses, homeless shelters, etc.), military conflict (is this area a war-torn refugee nightmare), resources (is there enough food for everyone, are there luxury resources and natural beauty for people to enjoy), and government. Maybe there can be an isolation penalty to reflect cities that are super remote (i.e. Alaska), but I don't think it makes sense to have that "remoteness" be the sole source of corruption, nor should it be a simple measure of distance from the capital but rather distance to other cities in the empire in general.
@@ethanpayne4116 Might have mentioned this in the vid, but I see it as centralization. Like, "corrupt" cities are vassals and don't pay much in taxes to the government.
why is this your favorite civ game? ive been contemplating picking it up, but i havent found any opinions anywhere of why it would be a better experience than civ4 (especially with realism invictus mod) all your vids are either playing civ 3 or saying why its not that great
I talk a ton about the reasons I love the game on this channel. The two (clickbait-ish) videos criticizing it are just to provide a balanced perspective. It isn't a perfect game, but it is spectacularly good. As to specifics: the core mechanics are really strong and engaging. It rewards careful consideration of the games rules and mechanics, but also creative problems solving. It's very challenging in a bunch of different ways, there are so many unique challenges that the game throws at you. Visually I think it looks great, it conveys all the needed information very clearly and aesthetically (kind of how I feel about old pixel based art like in Super Mario World). Admittedly I don't have the same understanding of Civ 4 as I do of Civ 3. Maybe if I knew what I was doing when playing high levels of Civ 4, I'd feel differently. I've watched videos of Deity level gameplay, and while it does look interesting and fun, it doesn't look quite as interesting or fun as Civ 3 is.
Great leaders in Civ 3 always seemed so annoyingly random in my experience, and armies give such a huge advantage that the military snowball can get out of hand really fast once you luck into getting your first army. Great people in the newer games aren't perfect but they feel a lot more intuitive and balanced.
My biggest complaint is the AI has a "do as I say, not as I do" take on being in their land. I am playing the Marla map, where I was at peace with two civ that both had units in my land for a long time. I was saving them for last as they were both over 50 cities and I was at war with 8 civs already. I had moved some workers back a tile and the IBT the tile for two stacks went under their culture. Both on the same IBT. They dial me up and get all huffy over my workers. First of all you cannot even get the option to boot their workers. So yeah tell me to move my guys, while you have 66 assorted attackers in land. I called Spain (66 units and gave the leave or DoW). Happily, she did declare. The Celt's only had two units, infantry, so I let that slide. I agree with all of the points, though only the culture one really bugs me. I am fine with a flip with border issues, but not with the "they are OCC now and not on my landmass now". How hard could have been to add a sanity check? No town with in 20 tiles of my culture, no flip. If armies were not overpowered, I probably would have stop playing long ago. I like to play AW on large pangea maps, 250x250 with 31 civs. I cannot beat demi that often, even with a fairly good start. Not sure, if even Monarch could be done without the armies.
Full agree with the despotism penalty. I remember when I was young I made an effort to really figure out exactly how the tile yields work and my tile yields never matched up with what I thought it was supposed to be. I ended up thinking the game was just too complicated to grasp and just deferred to automated workers instead of figuring the game out
One of the core issues in CIV III is that there is no valid "tall" strategy. (This might be a bit wordy) For a tall strategy to work in a game you have to have some sort penalty for playing wide. In theory this should be the corruption mechanic. But, it doesn't actually penalize you for having loads of land. It simply makes the fringe cities bad. Because it doesn't affect your core cities there is no reason to have a healthy core and no fringe lands. You can have a healthy AND fringe lands. Even crappy cities will still give some commerce which will help at least a little with teching and that's not to mention getting LUXs and RESs. Large empire will ALWAYS outperform small ones. Rank and ONC corruption MAY discourage it a little but never enough. Just to put the nail in the coffin, luxuries give happiness per city. So that encourages you have MORE cities. Also, (one of the features I most despise) excess production isn't carried over to the next thing being produced and so to reduce waste you are encouraged to spread production out. You should always have more land and build the most cities that you can. Also, unit cap. What's a better solution? Well the idea should be between 'Big and Strong' and 'Lean and Mean'. Add an actual penalty to having cities that doesn't invalidate having a bunch of them but makes having a lower number desirable. Ignoring corruption, and make a slight tech cost increase for every city that you have. Think of it as the cost of implementing the Tech over a large CIV. Don't make the penalty too high but enough that the commerce gain from planting a new city might net reduce your tech rate. This would encourage the player to only place 'good' cities. A 'good' city would be able to make enough commerce/production to compensate for the extra cost and afterwards you can factor corruption back in and balance as desired. It doesn't have to be based on cities though. It could be territory or workable tiles or anything else. Just something to break the 'more is more' mold.
Three thoughts 1) Yes, this is absolutely true. And it's a pity, because the game has so much depth in its other systems that it doesn't really need it? But at the same time people are harshly penalized for playing in a style that is intuitive to them. 2) Check out wonder stacking if you haven't, it's the one viable way to "play tall" in single player civ 3. 3) When designing multiplayer mods, this has been a priority. Generally it's done by rewarding tall strategies using multipliers.
@@suedeciviii7142 A lot of games have handled playing tall very badly. Civ games seem to just bounce back and forth between which play style is better. The hypothetical solution I offered is pretty much how stellaris works and it doesn't work very well due to poor balance. I'm also not a fan of civ V's global happiness solution. It is good to know that modders are aware of these problems and take steps to solve it. On the topic of mods, have there been attempts to fix the vanilla unit balance? I'm not very familiar with modding civ iii but from my understanding giving naval units more HP and better stats, adding units that are missing, fixing over powered ones would all be pretty easy wouldn't it? Do such mods exist and are they ever used?
@@cutthroatawesome The issue with naval units are pretty trivial to fix. Make them faster and hold more and the AI is better at naval landings. Giving them extra HP also makes them less underpowered compared to planes. Yes, a lot of custom mods exist like that. Many single player mods make such changes. Multiplayer actually has unique tools to fix land units. Due to a bug for example, cruise missiles fire once for every player in the game (so 4-8 times). That seems over powered, but it's great if you tune down the bombard numbers, it effectively gives them "splash damage",. That's something that Civ 4 tried with catapults, it's a good mechanic to have in the game because it punishes players for putting units in big stacks.
i actually like the despotism penalty, Yes it makes it hard but thats the whole point right. If it were really straight forward and clear what u should mine and irrigate it would be eazy. This ads a lot of thinking and planning into the game. for example.. irrigating grassland might be the good idea for the long run. whereas mining is obviously better in the shortrun. It adds all this complection with no right or wrong awsner and that makes every player and his playstyle unique. Ps. great job here on yt. there is nobody explaining civ 3 like u do on youtube and its good to see there is still love for this game, Keep it up!
Do you think that researching a particular science could speed up researching the whole age in the tech tree, for instance the blank sciences, like printing press, or steel, atomic theory, smart weapons, or chemistry and physics, could give a player for an example +20% speeding up science research for the next 20 turns? Or some like that.
Sure. I believe being the first civ to reach a particular tech in Civ 4 gives a free great scientist. There's just so many cool rewards that could have been in the civ 3 tech tree and they weren't really imaginative with it.
hey suede, i would love an awnser on this one: my dad taught me civ 3, and we have played it for years and years on hot seat. he always said cultural conversions are super anoying and as a result we always turn them off. in my thousands of hours of playing ive never played with them on. so could you elaborate a little more on why it messes with the ballance? in the video u talk about the temple thing, and indeed they are useless so i just never ever build tempels. it works cuz i always use luxuries plus marketplace for hapiness and the slider in a pinch. now whats interesting is my dad loves playing the celts, and he builds tempels like crazy for the points. meaning if the game goes to 2040, he will win. this gives him a tactical advantage since i need to come at him and destroy him before the game ends. i cant see why this wouldnt be balanced? Tempels=points for a defensive long game. and no tempels means more militairy and more agression. i would love an anwser to get insight as to if we have been playing the game "wrong" for all this time :-))) what am i not seeing here? much love, mickey
I don't know what kind of game you're playing, you'd have to send me the saves. If you're playing a huge map with 4 civs or something, then yes, games would almost always resolve on score and religious would provide a meaningful score boost. But in most games the slight increase in the speed in which you get your first 2 border expands does not impact score very much. Because you'll get these expands anyway when you build a library (or when you get 30 more shields for the non-half priced temple). But having more units, more population, more cities, etc, does impact score a lot, and they also help you win the game before it would get resolved on score.
@@suedeciviii7142 aah i didnt know you got score for units aswell. Tnx for the info. We mostly play 60% water huge pangea/continents. With 2 humans and 6 ai's.
I love the diplomacy system, I just wish it was more transparent. They are super trigger happy with alliances, but you have to know how to use alliances correctly, otherwise it's easy for your rivals to get bigger from them.
i know thats not possible for with the game as is, but wouldnt it be interesting if modern ships has some sort of modularity to them. i.e. they can load certain types of units that will participate in air/naval combat or provide additional bombard capabilties
Generally disagree for conservative or curmudgeonly reasons: 1) It's a complex game requiring considerable research to catch its nuances. Spilling the beans on Despotism penalty makes it too easy for humans. After all the AI is eternally ignorant of it. 2) Yes some Modern units are underwhelming yet Fighters are foils to Bombers and Tank Armies are about all you can count on to break down TOW Infantry in Metros; Artillery hardly hurts them (defending at 31 if fortified on just level ground) and individual Tank units (just 16 attack) would die like flies. Don't forget Mech Infantry either. And how could humans win at higher levels if AIs didn't have lame units to build? 3) Haven't had much flipping trouble at Emperor level, one or two conquered cities maybe per Civ per game. Usually if they flip I'll simply destroy them and never mind the rep hit. Playing for Domination most Civs won't like you anyway when you're ahead. Plus they'll still trade with you. 4) What's wrong with luck affecting creation of Leaders? Chance plays a great part in human affairs so it seems deterministic to presume there's a sure way to either make Leaders or prevent them. Still a great video and much appreciated Suede. Keep 'em coming!
>>how could humans win at higher levels if AIs didn't have lame units to build? The fact that the AI needs so many ridiculous advantages to compete with top tier humans isn't really desirable. If the creators patched the game to make it more balanced and less abusable by humans, and they had to scale back the difficulty levels as a result, I'd call that a plus. I don't like having to decide between having more fun each game and going for the great library (which is an overpowered winning strat). Luck is fine but the game already has so many luck based elements. Giving one player the pyramids on turn 10 imbalances the game.
I play a lot of Civ 4 and 5, but what features does Civ 3 have that make it worth your time? I'm playing it now because my laptop is fried and won't play anything newer right now.
Corruption is a necessary feature in the game imo but literally needs to be toned down 80-90%. Playing on a huge Pangea map is almost out of the question if you plan winning conquest, and if you’re like me that’s the only victory I go for.
I remember I played this game as a kid and being so happy that I finally researched democracy. Finally a government with low corruption, so finally my cities one island over from my main won't have 1 shield production anymore! I was so disappointed to find that production was barely improved compared to monarchy that day.
The AI will attack armies. But I've only seen it in 2 scenarios. First, when the army is weakened to a certain extent. How weak? Not sure. I'm guessing when they lose 50% or more of their strength. The second scenario is when you park your army in a city.. even at full strength, the AI will attack it. So.... If you keep your armies outside of cities vulnerable to attack, and make sure they don't get too weak..then you are golden.
Not a cire game mechanic, but i don't like that you can't upgrade cavalry. Maybe attack helicopters would be nice? Strong attack, weakdefence and can always move 3 tiles, even in enemy territory or unroaded mountains. And paratroopers should ATTACK the tile they land on. That would be great
The worker automation AI is TERRIBLE. It routinely puts my entire workforce on a single tile then repositions, wasting a turn. Particularly frustrating when there is no railroad.
Oh yeah, they're mostly meant to shoot things don't. And they're good at that. I meant more, even in situations where your opponent has air defense of their own, you're better off using mass bombers instead of bombing with jet fighters.
Bombers are so powerful that i jave stopped the celts with armies 5 times bigger than mine they moved them one tile away from my citys since i build my citys near a mountain range units of the enemy did less movement amd after the turn all the bombers placed in those citys swept 60% of the enemy that 60% didnt get a chance to shoot and they died the 40% i destroyed with fortress bonus or high ground bonuses but the bombers did 80% of the war they are the best at bombing effectively
I dont like how colonies work, they must be in contact by road, but you know there are resources thar you cannot comunicate cause there is only one tile. I know that are not too important because you can build a new city over a luxury/strategic resource. But for example in Napoleonic Europe scenario, you are not allowed to build settlers. And all those African resources are simply lost. Another thing that i would like to mod is the Food storage box, making harder to grow a city.
Yeah, colonies should count as harbors. There are situations with small islands consisting only of mountains, with resources you can never access. Not to mention a lot of multiplayer is played with city elimination, so island cities usually aren't worth planting.
Also railroads, too OP. They should triple the movement of roads. So instead of 3 squares, you should be able to go 9. The infinite movement could be something added way later on in the modern era, like a maglev or something like that.
I don't have alot of experience with the culture flips, but what if you take the city then abandon it instead of raze it and settle a new one. Do you still ruin your diplomacy?
That's the worst of both worlds. Razing cities gives you free workers, abandoning does not. But you still take a global rep hit for abandoning cities with foreign citizens. I believe if you starve it down first, you don't take a global rep hit for that, and it would reduce the global rep hit from abandoning.
@@suedeciviii7142 thanks for the reply. I work overnight and watched about 4 hours of your videos last night.. just got home and started a new game, I'm about to get the great library for the first time on emperor! Thank you for what you do! Lol
I actually found fighters/jet fighters very useful along with flak/mobile SAM when used to destroy enemies' bombers. You just have to put them in air superiority missions (the fighters) in cities close to the enemy or in air bases to defend your army. Obviously put a stack of flaks with the main army as well. When bombers are attacked, they lose their turn. It's great. Once all AI bombers are gone you are free to go unhindered (they don't replace bombers as often as one would think).
Nothing, that was actually on my list already. :) The current sid game I have on my channel has shitty video quality and I need to replace it with something better. It also has 2 reloads, and some non standard settings that I don't like (accelerated production, cultural conversions off). It just won't happen soon, since that last (11 part) series was exhausting and there's a bunch of stuff on my to-do list before doing another full game playthrough.
Also, i am noticing thatcthe main issye with the desp-pen is the lack of transparency as it changes a ton with little to no explanation, and since you *literally start in despotism* if you're not aware of it, as a newibie on top of having to learn a ton of concepts you also have to tackle this counter intuitive mechanic
@@suedeciviii7142 maybe, tough the game code must be pretty shortcut-y if there is no overflow for anything, so how would you implement a % penalty when the economy is all in whole numbers
I really hate barbarians, I used to active them, but after I was struggling against two civs that allied up to kill me, OUT FROM NOWHERE it came a boat with like more than 10 units just on top of my capital, and they were like advanced units(for the period the game was in) mounted on horses, not regular ones, and I was just like ''WTF?''... after that, I turned it off permanently. But the main reason I don't like them is because they spawn from nowhere, it doesn't follow logic, a barbarian may appear in the center of a dominated area of yours, without you seeing from where it came. Also: 1- Culture Conversion -> Ridiculous, I just turn it off. 2- The RNG combat is retarded af, sometimes just one AI unit destroys like 5 units or more of mine. 3- The AI have some retarded mechanics, like coming with a horse, killing your unit and then fleing far away(wtf??? where's the fuc*ing movement limit). 4- I hate how easy is the ''city overtaking'' that happens in the game, you just can't let a city alone with no units in there, because at every moment, an enemy unit can show up e just walk in, and take it, that's ridiculous, citizens don't even try to fight. 5- Moving units in the early game it's just a pain in the ass. 6- Managing everything in the late game is also a pain in the ass, too much things to look after. Point 5 and 6 combined make the saved games to take days for finishing. 7- Also I hate when computer put something to be produced on automatic without asking me(it happens a lot), when the empire is too big, sometimes I am surprised with that ''Warrior'' being made at Industrial Ages. 8- The AI have the option of telling you to leave their lands, we don't. That's broken, when the AI invades our territory, nothing happens, even if we try to contact it, there's no option such as ''leave my lands'' or ''get away''. 9- Lack of game music when some civ contact us(like in the SNES civ 1), there used to be dramatic music when we were contacted. 10- Support unit cost > this one really annoys me, I hate how much gold you have to give to maintain lot's of units, that's fuc*ing annoying, I think at least workers should be free and only military units should be paid. That added with corruption is just horrible, your gold just go away, I personally love to have lot's of units in other turn-based strategy games, but in civ 3 you just can't do that, or else I go broken. 11- Well, I can't remember more stuff now, but that's it. But I really like the game even so, LOL.
@@suedeciviii7142 Oh, didn't know that, because no pop up is shown when enemy units enter our area, unlike the opposite, gonna check that. I'm actually new to the game so many of my thoughts may probably change later on, and that's why I'm watching your videos, it has helped me a lot, I went from ''don't know what I'm doing'' to playing fine. My first save I was just broke af and got ''out-teched'' at middle age, I still had swordsman while AI already had medieval infantry, I got swept. Also I realised that playing dictator and going all out on the other civs at the start works terribly lmfao, I was playing like civ 1 from the snes, but civ 3 is nothing like it, having peace and trading techs works amazingly fine, while in civ 1 you just crush your enemies as soon as possible.
@@aizentaichou7210 You can play dictator, you just have to crush your enemies early! To kick someone out of your land, call them up in the diplomacy screen. There should be a dialogue prompt asking them to get their units out of their land.
almost every solution he offers is the Civ IV solution, he just doesn't like the other things Civ IV changed. Which is fair, even if it's incorrect. Insert snark about Civ V here.
Clip 1, 3, and 4 are all unmodded civ 3 conquests Clip 2 is the future start scenario, played multiplayer for a stream. Stream chat is in the top right, game chat in the top left, and the drop down menu with each players name/civ/score is unique to multiplayer.
5:19 Oooh, I remember now! I tried airdrop - pretty good for reinforcement, I tried marines - fantastic for D-Day style doomstack disembark directly onto coastal cities, choke an island etc, I tried paratrooping stuff and I was hugely disappointed. The thing you said about paratrooping on workers sounds frustrating - like, really, and it makes no sense either for units you could capture anyway... Really, now I remember why you bash paratrooping so much - it _IS_ absolute garbage. Unusable. But from your little label box, I gather Future somewhat fixes this?
One thing I have never understood is the purpose of Guerilla Infantry. They have less defence and the same attack as Infantry and the bombard mechanic is a mystery to me. Can somebody explain, are they useful?
Guerilla units are cheaper to build than Infantry, nor do they require any resources. Medieval Infantry and Longbowmen upgrade to them if they're still around. Bombardment works in three ways: Defensive - If another unit in its stack is targeted and it hasn't attacked this turn, it will perform a single strike in an effort to weaken or kill the opponent before the battle begins. All units with a bombardment rating are capable of Defensive Bombardment. Some units are only able to perform Defensive Bombardment, including Archers, Longbowmen, Guerillas, and TOW Infantry. Offensive - A unit will attempt to damage another unit or tile improvement. If successful, the target will receive damage or the tile improvement will be destroyed. Enemy units cannot be killed this way. These units include Catapults, Trebuchets, and Cannons, and many late game naval units. Be advised that some units cannot perform Offensive Bombardment (see Defensive Bombardment). Lethal - Performs the same as Offensive Bombardment, but is capable of killing the enemy unit. The Civilopedia will state if it is lethal against land or naval units. These units include Dromons, Hwachas, and Bombers.
I hate these "this was wrong this is how it could have been improved" things The game is 20 years old. Youve had 20 years of experience for your findings. They already DID fix these issues! They called it Civ 4, Civ 5, and Civ 6
Yeah the title is clickbait but I think it's an interesting discussion to have. I love this game so much, I think it's much better than later installments, so I can't just switch over. But as you point out, there are flaws that the newer games were able to fix. It's a little nitpickey but none of the things I mentioned were outside of the boundaries of what the devs were able to program or do.
I always thought that garrison units that were in a city that flipped should get bumped one tile away from the city in a random direction, and incur some amount of damage that may or may not kill them.
That way, you get a chance to retreat and save your units, but also your opponent has an opportunity to chase them down and finish them off.
Oooh! Damage on the unit would be a good idea.
@@suedeciviii7142 I know right? It fits aesthetically too imo, as it evokes the idea that the citizenry rose up and drove your troops from the city.
I don't like how science and shields aren't carried over to the next tech/unit/building. It encourages micro-managing of science budgets and shield output to avoid waste, but micro-managing these is not fun.
In single player it sucks. In multiplayer, you have limited time so you can't endlessly optimize, and there are some interesting trade-offs that you run into. "Do I build the thing I need most and waste some shields, or the thing that's normally more expensive, but isn't because I don't waste any shields here?"
You pointed out some interesting points, about the:
1) Despotism penalty: My main gripe is not with the penalty itself, but the other goverments come way later and techs like Monarchy and The Republic, unlike Feudalism or Communism, don't give too much so a beeline to either of them is just a goverment switch. Not bad, but not too good either.
2) Unit balance in Modern Era: I agree with you on the paratrooper thing. Funny that paratroopers in Civ 2 could move the turn they paradrop, I wonder why they changed it. And also fortress, from being overused in the previous title (at least by the AI) to vanishing into nothingness. I wonder what would be better: nerfing bombers or buffing the other units?
3) Cultural conversions: I agree with you in this one too. It makes fights between huge empires a chore. Another countermeasure is to starve the city to 1, but starving a 20 pop city? yeah, real fun. The main issue here I think is the loss of units in conquered cities.
4) Great Leaders: Many Great Wonders in Civ 3 are gamechanging. As you said, The Pyramids on turn 20 is absurd, but it also has to do with the wonder being available so early in the game. Maybe add some restrictions to wonder rushing like tagging (or flagging) them as 'Can't be build by Leaders'. Wonders grant golden age to civilizations with certain traits, another restriction to wonder rushing could be that only civilizations capable of obtaining a golden age through those wonders could rush them. About your solution of Military Leaders, that's Great Generals in later games and they have that meter you talked about but it could be bad for Scientific Leaders because in harder difficulties, your chances for obtaining even one would be very slim and in some cases not even worthy at that point. For building the Forbidden Palace in heavily corrupted cities: a possible solution could be being able to 'pack' it, that is, to being able to build let's say a Governor unit (just one) which costs the same as the FP and functioning the same as the Military Leader for rushing it but it will only apply to the FP.
One question: are you ok with the amount of resources generated in different map iterations? I used to play huge maps, having in some of them half the map but even on those I got cut off from oil resources on one, rubber on another and so on. It feels so random at times and to top it all off, they can get used up.
Awesome videos Suede, keep up the good work. Gameplay in the background is great in these type of videos.
I like how despotism is arranged, such that even if you could switch out of it turn 1, you probably wouldn't want to due to low unit support.
I don't have a problem with resource distribution on standard size maps. But I'm really good at managing my reputation so that the AI will still trade with me. If you can't reliably get resources through trade, it becomes a chore.
Republic doesn't give much? How 'bout the Commerce bonus? It's huuuuge. Enough to pay for extra unit support provided you disband obsolete units and grow town into cities.
Oh, these features are really annoying! But what about:
1. Broken randomizer. You may lose 4-5-6 fights in a row against a weaker unit, a weaker or an equal unit may suddenly stop losing it's health at all (I call this "terminator mode") in defense in 4-5-6 fights in a row (so many invasion armies have been broken just because of a chance, not because of maths), a pikeman sitting in the defense on a mountain may crash your industrial-era tank. Your fighters or AA units may skip 4-5-6 enemy aircrafts in a row (I've built my AA not for sitting and watching my city losing its buildings). Yes, it works for the AI as well, but it's so annoying anyway. The "chance" mechanic is a good idea but seems quite unbalanced to me.
2. Retreating. The game lies to you when telling you that a unit "will withdraw" instead of "has a chance to withdraw". By the way, the unit never withdraws if both units being involved in the fight lose their health during the fight and each gets 1 hp left. The game tells you nothing about that. That's totally confusing.
3. Zone of control. The game says the fortress gives your units the zone of control, but it doesn't. I've never seen any unit without the built-in zone of control shooting any enemy passing the fortress. No animation, no health lost by the enemy, nothing. The coastal fortress, according to the description, "attacks" all enemy naval units passing nearby, but it doesn't.
4. Air Superiority mechanic. The fighter ignores any aircraft bombing the tile the fighter is located at. The game tells you nothing about it.
I'm no expert but espionage seems pretty useless. I've never seen any favorable discussion of espionage.
Steal techs is useful, especially if you savescum.
Inspect city is useful.
Steal plans is useful, or at least, a great inclusion.
Everything else is not useful as far as I know. IDK, maybe someone has some 200 IQ strats that I don't know about.
I think Espionage works mostly fine, but its use is minimal because of how expensive it is with little chance of success.
I would also add that seeing unit counts is very helpful, and you get that every turn without having to risk a mission
@@LordSazz Oh yeah in the military advisor screen! Great feature
@@suedeciviii7142 I know this is a bit of a late reply, but the propaganda can be very useful. It only consistently works on cities with the first level of culture, and on cities size 6 or below. Doesn't sound too useful, but if there's civs duking it out on another continent, and a city gets conquered you can propaganda flip it with some luck. When I do that I rush a worker or an airport and airdrop my whole army there for an easy invasion of the continent without a navy
Bombers in the original civ3 were much better balanced: 8 bombard strength, 2 ROF, no lethal bombardement, no craters. This meant that ground artillery was stronger than bombers, but bombers instead had the range advantage (by far). In C3C they went completely overboard by strengthening bombers in every single regard, and lethal land bombardement is the worst design decision in the entirety of Civ 3 and its expansions.
And artillery itself was able to do destroy buildings instead of units (like aircraft in C3C still can), making them a little bit worse when attacking cities than they are in C3C as well.
But you can shoot down bombers, and they have to be based in fixed locations that are more difficult to manage. I think they were undertuned initially.
I like to have a stack of modern armor, mech infantry, and radar artillery when attacking cities. With obviously and overpowering bomber/jet fighter stack. But the radar artillery kills the enemy units without damaging the enemy city improvements like the bombers would, so I take out the enemy stack right away with bombers.
I don't know if it was really efficient (it was certainly not ethical) but when I was still playing Civ III I used to starve conquered cities that would flip (the best way was to make every citizen a tax collector to help financing the war) and replace the population by my own settlers or workers... When I think back Civ III could really be a totalitarism simulator and the next games in the franchise has been a lot soften (no more forced labour or anything like that)
I miss unit stacking, the newer Civ games are a pain with only one unit per tile.
I used to be fully on team doom-stack, but being forced to actually position your units in choke points and think critically about where each unit needs to be is actually much more fun than just monotonously sending an un-killable death ball to each city one at a time. I remember a situation in Civ 5 or 6 where the defending city was surrounded on several sides by mountains, making it really difficult to position an attacking military for a decisive strike. These types of situations incentivize strategic positioning of your cities and your defenses and add a layer of engagement to the combat that just wasn't possible in civ 3.
Rails allowing units to move unlimited is unbalanced for a turn based game. An offensive can now concentrate everything into 1 square while the other side can't do anything but watch.
Agreed. You should see them in multiplayer, lord have mercy. Should be 10 moves or something like Civ 4
I love the game, but have some complaints. Although real history has chariots being a major unit for centuries, here they are most likely obsolete before you get hooked up to horses. Civs with special chariots should at least start with the wheel so they can see where horses are. Later units; cruise missle, helicopters, paratroopers...the most cool units are somewhat worthless. I would like to see helicopters be able to "rescue" units and bring them home among other things. I like your idea of paratroopers still have their turn after an air drop. Spy missions are a complete waste. How about terrorist units that have invisiblility and hidden nationality that can bombard 2 spaces away. You have to have intelligence units that can detect them within 1 space...expensive units.
Most spy missions are a waste but some are actually quite strong. I've just recorded a part of my India Sid game that makes strong use of technology theft.
The despotism penalty is a thing since... I think it was even in the board game. It's such integral part of Civ format, even SMAC had its version of it (where you require bunch of technologies to increase output of your tiles, unless they have resource bonus). I know how and why it's annoying, but that's just part of the game. Dropping it in later entries dropped the ball, since there is no real hurry or urgency to your actions.
And if anything, it's a GOOD thing this penalty exists, or else it would be just absurd snowball from the turn one. I do get why it's confusing to new players, but to quote the truism: "it's a feature, not a bug". Nor a lie.
What Civ 3 did wrong with despotism AI unable to work with it (a carry-over from Civ 2) was the introduction of half-hearthed resource mechanics (as opposed to just bonus tiles like in Civ 2 or SMAC), creating the illusion that there is really something big going on and not just an early game production limit to force players to research governmental techs or suffer the consequences.
PS
The situation with really bad modern units comes from the ridiculous crunch time and openly ignoring play-test reports for both expansions. This isn't "the devs wanted this" or "the devs didn't understand what they are doing". It's "the publisher demanded new units and the devs didn't care one bit about them working properly". Rework on airforce is part of that.
The vanilla, release state of Civ 3 plays significantly different than the patched/complete edition. Especially in modern era. You lose control of resources? You're scewed, because you can't build new units, and this was intentional, preventing either player or the AI from mounting endless defensive forces and cutting wars short.
I agree that you need to hamstring tile yields early on somehow, to stop early megacities. But there are different more visually clear ways of doing it. I think something more gradual, like individual civics or techs that give slight bonuses to tile yields, would have been preferable. Instead of a massive tile yield boost when switching into rep, and another when you get rails, and that's pretty much it.
Were you involved in the development at all? I've heard similar things from one of the playtesters (Sulla wrote a bit about his experiences). It's a miracle the game turned out as well as it did.
I suppose we should be thankful in a way. With modding we were able to balance all the features for multiplayer play, but this wouldn't have been possible if they were more judicious about what features to include.
You are close to 1K!
I hate to admit it, but if I really want a certain wonder, and I know for sure that I'm the first civ to research that tech, I have, on rare occasions, just reloaded that last turn over and over until I spawn a great leader. If I'm playing as a scientific civ, this usually takes less than 10 minutes. Normally, I resist the temptation to do this, but sometimes...
Damn, I used to think the worst thing about Chris Watts was him murdering his wife and stuffing kids into oil barrels, but you've somehow managed to top that :P.
The one thing I would change about the game is how railroads give you infinite movement. Make it 9 tiles for all units regardless if its infantry or cavalry. Infinite movement robs the game of it's strategic element as you don't have to plan for troop placement nearly as thoroughly as you normally would.
@Lanz Friszt game interface for sure could be optimized in more ways than one.
Infinite move railways are simultaneously the funnest thing in the game but also kind of a bad idea. It sucks that as soon as someone rails, you have kill every unit in their army if you want to kill them. It's just fun for the human player because the AI doesn't know where to put their units.
They made the change you mentioned in civ 4
Robs it of strategy? Clearly you don't pave the way with artillery and bombers to make a "no-man's land" of sorts to disrupt that "infinite movement." 😅🤷♂️ Moreover, I'd pick a part of land mass, like a narrow peninsula, to funnel AI units into 2-3 road/railless tiles for artillery/bombers to ravage along the way while a worker builds an instant airport to funnel forces from every city of the homefront to reinforce. Hours of fun!
Civ 4 changed it to 1/3 of a movement point it would have been.
YES YES YES, ive said this before. 9 is perfect. BUT: what i have found is this: the infite movement does change the strategic element in an interesting way: you can use bombers to pillage a good chunk of their roads. Then land your units. This catches them by suprise and they wont be able to deploy all their units at once. This creates a beautifull dynamic: do you want to use your bombers to kill the units inside the city, take the city with 0 loses and then defend the city against the entire enemy force? Or do you want to pillage everything to islote the city, using your ground units as a brute attack force and probably lose a lot of them in the attack, but then not face the entire enemy force?
If ur at this face of the game you have fought a long time using the same tactics. Now the railroads throw everything in a complete 180 from the rest of the game. This is a lot of fun.
You could go either way. I would love to be able to test out a 9 tile railroad game. But i sure as hell dont dislike the infinte railroads
Speaking of unit balance, there is another thing that really bothered me and I have never seen it adressed - the lack of slow, offensive units from middle ages onwards. Basically, in early middle ages, you get medieval infantry, then nothing for a long time, and then they get upgraded to guerilla in mid to late industrial (basically rendering med infantry useless for almost an era) - but guerilla is only 6/6, which is the same offense as Infantry!
IMO, what they should have done - introduce another unit with Military Tradition, that would be strong but slow. My suggestion is 7/4/1. 7 offense is IMO adequate, since in most eras, offensive units usually have a 1 point advantage over defenders (swordsman-spearman, med infantry/knight-pikeman), and rifleman is only 1-2 techs away. Not sure though, maybe 6/5/1 would be more balanced... After that, make guerilla stronger, at least 8/6/1 or 9/6/1, so that it actually makes sense to build them instead of just stacking up infantry (they even cost the same... like what? The bombard is so not worth the additional 4 defense points).
Absolutely agreed.
I agree the guerilla is borderline useless. But if I remember right, it doesn't require any resources, just like the rifleman. So if you don't have rubber for whatever reason, you now have something with balanced mediocre attack and defense.
I feel like it should have some sort of mobility bonus; it is a "guerilla" fighter after all. Maybe if they made it 6/6/2, then it might be worth considering. Or maybe even give the same kind of attack a submarine has where it can target something specific within a stack through an ambush, also playing on the role of a guerilla fighter.
I always felt like there should have been a land unit that can target enemies in a stack like that or a land version of the privateer in the base gameplay, not just in the conquest scenarios.
i really hate the pollution micro in the later game
Unfortunately art imitates life in this instance, we hate it in the real world but it must be done. I think the newer games introduced more options for sustainability that reduce the need to deal with pollution, which makes sense.
@@ethanpayne4116 takes so damn long to clear, a non industrial civ before replaceable parts would waste I think 16(!!!) turns clearing pollution on a flat tile, which is the same cost as clearing a jungle. Add the rng factor in and you could have a worker waste 30 turns clearing a mountain tile. Improvements like mass transit and recycling centers do basically nothing so you're stuck managing your workers every time pollution crops up. At this point in the game thankfully you can mass workers to clear them in one turn since you have railroads everywhere.... But the city itself is too stupid to start working your cleared tile again! Meaning you have to go into the city screen and manually click on the tile you just cleared!!! If you have like 30+ cities you can easily forget and have a crapton of useless tax collectors because the city never works the tile again!! So you gotta have a good mental system where you clear the tile in the cities big fat cross, open the city screen, click on the cleared tile, then move on to the next pollution square. This is what I mean by frustrating micro, because you *need* *those* *tiles* *worked* , there's nothing more important that pops working tiles in this game. Oh and let's not forget when you have cities with overlapping big fat crosses and you're left scratching your head over which city should get what tile. I love this civ, it's probably my favourite one, but man do I hate pollution.
@@AGenericAccount oh they should definitely have added an automated pollution clearing algorithm for workers that makes more sense which restores the tile and it's citizen assignment status to the way it was before it got polluted. I feel like the city shouldn't even stop working the polluted tile, and like maybe the city itself just automatically clears the pollution at the cost of a couple turns worth of production from that tile/citizen. I get that clearing pollution gives workers something to do in the late game besides building railroads, but there has to be a better solution than forcing that level of micromanagement.
1) A spearman can kill far superior unit f.e. a tank (same for galley).
2) Some civs are weak. (imho Spain, Russia)
3) 9 turns of Anarchy
4) Some periods of history are not covered in game. (No WWI tanks and aircraft f.e.)
1) They could rush the tanks and pry open the hatch with their spears.
2) I only play spain and russia lol
Its enraging when single Hoplite murders your Knights and Crusaders left right and centre. But when you're playing as greece good luck getting him to stand up to 2-3 attackers
I find the RNG runs hot & cold. My drafted spearman will destroy swordsmen and promote to Elite, then get taken out by a single archer at the end.
Why a state or culture being "religious" makes any difference to the length of anarchy is beyond me. From history, internal religious differences have often prolonged "anarchy" rather than reduced it.
One that you forgot IMHO is beakers - there has to be a better way to both show the relative cost of techs in the civilopedia (which isn't the case) and guesstimate tech duration based on current commerce without clicking everywhere on the science advisor screen? :-)
Oh my literal god. I played this game to _death_ as a kid and I never knew about the Despotism penalty! It's like I can see the matrix now for the first time. Boom.
My mind is constantly being blown learning about all these mechanics, like I also had no idea how important the bonus grassland tiles were but I technically could have figured that one out on my own if I'd paid enough attention to tile yields.
Id say gameplay footage with gameplay pertaining to the specific point would be the golden standard ;)
Wow I never realized the reason my reputation was always so poor was because I was raising cities to prevent culture flips lol
This seems to be a problem in every Civ game though. They are always good about implementing changes that people want to see but oftentimes that comes at the price of other potentially bigger problems.
Unit stacking was taken out in Civ 5 but clean movement, especially in the late game, suffered dramatically.
In Civ 6 most haven't noticed, but they have just been slowly implementing mechanics and features from Civ 3. From introducing armies and city flipping in Rise & Fall to bringing back volcanoes and floodplains mechanics in Gathering Storm.
The biggest problem I see is that Civ 6 isn't friendly to beginners if you're not used to the series. Console gamers especially complain that they can't even win on Settler difficulty because there is just too much to manage and not enough time to manage it. Usually when I play on Diety, by the time I am comfortably able to build musketmen at a decent rate (15 turns or less), I'm in the middle of the Renaissance Era and outclassed by calvary and curaissers.
TLDR
These problems are often what define the next game but unfortunately the devs seem to solve problems with problems. On thing is I can say is thank god for the modding community.
Absolutely. One of the best things about Civ 3 was that it was so easy to mod. The multiplayer scene would be dead without that.
I would disagree that modern armor or mech infantry is fine because they can be killed with a fucking horse. Modern naval units are the same way. Overall, the natural border between generations of "old" and "new" tech does not existl. And bombers are OP. In fact, the entire concept of unit attack/defense force need to completely reworked. Still a fun game to play if you know the tricks.
Paratroopers are deathly overpowered with nukes. I had a big war with a civ and my front line wasn’t moving so I built up paratroopers in all my cities except my highest production cities to build ICBM. Nuked his middle cities where he had little units and dropped in with paratroopers which captured them instantly, in which he took troops from the front line to take back the cities and was able to push and win
The gold harvest. I can play Monarchy and exceeding my unit support by twice and still earning plenty of gold, because my corruption gold waste is almost zero.
Micromanaging production makes it in cases possible to use the squares for more than one city in the same turn, if a production has been completed, as you get the option to alter the citizens in all cities after each production has been completed, and the game goes through your cities in the same order every single turn. Having this in mind you can harvest gold form all cities in the chain after the first production in each turn, based on the city-order.
Regicide is too easy in late game just nuke there capitals game over
Regicide isn't something I'd play with in single player but I like its inclusion in the game. It works well in one multiplayer scenario I play regularly (future start) and some single player scenarios too. It's pretty trivial to turn it off, and turning it off won't affect the game balance in any way, unlike turning off cultural conversions or scientific great leaders.
@@suedeciviii7142 well they don't move the king so its easy kill
The number 1 problem with this game is random combat results. I hate random combat mechanics, absolutely despite it. Don't we all?
There's no reason to do it that way in the first place. So you want a damage of 5 with a 3/5ths chance of hitting uphill? Then just make it a damage of 3 CONSTANTLY... It's a no-brainer.
Three other things i don't like:
- Too much mechanics of "immaterial" like morale, culture, corruption, etc. making it overly complicated.
- Great wonders can be obtained by only 1 player and then locked out...really? So now in my archipelago game, whoever gets the Great Lighthouse is almost guaranteed to win...unless you trust random chances of safely moving thru deep water squares...more randomness...
- Each civ has a fixed set of traits, and wildly imbalanced. If ur gonna have that many different civs and be unbalanced, you should just let the player pick any two traits they want for ANY race at the start of a game. Again, no-brainer.
I always thought corruption was one of the game's poorer features. The math for calculating corruption and for how structures which reduce it do so is rather opaque, and I hate when game mechanics aren't transparent. After everyone figured out the best way to play Civ II was ICS, it makes sense that they would want to nerf that strategy, but since you can just convert all your 100% corrupt cities into specialist farms ICS is still viable and corruption becomes more of a speed bump that wastes your time than anything. I think it would have made more sense to simply establish a hard cap for the number of cities you can plant rather make a certain number useless except as farms and for rushing.
From what I've read, the corruption mechanic was so widely misunderstood and disliked when the game was new, the game was actually referred to as "Corruption III" rather than "Civ III."
I actually really like the corruption mechanic. You need something to prevent civs from snowballing too hard when they get big, and I like the corruption system much better than global happiness (Civ 5) or maintenance (civ 4). I wish the formula was less opaque, they could have rounded it to the nearest 10% and displayed that in the city menu, that would have been helpful.
It also makes sense to me conceptually. Far away cities are less centrally controlled, and don't contribute as much to the national treasury and the army. To bring these cities under central control, you need to change your government, or use make costly efforts to do so, represented by corruption buildings. You can also use forced labour. But the cities won't be happy about that.
I like the trade off between distance and rank corruption. Plant close for less distance corruption in the short term, but you get punished with more rank corruption in the long term.
I think you're right that ICS isn't much fun, at least in single player, because it's too much stuff to micromanage. That being said I don't think ICS is strictly the best way of playing, so it's far from mandatory.
@@suedeciviii7142 I definitely agree that it is a better mechanic than the other restrictions on growth. Although I'm not in love with it, it at least only makes cities past the OCN relatively unhelpful rather than actively detrimental.
Speaking of specialist farms, that could be an idea for one of your "how to" videos. I didn't know anything about them until I picked the game back up earlier this year.
@@suedeciviii7142 I'm not sure distance from capital is the best way to implement the corruption penalty, I agree that the systems in civ 4 and 5 are not perfect but it seems ridiculous that an entire half of your empire can be almost useless when it comes to production just because it happens to be on a different continent than the original capital (as if capitals themselves can't be super corrupt in real life). I think there should maybe be some uniform formula applied to all cities that takes into account anti-corruption buildings (courthouses, homeless shelters, etc.), military conflict (is this area a war-torn refugee nightmare), resources (is there enough food for everyone, are there luxury resources and natural beauty for people to enjoy), and government. Maybe there can be an isolation penalty to reflect cities that are super remote (i.e. Alaska), but I don't think it makes sense to have that "remoteness" be the sole source of corruption, nor should it be a simple measure of distance from the capital but rather distance to other cities in the empire in general.
@@ethanpayne4116 Might have mentioned this in the vid, but I see it as centralization. Like, "corrupt" cities are vassals and don't pay much in taxes to the government.
why is this your favorite civ game? ive been contemplating picking it up, but i havent found any opinions anywhere of why it would be a better experience than civ4 (especially with realism invictus mod) all your vids are either playing civ 3 or saying why its not that great
I talk a ton about the reasons I love the game on this channel. The two (clickbait-ish) videos criticizing it are just to provide a balanced perspective. It isn't a perfect game, but it is spectacularly good.
As to specifics: the core mechanics are really strong and engaging. It rewards careful consideration of the games rules and mechanics, but also creative problems solving. It's very challenging in a bunch of different ways, there are so many unique challenges that the game throws at you. Visually I think it looks great, it conveys all the needed information very clearly and aesthetically (kind of how I feel about old pixel based art like in Super Mario World).
Admittedly I don't have the same understanding of Civ 4 as I do of Civ 3. Maybe if I knew what I was doing when playing high levels of Civ 4, I'd feel differently. I've watched videos of Deity level gameplay, and while it does look interesting and fun, it doesn't look quite as interesting or fun as Civ 3 is.
It has the best scenarios in the civ series (3 and later) by far.
@@mattk1202 true, the civ 6 scenarios are a joke in comparison
For me cruise missiles and radar artillery are amazing if the land I have never spawns oil to build bombers.
Great leaders in Civ 3 always seemed so annoyingly random in my experience, and armies give such a huge advantage that the military snowball can get out of hand really fast once you luck into getting your first army. Great people in the newer games aren't perfect but they feel a lot more intuitive and balanced.
My biggest complaint is the AI has a "do as I say, not as I do" take on being in their land. I am playing the Marla map, where I was at peace with two civ that both had units in my land for a long time. I was saving them for last as they were both over 50 cities and I was at war with 8 civs already. I had moved some workers back a tile and the IBT the tile for two stacks went under their culture. Both on the same IBT.
They dial me up and get all huffy over my workers. First of all you cannot even get the option to boot their workers. So yeah tell me to move my guys, while you have 66 assorted attackers in land. I called Spain (66 units and gave the leave or DoW). Happily, she did declare. The Celt's only had two units, infantry, so I let that slide.
I agree with all of the points, though only the culture one really bugs me. I am fine with a flip with border issues, but not with the "they are OCC now and not on my landmass now".
How hard could have been to add a sanity check? No town with in 20 tiles of my culture, no flip.
If armies were not overpowered, I probably would have stop playing long ago. I like to play AW on large pangea maps, 250x250 with 31 civs. I cannot beat demi that often, even with a fairly good start. Not sure, if even Monarch could be done without the armies.
Full agree with the despotism penalty. I remember when I was young I made an effort to really figure out exactly how the tile yields work and my tile yields never matched up with what I thought it was supposed to be. I ended up thinking the game was just too complicated to grasp and just deferred to automated workers instead of figuring the game out
One of the core issues in CIV III is that there is no valid "tall" strategy. (This might be a bit wordy)
For a tall strategy to work in a game you have to have some sort penalty for playing wide. In theory this should be the corruption mechanic. But, it doesn't actually penalize you for having loads of land. It simply makes the fringe cities bad. Because it doesn't affect your core cities there is no reason to have a healthy core and no fringe lands. You can have a healthy AND fringe lands. Even crappy cities will still give some commerce which will help at least a little with teching and that's not to mention getting LUXs and RESs. Large empire will ALWAYS outperform small ones. Rank and ONC corruption MAY discourage it a little but never enough.
Just to put the nail in the coffin, luxuries give happiness per city. So that encourages you have MORE cities. Also, (one of the features I most despise) excess production isn't carried over to the next thing being produced and so to reduce waste you are encouraged to spread production out. You should always have more land and build the most cities that you can. Also, unit cap.
What's a better solution? Well the idea should be between 'Big and Strong' and 'Lean and Mean'. Add an actual penalty to having cities that doesn't invalidate having a bunch of them but makes having a lower number desirable. Ignoring corruption, and make a slight tech cost increase for every city that you have. Think of it as the cost of implementing the Tech over a large CIV. Don't make the penalty too high but enough that the commerce gain from planting a new city might net reduce your tech rate. This would encourage the player to only place 'good' cities. A 'good' city would be able to make enough commerce/production to compensate for the extra cost and afterwards you can factor corruption back in and balance as desired. It doesn't have to be based on cities though. It could be territory or workable tiles or anything else. Just something to break the 'more is more' mold.
Three thoughts
1) Yes, this is absolutely true. And it's a pity, because the game has so much depth in its other systems that it doesn't really need it? But at the same time people are harshly penalized for playing in a style that is intuitive to them.
2) Check out wonder stacking if you haven't, it's the one viable way to "play tall" in single player civ 3.
3) When designing multiplayer mods, this has been a priority. Generally it's done by rewarding tall strategies using multipliers.
@@suedeciviii7142 A lot of games have handled playing tall very badly. Civ games seem to just bounce back and forth between which play style is better. The hypothetical solution I offered is pretty much how stellaris works and it doesn't work very well due to poor balance. I'm also not a fan of civ V's global happiness solution.
It is good to know that modders are aware of these problems and take steps to solve it.
On the topic of mods, have there been attempts to fix the vanilla unit balance? I'm not very familiar with modding civ iii but from my understanding giving naval units more HP and better stats, adding units that are missing, fixing over powered ones would all be pretty easy wouldn't it? Do such mods exist and are they ever used?
@@cutthroatawesome The issue with naval units are pretty trivial to fix. Make them faster and hold more and the AI is better at naval landings. Giving them extra HP also makes them less underpowered compared to planes.
Yes, a lot of custom mods exist like that. Many single player mods make such changes. Multiplayer actually has unique tools to fix land units. Due to a bug for example, cruise missiles fire once for every player in the game (so 4-8 times). That seems over powered, but it's great if you tune down the bombard numbers, it effectively gives them "splash damage",. That's something that Civ 4 tried with catapults, it's a good mechanic to have in the game because it punishes players for putting units in big stacks.
i actually like the despotism penalty, Yes it makes it hard but thats the whole point right. If it were really straight forward and clear what u should mine and irrigate it would be eazy. This ads a lot of thinking and planning into the game. for example.. irrigating grassland might be the good idea for the long run. whereas mining is obviously better in the shortrun. It adds all this complection with no right or wrong awsner and that makes every player and his playstyle unique.
Ps. great job here on yt. there is nobody explaining civ 3 like u do on youtube and its good to see there is still love for this game, Keep it up!
Agreed, it adds a ton of strategic depth. If there was a clear visual indicator I wouldn't mind it so much.
@@suedeciviii7142 yeah u are totally right on that. The way its presented is very unlogical and unclear
Do you think that researching a particular science could speed up researching the whole age in the tech tree, for instance the blank sciences, like printing press, or steel, atomic theory, smart weapons, or chemistry and physics, could give a player for an example +20% speeding up science research for the next 20 turns? Or some like that.
Sure. I believe being the first civ to reach a particular tech in Civ 4 gives a free great scientist. There's just so many cool rewards that could have been in the civ 3 tech tree and they weren't really imaginative with it.
Yeiiii another suede vid :) Keep up the great content lad
Mix it up. I like the PPT format because I could do a screenshot and put the list into the gameplay folder. But this also worked.
hey suede,
i would love an awnser on this one:
my dad taught me civ 3, and we have played it for years and years on hot seat. he always said cultural conversions are super anoying and as a result we always turn them off. in my thousands of hours of playing ive never played with them on. so could you elaborate a little more on why it messes with the ballance? in the video u talk about the temple thing, and indeed they are useless so i just never ever build tempels. it works cuz i always use luxuries plus marketplace for hapiness and the slider in a pinch. now whats interesting is my dad loves playing the celts, and he builds tempels like crazy for the points. meaning if the game goes to 2040, he will win. this gives him a tactical advantage since i need to come at him and destroy him before the game ends.
i cant see why this wouldnt be balanced?
Tempels=points for a defensive long game. and no tempels means more militairy and more agression.
i would love an anwser to get insight as to if we have been playing the game "wrong" for all this time :-))) what am i not seeing here?
much love,
mickey
I don't know what kind of game you're playing, you'd have to send me the saves. If you're playing a huge map with 4 civs or something, then yes, games would almost always resolve on score and religious would provide a meaningful score boost. But in most games the slight increase in the speed in which you get your first 2 border expands does not impact score very much. Because you'll get these expands anyway when you build a library (or when you get 30 more shields for the non-half priced temple). But having more units, more population, more cities, etc, does impact score a lot, and they also help you win the game before it would get resolved on score.
@@suedeciviii7142 aah i didnt know you got score for units aswell. Tnx for the info.
We mostly play 60% water huge pangea/continents. With 2 humans and 6 ai's.
@@best7993 you don't. But if you have units you can kill people hahah
Not a big fan of the diplomacy (e.g. no matter someones standings they will sign a military alliance), just a few things in there I'd change
I love the diplomacy system, I just wish it was more transparent. They are super trigger happy with alliances, but you have to know how to use alliances correctly, otherwise it's easy for your rivals to get bigger from them.
i know thats not possible for with the game as is, but wouldnt it be interesting if modern ships has some sort of modularity to them. i.e. they can load certain types of units that will participate in air/naval combat or provide additional bombard capabilties
Generally disagree for conservative or curmudgeonly reasons:
1) It's a complex game requiring considerable research to catch its nuances. Spilling the beans on Despotism penalty makes it too easy for humans. After all the AI is eternally ignorant of it.
2) Yes some Modern units are underwhelming yet Fighters are foils to Bombers and Tank Armies are about all you can count on to break down TOW Infantry in Metros; Artillery hardly hurts them (defending at 31 if fortified on just level ground) and individual Tank units (just 16 attack) would die like flies. Don't forget Mech Infantry either. And how could humans win at higher levels if AIs didn't have lame units to build?
3) Haven't had much flipping trouble at Emperor level, one or two conquered cities maybe per Civ per game. Usually if they flip I'll simply destroy them and never mind the rep hit. Playing for Domination most Civs won't like you anyway when you're ahead. Plus they'll still trade with you.
4) What's wrong with luck affecting creation of Leaders? Chance plays a great part in human affairs so it seems deterministic to presume there's a sure way to either make Leaders or prevent them.
Still a great video and much appreciated Suede. Keep 'em coming!
>>how could humans win at higher levels if AIs didn't have lame units to build?
The fact that the AI needs so many ridiculous advantages to compete with top tier humans isn't really desirable. If the creators patched the game to make it more balanced and less abusable by humans, and they had to scale back the difficulty levels as a result, I'd call that a plus.
I don't like having to decide between having more fun each game and going for the great library (which is an overpowered winning strat).
Luck is fine but the game already has so many luck based elements. Giving one player the pyramids on turn 10 imbalances the game.
I play a lot of Civ 4 and 5, but what features does Civ 3 have that make it worth your time?
I'm playing it now because my laptop is fried and won't play anything newer right now.
Corruption is a necessary feature in the game imo but literally needs to be toned down 80-90%. Playing on a huge Pangea map is almost out of the question if you plan winning conquest, and if you’re like me that’s the only victory I go for.
Preferences vary but I can't imagine at looking at a large Pangea map and thinking "this needs 3x as many units".
I remember I played this game as a kid and being so happy that I finally researched democracy. Finally a government with low corruption, so finally my cities one island over from my main won't have 1 shield production anymore!
I was so disappointed to find that production was barely improved compared to monarchy that day.
The fact you can't rebase ICBMs.
Why would you want to?
Oh I guess to protect them. Yeah that is an oversight. Not a super impactful one though.
The AI will attack armies. But I've only seen it in 2 scenarios. First, when the army is weakened to a certain extent. How weak? Not sure. I'm guessing when they lose 50% or more of their strength. The second scenario is when you park your army in a city.. even at full strength, the AI will attack it. So.... If you keep your armies outside of cities vulnerable to attack, and make sure they don't get too weak..then you are golden.
Does the AI receive Scientific Great Leaders? If so, how do they tend to use them?
Not a cire game mechanic, but i don't like that you can't upgrade cavalry. Maybe attack helicopters would be nice? Strong attack, weakdefence and can always move 3 tiles, even in enemy territory or unroaded mountains.
And paratroopers should ATTACK the tile they land on. That would be great
i liked that you can't upgrade cavalry. you have to choose whether to go full napoleon or skip that step and get to infantry faster.
Getting tanks before everyone else is fun. But the advantage seems to last about ten minutes.
oh! so ships, especially modern ships should has vastly more health?
Personally for me stacking units should be limited to about max 30 per tile.This mechanic makes late games ridiculous on higher difficulties.
That's fair tbh.
The Slider system. Just remove it. Don't gerrymander science like this again.
The worker automation AI is TERRIBLE. It routinely puts my entire workforce on a single tile then repositions, wasting a turn. Particularly frustrating when there is no railroad.
Agreed with everything you said
looks like you researched the game to great detail, and why do you like CIV 3 when there's CIV 6???
I actually haven't played civ 6 yet. I feel that Civ 4 was pretty solid but not as good, and civ 5 was significantly worse.
@@suedeciviii7142 Hey. I'm curious why do you think civ 4 is worse than civ 3? (Apart from graphics because that didn't age too well...)
@@krzysztofpaszkiewicz1274 ruclips.net/video/pUbHzlT-Tm4/видео.html
Here's some of my thoughts on that question.
Isn’t the lack of general utility of jet fighters in anything but air defense supposed to counter an opponents use of bombers?
Oh yeah, they're mostly meant to shoot things don't. And they're good at that.
I meant more, even in situations where your opponent has air defense of their own, you're better off using mass bombers instead of bombing with jet fighters.
Is it possible to win the game if you stick only to despotism
yes ofc
@@suedeciviii7142 Funny how a tyrannical system of government is amazing in game but disastrous in real life.
Bombers are so powerful that i jave stopped the celts with armies 5 times bigger than mine they moved them one tile away from my citys since i build my citys near a mountain range units of the enemy did less movement amd after the turn all the bombers placed in those citys swept 60% of the enemy that 60% didnt get a chance to shoot and they died the 40% i destroyed with fortress bonus or high ground bonuses but the bombers did 80% of the war they are the best at bombing effectively
I dont like how colonies work, they must be in contact by road, but you know there are resources thar you cannot comunicate cause there is only one tile. I know that are not too important because you can build a new city over a luxury/strategic resource. But for example in Napoleonic Europe scenario, you are not allowed to build settlers. And all those African resources are simply lost.
Another thing that i would like to mod is the Food storage box, making harder to grow a city.
Yeah, colonies should count as harbors.
There are situations with small islands consisting only of mountains, with resources you can never access.
Not to mention a lot of multiplayer is played with city elimination, so island cities usually aren't worth planting.
for me:
1 corruption
2 roads not working in my enemy land
Also railroads, too OP. They should triple the movement of roads. So instead of 3 squares, you should be able to go 9. The infinite movement could be something added way later on in the modern era, like a maglev or something like that.
@@ArmaDino22 infinite movement is op, I agree.
I don't have alot of experience with the culture flips, but what if you take the city then abandon it instead of raze it and settle a new one. Do you still ruin your diplomacy?
That's the worst of both worlds. Razing cities gives you free workers, abandoning does not. But you still take a global rep hit for abandoning cities with foreign citizens.
I believe if you starve it down first, you don't take a global rep hit for that, and it would reduce the global rep hit from abandoning.
@@suedeciviii7142 thanks for the reply. I work overnight and watched about 4 hours of your videos last night.. just got home and started a new game, I'm about to get the great library for the first time on emperor! Thank you for what you do! Lol
@@ImEddy92 No problem! Send the save to the discord or to my email suedeciviii@gmail.com if you need any feedback!
I actually found fighters/jet fighters very useful along with flak/mobile SAM when used to destroy enemies' bombers. You just have to put them in air superiority missions (the fighters) in cities close to the enemy or in air bases to defend your army. Obviously put a stack of flaks with the main army as well. When bombers are attacked, they lose their turn. It's great. Once all AI bombers are gone you are free to go unhindered (they don't replace bombers as often as one would think).
No posibility of "script" on scenarios and only one uu per civ are the worse thing for me
Great list agree with all
If only they fixxed this in a sequel
Yeah if only they did that without making dozens of other things worse
@@suedeciviii7142 amen lol
10:40 units exiting the city is how rome total war deals with cities rebeling
How much would I have to donate for you to play a series game of sid pangaea standard map vs random ai to completion?
Nothing, that was actually on my list already. :)
The current sid game I have on my channel has shitty video quality and I need to replace it with something better. It also has 2 reloads, and some non standard settings that I don't like (accelerated production, cultural conversions off).
It just won't happen soon, since that last (11 part) series was exhausting and there's a bunch of stuff on my to-do list before doing another full game playthrough.
Wouldnt despotism be OP without the tile penalty?
Also, i am noticing thatcthe main issye with the desp-pen is the lack of transparency as it changes a ton with little to no explanation, and since you *literally start in despotism* if you're not aware of it, as a newibie on top of having to learn a ton of concepts you also have to tackle this counter intuitive mechanic
Yes definitely. Not better than communism but really strong. There should be some other penalty, maybe a 25% reduction in all yields.
@@suedeciviii7142 maybe, tough the game code must be pretty shortcut-y if there is no overflow for anything, so how would you implement a % penalty when the economy is all in whole numbers
@@voszvaivaldtkoszikovokh6418 Same way factories and libraries work, rounding.
I really hate barbarians, I used to active them, but after I was struggling against two civs that allied up to kill me, OUT FROM NOWHERE it came a boat with like more than 10 units just on top of my capital, and they were like advanced units(for the period the game was in) mounted on horses, not regular ones, and I was just like ''WTF?''... after that, I turned it off permanently. But the main reason I don't like them is because they spawn from nowhere, it doesn't follow logic, a barbarian may appear in the center of a dominated area of yours, without you seeing from where it came. Also:
1- Culture Conversion -> Ridiculous, I just turn it off.
2- The RNG combat is retarded af, sometimes just one AI unit destroys like 5 units or more of mine.
3- The AI have some retarded mechanics, like coming with a horse, killing your unit and then fleing far away(wtf??? where's the fuc*ing movement limit).
4- I hate how easy is the ''city overtaking'' that happens in the game, you just can't let a city alone with no units in there, because at every moment, an enemy unit can show up e just walk in, and take it, that's ridiculous, citizens don't even try to fight.
5- Moving units in the early game it's just a pain in the ass.
6- Managing everything in the late game is also a pain in the ass, too much things to look after. Point 5 and 6 combined make the saved games to take days for finishing.
7- Also I hate when computer put something to be produced on automatic without asking me(it happens a lot), when the empire is too big, sometimes I am surprised with that ''Warrior'' being made at Industrial Ages.
8- The AI have the option of telling you to leave their lands, we don't. That's broken, when the AI invades our territory, nothing happens, even if we try to contact it, there's no option such as ''leave my lands'' or ''get away''.
9- Lack of game music when some civ contact us(like in the SNES civ 1), there used to be dramatic music when we were contacted.
10- Support unit cost > this one really annoys me, I hate how much gold you have to give to maintain lot's of units, that's fuc*ing annoying, I think at least workers should be free and only military units should be paid. That added with corruption is just horrible, your gold just go away, I personally love to have lot's of units in other turn-based strategy games, but in civ 3 you just can't do that, or else I go broken.
11- Well, I can't remember more stuff now, but that's it.
But I really like the game even so, LOL.
A lot of these are really valid and I agree with them, but you can kick the AI out of your land in the diplomacy screen. Works fine!
@@suedeciviii7142 Oh, didn't know that, because no pop up is shown when enemy units enter our area, unlike the opposite, gonna check that. I'm actually new to the game so many of my thoughts may probably change later on, and that's why I'm watching your videos, it has helped me a lot, I went from ''don't know what I'm doing'' to playing fine. My first save I was just broke af and got ''out-teched'' at middle age, I still had swordsman while AI already had medieval infantry, I got swept. Also I realised that playing dictator and going all out on the other civs at the start works terribly lmfao, I was playing like civ 1 from the snes, but civ 3 is nothing like it, having peace and trading techs works amazingly fine, while in civ 1 you just crush your enemies as soon as possible.
@@aizentaichou7210 You can play dictator, you just have to crush your enemies early!
To kick someone out of your land, call them up in the diplomacy screen. There should be a dialogue prompt asking them to get their units out of their land.
13:32 civ 4 solution
almost every solution he offers is the Civ IV solution, he just doesn't like the other things Civ IV changed. Which is fair, even if it's incorrect.
Insert snark about Civ V here.
My civ 3 is diferent game , what is this ? Civ3 2001
You probably don't have the expansions
How do you have this
Clip 1, 3, and 4 are all unmodded civ 3 conquests
Clip 2 is the future start scenario, played multiplayer for a stream. Stream chat is in the top right, game chat in the top left, and the drop down menu with each players name/civ/score is unique to multiplayer.
@@suedeciviii7142 thanks
5:19 Oooh, I remember now! I tried airdrop - pretty good for reinforcement, I tried marines - fantastic for D-Day style doomstack disembark directly onto coastal cities, choke an island etc, I tried paratrooping stuff and I was hugely disappointed. The thing you said about paratrooping on workers sounds frustrating - like, really, and it makes no sense either for units you could capture anyway... Really, now I remember why you bash paratrooping so much - it _IS_ absolute garbage. Unusable. But from your little label box, I gather Future somewhat fixes this?
Yes! Future and modern both have much stronger paratrooping, cruise missiles, marines, etc
One thing I have never understood is the purpose of Guerilla Infantry. They have less defence and the same attack as Infantry and the bombard mechanic is a mystery to me. Can somebody explain, are they useful?
Guerilla units are cheaper to build than Infantry, nor do they require any resources. Medieval Infantry and Longbowmen upgrade to them if they're still around.
Bombardment works in three ways:
Defensive - If another unit in its stack is targeted and it hasn't attacked this turn, it will perform a single strike in an effort to weaken or kill the opponent before the battle begins. All units with a bombardment rating are capable of Defensive Bombardment. Some units are only able to perform Defensive Bombardment, including Archers, Longbowmen, Guerillas, and TOW Infantry.
Offensive - A unit will attempt to damage another unit or tile improvement. If successful, the target will receive damage or the tile improvement will be destroyed. Enemy units cannot be killed this way. These units include Catapults, Trebuchets, and Cannons, and many late game naval units. Be advised that some units cannot perform Offensive Bombardment (see Defensive Bombardment).
Lethal - Performs the same as Offensive Bombardment, but is capable of killing the enemy unit. The Civilopedia will state if it is lethal against land or naval units. These units include Dromons, Hwachas, and Bombers.
I hate these "this was wrong this is how it could have been improved" things
The game is 20 years old. Youve had 20 years of experience for your findings.
They already DID fix these issues! They called it Civ 4, Civ 5, and Civ 6
Yeah the title is clickbait but I think it's an interesting discussion to have. I love this game so much, I think it's much better than later installments, so I can't just switch over. But as you point out, there are flaws that the newer games were able to fix. It's a little nitpickey but none of the things I mentioned were outside of the boundaries of what the devs were able to program or do.