- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
Civ 3 (which is now 21 years old) was two bucks on GOG, and since I spent the 1990s and 00s playing first person shooters almost exclusively, I gave it a try (Civ 4 is $30, too rich for my blood). Arguably, the game needs no introduction, but still, I can't be the only person who never played Civilization.
It's a fun turn-based game with neat ideas. Having now played it, it's obvious how this game inspired countless others, with Paradox games clearly owing a great deal to Civ.
While I'm enjoying it, I feel it ultimately falls short of being a simulation game. For one thing, as Hannibal of Carthage, I apparently am immortal, as is Joan of Arc on the continent south of me. A thousand years later, Joan remembers how I invaded France in 200 AD to take her iron mine, and will never give me right of passage again. Bitch really holds a grudge.
The second thing that bugs me is the inability to trade food. Food trade is fundamental to human civilization, so ignoring that is too big an oversight for me to dismiss as a limitation of trying to do so much in a few megabytes of memory. For example, I found an area with iron, gold, and other resources, but it was nearly un-farmable tundra, so I couldn't populate it. I couldn't ship surplus food from my capital city up north to build a mining town, as humanity has done since we discovered valuables in the mountains, so the resources went unclaimed.
The third kind of weird thing that seems to be to force warfare is how scarce key mineral resources, like iron and saltpeter, are. These minerals are extremely common in the real world, but in Civ3, rather than needing to expand your iron mines as your civilization's need for iron and steel grows, you either grab the one iron mine on a continent, or go sailing off to find one somewhere else. It would have made more sense to limit manufacturing by how much iron I'd found.
This doesn't stop it from being a good game, of course, I'm just saying it's a little too gamified.
It's a fun turn-based game with neat ideas. Having now played it, it's obvious how this game inspired countless others, with Paradox games clearly owing a great deal to Civ.
While I'm enjoying it, I feel it ultimately falls short of being a simulation game. For one thing, as Hannibal of Carthage, I apparently am immortal, as is Joan of Arc on the continent south of me. A thousand years later, Joan remembers how I invaded France in 200 AD to take her iron mine, and will never give me right of passage again. Bitch really holds a grudge.
The second thing that bugs me is the inability to trade food. Food trade is fundamental to human civilization, so ignoring that is too big an oversight for me to dismiss as a limitation of trying to do so much in a few megabytes of memory. For example, I found an area with iron, gold, and other resources, but it was nearly un-farmable tundra, so I couldn't populate it. I couldn't ship surplus food from my capital city up north to build a mining town, as humanity has done since we discovered valuables in the mountains, so the resources went unclaimed.
The third kind of weird thing that seems to be to force warfare is how scarce key mineral resources, like iron and saltpeter, are. These minerals are extremely common in the real world, but in Civ3, rather than needing to expand your iron mines as your civilization's need for iron and steel grows, you either grab the one iron mine on a continent, or go sailing off to find one somewhere else. It would have made more sense to limit manufacturing by how much iron I'd found.
This doesn't stop it from being a good game, of course, I'm just saying it's a little too gamified.
