Half and Half
Written: Jan 30 '02 (Updated Jan 30 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Unique concept, incredible potential, works for the most part.
Cons: Not for those who are new to Civ games, very buggy, unfulfilled promises.
The Bottom Line: Unfulfilled potential is worthless. This game is unfulfilled potential. It's damn near impossible for newbies to understand. It has issues, even for long-time Civ gamers.
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| Alastor's Full Review: Civilization Call to Power |
I had never played the Civ series of games before, but had played the tabletop game once, which I won. Looking for something new to tinker with after disappointing showings from Microsoft, Blizzard, Maxis and Westwood I looked to the Civ series. I figured after this run of four games that I barely recommended or didn't recommend at all, I'd give a newer and less renowned company a run. Enter Sid Meier who recently broke from his old company to create (in part) Infogrames whose sole line of games that any of us would know by name are the Civ series.
I'll make this simple since it's also really long. I'll break my review down into the following parts and then drop off my conclusion at the bottom:
1.Guidebook
2.The tutorial
3.Gameplay
4.Civ3.com (their website)
5.Other resources I found (and will share)
6.Game Editor
7.Comparison to other games of the genre
8. Conclusion
Guidebook
The guidebook is actually very impressive in my opinion. It is well written and with few grammatical errors. I realize that not everyone cares about spelling and punctuation, but I do. It shows attention to detail. Aside from that though, one should keep in mind that I have never played this game or any of its predecessors before. I did play the tabletop - ONCE. And that was years ago. As is typical for me, when playing a new line of game, I read the guidebook from cover to cover prior to even installing the game.
I found the guidebook to be generally well organized and fairly straightforward. Perhaps too straightforward. The guidebook assumes that the reader is familiar with this line of game quite often and leaves out information that someone new to the game would absolutely need to know.
There are informative errors in the book of course, but those are relatively few and are to be expected when the guidebook is finished before the game is (and why companies do this I have no idea, it's stupid). Alas, since every game company does it, I guess I can overlook it since this book had fewer errors than most do.
The guidebook is also fairly redundant, and this actually makes finding information a lot harder. Since things are covered in parts multiple times, and usually in places that they shouldn't be, when a question about previous information arises for the reader, it's hard as Hell to seek out the portion of the text that one recalls mentioning it to get your answers. Still this is not the worst I've seen, and is undoubtedly the thickest instruction manual I've seen in the genre.
There were some major problems though. After reading the guidebook (three times) I was left with what would only barely be called an understanding of the game concepts and I had a lot more questions than answers. Those questions that I had no answer to that I have since found on my own are listed later in the "Things you should know" section.
Overall, I'd say that this is the best guidebook for this type of game that I've probably ever seen in terms of depth and quality. It's at least comparable to the StarCraft guidebooks that were quality as well. Sadly, being among the best of these guidebooks doesn't say much. Despite that this book is better than most, it's still very lacking in many areas. If I were to put it against its peers alone, it would get 5 stars, but since all of its peers are inadequate as well, I have to rate it in the context of how well it informs the player. Here it gets 3 stars.
The Tutorial
This is the worst tutorial ever built. I mean it sucks. In this department it actually rates worse than the Westwood monstrosity of the Red Alert games, and they didn't even have a tutorial, just a set of scenarios you could run through.
Here's why it is the fecal matter of the gaming world in this department. I opened the game, and loaded everything up, and opened the tutorial. The first thing it said to me was "It is important to place your starting city carefully as it is the single biggest factor in your future success." Now it didn't tell me where to put it, and it didn't say "look for this or that" to build your town around, it just fed me that line of obvious crap that I had already read 8 times (each in a different spot) in the guidebook.
I then proceeded to attempt to play the game. It gave me no further advice on anything in the game for the duration of the game. Not once did a pop-up window or any type of trigger go off that made the game any different than a standard game.
There should be a tutorial in this game as it is incredibly hard for "newbies" to learn their way around. Sadly, the thing that says it's a tutorial is not one. It's actually very frustrating, and it's shoddy and shows laziness and greed since the company promised a tutorial with this game. It's sort of like buying a car and then when you pick it up, you find out that it does indeed come with tires, but they're in the trunk and you need to put them on yourself before you can cruise the strip.
Sad here. Not even one star. They get a rating of zero here. That's actually sort of hard to get from me, since I usually reward effort if nothing else. Since there was no effort here, I can't do that this time.
Game play
Game play is actually fairly decent. I had very few lock-ups and the game never outright crashed on me. There are a few things I disliked though (although I truly love the idea of a turn based strategy game).
During the game you can right click on a grid square to get terrain info. I know that you can usually see the graphics for it, but I think that the presence of a road, irrigation or mine ought to be listed in the terrain information, and what affect that has on that square. Just a minor quibble here.
Often the game ends your turn when you're not ready. Sometimes closing out a city-screen or moving an army or unit will end your turn even if there are other things you want to do or look at. I don't like that the game decides when my turns end and in what appears to be an erratic and unpredictable fashion.
It was hard for me to plan ahead for things, because there was a drastic lack of information about how many resources and of what type certain things took to build. The queue was no help here, as I could not (and still can't) figure out what the number of turns actually means when you place something in a queue. It follows no mathematical formula at all (at least not consistently) and is completely useless. This needs to be explained better, and if it's broken (I suspect that it is) it needs to be fixed.
The queue sucks. I mean it works - sort of - but it's not something new to gaming and it has flaws that anyone could see coming. For one thing, I can't plan ahead. For example, you must have a factory before you can build a manufacturing plant. If I want to queue those up in order, I can't. I have to wait until the factory is actually built in order to then queue up my manufacturing plant. Not cool.
Also, if you add something to your queue in the wrong order, or simply decide that you don't want to build something, there is no way to remove it from the queue. You have to replace it with something not already in the queue. This costs resources, and more importantly, time. There should be a way to remove items from the queues.
Nowhere in the game, even in the civilopedia, is there a list of what each unit and structure or tech costs to build or develop. This is vital to the planning of the game and I had to make my own tables for my own use. This is something that is obvious and is present in every strategy game on the market. I have a hard time believing that they didn't realize they were leaving this out. More I think they didn't take the time to do it right.
During different times in the game, my buildings or other objects all turned red on me. Not all once, sometimes it was the granary, sometimes my police station, sometimes the cathedral, but it would turn red from time to time, and I have no idea why. They all seemed to continue functioning correctly and still added their features to my city and civ, but there is clearly something going on here that I should know about. What that is would be nice to know.
On the scorecard when a game is over, what does all that crap mean? What does "Military service" mean and how do I achieve a good score in it? How do I determine what creates a "ton" of production or pollution? How can I determine my annual per-capita income in the game? What the Hell is all this crap and what does it mean? It's not explained any place.
Nowhere in the game (except in the civilopedia and even there it's vague) does the game ever inform me that certain types of structures are cyclical. What I mean is that as a newbie playing the game, I saw an option to build a coal plant. I thought this would be cool (even though I had no idea what it did) so I built one. Then an option came up for me to build a nuclear plant. I built one. Then a hydro plant, then a solar plant, and then a coal plant, and then a hydro plant, and then a nuke plant... it took me a while to figure out that I was replacing other buildings and running myself in a circle of resource waste. This needs to be cleared up a bit.
The book lists one of the wonders as "Michelangelo’s Chapel". Now I realize that as a Historian I should be keenly aware of things like this, but the whole game was new to me and it just didn't click that it had been renamed the Sistine Chapel in the game. I was trying to get all the wonders and looked for this for quite some time before I realized that I had already built it. It was agitating.
I selected to change my name at one point in the game. Once I changed to different governments in the game, I got messages no longer addressed to me, but to "Comrade ," or "Mr.," without any name in it at all. It even happens when I don't switch the names out. It's obviously a bug in the name field. It's sloppy.
I had a lot of other questions in the game as well. For example, does Mr. Smith's Trading Company pick up all of the trade related fees for just the city that it's in, the whole continent or the entire civilization? It never clarifies this in the civilopedia or in the book.
Am I paying maintenance for roads? What about railroads? Do either of them contribute to pollution? What do they cost to build if anything (I haven't noticed them costing things to build, but still).
At certain points in the game, wonders become obsolete. One of them is the Oracle. Now here's a hypothetical, what if I want to build the Oracle after it's obsolete just because or to prevent an enemy from getting it and building it? Why can't I still build something just because I've passed that point in my civ? That's crap. It annoyed me when my opponent got to build it because I had made it obsolete and could not build it myself even though I was way ahead of him.
I'd really like it if my cities pooled food and resources. I mean, what, we can share silks and furs and the like with no problem, but not food, commerce or shields? I hate the wasted production that is often created by the city system. It should be shared and panned out more evenly, and I should be given the option of specifying where we allocate things like this. At one point, I had one city producing 300 shields per turn. Another city that was a port city needed to build a whole bunch of stuff. They were about 3 spaces apart. I couldn't use the first city's productive capacity to help my second city at all. That's frustrating.
It annoys me that my city is so limited space wise in terms of where my citizens inside the town can work. Add to this that my idiot workers will lay roads and irrigate, add mines to, build railroads upon every square inch of ground within a cultural radius even though my citizens can only reach two squares out, and I become doubly angry. Why do the workers do that if no citizens can get there to work it anyway?
Governors, while handy, have issues. The civilopedia and the guidebook both state that I can assign a governor to "manage citizens". Now what this means is beyond me, I think it means place them in the most productive slot to work in a given town and let them go at it. However, in the governor's window where you actually assign them, this option isn't present. You can assign a governor to govern "citizen moods but not to manage the citizens themselves. Is this a misprint or what?
Armies bite. I had a hell of a time building one at first. There should be something that explains more thoroughly how experience works and is calculated, and something that states that you can't get a leader from attacking barbarians, you must attack another opponent (since this is the case in reality). I ran all over chasing down those stupid barbarians because I didn't want to go to war but wanted to build an army. I did finally get bored and attack someone else and got to build my army though.
Once I built my army, I went ahead and did that "Heroic Epic" small wonder. After that I built the military academy. I then used the city that had the military academy and told it to build 4 more armies so that I would have them when it came time to build my Pentagon. Know what? It built one army and then stopped building armies all together. When I went back to the city, the academy was still there, but I could not produce any more armies. Is this a one shot deal (because that is clearly not what the book and civilopedia indicate) or is it a bug? I think it's a bug.
Once I did get another leader from attacking someone else, I went to go build an army with him, and couldn't. Now the normal game had already ended (I won the space race) but I wanted to build the damn Pentagon. I needed one more army to do it, and had a leader, but could not turn him into an army. Why?
When you do have a leader and have him changed into an army, there are still more issues. You cannot remove or upgrade any unit in an army once it is placed there. I ended up with mech-infantry running all over like idiots because I couldn't get my three spearmen out of my "Barbarossa" army and couldn't upgrade them to anything useful. Eventually they got whacked by an enemy warrior (which frustrated me too since they're not remotely as powerful as one spearman much less three together at once).
I got to build a cruise missile though and that was cool! Until I tried to use it that is. It moves slow as hell and has zero range for one thing, but I finally got it the two hundred or whatever moves over to the civ I wanted to bomb. Out stepped their warrior and with a stone axe-head tied to a stick, he promptly stepped up and hit a homer off my incoming cruise missile, destroying it. Right, like that'd happen. Stone-aged club-totters always are the best defense against a Tomahawk cruise missile after all.
Tactical nukes are worthless for the same reason as cruise missiles.
Nuclear submarines cannot fire nuclear weapons. They can drop nukes off on land and you can fire them from there, but that's it. What good is a nuclear sub if it can't shoot a missile? Transports are faster and do the same thing. They're cheaper to make too.
How come my single warrior can tear up a road any time it wants, but an army can't?
Whales are neat as far as resources go. They provide a lot of benefits. The problem is that they must be in sea squares. Sea squares must be separated from shore by a coast square. That means that maybe if you're very lucky you might find one spot on an entire random map that has a usable whale on it. This was pretty lame. There's no boat that can go whale hunting? I've got bad news for you, in real life the only reasonable or feasible way to catch a whale is with a ship. Unless you like hunting the beached kind anyway.
The civilopedia should be more specific. It mentions that Communism "Limits commerce but reduces corruption and waste." By how much? How do I know if this is actually a good idea for my civ? Want a laugh? Look up "Feudalism" in the civilopedia. I'm not even sure it works and if it does, I'll be damned if I know what it does.
I should be able to automate my workers without them throwing roads all over hell and creation. I usually only want them to build roads within the city radius, and then clean up pollution. Perhaps, maybe, add some mines to certain squares. As my cities grow it looks like a giant railroad beast threw up all over the map and left mines and roads in every square inch of the damned globe. And that's the truth of it within my cultural radiuses.
I'd sort of like to know what it is that determines the number of stars on my army's flag.
Does planting forests help you reduce pollution?
If a square or tile is changed due to global warming, can you restore it? I don't think you can, but you should be able to.
Do roads contribute to pollution or cost upkeep or maintenance? My workers build them like they produce solid gold.
How come I can only build a forbidden palace on a standard sized map? What, the larger maps don't need two capitals or what? The smaller ones don't either? What's up with this? This makes no sense.
Anyway, those are my issues with the actual game play. There are others, but you get the idea. This game was not play-tested and had zero quality control on it. It does function and is still fun to play, but it's also a pain in the butt and frustrating at times. A little quality improvement would vastly improve the game overall.
Civ3.com
I went to the website from the creators to see what goodies they had for me and to see if there was an FAQ or a patch or something.
There is a patch. It's the second patch they've released so far, since the first patch actually made the game crash. The new patch is a mere 7 MB download that takes a half hour to save. Of course if you lose your connection at any point in the download process you have to start from scratch.
The FAQ is lame and almost empty. There really is no FAQ for all intents and purposes.
The downloadable icons and new resources and government types and units they promised don't exist.
This web site is sorry. It has nothing it promised except for the patches. The rest of it could be replaced by my five year-old cousin and thirty minutes of his time to build a better web page than the one that's present.
Other resources you might want
Because their web site is so pathetic, I went looking for other sources. I found one that was useful. It's only moderately useful, but it's a lot handier than Civ3.com. I post it here as a tool for people that need info and so that if the Sid Meier's team reads this they can see how little effort it takes to supercede their sorry butts:
http://gamespot.com/gamespotfaqs/civilization_iii.txt
It's pretty sad when another company can get an FAQ from a schmoe not unlike me and have a better FAQ than the game makers.
The Editor
The editor is fairly simple and easy to use, but it is very limited. You're supposed to be able to create new resources, civs, governments, techs, wonders, terrain, units and more. You can't. All you can do is build a map. You can't even place units on the map or designate which civilization starts where. It's sort of lame. The only thing you can do, essentially, is what I did, and that's to create a map that you can learn the game on by placing resources and enemies where you need them. Of course, this requires you to continually load the map, exit out, and reload, until you get the starting position you want.
This editor is very substandard and in fact the only game I've seen with a worse editor is Red Alert. Even Microsoft and their shoddy butts over at Age of Empires managed to crap a better editor than this.
Comparison to other games of the genre
Compared to WarCraft, this game lags way behind. It actually ends up eating Age of Empire's dust too, simply because of the fewer bugs and the cleaner game system. The editor in Age of Empire is better, and the rules are easier to figure out. If this game had a better tutorial or a better editor, it might be different, but sadly, this game only beats out (and even then just narrowly) the Red Alert series in my book.
The redeeming quality of this game is that it is turn-based instead of real-time. And that, I love. My mom and I like to play games together, and my girlfriend likes games like this too. But they can't keep up with the 12 year olds that have the dexterity of a magician on PCP and they get frustrated. The turn based moving levels the playing field for them and makes the game really fun. In this regard, I actually place it above WarCraft, StarCraft, Red Alert, and Age of Empires.
One should note however that this concept so far has only been used in this game (that I know of) and it is the concept, not the execution of that concept, that I am impressed with. In other words, if anyone makes another turn-based strat game it will undoubtedly be more well rated by me.
Conclusion
This game has ENORMOUS potential. Yet unfulfilled potential is what lines the gutters and prisons of the world. The turn-based idea totally rocks and lets everyone play on an equal footing. That's totally awesome and I will probably forever pray for more games of this type.
The tools for the game are lacking severely. The idea that we as users could create our own sounds, governments, techs, units, resources, civilizations, etc, would be so incredibly cool that this game could easily become my new favorite. IF THOSE TOOLS EXISTED AS ADVERTISED ON THE BOX! As it sits, they do not.
The tutorial is pathetic. It is really, really hard for someone new to this game to learn how to play it. I'm an experienced gamer of both tabletops and computer games, and I almost got frustrated and stopped playing with it more than once.
Bugs. There are a ton of bugs in this game so that the few options that do function, don't function correctly.
When they add the multiplayer option to the game it will be more fun. My girlfriend and I have discussed how it would be fun to play the same game at one time (which you can only do in turn based strategy without having multiple computers). We look forward to this advance, and hope that it is on its way. It really could have been the difference in my recommendation on the game as well (along with the editor, the game play, the guidebook... any one of those being done a little bit better than they were would have changed my opinion about the game).
The civilopedia is a force to be reckoned with and has enormous capacity to become a gaming icon. The civilopedia is good overall, and could really be spectacular with just a few additions and clarifications. It still works really well without those things though.
Overall, I think that this is a good game for those that are familiar with and loyal to the Civ line of games. For anyone else, it's a bad investment of time and money. Wait until they start producing a quality product and then think about buying the game. The game as it comes in the box (and even after the 7 MB+ patch) is really just a skeleton that has little substance. I've not followed Infogrames in the past, so perhaps over time they'll fill it up. But for now, don't bother investing in this game. Authors like myself will let you know when it's worth getting into.
It says A LOT for me to put down that I never managed to figure it out. In my other reviews I have done no small amount of number crunching and formula figuring. For this game to have daunted me says that it is a hard game to learn from scratch.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
Alastor
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Location: Littleton, Colorado
Reviews written: 90
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