[Freeciv-Dev] civ 3 impressions

["Per I. Mathisen" <Per.Inge.Mathisen@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Okay, just some thoughts from playing civ 3 a few hours. I've always been
playing big maps, and in the late stages of this game, my computer started
crawling as the AIs and I settled the entire world and began moving our
huge armies around. By around 1400 AD the game became practically
unplayable, at least until I've bought myself more RAM.

So. Big cities in civ 3 are way better than in freeciv and civ 2. The
culture system means their reach expands as the city grows, and allows it
to use more resource tiles. Very good. I really like culture. Paying two
citizens for a settler really hurts early in the game, but as cities reach
the Aqueduct and Hospital limits, making settlers and workers is the only
sane thing to do while you wait for the necessary tech - and Hospital
is a long wait.

Wonders affect continents and world less, and those who do usually have
their own tech to make them hard to acquire. Bach's requires Music Theory,
for example, which only gives you Bach's. Perhaps this is a way to make it
harder to get to the best of freeciv's wonders?

Catapults and cannons now fire ranged attacks, and do not use normal
attacks. They don't even have defence values, and can be captured. I
didn't really like this. Built a few experimental units and then went back
to only normal units.

Every player type has two characteristics (commercial, industrious,
militaristic, expansionist or scientific) that gives it in-game bonuses
and has one unique unit type that it can build (usually a variation on a
normal unit). I liked that. The Greeks, for example, start the game with
a 1/3/1 Hoplite unit. The French can build 3/4/1 Musketeers when they get
Salpeter resource and Gunpowder tech. But I would think this is rather
hopeless for us to adopt, since we have so many nations.

Resource management and trade is a lot better than previous civs. No more
caravans. Make trade routes by building roads. Building a road to a
resource within a city's range gives all cities connected to that road
access to this resource. Some resources are needed to build some units and
others give more luxuries. Really good idea.

There is no tax rate any more. Good riddance. I always hated fiddling with
that.

Units no longer require production upkeep. Nor food. Only gold. Whoa. This
is perhaps what I disliked the most, since it allows way too many units to
be built, and I had to build a lot myself for defence and attack. The
result was a micromanagement nightmare.

At lower difficulty levels, the AI is useless and builds cities all over
the map, even where there is totally no point in doing so. It also build
ridiculously large armies that it moves around all the map all the time,
hogging the CPU.

Later in the game you can research "armies", which is a way to unite
several units into a stack. You can also get "leaders". I never got around
to test this.

All in all I think there are lot of good ideas there.

Yours,
Per