ravinhood
Posts: 3891
Joined: 10/23/2003 Status: offline
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Just like everyone else just about Pippin, I think Sid was "persuaded" to add that dancing crap to the new pirates because of the new age "action gamer" today vs the true strategy gamers. The origional Pirates didn't have that and wasn't tedious at all, I played several campaigns of the first version. No silly puzzles, just straight forward privateering and conquering cities and getting treasure trains and finding lost relatives. Todays rts crowd has brought many unwanted changes to a lot of strategy gaming sadly at the demise of good turn based true to life strategy gaming. Though Matrixgames/HPS are still holding the torch for good turn based strategy games, Matrixgames have stepped over into this action oriented rts genre as well and now "sports" games too. But, what can yah do, if you're trying to keep your head above water and yourself in "suits" I guess you have to sort of go with the flow and produce a little of everything to keep a steady income to produce the few and far between turn based strategy games that most of us enjoy the most. Civilization keeps changing over the years as well. If you will notice it keeps getting more "graphic" oriented and "dumbed down" so the casual 12-13 year old will buy it. CIV II is the strategy gamers CIV, everything afterwards has been less while looking like more. Excluding graphics, compare CIV III with CIV II and look what more you got and what less you got. You got more factions to play against, but, you got less activity out of them. You lost two units; Diplomats and Caravans, but, you gained a Hero unit. You had to "pay" for a "chance" at stealing or sabatoging another civilization, instead of going for it with your own individual diplomats/spies. You got resources to trade, that was a plus I'da like to have seen in CIV II. CIV II you can adjust just about everything, in CIV III you can hardly adjust anything. You have "zone of control" in CIV II, you lose it in CIV III, in CIV III you have to build a wall of units to block invading forces, in CIV II you could play units in "strategic points" to block movement/invasion. CIV II gave us "talking council members", now while to some of the older crowd this might not be fun or important, but, I got a kick out of it everytime. CIV III just gave you text to read. CIV II ai would backstab you in a heartbeat, CIV III ai makes a pack with you and rarely backstabs you unless you do it first. CIV III did add embargos and fairly decent alliances I will give it that, but, in CIV II with only 7 factions alliances just didn't seem necessary. And that's just some of the things I can think of off the top of my head, but, like someone else said, something about CIV III just didn't bring the game alive as much as CIV II did. CIV II made you really think about what to build and when to build it since units as well as city production depended on shields. In CIV III it was pretty easy to do both, not a lot of thought required, just keep the money flowing in from the city production and you could build lots more units (which you needed to build that wall I spoke of earlier). Things I would have liked to have seen in CIV II from CIV III 1) The resources to trade and need to build units and keep citizens happy. 2) The embargo system 3) The ability to have double the civilizations in the game 15 I think it was. 4) The different victory conditions. That's all CIV III really brought to the table as far as I'm concerned with making the game better, the other changes were bad and took too much strategy away instead of adding to it.
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