I have done it again! (CIV III)

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I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/2/2004 5:34:12 AM

Pippin

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Right, just the other day I walked into the same old EB stores again and sure enough, there is ANOTHER CIV III edition sitting on the shelves. Sheesh, how much more are they going to milk this product? I think there are what, 8 different versions of CIV III out there now.

Well I certainly wasn't going to pick it up, after finally getting over that Civ III addiction months ago. Well, sure enough, a week later I find the original Civ III still in the box, with the original manual etc, at reduced price. Tried to hold off the urge to pick it up. I held out a week or two, then just broke down and picked it up before someone else did. Hence, every day i've been doing a bit of civ III despite it gets me hopping mad every time my citties flip to the other side.

Not sure what I should do now. Perhaps play it on Diety again until I get so frustrated, I burn the box?

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Post #: 1

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/2/2004 9:50:08 AM

bostonrpgmania

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I also have seen new collection version. I have CIV III, play the world and conquest. But since conquest contains play the world, I dont know why they make 3 cd version this time. do they really think that customers are dumb or what?

(in reply to Pippin)

Post #: 2

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/2/2004 12:47:11 PM

Hexed Gamer

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Some games sure are like peanuts ain't they hehe.

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Post #: 3

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/2/2004 5:19:57 PM

Charles2222

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testing

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Post #: 4

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/2/2004 5:28:31 PM

Charles2222

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Flipping really is a non-issue. Dealing with it is not that difficult. The main thing is to build more cultural buildings so that it isn't a problem. Taking over enemy cities and holding them is a little more tricky, but I've probably put over a thousand hours into that game and can't recall, other than when I first started out, ever losing a city to a flip. I've only played on the regent level, so perhaps the flipping is worse on the harder levels, but IIRC from my frequent forays into the Civ forums the harder levels don't affect that.

Try www.civfanatics.com and you can get all kinds of easy workarounds to any cultural problems you're having.

(in reply to Pippin)

Post #: 5

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/2/2004 6:11:31 PM

Kevinugly

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I bought Civ3 when it came out, didn't bother with PTW (I gather this is true of many) and hence acquired 'Conquests' when that came out. Now I find it quite playable, especially on the shorter scenarios but I have to say that I still turn to Civ2 if I want to play the full game.

Regarding the plethora of Civ3 versions, they did the same thing with Civ2. Not saying that's good or bad mind.

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RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/2/2004 7:52:02 PM

gunny

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I could never understand why technology trees had to be so linear. And that was a big disappointment for me regarding CiV 3.
For example why not this:
Discover physics in the ancient age, discover gravity with small hot airballoons such as the pre Newworld aztecs did, mix that with medeval chinese rocketry, and Leonardos plans for gliders and his concept of aero dynamics.And what have you got?
A NAZI style Comet rocket plane by the 16th century. And there, that Branch ends.

But as it is there is only one fast track to tanks and everbody plays the same style.

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Post #: 7

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/2/2004 10:09:00 PM

Charles2222

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The only thing I like about Civ2 in comparison is the cut-scenes and the King. As long as I can think that game is playable on whatever system I may have in the future, I'll always keep it just on the off chance I want to install it to hear some Kingly comedy again.

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Post #: 8

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/2/2004 10:55:46 PM

Pippin

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Ok, I played last night again. I was very, very kind to everyone. Then sure enough I get backstabed with no warning what-so-ever. GRRR!!!

No civ III for today. That is my promise to myself. Lets see if I can hold it.

_____________________________

Nelson stood on deck and observed as the last of the Spanish fleets sank below the waves�

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Post #: 9

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/3/2004 1:07:38 AM

Kevinugly

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This is probably an idiot suggestion but have you checked out Apolyton? I find the forums there quite helpful

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RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/3/2004 5:57:08 AM

ravinhood

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I like all the different victory conditions and extra features of CIV III Play the World. The culture victory is one of the most challenging and on higher difficulties sometimes impossible for me.

Just can't beat the Civilization series though for good gameplay, at least one of the versions should appeal to just about everyone. I liked CIV II for it's 1000's of scenarios, though I'll never play them all, there was a horde of them. Master of Magic Jr. is one of my favorite.

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Post #: 11

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/4/2004 1:15:28 AM

Svennemir

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quote:

Flipping really is a non-issue. Dealing with it is not that difficult. The main thing is to build more cultural buildings so that it isn't a problem.

A non-issue? Well, except for probably being incorporated in the lamest possible way. So, let's say you capture some city and have a large force in there to quell the resistance. Then they revolt in the city. What happens? Do your forces take damage, do civilians get killed? No, your forces DISAPPEAR and the city will henceforth belong to the enemy. Wow, that has got to be the most ill-thought out concept in history, with the possible exception of windows 95! And if you move more forces into the city - they'll probably just disappear as well! Except, maybe, if you move EXTREMELY large forces into it, then maybe nothing at all will happen! Nothing in between - just like quantum mechanics!

And then they totally ditched the concept of Zones of Control. It's impossible to stop enemies from slipping through wherever they want to go. So you might as well assemble all your forces in one giant stack and attack with that stack - since collateral damage is unheard of.

But except for these issues the game is actually a masterpiece. There are so many really good concepts like strategic and luxury resources.

(edit: changed "bold" to "quote")

< Message edited by Svennemir -- 10/4/2004 12:15:57 AM >

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Post #: 12

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/4/2004 1:20:19 AM

Svennemir

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Maybe I... got a bit carried away.

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Post #: 13

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/4/2004 3:42:40 AM

Charles2222

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Svennemir

quote:

Flipping really is a non-issue. Dealing with it is not that difficult. The main thing is to build more cultural buildings so that it isn't a problem.

A non-issue? Well, except for probably being incorporated in the lamest possible way. So, let's say you capture some city and have a large force in there to quell the resistance. Then they revolt in the city. What happens? Do your forces take damage, do civilians get killed? No, your forces DISAPPEAR and the city will henceforth belong to the enemy. Wow, that has got to be the most ill-thought out concept in history, with the possible exception of windows 95! And if you move more forces into the city - they'll probably just disappear as well! Except, maybe, if you move EXTREMELY large forces into it, then maybe nothing at all will happen! Nothing in between - just like quantum mechanics!

And then they totally ditched the concept of Zones of Control. It's impossible to stop enemies from slipping through wherever they want to go. So you might as well assemble all your forces in one giant stack and attack with that stack - since collateral damage is unheard of.

But except for these issues the game is actually a masterpiece. There are so many really good concepts like strategic and luxury resources.

(edit: changed "bold" to "quote")

If you would have studied my posts more carefully you would have noted that I made a distinction between the difficulty of maintaining order in your own cities and the quite different problem of occupying conquered ones. The way the original post put it, it appeared that he was having trouble with his own border citites flipping, which, as I said, is easy enough to fix. Don't at least culturalize those cities and you might as well hand them over. In a small degree I only covered the problem of dealing with border cities, not conquered ones. Trying to explain either indepth could take a pretty good while and saying to build cultural buildings is a good small start.

BTW, in case I didn't make it clear, I was talking about keeping your border cities (not ones you've conquered) from flipping was easy, not that dealing with having flips as being easy:

Preventing border cities from flipping = easy.
Trying to deal with it 'after' a flip = not so easy.

< Message edited by Charles_22 -- 10/3/2004 7:50:16 PM >

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Post #: 14

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/4/2004 6:54:11 PM

Svennemir

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Oh, sorry Charles, the rant was against the game, not your argument as such.

Still I believe that even in peacetime the "all your units are now gone"-principle is quite bad. True, it's easy to almost eliminate the chance of this happening to native cities, with libraries and whatnot.

I just like to take a swing at the badly implemented concepts once in a while.

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Post #: 15

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/4/2004 8:06:04 PM

ravinhood

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I never had a problem with the lack of a zone of control myself. I just sent out infantry and calvary/tank units and made a line across my borders, looked like WWI when I actually got to the WWI era units, was pretty kewl. I believe they changed that zone of control feature because it was too easy to exploit the AI with "diplomats" in previous versions, so I didn't mind having to find another "realistic" way to stop enemy units from running deep behind my lines.

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Post #: 16

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/5/2004 3:39:44 AM

Pippin

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I am very interested in how you stop your cities from flipping? I mean, I have even had my capitol city flip on me once because the AI built a city too close to me. I do not DARE to attack a city and capture it, because as mentioned, all that happens is I quell the resistors, and POOF, all my precious tanks disappear just as I needed them for my counter-counter attacks.

Lets put it this way, even when I have luxouries, and I drop science funding to zero while putting happy spending up to 90%, and even spend all my time building culture, my cities still flip to an opponent who doesn�t even have a single city of his on my own continent!

For the love of God, if someone here has found an EASY exploit to stop this on diety I REALY REALY REALY would like to know!

_____________________________

Nelson stood on deck and observed as the last of the Spanish fleets sank below the waves�

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RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/5/2004 3:51:52 AM

Kevinugly

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http://apolyton.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=136 might help

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RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/5/2004 4:19:12 PM

Svennemir

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quote:

For the love of God, if someone here has found an EASY exploit to stop this on diety I REALY REALY REALY would like to know!

For one thing, you could turn off the preference when starting a game, so no cities can flip.

When conquering cities, just don't put more than one defending unit into them if the city is not in immediate danger of being attacked. Don't quell the resisters. They may flip, but if there's only one unit in the city it isn't critical. Just exterminate the entire civilization you're fighting, and THEN quell all the resistors. They can't flip back when their original civilization doesn't exist. Of course this might be a pretty messy way, but it kind of works in my experience.

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Post #: 19

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/5/2004 5:41:49 PM

Charles2222

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I agree that it's a bad implementation, only. The idea is good, but it shouldn't have as high a rate as it does. Surely one or two units should fall to rebellion, but just not as easily is all.

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RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/5/2004 6:52:16 PM

Charles2222

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Pippin

I am very interested in how you stop your cities from flipping? I mean, I have even had my capitol city flip on me once because the AI built a city too close to me. I do not DARE to attack a city and capture it, because as mentioned, all that happens is I quell the resistors, and POOF, all my precious tanks disappear just as I needed them for my counter-counter attacks.

Lets put it this way, even when I have luxouries, and I drop science funding to zero while putting happy spending up to 90%, and even spend all my time building culture, my cities still flip to an opponent who doesn�t even have a single city of his on my own continent!

For the love of God, if someone here has found an EASY exploit to stop this on diety I REALY REALY REALY would like to know!

For more of the basics, and as I said I don't think the flip chances are different on deity (and why on earth would you play deity if you don'y really grasp the flip issue?) your luxuries have nothing to do with 'culture' or the flip factor if you will. Each city builds culture, and I think there's an overall civ culture factor which play in there somewhere at times too. There's some screen or other (probably F1) which will show you the culture that city is producing. When you first have a city it won't be producing any. Should you place a new city beside an already established city, which has a good sized culture buildup, your city is toast. You have to learn not to ever do that, unless, of course, you have somethign like a huge amount of money and can speedup the cultural buildings to one turn builds, and 'then' you might be able to get away with that. I don't know what version you're on, but in Conquests the AI never builds a city within four hexes of your cities, and that's because of the danger of the flip.

Now realize, I'm a bigtime culture producer and don't start wars much myself, so if anybody, at least on the regent level, should be having cities flip to them it should be me. I can tell you that after playing maybe a 1000 turns, the most city flips I've seen have been 3 or 4 to me. It's when you park your cities as close to the other civs as you can that you'll run into trouble. I don't care what level you're playing, but if you're doing that it's a recipe for failure (and usually a fine way to start a war). The only break you might get that way is that on some of the outskirt cities the AI may not put any culture into them, but I wouldn't count ion it.

I'm just trying to give you a few basic pointers, but the finer points can be found in those forums. The culture producing buildings BTW, are the ones with the little musical notes beside them. One note produces one culture point a turn etc.

(in reply to Pippin)

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RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/6/2004 4:21:42 PM

Firefly

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Svennemir

quote:

For the love of God, if someone here has found an EASY exploit to stop this on diety I REALY REALY REALY would like to know!

For one thing, you could turn off the preference when starting a game, so no cities can flip.

When conquering cities, just don't put more than one defending unit into them if the city is not in immediate danger of being attacked. Don't quell the resisters. They may flip, but if there's only one unit in the city it isn't critical. Just exterminate the entire civilization you're fighting, and THEN quell all the resistors. They can't flip back when their original civilization doesn't exist. Of course this might be a pretty messy way, but it kind of works in my experience.

If you conquer an enemy city a long way from your borders, razing it is probably better than trying to keep it. If it's on the border, starve it down to one citizen by converting sll the inhabitants to specialists and when it grows back the new citizens will be of your nationality and less likely to flip. Once you've quelled the resistance, rush building a temple and a library will help. Doing both of these will not eliminate all flips, particularly if the captured city is close to the enemy capital (in which case razing may be better), but it will help.

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RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/6/2004 5:42:45 PM

Charles2222

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Good general advice there Firefly.

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RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/7/2004 3:46:03 AM

Pippin

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I do know quite a bit about the culture process. The first things I go for are culture points. I will rush build culture as fast as possible and yes I am well aware if you build too far away from your capitol or too close to someone else you risk the flip.

Also, it seems to me that luxouries do help your folks. You want to keep them happy, because when they are not it helps to increase a flip on you. I will try to make my folks as happy as possible, not only does this help to prevent flips, but it also helps the production.

I am a bit puzzled though on why it is mentioned here that fliping is not different on diety, when I have seen time and time again that it certainly is biased on diety. Also, one of the links mentioned here even explains somewhere that diety contains a high modifier which gives the AI extra flip advantages, while you of course get the opposite.

Has someone here beat the game on diety, or is this just speculation?

_____________________________

Nelson stood on deck and observed as the last of the Spanish fleets sank below the waves�

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RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/7/2004 3:18:10 PM

Charles2222

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The way I look at it culture and happiness are completely different things. The only way they're similar is that you can lose control of the town. Rioting is due to lack of happiness and flipping is due to lack of culture. I'm sure there's a good number of us who have built towns and still just had one man in it, only to see it flip relatively soon, which of course means in most instances like that, that such a town was content and still it flipped.

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Post #: 25

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/7/2004 4:03:01 PM

Svennemir

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I'm fairly certain that cities in civil disorder have much higher chance of flipping. If they are in "we love the..." mode, flipping is highly unlikely.

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RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/7/2004 6:48:52 PM

Firefly

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Pippin

I am a bit puzzled though on why it is mentioned here that fliping is not different on diety, when I have seen time and time again that it certainly is biased on diety. Also, one of the links mentioned here even explains somewhere that diety contains a high modifier which gives the AI extra flip advantages, while you of course get the opposite.

There is a utility at CivFanatics called FlipCalc which will calculate the chance of a particular city flipping. It's available in this thread:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=53157

The author gives the formula for the probability (which he got from one the Firaxis guys) as:

quote:

P=[(F+T)*Cc*H*(Cte/Cty) - G]/D

where:
P = probability that it will flip this turn
F = # foreigners, with resistors counting double
T = # working tiles under foreign control (out of the max of 21, no matter what the cultural boundaries are atm)
Cc = 2 if foreign civ has more local culture than you, 1 otherwise
H = .5 for WLTKD, 2 for disorder, 1 otherwise
Cte = Total culture of the foreign civ
Cty = Total culture of your civ
G = # garrison units
D = factor based on relative distance to capitals

(Spelling corrected :) )

Soren Johnson (the Firaxis guy) expands on the value of D in this thread at Apolyton:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=48254

< Message edited by Firefly -- 10/7/2004 5:09:32 PM >

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Post #: 27

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/7/2004 10:26:17 PM

Charles2222

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I would think if that were true, for my current game, I would see more then 2 cities (recently conquered) with any kind of flip percentage at all, as I commonly run my cities to one guy above contented. Crpmapstat shows you the percentage each turn that a location will flip, but of course if you change the situation mid-turn the percentage won't change in that program until the start of the next turn.

I always thought the situation (apart from rebellions of course) had something to do with the pop's happiness quotient too, but then I saw crpmapstat and know how my cities never flip (but then being a culture hog would certainly help my chances). It can be a little deceptive though, because my use of crpmapstat is confines to a small sample. Perhaps I should load one of the games where that nation is teetering on rebellion?

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Post #: 28

RE: I have done it again! (CIV III) - 10/8/2004 1:28:24 AM

Charles2222

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Okay, got it.

I loaded up the start of the Phoenix WWII scenario with France. I count 18 cities in unhappy status. I also count only 3 cities with any chance to flip (although it listed a 0.0% for some reason - so actually 2 with a chance to flip). The two cities were bordered by other civs, with Calais having more than one city threatening it culturally, which gave it the highest percentage. Sad face cities will rebell the next turn, so why aren't the other 16 showing a chance to flip then? Clearly they have to border another nation for a start.

I used to believe as you guys, but that informatio makes me believe that only an active rebellion would matter with flipping as far as happiness is concerned. I see no city that was content, and a good deal of them were, which were also running a flip percentage. I mean if Calais is running .385% chance with unhappy pop. then wouldn't a content pop bordering another nation's city be at lease .001% if a stronger happiness mattered? I'm not sure how this thinking would be wrong.

Oh BTW, I just thought of something. Maybe my limited sample is the problem, but this scenario doesn't have expanding borders that I can detect and there aren't any buildings that promote culture. Goofy still, because if this peculiarity mattered, then why do any of them flag a percentage (Calais is a mere 2 hexes from Dover)?

< Message edited by Charles_22 -- 10/7/2004 5:31:44 PM >

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Post #: 29