“Visuals are abysmal, the map consists of plain squares of only two garish colors, both of which have the same defense values! Units don’t resemble their real life counterparts at all, btw: a stone castle tower moving around doesn’t make the slightest sense!

Starting options are meagre, most of your units can’t move at all. The game always forces you into a version of capture-the-flag against your only opponent which feels dull and repetitive. Once you thought you brought your best units into position for the final strike, there’s always a tile left for your enemy to run to that you somehow have overlooked.

To really nail down victory, you have to make use of the only upgrade path available and turn the weakest unit in the game to the strongest one, which is not only hard to do, as you have to walk it across the whole map, but also appears very unrealistic.

On hintsight, though, everything looks easy and the original developers of the game introduced some features that over the ages have matured into many more refined game mechanics we are used to today. Kudos for that!”

Resources are not hard to come by – not at all. Also, every single unit in the game TELLS you what resources they require, it’s not a surprise.

” or having a less-powerful alternative that’s always available, if you aren’t lucky enough to have one of that resource within your civilization borders (and remember, you can’t see where they’ve spawned until you research the appropriate technology)”

This is just patently false. There are these exact types of units in the game.

Of course you can’t see them. Do you think a tribe in 3000BC understood what aluminum or uranium is?

“and having it hooked up to their road network with a mine” Again, this is wrong. You don’t ever need to mine a strategic resource to be able to use it. Just a road.

” because that’s the point when you find out that your empire has no Aluminum, which is — you’ve guessed it — a hard requirement to build the spaceship”

Are you REALLY trying to complain about this? A spaceship requiring Aluminum? Wow.

“If you don’t have it you need to go and get it, which means that even if you’re going for the non-violent Science Victory you need to fight multiple wars to keep your technological advantage and build the sodding thing.”

Again, what your saying makes no sense. You don’t need to fight a war to get a scientific advantage. Most of your issues with the game come from your lack of understanding of how to play, and your seeming to think there’s only one way to play.

You say this in your final paragraph – “I can finally pinpoint why it annoyed me so much: it’s forcing the player to play in one specific way.”

This is untrue, and if you had done any real research into the game you’d know this. There are many different ways to play the game, and there are many different ways in which a game can be won. You seem to be upset because almost all play through will involve some amount of fighting, this can be kept to a minimum and you can choose not to fight, it is possible.

All in all – I think you didn’t enjoy Civ3 because you didn’t bother to learn how to play and you got punished for it, but that’s not the mark of a bad game. Your criticisms can almost all be avoided, you are pointing out your own mistakes in gameplay, not bad game design.

I hope you can put some time in and enjoy what is one of the greatest games of all time, feel free to watch some YouTube guides to help get you going! Shoutout to SuedeCiviii.

So while I acknowledge some of your individual criticisms, I still have some questions I wouldn’t mind being answered:

1. Is the end game combat really all that much worse in Civ 3 than Civ 2? From your description, Civ 2 has even worse ICS than Civ 3, with even tundra and desert cities eventually becoming worth it.
2. From what I read, Civilization 2 AI has a flag for turning all computer opponents hostile to the human player if they’re winning. So doesn’t the end game there also automatically include war, or has that not been your experience?
3. Did you ever try for a culture victory? I distinctly remember some games I played where I went for culture heavy civs such as Babylon and so long as I kept up my defenses, I was able to enjoy millennia of peace. I found it kinda dull, but that’s more due to the rather basic design of the culture win.

If you feel like answering these questions, awesome. If not, cheers, no hard feelings. I look forward to your retrospective on Civ 4.

Still hope that something like Endless games tech eras will come into Civ. It would be much more interesting thematically cause techs in Endless games are fantasy technobabble while in Civ it would be interesting to define your civilization as the one who didn’t care about libraries and paper and only got those together with computers or something like that.

Also, Civ3 OST sounds like a bad MIDI to me. Was disappointed when it was added to Civ4 in one of the expansions alongside live orchestra recorded masterpieces.

>these days there’s widescreen patches and/or hacks for just about every older strategy game out there

Not for Heroes 4 And somehow the first King’s Bounty game (remake, not the first-first) doesn’t work right in 16:9.