Civilization III is the latest release in Sid Meier's line of popular civilization-building computer games. All-in-all, it's been quite a successful line, spawning not just the three computer games, but also the related Alpha Centauri computer game and the recently-reviewed
Civilization Board Game.
Civilization III is a game of diplomacy, war, technology and, generally, civilization building. It's, to a large extent, a simulation of the history of civilization on Earth. And, it's a damned fine game that founded an entire genre.
Players: 1
Playing Time: 8-10 hours
Difficulty: 8 (of 10)
The Components
Computer game components are pretty standardized. You tend to get a box, a book, and a CD. Nonetheless, they're worth visiting at least in short because they do form a part of Civilization's "style".
Box: A computer box. Next.
CD: 1 standard CD, with nice art on the top.
Book: A 236-page colossus. It's nicely divided up into an introductory tutorial, chapters describing all of the core parts of the gameplay, and some appendices that run through the screens one by one and also provide tabular displays of many of the game play elements. The book is well illustrated with screen shots, but it suffers somewhat from being in black and white, making many of those screen shots murky and mysterious.
Overall, the manual is an excellent introduction to the game, and a fair reference. Some of the stuff that I would have preferred to have in this book, such as explanations of individual city improvements and technological gains, is instead located in the online civlopedia on the computer, which is a shame, but at least it's available.
Graphics & UI
The core of "style" in any computer game really comes from what the game itself looks like: the graphics, the charts, and the user interface (UI).
Graphics: There are a few forays into 3D graphics in Civilization, via the obligatory prologue and epilogue cut-scenes and through the portraits in the diplomacy scenes. However, most of Civilization III is composed of 2.5D overhead graphics.
However, this is exactly what's desired. A nice isomorphic overview is what a player needs figure out what's going on. The various terrains and units are all very nicely depicted, and there's even some nice variation. Different civilization's cities have ethnic looks, for example. In addition the look and feel of your entire civilization changes every time you enter a new age of technology. This offers nice variety and is also quite appropriate for the different periods.
Charts: You can't have a good sim game without having lots of charts to help the min-maxer figure out exactly what he should be doing. In actuality, Civilization comes up a bit short in the chart department, but the ones that are included are well done. You can see a "histograph" showing the powers of various civilizations throughout history. You can also quickly look at diplomatic relations via the diplomacy windows. A few overall civilization charts, showing things such as your culture city-by-city, are included as part of "advisor" screens; they also do a good job of quickly and easily showing how the civilization is doing.
Some of the advisor charts (e.g., the culture chart and the wonders chart in particular) could really be helped via some "sort" features. When you get too many elements it becomes a bit hard to find everything. But other than that, which only becomes a problem at game end, the charts are well done.
Within individual cities you have superb displays of the state of things. Food, production shields, and commerce are all shown very clearly. In particular excellent displays depict how much food and production shields are need for the next goal of each city.
User Interface: Overall, the UI is also quite well done. Whenever you're manipulating an individual unit, you have an exact listing of what the unit can do. Both unit action buttons and city production buttons also tend to show exact times required to finish tasks, which is very important in a turn-based game.
In addition, most screens involving city improvements, units, or technology allow you to right-click to access the Civlopedia which gives help on that specific item. This contextual help is superb and should be adopted by more guys. It's so central to Civilization III that it's very notable in the couple of places where it's missing (e.g., the production-choice button on the actual city display).
Extra options, from saving games to gathering information, are hidden on buttons scattered throughout the main display screen. Some of these are initially a bit hard to find (e.g., the "Histograph" button hidden on the tiny "H" to the right of the "Unit Box"), but once you've stumbled upon it the first time, you won't have any problems re-locating it.
The only real annoyances are a couple of general options which require you to scroll to individual cities to access them (e.g., you must click on your capital city icon to create embassies, and you must click on your intelligence agency icon in its city to engage in espionage). This are hide to find and a pain to access later; they could have been better incorporated into the advisor screens.
Overall, Civilization rates above average all around in style. The manual and UI both tend to be excellent, which is what you want in a game of this complexity, and everything else is above average. Thus, a 4 out of 5 for style.
The Game Play
The complexity of Civilization III is fairly notable, but it also proves a maxim of computer games: you can increase the complexity of the game, as long as you allow the computer to arbitrate. And that's exactly what Civilization does--taking care of lots of details so that you don't have (although I wish it did more, as I comment in my thoughts on Game Design, below).
Because of Civilization's complexity, I'm not going to try and detail every system, but I do want to hit all the major categories of gameplay in some depth.
Exploration: At the start of a game of Civilization it seems to be a game about exploration. You appear on a mostly black map, with only the 9 squares immediately surrounding you illuminated. Though your settler will have to very quickly build a city, you might have other units, including warriors, workers, and scouts, that you can bop around the map with to learn more about your terrain. This is fairly important early game so that you can find good places for additional cities, and also so that you can discover the other civilizations in the game and initiate diplomatic contact.
Later in the game, the exploration aspect pretty much fades away, as you learn about your immediate surroundings and later start trading maps with other civilizations thanks to the wonders of diplomacy. (Only in island games does exploration remain an important element into mid-game.)
City Building: One of the two cores of Civilization is, without a doubt, in the gameplay of city building. You start the game with one settler and you use him to found your first city.
As soon as you do so, your city gains control over the 9 nearest squares of land (which will later expand to 18). Each of those squares produces up to three different types of resources: food, production shields, and commerce. Typically a square will produce between 0 and 3 of each type, except in particularly extraordinary situations (and later in the game when technological advances allow you to start improving your harvesting). There are a number of different types of terrains, but some of the most common include: deserts, which produce one production shield; plains, which produce one food and one production shield; and grasslands, which produce two food. Each citizen in your city will be able to harvest one square in addition to the square your city is built on. Thus, the more citizens you have, the more your city harvests.
The most important resource for the actual growth of your city is food. Each citizen needs two food to survive. Any excess goes into storage, and when you have enough stored, another citizen is produced. The process continues on, ad infinitum, unless various limitations slow or stop the growth of your city. The most common reason is limited food supplies, which can be a particular nuisance in mountains and deserts. However, cities without running water will also need the city improvement of aqueducts before they can grow beyond 6 citizens, and all cities need the city improvement of hospitals before they can grow beyond 12 citizens.
Worker are the only other part of the game that has major influence on cities. These are special units who can improve the terrain surrounding your cities. Sometimes you simply use them to improve a terrain's best features (e.g., building a mine in a mountain for 2 production shields or irrigating a plain for 1 food). However, you can also use workers to change the production of a terrain to better suit your needs (e.g., destroying irrigation in a grassland to build mines, for –1 food and 1 production shield). You can even, in a few cases, dramatically change the landscape, cutting down (mostly useless) jungles or planting forests.
As you'll recall, I noted that each square can be harvested for one of three different resources. Food, just described, helps population growth. The other two resources, shields and commerce, prove the basis of other game systems.
Production: Once you begin gathering production shields, you can have a city start producing things. You simply list an item to produce, and production shields will be saved up until you have enough. The cheapest items might be 10 shields, the most expensives hundreds or thousands. There are three main things that you choose to produce: units, city improvements, or wonders.
Units include those aforementioned settlers and workers, who can be used to found additional cities and to improve the terrain. Producing either of these unit types lowers the population of your city. You can also create scouts, to simply explore. Finally, you can create any number of combat units, starting with warriors and going up to stealth bombers and other such modern terrors.
City improvements are things like temples, marketplaces and, much later, factories. Some improvements make citizens happy, others reduce city "corruption", and others improve your harvesting of the various resources (e.g., marketplaces increase commerce, factories increase production shield harvesting, and granaries speed up city growth by reducing new citizen food cost).
Wonders are much bigger city improvement projects. Small wonders, like the Intelligence Agency, can only be created once per civilization; wonders of the world can only be created once per game. These city improvements tend to not only benefit the city, but sometimes the entire civilization as well. A few of the small wonders also give you access to additional functions (e.g., the intelligence agency improves espionage capability).
Many city improvements and all of the wonders also produce a certain amount of "culture" every turn. The cumulative culture generated by a city is recorded, and whenever it passes a power of 10 (10, 100, 1000, 10000), the cultural influence of the city increases. Initially this simply allows you to harvest more potential spaces. However, the cultural influence of all of your cities is also added together to produce the total territory of your civilization.
Commerce: All commerce production in Civilization comes from squares with roads and from sea squares; in other words, it's trade. You can use commerce for one of three things: taxes, which gives you money in your coffers to use for later deficit spending or diplomacy with other nations; entertainment, which makes citizens in your towns happy; or science, which is used to generate technology.
Technology: If city building is one core in Diplomacy, the other is building technology. Technology in Civilization is divided into individual discoveries, from the "alphabet" and "writing" to "astronomy" to "genetics". It's all arranged in a tree, with some techs being prerequisites for other techs. Beyond that, it's arranged into four ages, from ancient times to the modern day, and you must discover most of the technologies in an age before you move.
It takes a varying amount of time to learn a technology based on how much of your commerce that you're allocating to in. Some technologies solely act as prerequisites to others, while others make new city improvements, units, and wonders available to be built.
Diplomacy: And that would pretty much be the whole game if it was a solitaire affair. However, there are also up to seven other civilizations out there in the world. As soon as you encounter them you can open diplomatic relations up, allowing you to make peace treaties, declare war, and trade money and technology. Certain technological improvements will allow you to engage in more meaningful diplomatic relations. For example nationalism allows you to create mutual protection pacts, while espionage allows you to engage in dirty tricks within their countries. Finally once you've opened up physical trade routes to other countries, through roads, harbors, or airports, you'll also be able to trade luxury goods, like diamonds, which keep citizens happy, and strategic goods, like oil, which are required to produce certain units or city improvements.
Warfare: Sometimes diplomacy isn't enough, and Civilization does offer options for war as well. Basically you move units at each other trying to capture cities until either one civilization is destroyed or else begs for peace, with a very generous diplomatic offering.
Winning the Game: There are a number of ways to win the game, which including building a space ship, becoming the secretary-general of the UN, destroying all of the other civilizations, controlling 66% of the land masses, attaining a stupendous culture, or just being ahead based on a game-long average scoring when the clock rolls around to 2050 AD. In the end, these all amount to about the same thing, which is to have the biggest civilization as you come toward the end of the twentieth century, and in actuality if you can achieve any one victory condition you can most likely achieve a number of them, depending on your preference.
Changes in Civilization
I did play the first Civilization back at the dawn of time, but its now been almost a decade since I tried out one of Sid Meier's games of empire building. Thus, I can't say how things have changed from Civilization II to Civilization III and my recollection of changes from Civilization I to Civilization III is somewhat spotty.
Graphics are much nicer, but that's really not a surprise since we're talking about 1991 and 2001; in fact, as I recall, my original Civilization was in black and white(!). Beyond that, there's just more complexity: more city improvements, more technological improvements, more units.
Civilization III has the real feel of being a polished, mature game, and that's the biggest win you'll get if you upgrade from the original version (though I should note that some people seem to have preferred Civilization II, and the net certainly seems to have more user-created scenarios available for that version of the game).
The Game Design
On the whole, Civilization III is a strong, fun game, which probably is at least partially due to the fact that the developers have had three different releases to get their game play just right. On the other hand, it does have some definite problems, especially in the end game ... which probably leaves room open for Civilization IV.
So, what's good?
Good Reward Structure: The reward structure in Civ3 is a solid example of how to ensure a player stays interested throughout a game. Rewards, via city improvements, wonders, and units, come fairly quickly early in the game because of their low prices. Later in the game, production costs go up, but at the same time your production capacity has dramatically improved. As a result you have a fairly linear scale of advancement throughout the game, rather than one that increases exponentially in cost and time as the game goes on, as is the case in most reward structures, such as, for example, the D&D leveling system.
Multiple Starting Conditions: Each different culture in Civilization (e.g., Roman, American, English, etc.) allows for slightly different setup conditions. You might have different units at start, you definitely have different technologies at start, and you also have slightly different advantages as the game progresses (e.g., some cultures get free technological advances each time they hit a new "age", while others only have minimal periods of anarchy when they change their government).
These different starting conditions cause slightly different gameplay in the early game, as you'll make different decisions based on your advantages. They also offer slight variations to gameplay as the game progresses (e.g., that technological culture is more likely to push quickly through the technology tree, while the religious culture which doesn't suffer much anarchy is more likely to change its government, possibly multiple times, in order to take advantage of the different pluses and minuses different governments allow).
Multiple Paths to Victory: As noted above, Civilization III offers a number of different paths to victory. In reality, I think that all of these victory conditions collapse to the same midgame options; you spend the midgame growing your cities and your culture in order to be on the leading side of the development curve when you make your move for end-game domination.
However, despite the sameness in midgame, the differing endgame victories allow you to begin taking different paths as you enter the fourth age of civilization. Do you begin developing diplomacy, for a U.N. win, begin developing space ship parts for a Alpha Centauri win, or do you mobilize the armies? Though much of the game is the same to this point, at least you have some variety in your victory (though, as I said, all the different victory conditions are pretty equally available if you've developed successfully to this point).
The difference in starting setup, already mentioned, and the difference in endgames discussed here combine to make Civilization III slightly richer than it otherwise could be, and thus increase the replayability of the game somewhat.
Interesting Modeling: As an amateur historian, I find the civilization modeling of Civilization III very interesting. You get to see civilization evolve much as it did on Earth, with great expansions occurring upon the discovery of some technologies, while others destroy your ability to benefit from past Wonders of the World. Despite some lapses (e.g., the fact that even in the modern age you tend to have warriors and archers running around), you generally get a feeling that you've participated in the evolution of human culture. That's pretty cool.
Moving on to the bad side of Civ3 ...
Bad AI: I don't have any particular concern with how the computer-run players in Civilization III work. They're adequate. They don't always make intelligent decisions and usually can't see your scheming. In other words, they're pretty typical AI opponents.
Where I do have problems with the AI is in the "governor" functions, which are intended to make your life easier by helping make decisions about how to keep individual cities happy and what should be built in each of those cities.
The keeping-your-cities happy function works halfway. It does a good job of combating civil unrest. Unfortunately it often fails to respond to territory being improved by workers, and thus doesn't update to making the most efficient use of your resources. Thus you often have to turn the governor off, switch over the usage, and turn him back on.
The governor functions for deciding what each city should build are terrible. The game isn't bright enough to figure out, for example, that you usually building improvement A followed by improvement B followed by improvement C, etc. The best you can do is tell it extremely general classes of production, and that just doesn't cut it.
The ability to cleanly layout a standard improvement path for cities, combined with the ability to put your nation on a war footing that allowed you to tell what combat units should be created in what percentages would have tremendously improved the "governor" AI of this game without huge cost. But, alas,no.
Unwieldy End Game: The game really starts to fall apart when you hit the late 1800s or early 1900s. By that time your single city at game start has multiplied to tens or scores. And, it becomes hard to keep track of your civilization. There's no way to sort any of your city lists, so it can often be difficult to find an exact city that you're looking for. In addition, the aforemention AI problems start to make things a management nightmare. Civ3 starts to get really dull in the end game because there's a huge amount of button pushing, just getting from one turn to the next.
Knowing You Won: Another way that the end game tends to fail is when you know already that you've won (or lost). It might be obvious 20 or 30 turns before game end that no one else is anywhere close to you, but you still have to keep clicking through the turns, year after year, until you finally get to the point where your culture is high enough or you've finished up your space ship, or whatever. I literally spent an hour or two clicking through the end years in one of the playtests I did of Civ3, waiting for my culture to get high enough to produce a win.
This type of problem is fairly rampant in tabletop games where frequently it's obvious that someone is going long before you get there, but Civ3 makes it obvious that this problem can manifest in single-player computer games too. It's a shame, because if you know you've won, the computer should be able to algorithmically figure it out too, but not in this game.
Unwieldy Combat: The problem of too many units to control also shows up in this game's combat. You, literally, tend to be moving scores of units around when you're in a war with another civilization. There are some options to list destinations for unit movements, but even that tends to fall apart when the war gets big and the front is moving about.
There are capabilities in Civ3 to form armies, but they're extremely limited in the size that you can form, and only available as a reward or at extra expense. A pity, because it might have made the combat system actually work if you could form armies at will, or even better, automatically (e.g., "group these units in this space, then move them forward").
The combat in this game is enough of a pain that after you've done it once or twice you avoid it like the plague and declare eternal vengeance on any civilization which declares war on you. And, all around, that's too bad.
I noted earlier that mid-game of Civilization III tends to always be about the same. That's because you're always building up your civilization toward the same goal--many big, productive cities. If combat actually worked well there'd instead be two major ways to move your game forward, but that's unfortunately not the case.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, if you like civilization-building games, Sid Meier's Civilization III is still a winner. It has the advantage of including all of the major aspects of such a game: exploration, city building, technological game, diplomacy, and warfare, though the last is sadly broken in this version of the game.
The end game management problems limit the replay for me, but this game still got a good 30 or 40 hours out of me before I threw in the towel (4 complete games), and I expect to leave it on my computer for some day in the future when I'm feeling burned out.
Even though Civ3 has flaws, that's my mark of a successful game.
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