Civ

[prog]

In case I haven't mentioned: I bequeath 7 stars out of 5 to Civilization III. I'm only on my third game (well, only my second full game; I surrendered early on my second try after a really bad start) and play it only a couple of times a week, in two- or three-hour sessions. It works pretty well at this pace, so long as I don't crank up the difficulty too much. Actually, I currently find the second-to-easiest difficultly level a challenge. Having lots of fun even though I'm losing, playing as the Germans, fenced in and unwillingly peaceful because all my neighbors keep signing mutual protection pacts with each other, so that invading one measly little Russian city they'd never miss results in a counterattack by two dozen international units. Oh well.

Minor quibble: Now that (unlike Civ I and II) units appear as realistically animated people, I kind of wish there was more racial diversity depicted among them, as they're almost all light-skinned. (There are exceptions where it would have been sort of silly otherwise, as with Zulu impi or Egyptian war charioteers.) It would have been kind of cool to have a new unit's skin color be a randomly determined shade of brown, perhaps with biases one way or the other depending upon its home civ. (I suppose I could also argue about gender balance, since there are no (obvious) women anywhere among the unit types -- not even among the non-combatant workers or settlers -- but that would take more work to render than programmatic tint-adjusting, so it's somewhat more forgivable, I guess.)

One very minor politically incorrect thing I do like: the idle animation of the French special unit, the musketeers, has them giggling en francais. I can hear them faintly chuckling in the distance whenever managing cities on the French border. Honh honh hooonh! I appreciate this.

Comments

[prog.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was deligted with the Street Fighter II-inspired end screen after my first, largely military victory (under the Chieftain a.k.a. Wet Paper Bag level) and I did indeed get a bizarre Jasper Johns taunting screen after disgracefully surrending my second game due to me foolishly trying a Regent-level game next. I've been wondering if you get a different screen if you lose due to another civ winning. Probably I'll find out pretty soon. ;b

My housemate Noah loves his SMAC a lot, enough to work "nerve-staple" into his daily language, but has never tried multiplayer. I've never even played the game, but it does look pretty cool. Maybe I should buy the local Apple Store's one beat-up $10 copy that they've had on their shelves since they opened.