generationofswine

It's pretty ugly. You play for long enough and your civ turns into a web or roads, and then railroads that is just... ugly.

IV was a bit more attractive.

But that doesn't really matter much because as fun as III is to play, the real appeal is in the scenarios. They were fun. They were seriously run, especially the dark age scenario, or the cult of blood as you marched slaves to be sacrificed in the mesoamerica scenario.

Those were fun games to play, and you could approach them from so many different strategies and locations that you could play them endlessly.

This was a very fun game, and one that I wish I could still play.

I was at war for the majority of the game, in one city that the AI couldn't manage to take. It was a war that I could largely ignore as I went about the rest of the game, and that is just not fun. When you keep it going just to see if the PC can think a way to take it... it doesn't make for a fun game.

IV was my favorite and V I absolutely hated... and then came VI...

... there are points of this that I like and would want to keep in future installments. And then there is, well...

... once more it is like you are using a God Mod when you go to war, the AI still isn't there as far as strategy and you still need the ability to stack for it to be a threat.

But, like V, if you are playing with friends... the wars aren't as bad and the new way is actually a lot of fun... but civ isn't exactly a game made for group play, it's more of an alone time killer.

And it doesn't punish as much economically for having an empire, but it still discourages watching your armies sweep across the glob a little too much.

But the killer is still stacking units for me. I don't want to play a game where I can fight a war without having the outcome matter. I want to be able to lose... and you really can't with an AI that can't think well enough to keep the artillery in the rear. When you let the computer stack, you have more fun because the computer is more of a threat.

The AI isn't a strategic threat, and it still punishes the parts of the game that make it fun and replaces them with victories that aren't as satisfying to win.

IDK, I am hoping in the next installment, they will change things back to a stack, or make the AI smart enough to use the new war mechanics effectively.

This was the best of the bunch (although I miss some of the III scenarios and I miss the WW1 style infantry that just looked and sounded deadly).

But it still stacked units and that is necessary for the PC to be an actual threat. When you don't stack... wars are sort of boring and void of all challenge when you face off against the AI.

So the stacking was still here and they made cultural victories so difficult that you no longer had to disable them to avoid an accidental win (which actually makes cultural victories a little more respectable).

The space-race is an actual race this time (but, again, it works better when you play against a human than when you play against the AI).

And the introduction of religion makes for a fun turn. It aids in alliances, it makes the game feel more like there are linked cultures.

IV is where Civilization hit it's high water mark. Despite it's short comings this is the best of the series. It's almost a decade old and this is still the game I fire up when I have a long wait on my hands and want to kill time.