Civilization III
Civilization III | |
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Single-player, multiplayer |
Sid Meier's Civilization III is the third installment of the
Civilization III, like the other Civilization games, entails building an empire, from the ground up, beginning in 4,000 BC and continuing slightly beyond the modern day. The player must construct and improve cities, train military and non-military units, improve terrain, research technologies, build Wonders of the World, make war or peace with neighboring civilizations, and so on. The player must balance a good infrastructure, resources, diplomatic and trading skills, technological advancement, city and empire management, culture, and military power to succeed.
Gameplay
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The game map is made up of square tiles on a grid. Each city, terrain improvement, and unit is located in a specific tile, and each tile can host any number of units. Land tiles can contain a transportation improvement (
) or a city. Cities must be built a minimum of one tile away from each other, i.e., no two cities may touch. Each tile is made of a particular type of terrain that determines, among other things, how much food, production, and trade it produces when "worked". A tile can only be worked if it is one of the twenty tiles surrounding a city. A tile can only be worked by one city at a time, and each city can only work a number of tiles equal to or less than its population.Food is used to grow the player's cities. Each population unit requires food to survive, and excess food is stored. Production, represented in the game as "shields", is used to build units, buildings, and wonders. Commerce powers the player's economy. This commerce is split up as the player sees fit between research, tax revenue, and luxuries, each with a different purpose.
Each city's citizens have a certain mood (happy, content, unhappy, or resisting). If most citizens are unhappy, the city falls into civil disorder and all production ceases; if a city remains in civil disorder for too long, it can lead to rioting, which results in improvements being destroyed. If most citizens are happy, they will like their leader and increase economic benefits.
Terrain improvements are built by Worker units. Irrigation increases food, mines increase production, and roads increase commerce and reduce movement costs for all allied land units using them. Two civilizations must have Right of passage treaty signed to benefit from each other's roads.
Buildings enhance a city in some way and cost maintenance. Like units and Wonders, each one can only be built when the requisite technology has been acquired. Buildings require financial maintenance each turn, and can be destroyed. Only one of each type of building can be constructed in each city.
As in previous installments of Civilization, there are unique Wonders of the World that can only be built once per game. Wonders provide a variety of major benefits to a specific city, all cities on a continent, or to an entire empire. Civilization III also added Small Wonders, which are functionally equivalent to Wonders except that each one can be constructed once per civilization, as opposed to once in every whole game. Small Wonders have, for the most part, a sociological requirement to construct them, as well as a technological requirement. When a civilization captures a city with a Small Wonder, it is automatically destroyed. Some examples of small wonders are
One of the major features of gameplay is
Citizens are the people who work in a city. There are four kinds: Laborers, Entertainers, Tax Collectors, and Scientists. If there are more citizens in a city than available tiles to work, the extra citizens automatically become Entertainers. The second expansion, Conquests, adds two new types of citizens to the game: Policemen (reduce corruption) and Civil Engineers (enhance building and wonder production).
Culture is a feature that was not present in previous installments of the franchise. Each city has a cultural rating, which is the city's influence over local terrain. Essentially, the culture's outer edge, or "border", acts as the boundary of each civilization's empire. As the city's culture rating increases, so does its sphere of influence, bringing more territory under the player's control. Civilizations' borders may abut, resulting in their culture ratings vying for territory. If one player's culture rating is sufficiently higher than the other's, the former's borders will encroach into territory previously owned by the latter. Given enough time and cultural pressure, the latter player's city may even elect to join, or "flip to," the former's empire. Culture can thus serve as a means of peaceful conquest.
Every civilization starts with certain special abilities, and they have a special "unique unit" that only they can build; these units usually have a historical basis (for example: the Japanese unique unit is the samurai, which replaces the standard knight, whereas the British unique unit is the Man-O-War, which replaces the standard frigate).
Citizens have a nationality based upon the civilization under which they were "born." Citizens have a "memory" of their nationality and will consider themselves members of their previous civilization until they are assimilated into their new civilization.
Combat is an important aspect of the game. Each combat unit begins as a "regular" unit with three hit points (although some units have additional hit points bonuses which affect their stats). If the unit loses all its hit points, it dies. Units can be promoted after successful combat missions and gain hit points. The highest rank a unit can attain is that of "elite" (which features five hit points), whereas the lowest is "conscript" (featuring two hit points; this rank is only given to newly drafted soldiers and barbarian units). Each unit has an attack and defense value to determine the winner of each battle. Additional defensive bonuses can be conferred by, e.g., certain terrain types, the unit's "Fortify" command, or defending across a river. Ultimately, a
With respect to developing the cities within an empire, bonus resources may be found on tiles within the cultural borders. Each type of resource may provide a bonus to food, production, or commerce if found within the city radius and worked by a citizen. Particular kinds of resources, such as luxury or strategic resources, provide additional benefits such as increasing citizens' happiness or providing access to resource-specific combat units.
There are several ways to win the game. A player needs to meet only one of the victory conditions in order to win. These include Conquest victory, achieved when no civilizations besides the player's exist; Domination victory, achieved when two thirds of the world's land and population are controlled by the player; Cultural victory, achieved when the player successfully assimilates other civilizations; Diplomatic victory, achieved when the player is elected leader of the United Nations; and a science-based victory, achieved when the player researches a sufficient number of technologies and builds a spaceship to reach Alpha Centauri. If no civilization has met any of the other victory conditions by the year 2050, the civilization with the highest score wins the game.
Development
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Civilization III was released after about two years of development on October 30, 2001.[2] Developed by Westlake Interactive and published by MacSoft, a version for Mac OS was released on January 6, 2002.[3]
Reception
Sales
In the United States, Civilization III entered
Civilization III sold 550,000 copies and earned $21.7 million in the United States by August 2006. At the time, this led
Reviews and awards
Aggregator | Score |
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Metacritic | 90/100[25] |
Publication | Score |
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Game Informer | 8.5/10[18] |
GameRevolution | A−[19][20] |
GameSpot | 9.2/10[21] |
IGN | 9.3/10[22] |
Next Generation | [23] |
PC Gamer (US) | 92%[24] |
Jeff Lundrigan reviewed the PC version of the game for Next Generation, rating it five stars out of five, and stated that "Given that Civ II was as close to perfect as any game has ever been, it's arguable that it wasn't possible to change it so much as add to it."[23]
Upon release, the reaction to Civilization III was very positive.[
The editors of
Expansions
Two expansion sets have been published for Sid Meier's Civilization III: Play the World in October 2002, and Conquests in November 2003.[30] Play the World added multiplayer capabilities, eight new civilizations and some new units to the original release.[30] The roll-out of the multiplayer functionalities with this expansion was highly criticized.[clarification needed][31] Play the World was followed-up by Conquests, which offers nine more historical scenarios, ranging from Mesopotamia to WWII in the Pacific. Many of these scenarios have resources, improvements, wonders, music, and even government types that are specific to the scenario, especially the Mesoamerican and Sengoku Japan campaigns.[30]
The stand-alone version is Civilization III: Complete Edition, which includes the two expansions and several patches. (This version came after Civilization III: Gold Edition and Civilization III: Game of the Year Edition.)
Board game
In 2002, Eagle Games published the Sid Meier's Civilization board game, created by Glenn Dover. The game was based on Civilization III and mirrored many of the video game's concepts and gameplay components.[32]
References
- ^ "Infogrames UK". www.uk.infogrames.com. Archived from the original on 28 June 2003. Retrieved 22 February 2022.
- ^ "Civilization III limited edition available for preorder". GameSpot. Retrieved 2024-01-19.
- ^ "MacSoft ships Civilization III". Macworld. Retrieved 2024-01-19.
- ^ Walker, Trey (November 14, 2001). "Civilization III takes first and second place". GameSpot. Archived from the original on December 13, 2001. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
- ^ a b Walker, Trey (November 29, 2001). "Hot Date holds off Harry Potter". GameSpot. Archived from the original on December 2, 2001. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
- ^ Walker, Trey (November 21, 2001). "Humongous takes the lead". GameSpot. Archived from the original on November 23, 2001. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
- ^ Walker, Trey (December 5, 2001). "Hot Date still hot". GameSpot. Archived from the original on December 7, 2001. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
- ^ Walker, Trey (December 12, 2001). "Harry Potter beats Hot Date". GameSpot. Archived from the original on December 14, 2001. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
- ^ a b Walker, Trey (December 19, 2001). "Hot Date rules November". GameSpot. Archived from the original on February 13, 2002. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
- ^ Walker, Trey (January 3, 2002). "Harry Potter on top again". GameSpot. Archived from the original on January 5, 2002. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
- ^ Walker, Trey (January 4, 2002). "EA takes three". GameSpot. Archived from the original on February 2, 2002. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
- ^ Walker, Trey (January 9, 2002). "Sims games dominate year-end PC game sales". GameSpot. Archived from the original on January 11, 2002. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
- ^ Walker, Trey (January 23, 2002). "Harry Potter takes December". GameSpot. Archived from the original on January 27, 2002. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
- ^ Bradshaw, Lucy (January 31, 2002). "Markle Forum on Children and Media" (PDF). New York University. Archived (PDF) from the original on June 19, 2004.
- ^ Edge Staff (August 25, 2006). "The Top 100 PC Games of the 21st Century". Edge. Archived from the original on October 17, 2012.
- Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association. Archived from the originalon February 21, 2009.
- Gamasutra. Archived from the originalon September 18, 2017.
- GameInformer.com. Archived from the originalon September 24, 2004.
- ^ Civilization III review for the PC Archived 2007-03-05 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Squire, Kurt; Constance Steinkuehler (2005-04-15). "Meet the Gamers". LibraryJournal.com. Archived from the original on 2005-08-22. Retrieved 2007-01-28.
- ^ "Civilization III for PC Review – PC Civilization III Review". GameSpot. Archived from the original on February 21, 2006.
- ^ "Civilization III Review". IGN. October 29, 2001. Archived from the original on October 21, 2017.
- ^ a b Lundrigan, Jeff (January 2002). "Finals". Next Generation. Vol. 5, no. 1. Imagine Media. p. 90.
- ^ Harms, William. "Sid Meier's Civilization III". PC Gamer. Archived from the original on October 18, 2006.
- ^ "Sid Meier's Civilization III for PC Reviews". Metacritic. Retrieved March 25, 2017.
- ^ "2002 PC Strategy Game of the year". Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.
- ^ Staff (March 2002). "11th Annual Computer Games Awards". Computer Games Magazine (136): 50–56.
- PC Gamer US. 9 (3): 32, 33, 36, 36, 37, 40, 42.
- ^ Editors of Computer Gaming World (April 2002). "Games of the Year; The Very Best of a (Sometimes) Great Year in Gaming". Computer Gaming World. No. 213. pp. 69–73, 76–84.
- ^ a b c "Civilization III Official Website Features Page". Civilization III Official Website. Archived from the original on 7 December 2014. Retrieved 5 December 2014.
- ^ Editors of CGW (July 2004). "Sim Games that Suck". Computer Gaming World. No. 240. p. 108.
- Boardgame Geek. Retrieved January 24, 2018.