Civilization 3, Can I play it?

[dullard]

My favorite games of all time have to be Civilization and Civ 2. I'd love to play the new Civ 3 game. On the box it lists the minimum requirement as a 300 MHz Pentium 2, but a 500 MHz is recommended. I currently own a 300 MHz Pentium 2 computer. Has anyone here played Civ 3 on a computer that slow? Is it unplayable, or just annoyingly slow?

Background: When Civ 2 first came out, I played it on a 25 MHz 486 machine (with 6 MB of memory). It took 10 minutes to display the civilization advance screen - every single time I researched a new technology. I still loved that game with that wait. I eventually upgraded to 16 MB of memory and that was the biggest performance increase I've ever seen from an upgrade...

 

[MustPost]

I played civ2 on a 486 25 MHz also . Although it may have been upgraded to a 66 MHz soon after I got it.

I have heard of people playing civ3 on computers as low as 500 MHz with no trouble. Thus I would guess it is possible to play it on a 300 MHz too much trouble, probobly will be significant slowdown though.. Unless there is a hardware confict, which are many in civ3.

 

[Rand]

Well minimum specs call for a PII 300MHz, but it will allow you to install and run it on a much slower computer.
I would imagine it would run pretty slow and you'd be in for some fairly long wait times between turns, and scrolling the screen could be pretty choppy. If your willing to put up with that then I'd say it should be playable for you.
From what I've heard most people on this forum with 400-500MHz systems seem pretty displeased with it's performance, but it's at least playable for them. In my own experience as long as your willing to put up with some long waits between turns it should be okay even on a Minimum speced machine.

It likes RAM quite a bit so I'd strongly recommend at least 128MB though, and frankly I'd much prefer 256MB if possible. It can quickly take up a good 170MB by itself pretty quickly after aunching the program.
Luckily RAM prices are pretty damn cheap, so you could pick up a 256MB DIMM for around $25... less if you care to look around.

Comments about the game seem pretty mixed thus far, some like me are enjoying it quite a lot. Others a re complaining that it hasnt improved significantly from Civ2, and certainly not enough to justify the far harsher system requirements.

 

[dullard]

<< Comments about the game seem pretty mixed thus far, some like me are enjoying it quite a lot. Others a re complaining that it hasnt improved significantly from Civ2, and certainly not enough to justify the far harsher system requirements. >>



Could you expand a little bit on this point. I've never seen Civ 3 yet. What are the new features? Here is what I'd like to have:
1) better artificial intelligence,
2) more civilization advances,
3) more buildings to build,
4) larger worlds.

Are any of these significantly improved? Or is it just a graphics improvement?

 

[Rankor]

You should be able to play it. All performance options (ie. graphical enhancements) would have to be turned off.

It is a graphical upgrade from Civ 2. Everything else seems to be the same. With exception to cultural influence and unique units depending on the country, kinda like Red Alert 2. Cultural influence is new and gives more incentive to build up the cultural aspects of your civilization such as temples, churches, librarys instead of building an army to conquer.

What I didn't like about Civ 3 were its included scenarios; there was only a small world map and a large world map. Civ 2 had the WW2 scenario w/c was my favorite.

Other differences included constructing units without the necessary materials (ie. building a legionaire in a city with an copper ore mine nearby).

There's no global warming w/c I think blows and espionage is different but a welcome change.

There are varying degrees of stealing technologies now. There's the cheap and dirty way w/c requires less gold, a shorter amount of time to steal, more chance of failure and getting caught all the way to expensive and clean way w/c requires a lot of gold a longer amount of time to steal, no chance of failure and getting away with it scott-free.

I think the paratroopers have too much power. As soon as a rival country has the paratrooper before you do, it'll be much harder to defeat them.

What I enjoyed from Civ 2 were the cutscenes when you built a Great Wonder; nothing like that this time around.

 

[Rand]

<< and clean way w/c requires a lot of gold a longer amount of time to steal, no chance of failure and getting away with it scott-free.
>>



Just to point out something, you can still get caught no matter how you go about it and how much gold you use to, time you spend etc.
I've been caught on the supposedly "safest, most assured" way.