Bombardment on ships and planes worked the same way, and intelligent players fighting wars in the Modern Age would frequently use both.

Intelligent use of combined arms like this added a great deal of strategy to Civ3, and helped elevate it quite a bit beyond its two predecessors (where catapults were 6/1/1, for example). Regular units were the only ones which could actually kill units or capture other artillery pieces, so it was necessary to use a combination of both to achieve best results. Most importantly though, they could NEVER kill other units the only unit which could was the pricey, one-time use cruise missile. The stand-alone game offered a great balance between artillery and regular units, with artillery being able to damage other units but unable to defend themselves. In retrospect, I feel that the final release version of standard Civ3 (1.29f) actually offered the best overall game balance.ġ) Lethal Bombardment: This change, without a doubt, was by far the worst thing that BreakAway Games did to Civ3. But I believe that if Conquests had truly improved the balance of the game instead of simply 'adding more stuff', we would be seeing a larger share of old-timers hanging around it still.Īs such, what follows are ten places where Conquests, at least for my money, failed to deliver. Now I understand that a lot of this is due simply to burnout on Civ3, as the game has been around for more than two and a half years at this point, and there is inarguably a sizeable community of players who are still going on strong.

Participation in the Realms Beyond Epics, what I consider to be my 'home' series of games, is at its lowest point ever. The release of Conquests briefly generated a renewal of interest in Civilization 3 among many different players, but within six months most of that had died away. Now that a year has passed since the second expansion was released, I have to say that I am disappointed with the way that Conquests ultimately turned out. Unlike most players, this was not based on idle speculation but rather stemmed from a great deal of time spent testing Conquests while it was still in development. Like a lot of other Civ3 enthusiasts, I had high expectations for Civ3 Conquests. This is not to say that Conquests is a bad expansion pack, or even that I don't like it (I have somewhat mixed feelings about it), only that the game balance of Civ3 was on the whole negatively affected by the Conquests expansion. When it became clear that some of these problems would never be adequately addressed, I felt compelled to write up a short editorial on the subject.

It was a summary of a number of different problems and complaints I had with the final version of the expansion, issues that I had believed would be solved through patching after the game released. This was written in August of 2004, about a year after the Conquests expansion for Civ3 was released.

Civilization 3 patch corruption