Column 6

The Column
*by Julius Caesar*
	If I keep on delaying my columns, Civilization IV will be released before I publish the next one. Unfortunately, real life makes impossible to update it more frequently. For example, Hannibal hasn't been slain by my legions as some people suspect, he's just working and moved out of his hometown. Hard times, these when men that directed armies and conquered worlds have to world for technological corporations.

So much time has passed since my last column that in these times we didn't even have seen the last Civilization III expansion pack: Conquests! (a.k.a C3C).everybody knows that I'm a sort of Civ2 fanatic, so it's difficult to me to say something possitive about Civ3. I have to make it clear because I want you to see the next words as a real sacriffice: I like C3C. I'm not enthusiastic about it, but I like it quite a lot.

Today we can finally say that C3C is a full game. It has a more than satisfactory multiplayer mode and, after a few patches, very stable. New techs, units, and mainly the new governments are perfectly integrated in the game. I think that the “one more turn” feeling that we all know is finally buck. And the new editor options allow us to create decent scenarios, not to mention that the scenarios included in the expansion pack are really good. I'd like to congratulate his creators, that according to my informations are the people at Breakaway Games.

Of course, I can't forget to say that all is not so beautiful as it seems. The Civ2 scenario creators don't have jumped to civ3 for one good reasons: the lack of events in the civ3 scenario creation. A good scenario can be created without using events (some of us did before CiC and FW appeared for Civ2), but we're not interested. It's curious that any expansion pack scenarios, like “Medieval Europe”, have events like “black death” that affects randomly any cities. Why don't we have this possibility? There ara events in this scenario, so it's not true that its implementation is impossible.

Even worse, we have the price. Is it fair that users pay 50€ the first year, 30€ the second and another 30€ the third one to finally have a full game? How is it possible that the first expansion pack has lost all its value in just a year (because Conquests includes Play the World)? I think that Atari is behaving awfully with their customers, and sooner or later y tarde hey'll pay for it.

Today's column is dedicated to Civ3, so there isn't a lot of space to talk about Civ2. I just want to say that finally Jesús Balsinde (with a little help from Javier Arriaga) ended his old "Bolivar's Dream", that Academia released a scenario about the Second Ages at Middle Earth ("The age of Númenor") and that finally Alfonso Sánchez (El Zenehegí) has ended his scenario about Reconquista. Meanwhile, at Scenario League and at Creative Design Group, Civ2 creators around the world they still produce scenarios at high speed.

Caius Julius Caesar, 17th February 2004.

The Column