Civilization III: Play the World Updated Preview
This expansion to Sid Meier's latest Civilization game aims to revolutionize turn-based multiplayer gaming without forgetting single-player.
It's really all about multiplayer with the Civilization III expansion, Play the World. The expansion aims to transform the stagnant world of turn-based multiplayer into an experience that is quick, fast-paced, manageable, exciting, and exhilarating, where you don't have to wait seemingly forever for others to move, and where you don't have to play for dozens of hours to finish a game. Famed Civilization designer Sid Meier and his team at Firaxis weren't content just to add traditional multiplayer--they aimed to revolutionize it. In Play the World, games of Civilization can progress at the clip of a real-time strategy game--thanks to five new multiplayer victory conditions aimed at shortening game length; options like accelerated production that cut build, growth, and research times in half; and a turnless multiplayer mode where all players move units at once. What's more is that these multiplayer additions don't just take Civilization III online, but they redefine Civilization strategy in the process.
The revolutionary new turnless multiplayer mode is arguably Play the World's biggest attraction, as it creates what is in essence a real-time multiplayer mode in a turn-based game. Turnless mode accomplishes this feat by using a turn clock, which tracks the progression of time through a timed cycle. After you move a unit, you must wait for the turn clock to return to the same point in the cycle before you can move your unit again. But because you are moving units at any point in the cycle and then returning to them one revolution later, it's actually very fluid.
Since we last previewed Play the World, we were able to play with the new turnless mode long and hard to see how it really works. From our time with it, we've found that it is as simple as it is elegant. You'll find that by the time you're ready to return to a unit, it'll likely be waiting for new orders, and since each player moves at the same time in turnless mode, there is virtually no waiting--a truly remarkable feat for the genre. With each person moving units at various points in the turn cycle, enemy units will almost never remain right where they are for long. Instead of being able to plan moves based on a static world, you'll need to use strategies from real-time strategy games to account for the new real-time nature of turnless mode.
The foundation of the turn-based gameplay remains the same, though, even with the incorporation of real-time elements. The rest of the game mechanics function roughly the same as they would in normal turn-based mode, but they adhere to the turn-clock guide. For example, cities still add shields to production in one lump at the beginning of the turn, and civil disorder still remains until the end of a turn has been reached. The gameplay is still turn-based at its core--units still move step-by-step, and production is completed one chunk at a time--but because your units and your enemy's units are all moving at different times, it feels continuous, unlike traditional turn-based multiplayer gameplay.
The turn clock is a variable period of time that lengthens so that one turn takes much more time to cycle through the later in the game you go. For example, it may take 10 seconds for the clock to cycle one revolution early in the game, but it might take a minute for it to cycle one revolution later in the game. The more advanced your civilization becomes, the more pieces of the puzzle you'll have to worry about moving in each turn cycle, and so more time is allotted. The time adjustment takes place invisibly in the background, and it's balanced well enough that at any point you'll usually have just enough to do to consistently be busy, but not too little that you're waiting for units to activate. You can also set whether you want the turn clock to run fast, normal, or slow turns, allowing respectively a small amount of time, a normal amount of time, or plenty of time for each revolution, keeping the game suited for all manner of play. For easy reference, the turn clock, seen as an ever-refilling bar, is visible at the top left of the screen.
Civilization III: Play the World Quick Links
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- Atari
- Firaxis Games
- Historic Turn-Based...
- Release: Oct 25, 2002
- ESRB: Everyone
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