The problem I had with Civ2, SMAC, and the other Civ-like games was that the scope of the management decisions you had to make didn't scale with the game size. Towards the end of the game, in order to stay competitive, you had to have zillions of cities, "engineer" units (settlers, terraformers, etc.), and possibly military units (if you wanted to wage war). You had to manage all this stuff yourself, and implementing high-level strategic decisions (i.e. the interesting ones) involved more and more tedious mouse clicks as the game went on. The AI-automated build queues in SMAC helped some, but it made a lot of bad decisions (such as building infrastructure whose maintenance you couldn't pay for, or tons of military units you didn't need), and there was no help at all for performing routine military operations like transporting a bunch of units across an ocean. Can anyone comment on whether Civ3 has made any progress in fixing this problem?
I'll be the guy to drop the other shoe for ya....Civ3 has a problem finding the font that it wants to use (Lucida Sans) if you have more than 256 fonts installed on your system. Without this font, the text gets all distorted (yes, even with antialiasing turned on) and is out of position or even offscreen in some cases (civ-o-pedia, diplomacy dialogs). Infogrames tech support is aware of the problem....I personally am going to wait for them to patch this before I start playing seriously....
XP *does* have more consumer-oriented features than W2K....'95 compatibility modes, hotkey user switching, thumbnail view for images, ID3 support in the Explorer for MP3s, system restore, supposedly "friendlier" interface for admin tasks...and if the XP kernel is the same as the W2K one, it'll be a lot more stable than the one in the '95-based OSes. The average consumer/business end-user is more likely to choose an OS based on features than on raw performance....non-tech-types don't care much about what's under the hood as long as the car has the right-sized cupholders. Infrastructure/IT people are a different story, but I think MS still wants these people to buy W2K Server anyway.
You're correct in surmising that ClearType doesn't look that great on CRT's....it's designed to take advantage of the fact that LCD displays contain sharp, clearly-defined subpixel elements (the red, green, and blue dots that make up a pixel) that occur in a specific pattern. CRTs have their subpixels arranged differently---on my display, ClearType gives all the characters a slight rainbow fringe that makes me think about the last time I had an eye exam. This technology *is* great for LCD displays, however.
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The problem I had with Civ2, SMAC, and the other Civ-like games was that the scope of the management decisions you had to make didn't scale with the game size. Towards the end of the game, in order to stay competitive, you had to have zillions of cities, "engineer" units (settlers, terraformers, etc.), and possibly military units (if you wanted to wage war). You had to manage all this stuff yourself, and implementing high-level strategic decisions (i.e. the interesting ones) involved more and more tedious mouse clicks as the game went on. The AI-automated build queues in SMAC helped some, but it made a lot of bad decisions (such as building infrastructure whose maintenance you couldn't pay for, or tons of military units you didn't need), and there was no help at all for performing routine military operations like transporting a bunch of units across an ocean. Can anyone comment on whether Civ3 has made any progress in fixing this problem?
I'll be the guy to drop the other shoe for ya....Civ3 has a problem finding the font that it wants to use (Lucida Sans) if you have more than 256 fonts installed on your system. Without this font, the text gets all distorted (yes, even with antialiasing turned on) and is out of position or even offscreen in some cases (civ-o-pedia, diplomacy dialogs). Infogrames tech support is aware of the problem....I personally am going to wait for them to patch this before I start playing seriously....
XP *does* have more consumer-oriented features than W2K....'95 compatibility modes, hotkey user switching, thumbnail view for images, ID3 support in the Explorer for MP3s, system restore, supposedly "friendlier" interface for admin tasks...and if the XP kernel is the same as the W2K one, it'll be a lot more stable than the one in the '95-based OSes. The average consumer/business end-user is more likely to choose an OS based on features than on raw performance....non-tech-types don't care much about what's under the hood as long as the car has the right-sized cupholders. Infrastructure/IT people are a different story, but I think MS still wants these people to buy W2K Server anyway.
You're correct in surmising that ClearType doesn't look that great on CRT's....it's designed to take advantage of the fact that LCD displays contain sharp, clearly-defined subpixel elements (the red, green, and blue dots that make up a pixel) that occur in a specific pattern. CRTs have their subpixels arranged differently---on my display, ClearType gives all the characters a slight rainbow fringe that makes me think about the last time I had an eye exam. This technology *is* great for LCD displays, however.