Things I would like to see

There being nothing new under the sun, I bet this has come up before. It would be really cool if one could divide up a large empire into regional zones so that one could monitor performance zone by zone. In my current game, I have: an inner and outer core, a forbidden palace zone, a far north zone and a secret police HQ zone. I would like to see how each is faring over time and in comparison with the other zones. Is this possible?

I would also like to control the sequence in which units apply for orders. In general, I want to use non-lethal before lethal bombardment, for example but as the bombers are seeking orders before the artillery I have to fortify the bombers and then remember where they all are after the artillery has gone to work because they don't reapply (I know you can use the wait command but if the artillery happen to be fortified you will be going round and round for forever telling bombers to wait). Same with fighters and bombers. Fighters first please.

I would also like it if cities I am managing (i.e. not entrusted to the governor) would apply to me before deciding how best to deploy a specialist. In the later stages of the game a lot of specialist tweaking is necessary and I often find the default arrangements unsatisfactory.

Also cool would be if workers designated for clearing pollution would just keep on doing it whenever pollution broke out without being asked. I know you can automate 'clear pollution' but the automation turns off once the last scrap of damage is under control. Consequently, when there are no other jobs, you either leave your workers scattered all over the place, which makes finding them a pain, or you stack them somewhere waiting for the next job sheet to come in.

walletta said:

There being nothing new under the sun, I bet this has come up before. It would be really cool if one could divide up a large empire into regional zones so that one could monitor performance zone by zone. In my current game, I have: an inner and outer core, a forbidden palace zone, a far north zone and a secret police HQ zone. I would like to see how each is faring over time and in comparison with the other zones. Is this possible?

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For 'cluster-analysis' of your cities, numbering/prefixing them accordingly (as I suggested in another thread) would automatically group them in Madame Effwon's list -- and also in CAII's city list. I would have to double-check this, but I believe you might be able to copy and export CAII data to e.g. an exCel workbook (if so inclined) -- or you might even be able to get CAII to spit out whatever data you wanted directly, by selecting specific groups in the Cities list.

I would also like to control the sequence in which units apply for orders. In general, I want to use non-lethal before lethal bombardment *SNIP* but if the artillery happen to be fortified you will be going round and round for forever telling bombers to wait). Same with fighters and bombers. Fighters first please.

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You can always use Colonel Effthree to find your Arty-stack(s), right-click (Apple-click on a Mac?) on the stack and select 'Wake All', then use the Arty before unfortifiying the Bombers and sending them in. This does of course become easier if you have your Bombers all based on only 1-2 tile(s)...

In the initial stages of the war, you can base them on your Carriers -- with Range=10 (in C3C), you should still be able to hit a large chunk of enemy territory, even on Large maps. Later on, if you don't want to risk leaving the Bombers in a captured city and losing them to a back-flip, use a Slave to build an Airfield, guard it with something heavy (Inf-Army?), and base your Bombers there instead. NB The Civilopedia says you lose the use of an Airfield if it later falls inside a foreign Civ's borders, but I think that might only apply -- if at all -- if the new owner is hostile.But if you're worried about flips recapturing your Airfield+Bombers, you can always raze(+replace) the surrounding towns. Or just keep your planes on your Carriers.

... a lot of specialist tweaking is necessary and I often find the default arrangements unsatisfactory.

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Yeah, specialist (re)assigments can be a pain in the late game.

The 'easiest' way I found to do them all in one go is via the F1 screen: when you mouse-over the Specialist popheads, you'll get a little pop-up tag (e.g. 'Mayan Taxman'), and you can then click-cycle through the Specialist-types just like you do in the individual city-screens -- with the advantage that you can also immediately see the resulting changes to your total Science/Income. Admittedly that does get a bit fiddly if/when you have Pop 20+ Metros, and the popheads are all piled up...

CAII can also be set to give alerts when a city has grown, so you can use the Alerts pop-up to quickly zoom to the cities on the main mapscreen, where reassignments are likely to be needed. Still not ideal, but better than a

I know you can automate 'clear pollution' but the automation turns off once the last scrap of damage is under control.*SNIP* workers scattered all over the place, which makes finding them a pain

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Are you sure that this is the case? AFAIK, automated damage-clearing Workers will retreat to the nearest city when there's nothing left for them to do, but I'm pretty sure they wake up again if another tile becomes polluted. And if not, like the Arty, you can find the Worker-stack(s) pretty quickly using Colonel Effthree...

Thanks tjs282 - some useful ideas in there, especially the town naming and the specialist clicking. But what I wanted was a visual of the combined stats for any particular zone. I have no clue how to export data to an excel spreadsheet btw. (and I play on a PC although I am a MAc person, so I can do the right-clicking stuff).

I promise you in Civ III once the last polluted tile has been cleared up the workers just stand on it smoking and chatting until you spot them. If you order them to be ready to clean up the next polluted tile when it appears you can see them , if you look really close at your screen, give you two fingers (wouldn't it be cool if they really did that? )

tjs282 said:

For 'cluster-analysis' of your cities, numbering/prefixing them accordingly (as I suggested in another thread) would automatically group them in Madame Effwon's list -- and also in CAII's city list. I would have to double-check this, but I believe you might be able to copy and export CAII data to e.g. an exCel workbook (if so inclined) -- or you might even be able to get CAII to spit out whatever data you wanted directly, by selecting specific groups in the Cities list.
You can always use Colonel Effthree to find your Arty-stack(s), right-click (Apple-click on a Mac?) on the stack and select 'Wake All', then use the Arty before unfortifiying the Bombers and sending them in. This does of course become easier if you have your Bombers all based on only 1-2 tile(s)...

In the initial stages of the war, you can base them on your Carriers -- with Range=10 (in C3C), you should still be able to hit a large chunk of enemy territory, even on Large maps. Later on, if you don't want to risk leaving the Bombers in a captured city and losing them to a back-flip, use a Slave to build an Airfield, guard it with something heavy (Inf-Army?), and base your Bombers there instead. NB The Civilopedia says you lose the use of an Airfield if it later falls inside a foreign Civ's borders, but I think that might only apply -- if at all -- if the new owner is hostile.

Spoiler :

In my first ever game of Conquests (Standard 70% Continents, English, Regent), I'm 99% certain that I retained the use of a 'beachead' Airfield I built -- and guarded with MechInfs -- even after gifting the adjacent city to the Greeks, with whom I had an MPP+RoP (I was building my Spaceship, but kicking the Incas just for laffs).

But if you're worried about flips recapturing your Airfield+Bombers, you can always raze(+replace) the surrounding towns. Or just keep your planes on your Carriers.
Yeah, specialist (re)assigments can be a pain in the late game.

The 'easiest' way I found to do them all in one go is via the F1 screen: when you mouse-over the Specialist popheads, you'll get a little pop-up tag (e.g. 'Mayan Taxman'), and you can then click-cycle through the Specialist-types just like you do in the individual city-screens -- with the advantage that you can also immediately see the resulting changes to your total Science/Income. Admittedly that does get a bit fiddly if/when you have Pop 20+ Metros, and the popheads are all piled up...

CAII can also be set to give alerts when a city has grown, so you can use the Alerts pop-up to quickly zoom to the cities on the main mapscreen, where reassignments are likely to be needed. Still not ideal, but better than a
Are you sure that this is the case? AFAIK, automated damage-clearing Workers will retreat to the nearest city when there's nothing left for them to do, but I'm pretty sure they wake up again if another tile becomes polluted. And if not, like the Arty, you can find the Worker-stack(s) pretty quickly using Colonel Effthree...

Click to expand...

would one of these help??


View attachment SmallHeads.rar

Save the original somewhere and put one of these in ...Civilization III Complete\Conquests\Art\SmallHeads

Yes walletta, these are the kind of things that pop-up from time to time and are the primary reason why it's the very special people who manage to enjoy late-game, high difficulty, vast empire, perfection-play. It's not so much that the game is hard, it's just ball-breakingly frustrating dealing with all the cruddy interfaces without developing either epilepsy or motion sickness as you zip around your empire trying to correct a whole load of automations that were supposedly added to the game in order to make it less stressful for casual non-micromanagement players - quite the irony really.

And yes, you've hit on the big ones that get everyone's goat, the ones that even 'mods will fix it' have a hard time coping with.

I'll even make a further extension to one of your points:

As you say, when a new Specialist is created it get's auto created. The game kindly and helpfully (sarcastic) decides what Specialist you'd like in your populous city, to which you then have the laborious task of altering. Also, when Pollution hits, not only do you have to remember to get your Workers off their ass in the same turn, you also have to then go back into the city screen and reassign the Citizen to that square, because that square has now become a Specialist of a type you haven't chosen!!!!

The game thinks it's being kindly and helpful (sarcastic) by removing your Citizen from working a square simply because it's got Pollution on it! While also being kindly and helpful (sarcastic) by choosing what Specialist that removed Citizen is going to be! What a carve-up!

And even if you're a master of coping with pedantic micromanagement you might still not have the greatest memory in the world when it comes to remembering which exact city it was that's got to put a Citizen back to work - in some games creating this awkward shift of Citizens across the world that doesn't become noticeable until one of your towns suddenly starts starving and you realise you have to reassign all the 20 lost Citizens across your continent to put everything back to how it was originally.

So what you're talking about is indeed the original old story criticism of Civ III:

This is a game for micromanagers, where micromanagers can be at peace with their skill.
but...
This is a game with no respect at all for micromanagers, where micromanagers have to spend a great deal of time effing around with automations that have no place in a micromanagement game - combined with some really irritating mechanics such as Pollution and Corruption.

You have a much more interesting game than Civ II, but you also have a much more unwieldy game than Civ II.

Thanks Buttercup. Its good to know I'm not alone and you reminded me of the pollution thing which is also a pain. Another thing that peeves me is that I may set a city to produce, what, 45 shields per turn so as to get a bomber every two turns. Then something or other happens and the next time I look its down to 44 per turn, having produced 89 shields in the last two turns with the turn to follow burning 40+ more into the stratosphere like its modern China or something

Another one: I would like to 'spot' or mark damaged tiles that I don't want cleared by the automated work force. Specifically, damaged tiles near the front line.

[Off topic question: does anyone ever use workers as bait? The AI seems irresistibly drawn to unprotected workers and I just wondered whether using them as decoys was ever a good idea.]

Only as long as you donnot lose them. There might be some situations where it might be wise to use decoys, but usually there is no need for that.

Changing the garrisions strenght of cities to make AI alter marching to city A in turn 1, to city B in turn 2 and back towards City A in turn 3 etc. is more profitable. Baiting AI into seemingly weak protected places of value can be a strong move, but it need to be done in a proper way.

In total preventing the existing of irresistible targets is probably more important. In the early game leaving a city unprotected or very weak protected lures AI to declare war onto you. At that time however you are more interested to prevent that war.

justanick said:

Only as long as you donnot lose them. There might be some situations where it might be wise to use decoys, but usually there is no need for that.

Changing the garrisions strenght of cities to make AI alter marching to city A in turn 1, to city B in turn 2 and back towards City A in turn 3 etc. is more profitable. Baiting AI into seemingly weak protected places of value can be a strong move, but it need to be done in a proper way.

In total preventing the existing of irresistible targets is probably more important. In the early game leaving a city unprotected or very weak protected lures AI to declare war onto you. At that time however you are more interested to prevent that war.

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Amen to this.

Btw. am I just missing it or is there no way to select and highlight parts of posts on this forum?

walletta said:

Amen to this.

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Btw. am I just missing it or is there no way to select and highlight parts of posts on this forum?

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If you're hitting the 'Quote' button to reply, just delete the text you don't want to quote. If it's a large chunk, I usually put a '*SNIP*' in to show that I've done that.

If I want to make a paragraph-by-paragraph responses, I treble-click the para to select it, and then click the 'Speech-bubble' icon to add the {QUOTE}+{/QUOTE} tags round it. Just like I did here, in fact...

(I think the 'Multi-quote this message' button should do that automatically, but I've never managed to get it to work right -- i.e. I'm probably doing something wrong!)

tjs282 said:

If you're hitting the 'Quote' button to reply, just delete the text you don't want to quote. If it's a large chunk, I usually put a '*SNIP*' in to show that I've done that.

If I want to make a paragraph-by-paragraph responses, I treble-click the para to select it, and then click the 'Speech-bubble' icon to add the {QUOTE}+{/QUOTE} tags round it. Just like I did here, in fact...

(I think the 'Multi-quote this message' button should do that automatically, but I've never managed to get it to work right -- i.e. I'm probably doing something wrong!)

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I can do all that (well almost) but I meant highlight as in using a highlighter pen - yellow, pink etc. I don't see it anywhere. Oh well, I'll get by

walletta said:

I can do all that (well almost) but I meant highlight as in using a highlighter pen - yellow, pink etc. I don't see it anywhere. Oh well, I'll get by

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You can change the font-colour to something brighter, and/or make text bold and/or increase the Font-size, and/or some combination of the above, but that's about it...

It makes your own post a pain to read through, though -- but the 'Preview Post' option shows you a clean version.

Also, changing the font colour may result in text not showing up well against some of the CFC colour-schemes (you can (re)set this at the lower left)-- for example, I like the 'Turnip Green' scheme, but the 'Lime-green' and 'Cyan' text-colours are nearly invisible against it (well, they do nasty things to my eyes, anyway).

tjs282 said:

You can change the font-colour to something brighter, and/or make text bold and/or increase the Font-size, and/or some combination of the above, but that's about it...

It makes your own post a pain to read through, though -- but the 'Preview Post' option shows you a clean version.

Also, changing the font colour may result in text not showing up well against some of the CFC colour-schemes (you can (re)set this at the lower left)-- for example, I like the 'Turnip Green' scheme, but the 'Lime-green' and 'Cyan' text-colours are nearly invisible against it (well, they do nasty things to my eyes, anyway).

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Yes, this is one of the few things I actually know. Shall we revolt and force the Admin staff to give us highlight buttons?