Frequently Asked Questions

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Last updated on 5/5/02 by PaleHorse76 and 4/20/02 by Thunderfall.

General Questions

What is the latest patch version and where can I get it?
. The latest patch is v1.21f. You can get it (as well as all old patches) at http://www.civfanatics.com/civilization3.shtml#patches. The latest patch includes all fixes in previous patches.

How do I take screenshots?
. Hit the 'Prt Scrn' button on your keyboard. Then open a graphics program such as Paint (you can use the windows key, then go to Programs....Accesories...Paint, this way you don't need to exit the game), then you 'paste' and there's the screenshot! Remember to reduce the image size a bit, or crop it, and save the file as .JPG. There are also lots of screenshot programs you can download at download.com.

What does GOTM stand for?
. GOTM stands for Game of the Month. It's the most popular (casual) contest in the Civ community. You can learn more about it here.

Is there a newsgroup for Civilization III?
. Yes, the newsgroup is at alt.games.civ3

Where can I download Civ3 scenarios?
. No scenarios are available at this time because Firaxis hasn't released an editor capable of building scenarios.

Multiplayer Questions

Where is the multiplayer?
. Multiplayer will be available with the expansion pack. Check here for more information.

Gameplay Questions

Why doesn't my city grow past size 6 or 12?
. Cities either need access to a river or need an aqueduct to grow to size 6. To grow beyond size 12 you need to invent Sanitation and build hospitals.

How to establish embassies?
. Double click the star next to your own capital to establish embassies.

How do I disband a city?
. There are two ways. The NEW way: Right click on a city and choose "Abandon City" from the menu (requires patch v1.21 or higher). The OLD way: Starve the city (by changing the citizens into entertainers) and keep producing workers or settlers.

How do I access the advanced espionage missions?
. Click the pentagon next to the city you built the Intelligence Agency in. Once you have planted a spy use the Pentagon icon near the enemy city you infiltrated to execute missions.

How do I change/stop trades after 20 turns?
. In the trading dialog click "Active" at the bottom of the screen to view active trades. If a trade is preceded by a number that means how many turns are still left. Press "New" to return to new trades.

Why do capturable units sometimes get destroyed and sometimes captured?
. You can only capture units when you have the appropriate technology to build them.

What do the numbers and icons by my cities mean?
. The large number on the left shows the size of the city (red if the city is decreasing in size, yellow if it stays the same, white if it's growing
. The top number indicates how many turns are left before the city will grow.
. The bottom number indicates how many turns are left before the current building or unit is built.
. An anchor indicates there is a harbor in the city.
. An airplane indicates there is an an airport in the city.
. Black smoke means the city is in disorder.
. Fireworks mean the city has a We Love The [ruler] Day.

How do I get out of Mobilization economy?
. End all your wars to get out of it, if you enabled it during peace time you will have to start a war to get out of it.

Why can't I build my wonder?
. You might be building it in another city already. You can only build one of the same wonder at a time.
. You rush-built your current building and you're trying to switch. To force people to build a wonder completely you can't do any type of rush-building, not paying for it, not clearing forests, not disbanding units, not even if you rush somehting and then try to switch.
. You don't have the required items yet, some wonders like SDI Defense require 5 Sam Sites in your cities.

Upgrading all my units is a pain in the ***!
. When on of your units is selected press shift-U instead of U and all the units of the same type that can be upgraded will be upgraded. (Must be in cities with barracks, resources must be available, gold must be available) If you are upgrading naval units, the city must have a harbor.

How many units can I build off one iron resource and similar questions.
. Resources disappear randomly, don't hold back on building units, it won't make resources disappear faster or slower.

I can't build railroads. Why?
. Your capital needs to have access to Coal and Iron strategic resources.

How do I cancel a bombardment?
. Right-click on the unit that you had selected. The bombardment grid will disappear.

How do I use the queue?
. Shift-Click - Add to production queue.
. Shift-Q - Save production queue as default.
. Q - Load production queue with default.
. Shift-Del - Removes all items from the queue.
. Click-Del - Removes the item clicked.

How do you load a nuclear missile into a submarine?
. Same as you would for a unit into a transport. Have the sub in a coastal square and simply move the unit over land and then load on the sub.

I irrigated my grassland, and it's still producing only 2 food. Is this a bug?
. In a despotism, production that is 3 or more gets cut down by one point. So if you have 2 food on a square you get both of it. If you then irrigate you have 3, which gets cut down by one so in the end you have 2 food.

How do I unload armies or change units in an army?
. You can't upload, change, or upgrade units in an army once it's formed, in versions 1.07f, 1.16f, and 1.21f of the game. In version 1.17f you can unload units from an army by using the stack movement command, "J". Being able to unload units is a bug in version 1.17f.

How do I turn off the city governers?
. Rightclick on your city and select contact governer to change options.

Is there a turn limit on the game, regardless of what victory conditions you chose?
. Games will always stop recording score at 2050, no matter what type of game you are playing, but you can still continue playing after that. If no one has won by the year 2050 then the winner is determined by the sum of your score at the end of each time period. So, if you ended the game with 200 points at the end of the first time period, 300 the next then 400 then 1000 you'd have a final score of 200+300+400+1000/4 = 475.

How do I view the other 8 civs on the foreign advisor screen in a 16 player game?
. Shift-rightclick on a portait to change it to another civ. There still is a maximum of 8 portaits at any time.

How often do Great Leaders appear?
. When your elite unit won a battle, there is 1/16 chance to become a GL; If Heroic small wonder exist, then 1/12.
. A "militaristic" civ improves that ratio, but no quantative # is available.
. No GL will appear from fighting Barbarians, only against another civs units.
. You can only have a maximum of one GL at a time.
. There are reported bugs of getting more than one GL at a time and getting armies from goody huts.

How do I view Top 5 cities, wonders of the world, etc?
. The keys F7 through F12 show such things, just like in Civ2.

Corruption is way too high.
. To reduce corruption don't make too many cities, the game keeps corruption lower when you have upto 8 cities on a tiny map and upto 32 cities on a huge map, other maps are in between.
. Try to get your cities in We Love the Ruler mode, do this by trading for all luxuries, or increasing the luxuries rate in the domestic advisor.
. Corruption is modifiable in version 1.21f of the game through the editor in new games only.

The AI always gangs up on me.
. Beat the AI to alliances, and get some Mutual Protection Pacts (MPP) for yourself.
. Use the Foreign Advisor screen to see which A.I.s have MPP.

Read the hotkey reference in the civilopedia or manual and read readme.txt from the civilization 3 directory to access some options that can't be accessed through menus or icons, like Railroad-to (ctrl-shift-R), upgrade all (shift-U), view clean terrain (ctrl-shift-M), etc. The Civ3 Reference section also contains some excellent reference files.

My automated workers keep changing my irrigation and mines. How do I stop that?
. Press shift-A to automate them instead of A, this way they will
- won't destroy any existing improvements
- won't plant forests
- will do things like forest/jungle cutting
- will build irrigations, mines (not sure what's the decision factor but it works fairly well, as most of my major cities are around size 25-30)
- will build roads, railroads, although often without any sense(IE, they will not build railroads between cities FIRST, but rather they will build rails around one city, then around another and so on). They will build roads and rails outside your borders as well, if cities aren't connected.
- will clean pollution (it's their priority task)
- will connect any resources to existing road/railroad network as soon as they are discovered and inside your borders(that's great IMO, you don't have to bother with map scanning)
- will generally avoid contact with any enemy forces(if auto worker sees enemy unit they will turn back)

How exactly do you "heal" your troops?
. Whenever a unit stands still for a hole Turn, he will heal. If he is in a city WITH the Barracks, he will heal completely, but if the troop is healing in the field he will heal one point. Your unit can't heal in enemy territory, without the Battlefield medicine.

How do I destroy an enemy Colony?
. You just walk over it with an unit. Or build a city near the enemy colony.

Can I rush the production of a Wonder with an Army?
. No, only with a Leader, which is the unit you build armies with.

After I build a Solar Plant I notice no difference in Production.
. That's because you have another Power Plant that already produces 50% production. The positive thing with Solar Plant is that it doesn't produce any Polution.

How many Golden Ages can I have throughout the game?
. One, and it lasts 20 turns.

What does the yellow dot next to a leader mean in the foreign advisor screen?
. It means you have an embassy with that civ.

Is there any way to change the year the game ends?
. For this you'll need to use one of the player-created save game editors.


Bugs &Technical Questions

Miscellaneous game-doesn't-start-problems.
. Unload all programs running in the background by rightclicking and closing all the icons near the clock and use ctrl-alt-del to stop other unused programs.
. Update mother board, video card and/or sound card drivers.

I get a divide by zero error in the game.
. If you have over 255 fonts this can occur, reduce your fonts to less than 255.

The text in the game is exceptionally large and doesn't fit in dialog boxes.
. Try removing the Lucida Sans font from your windows\fonts directory.

The screen goes black or says Out of sync after the intro video.
. This is caused because you don't have the right driver installed for your monitor, find it and install it. If you're unable to do this you can find more difficult solutions on the problems forum.

Scrolling is terribly slow and I'm using a NVidia video card and Windows 2000 or XP.
. Either change your driver to the windows default one or put hardware acceleration down to one notch from the lowest in the windows advanced display properties, however this will cause the next problem mentioned.

The screen goes black after the splash screen and doesn't do anything anymore.
. The intro video can't be played. Delete or rename the movie files, they are in your Civ3 directory below Art\Movies\

The splash screen shows and the game stops or gives an error in ~DF394B.TMP
. This is an error in the copy protection, try running the game with a different cdrom drive or remove the Safedisc copyprotection (this is illegal in USA and some other countries though). Contact Infogrames through their technical support and they can give you a legal copy of the .exe file without the Safedisc protect if you prove that you purchased the game.

My foreign advisor shows too few enemy faces.
. In your previous game you played with less enemies, a possible solution seems to be to delete the savegames from your previous game.
. If you play with more than 7 enemies you have to shift-rightclick on faces to change to one of the others.

I tried changing the resolution as written in the readme.txt, but it doesn't work?
. You can only change the resolution by setting KeepRes=1 and changing your desktop resolution.

Patch 1.21f civ3mod.bic changes from 1.17 compiled by ColdFever with supplemental information from Nero Would.





[Original Post] before being modified by PaleHorse76 to add the above information. :

- Upgrading all my units is a pain in the ***!
. When on of your units is selected press shift-U instead of U and all the units of the same type that can be upgraded will be upgraded. (Must be in cities, resources must be available, gold must be available)

Click to expand...

The City must contain a barrack also...

Thank you Meneer Popken. your post is a good resource. I have toped this thread for the time being.

Okay, this is clear,

.. but what does the small anchor mean???
some of my cities show a small black anchor,
just above the size-number and left of the city-name.

i can´t find out what this indicates. Any comments anybody?

Originally posted by Meneer Popken

- What do the numbers by my cities mean?
. The large number on the left shows the size of the city (red if the city is decreasing in size, yellow if it stays the same, white if it's growing
. The top number indicates how many turns are left before the city will grow.
. The bottom number indicates how many turns are left before the current building or unit is built.

Click to expand...

but what does the small anchor mean?

Click to expand...

The anchor indicates a harbor.

- I get a devide by zero error in the game.
. If you have over 255 fonts this will occur, reduce your fonts to less than 255.

Click to expand...

Apparently not a universal bug. We have over 500 fonts installed and have no problems. We use Windows 98. Bug might apply to 2000 and XP?

How do you cancel a bombardment?

Right-click on the unit that you had selected. The bombardment grid will disappear.

Originally posted by Meneer Popken
- Coastal Fortresses don't work.

Click to expand...

Is this universal or are they supposed to work some way I'm not seeing? I mean, in my current game, a destroyer moved past my coastal fortress equipped city and the city shot at it and did some damage. I assumed this was what a coastal fortress did. So, is it working for me? Did I see something else and think it was the fortress?

Hi there,
Just to make sure the espionage statement in the FAQ is clear, to plant a spy in another civ, click on the pentagon icon next to your city with the intelligence agency. If you successfully plant a spy, click on the pentagon in that enemy's capital for a list of advanced missions and also the older missions (investigate cities and steal technology. There also seems to be a bug in that if you get caught trying to find a mole in your city, it kicks you back to the main spy menu where you can do further espionage even though you were exposed. After you leave the menu, you then lose your spy.

JAG

Thanks, Meneer, that looks useful. I'm expecting to get my copy of the game any day now...

Someone has posted in another thread that We Love the Day is a useful way of reducing corruption.

Terrified: I did not verify everything myself, allthough I did with most of it, but the coastal fortress thing I put in because I saw two people complain it didn't work... I assumed it would be broken then, in my games enemies have never dared to sail past my coastal fortresses

Hi
Are ZOC (Zone of Control) broken for the fortress? or is it just me?

It seems when i was trying to choke at where mexico connects to south america, (Earth Standard) the AI can still walk past my fortress.

I then built a whole series of fortresses, however, it felt that my defenders did not really have an advantage. Are fortresses broken in general?

I am fuzzy on a few things... haven't had time to test/figure out... my time on Civ 3 has been limited...

The Build Road and Irrigation "to" hot key commands can you explain how to make these work?

Is it a good idea to automate workers? I have a lot of workers (but because they are of foreign nationality, more like slaves).

Does the city being filled with foreign citizens increase corruption? Should I try to water down the gene pool with my citizens?

Do I need to update my map by trading world maps after I have discovered a new technology, to determine whether or not the resource associated with this technology is located near me in another civilization (soon to be an enemy if he/she has it).

In my game I discovered Gunpowder before the other civs and I scanned the known world for saltpeter. Now saltpeter is hard to see anyway but I didn't find it until much later when I enetered in to a trade agreement with Babylon and saw he had saltpeter to offer, then I found it on his map. Does the owner of the territory have to advance to the technology and discover the resources himself before you can see it? or am I blind and just missed it. It cost me many turns where I could have had Musketmen producing.

I would imagine that coastal fortresses apply to seafaring vessels only, and not land units, just as in RL.

Crushslider

Build road to is Ctrl + R, the end square must be a valid square for roadbuilding (ie. not a city square or ocean square). Then the settler is off on its own.

Build irrigation to I think only works towards a city, and the nearest one at that. Personally I don't ever use this command, a good deal of the time its better to mine than irrigate. Remember you need fresh water (a lake or a river) to commence irrigation from.

Automated workers will replace existing improvements with what they fell is better. This can be annoying if they are automated near your production cities...they tend to focus more on city growth than production.

Cities with foreigners are more prone to corruption, but mainly because they generally are not as happy as cities with only your population. This is especially true if you are at war with their motherland. The gene pool automatically gets watered down through time, you can speed it up by adding settlers or workers to a city (if you use workers, make sure that they are ones you made, not captured ones...captured workers will add a population point of their original nationality)

You don't need to update your map, the resources will always show once you discover the tech. As for enemies, they cannot trade it to you until they know of its existence as well...

Question....

When a new resource is available on your side, don't you HAVE to ask for updated maps to see into the other Civ's? Why do they keep ask'n me for updates then?

Also, is it correct that even if the resource IS in their territory if they have yet to reach the tech, they cannot SEE it?

Thanx.

Drew62

Nope, if you've seen a location once you'll always be able to tell if a resource pops up in that spot by looking at it again.

Maps are more useful than just resources though, they show units, town size, improvements...if you trade your territory map they show those things as your empire stands right when you trade them...if you trade your World map, it shows your territory as it stands and everything else you know as of the last time it was updated (ie everyone elses improvements as of the last time your map was updated with them). Thats why the computer asks for your map. Be warned, sometimes its just asking for your map to be able to plan an offensive.

If a resource lies in someone else's terrain you'll be able to see it, even if they don't have the tech...however, they cannot trade it to you (if they have more than 1...a prerequisite it seems) until they have the necessary technology to use it themselves.

Libertarian I don't think coastal fortresses are working as intended, regular fortresses will fire on troops that move by them...I've seen that happen once. It is a rare thing to see though, most of the time your enemy cannot (or will not) move more than one square either towards or away from the fortress. The ZOC attack only seems to work if the move by the fortress, not directly towards it or away from it.

Originally posted by Malys Faisent
Crushslider

Automated workers will replace existing improvements with what they fell is better. This can be annoying if they are automated near your production cities...they tend to focus more on city growth than production.

Click to expand...

Use the SHIFT-A key and your workers won't destroy current improvements. Works well...

ScrewWorkn

>>
Automated workers will replace existing improvements with what they fell is better. This can be annoying if they are automated near your production cities...they tend to focus more on city growth than production.
>>

Just an addition to previous poster:

Workers automated with SHIFT-A will do these things:
- won't destroy any existing improvements
- won't plant forests
- will do things like forest/jungle cutting
- will build irrigations, mines (not sure what's the decision factor but it works fairly well, as most of my major cities are around size 25-30)
- will build roads, railroads, although often without any sense(IE, they will not build railroads between cities FIRST, but rather they will build rails around one city, then around another and so on). They will build roads and rails outside your borders as well, if cities aren't connected.
- will clean pollution (it's their priority task)
- will connect any resources to existing road/railroad network as soon as they are discovered and inside your borders(that's great IMO, you don't have to bother with map scanning)
- will generally avoid contact with any enemy forces(if auto worker sees enemy unit they will turn back)

So if you have like 30 workers on a big continent, automated workers work very well. Reserve some workers for yourself so that you can build things like strategic railroad connections quickly. Worker automation will save you a headache that's for sure.

-- Leo

Here's a question:

How do you view the wonders that have been built and the top 5 cities?

MWA

Wonders are F9 I believe, perhaps F8 shows you all built and all currently in production by civs that you've met (and where too if you are planning a military campaign to stop them)

Top 5 and Demographics are F11

Bleh, I need to get some work done and stop posting on this board.

BTW thanks for the tips, Screw and Leon I might try it tonight...I'm such a micromanager that I dunno if I'd like it.