Let's Play Civiliation III

Depends on what the "target audience" is. For showing a "feel" of the game and getting some newbees hooked to our noble game it's very nice. However, in terms of game strategy it is of not much help to the beginner. I think it is important for a beginner who's trying to learn the game, to get a good grasp of the following basics:

  • Early worker management. This is the most important ingredient for a successful game, but in your video it is basically non-existent: workers wasting lots of time running back and forth. E.g. at one point a barbarian showed up next to a worker. You sent that worker back into town (aborting what it was currently doing) and right afterwards you sent a warrior out and killed the barbarian. So the worker could just have stayed where it was... It was never in any danger... :D That way you lost about 3-4 worker turns: 1 for moving into the town, 1 for moving back on the square and 1-2 turns that had already been put into building a road on that square (the effort gets lost when aborting a worker job). Also you build roads and nothing but roads, even on squares that are not even worked by the town! Instead you should have built a few mines on the tiles that do get worked by the town. This would have doubled your shield-output by around 1000BC compared to what you had at the time. (Meaning: you could have had twice as much of everything.)
  • You run 100% science all the time. This wastes a lot of gold: usually you can lower the science slider to something like 50-60% on the last turn of a tech. The tech will complete nevertheless on the follwing turn, but you earn like 20-30 extra gold on that turn...
  • Also happiness management is a problem: never use a clown and let your capitol starve. Just lower science to 90% and raise the lux tax to 10%, that'll deal with happiness as well and you don't have a non-productive citizen, but one who's producing additional food, shields and commerce!
  • Don't walk a settler from one end of the empire to the other end and have him found a town like 15 turns later... A settler should found a new town asap, meaning at most 2-3 turns after it was created. Just imagine how much food, production and commerce you lost, while that settler was taking a 15-turn hike through the country-side... So that means: plan ahead where you want to settle towns and where&when the corresponding settler should best be produced. (And coordinate the worker tasks in such a way, that ideally a road is already in place for that settler.)

If we could have some of these basics in the videos, it would make the learning curve of a beginner much more steep. As a suggestion: perhaps you could look up some of the articles in the "Introductory" and "Empire Management" sections of the War Academy, and try to incorporate those lessons in the instructive video?! (Of course I realize that trying to teach the finer points of e.g. cracker's opening manual in a 25min video is impossible. It takes a couple of evenings to read and digest all that material. But it should be possible to mention some of the basics and provide links to the source for those students who want to continue learning the game after they watched the video?! :think:)
 
Well, the intention of the video is not to be a tutorial of any kind. I have been working my way through the Civs in order (1 & 2 are done so far). So really it's more of a "this is what's different" kind of video. I'm sure my strategy is quite lacking, it's been over 10 years since I last played Civ3 for one thing.
I do appreciate the advice though, I'll definitely check out the War Academy, it will come in handy for the later videos I bet.
 
Top Bottom