Am I doing something wrong?

CedricTheAwesom

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I just read the first part of a Civ3 guide and he said that the third thing you should build in your first city is The Pyramids. To me, he sounded nuts. In every game I've played the Pyramids take about 60-70 turns to complete and all you get is a free granary everywhere. I mean, that's nice, but I thought we were never supposed to spend more than like 30 turns on anything. Am I wrong on that?
Also, I NEVER build enough settlers. I hear people say "You need ten cities before 1000 BC!" and I'm like "Wut?" I'm lucky to build six cities for the entire game. Coincidentally, I've never won a game. But that's because I've only played two and the first time I couldn't figure out how to increase science funding until the Middle Ages. In that game I only had four cities and no room to expand.
My favorite way to win is Space Race, I think Domination takes too long. I never have enough time to build Wonders for a cultural victory. Diplomatic might be nice, but I can't figure out how to make people like me (It was pretty obvious in Civ4).
Sorry if this is too rambling, but I feel like I need to air my frustrations.
 
More cities does mean more unit support and GPT. A lack of cities can really set you back depending on the difficulty lvl you play on. But this does not mean you should just spam settlers, you do have to do tile development, and not space your cities too far apart so that it is wasting tiles and it is very difficult to move units about. Corruption can also be a problem. I do not know your habits on how far you are placing cities, but it sounds like you place them pretty far if you have no room to expand. I would suggest 2-4 tiles between each city in most cases. In Civ4 you may survive with less cities, and it is also harder to manage because of the city maintenance, but in civ3, it is almost always better to have more cities than too few.

In order to do wonders, you have to have a good production city with a good amount of population. To have good production you need to place the city among tiles with good yields, but you also have to have the workers to develop them and at sufficient speed. Also, most wonders are not necessarily that crucial, and sometimes better to just obtain them from the AI.
 
So... I should spend 60 turns on the pyramids???
I realize now I am putting my cities a bit too far apart
 
So... I should spend 60 turns on the pyramids???
I realize now I am putting my cities a bit too far apart

I never said anything about building the Pyramids... that is up to you, but you should make sure your city has some good production as 60 turns is probably unwise.
 
You should not try to build the pyramids by regular means. If you get an SGL you can build them in one turn and if AI builds them you can take them by force. As a beginner you should try to not build any wonders at all and learn the basics first. Wonders tend to be too expensive. Of course there are situations where they are worth it, but properly identifying those may exceed your skill for now. If you have unused production capabilities and are ahead of AI in technology, than using spare shields for wonders is alright.
 
ok.
What is an SGL?
You're right in the sense that I am a beginner in ability, but I've actually played over 75 hours of the various versions of Civ. I'm just really bad at it. :shake:
 
Look up the glossary of terms in the war academy, this will help. SGL = scientific great leader, which can one-turn-rush a wonder.
 
I'd avoid a "one size fits all" approach. The Pyramids are a great wonder but if you have only a few cities and plan to win a spaceship race without expanding much, or you're starting on a small land mass, it is not worth it. Also, as you pointed out such a huge investment in shields early on can cripple you.

The biggest "sin" for most conventional games is insufficient workers and inadequate tile development. The second is probably overbuilding unneeded improvements (eg libraries in corrupt cities only drain your treasury in maintenance).

If you LOVE wonders, try the OCC (one city challenge). Get a very lucky start position and build just one city and try for a cultural victory. It takes a lot of luck to avoid getting wiped out by your neighbors and some skill to trade techs enough to stay current.

Have fun!
 
I play at Regent level, and I like to go for Spaceship victories. I almost never build the Pyramids myself, but I will try to build the Colossus for the boost to my economy. A key element for me is to look, really look, at the terrain around my city. If I've got hills, then I've got a chance to mine them and have enough hammers to build a wonder there. If I've got grasslands -- and especially if I've got a river -- then I can pop out settlers and grow back quickly.
As Splunge wrote, the key to getting ahead of the AI players is to improve the terrain around your cities. Mine green, irrigate brown, and make sure you have roads between the cities. Unlike Civ4, the roads give more commerce per tile so you have an incentive to build them on each tile your city is working.
As Nathiri wrote, keep your cities about 3 spaces apart ... CxxC is my favorite. With a road, I can move a defender from one city to another in one turn, in case I get surprised. Yes, in the long term those cities may get big enough to compete for the same tiles. But for the first 100 to 150 turns, they won't be large enough and you can benefit from having all the tiles improved between them.
 
As Nathiri wrote, keep your cities about 3 spaces apart ... CxxC is my favorite. With a road, I can move a defender from one city to another in one turn, in case I get surprised. Yes, in the long term those cities may get big enough to compete for the same tiles. But for the first 100 to 150 turns, they won't be large enough and you can benefit from having all the tiles improved between them.
Just to add to that, since movement costs are the same moving across tile corners as across edges, placing towns at CxxC in the N/S/E/W direction rather than NE/SE/SW/NW, will still allow foot-units to make 1T-moves from one town to the next, while also giving all those towns at least 12 exclusive tiles to work before Sanitation. Obviously, this pattern doesn't need to be adhered to slavishly. Unbuildable terrain, or a wish to snag a bonus-resource, avoid founding on a food-bonus, or settle next to freshwater (etc.), may prevent you from founding your cities in a completely regular 'grid' pattern, but aiming for at least semi-regular CxxC corner-to-corner placement gives you flexibility for the whole game.

Because of the 'big fat cross' (BFC)-overlap, you have more possibilities to shift your citizens round, or shift tile-usage between adjacent cities, for optimised food/shield outputs. And some of those towns -- especially the coastal towns, which will have fewer neighbours and hence less BFC-overlap -- will then easily be able to get to Pop16-18 with Hospitals later (if you choose to do so).

Cons:

As with so-called Optimal City Placement (OCP), where towns are placed CxxxxC to have zero tile-overlap (i.e. what the AI usually tries to do), some tiles will be eternally unworkable (i.e. no need to improve them, beyond maybe a road) under this CxxC spacing, but not nearly so many. An 'ideal' perfectly spaced 3 x 3 OCP grid leaves 4 unworkable (corner) tiles per town, i.e. 16 internal tiles of the 205 tiles enclosed by the 9 BFCs; conversely, 9 CxxC'd towns leaves only 4 unworkable tiles out of 169 BFC-enclosed tiles (if I counted right).

(Technically, yes, unworkable tile-numbers are actually much higher over the course of a long game, since you can only ever use 12/20 BFC-tiles per town simultaneously before Sanitation -- but CxxC corner-to-corner still mitigates this much better than CxxxxC does).
 
wow... you people are amazing.
I never think about cities or anything that way. I just look for a good combination of food and shields.
 
wow... you people are amazing.
I never think about cities or anything that way. I just look for a good combination of food and shields.
Yeah, when I was a kid I always played for just a couple spread-out cities at a time too. I'm only just now starting to see the appeal of the Rapid Early Expansion that all of the articles always talk about, and that's embarrassing because

Spoiler :
my old favorite civilization to play as a Culture/Wonder builder was always the Mayans.

Agricultural gave my cities more population once I got out of Despotism, Industrial and a Special Unit with the "Enslave" ability meant that fewer of my cities' people had to serve as Workers, and the Special Unit itself meant that I started the game just one tech away from a unit that required no resources to be good on both the offense and the defense: this is a nation tailored specifically to dominate in the REX phase, and I always squandered that by never pedaling my Settler production to the metal.

I haven't had the time yet to start playing actual games again (stupid real life :mad: ), but when I do I will definitely start experimenting with new play-styles.


Would you like me to PM you a link to a Civ3 Youtube series I just discovered earlier this week? I'd thought reading the articles on this site for years was eye-opening enough, but watching a game play out in recorded real-time, seeing him make decisions I wouldn't have, but then hearing him explain his decisions and then watching how well they worked, was a completely different experience than just reading about it :p
 
Thanks for all the responses guys.
Simpson17866, thanks but no thanks on the video series. I don't really do youtube series that much.
 
Simpson could you post it here anyways? I'd be interested and I'm sure if someone stumbles on the thread in the future it would be nice :)
 
Simpson could you post it here anyways? I'd be interested and I'm sure if someone stumbles on the thread in the future it would be nice :)
Oh, OK. The guy plays France on a Pangaea map, the episodes are about 15 minutes each (I've gotten through about the first 30), and the first one is right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUJwDWpy4wY.

Warning: This is not a link to the actual Civilization game.
This is just a recording of a game that somebody else has already played, and the buttons that you will see on your screen do not actually do anything anymore (except for pause the video) :p

I haven't even played a game in years, and I still had to remind my muscle memory not to try clicking on anything :lol: Even when it wasn't in full-screen and I could see all the Youtube banners (comments, likes/dislikes, recommended videos...)

Spoiler :
I actually got a few episodes into another series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCQDeEn7DM8) before finding this one, but it was so physically painful watching the other guy play as England, on an Archipelago map, and not do anything remotely seafaring whatsoever.

And complain that he refuses to build cathedrals or the Knights Templar in the game because he's not religious in real life. Like my not being a nose-pierced industrial farmer named Smoke Jaguar in real life means I can't play as the Mayans in the game?

I mean, sure, it would've been OK if he'd described it as a self-imposed challenge "I'm going to see how well I can run a 100% non-religious game," the first civilization I ever played, period, on Civ3 Vanilla as a 9 year old graduating from Civ2 for the first time was the Babylonians because I thought of myself as a Scientific and Religious person.

It just got so annoying for him to keep saying that he couldn't do it in the game because he wasn't like that in real life. Isn't the stereotype supposed to be that it's religious people who say "It's against my religion to indulge in certain types of art and fiction"?
 
LOL no worries, I listen to a lot of podcasts and let's plays when I'm in my workshop so it's nice to have one for Civ III. Thanks!
 
If you want to see a funny video, look up on youtube hitler playing civ III.
 
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