Culture is Key!!!

[MummyMan]

Culture is definitely one of the few key points in Civ 3. By building Libraries, Temples and other educational and religous buildings you gain culture points that are consistently added to your "culture bar" that extends your territory and ability to work that territory when filled. The target amount of culture points rises exponentially by 10. The ability to extend the amount of land a city can work is very impressive and a very big plus. I'm not sure but i think that when your territory extends into an enemy city you can take it over. This is probably the coolest added gameplay feture from Civ 2.

[Diety]

Phoe, culture is a nice concept, but pretty useless in the game.
I mean, come-on, expand the borders of your empire ???
Assimilate like what, three cities in the entire game ???
No, culture is fun on low difficululty levels, just for the consept, but on high difficulty levels it's no good : just get your cities to expand once, that's enough.

[amax]

After getting crushed a few times, I decided to go with the 'island' option of custom world. Ended up sharing an island w/the aztecs. My standard Civ2 strat is to go full military and wipe out any nearby civs, then turtle up and go for tech dominance. It had some interesting results this game. I didn't fully wipe out the Aztecs, but I did capture 2 out of 3 of their cities. I declared peace w/them, and they started building more cities. However, because I had the culture edge, what in effect ended up happening is that the aztecs would build a city, and then I would take it through culture -- in essence I have the Aztecs doing the heavy lifting of building cities while I specialize in taking them. --All the while being on good terms w/the Aztecs. Don't quite know how long this is going to go on.


One drawback so far -- iron isn't on my island. I do have a city with a harbor on another island with iron in its territory, but it isn't in my trade goods yet. I am trading with 2 other civs, but I think that I might not be seeing the iron because there is sea/ocean between my iron island and my civ, and I haven't discovered sail yet.