Looking for a copy of Crackers Opening Plays & KayEss's Worker Moves

[rleuchs]

Completely new to Civ series as of two weeks ago, and having a blast with C3C. I honestly don't know where I have been for the past 20 years, but I should have been playing this game!

In reading through the forums and articles, I have seen countless references to Cracker's "Improving Your Opening Plays" article/website and would very much like to read it (several times in fact!). Holding my own on Monarch level so far with an initial intro from a friend who is a casual C3C player, but I would love to dive into the minutiae of worker efficiency and city/empire management to move up levels eventually.

However, throughout all the forums and articles, the numerous links to Cracker's site are invalid as the webpage is down. Does anyone out there have a downloaded/saved copy? or any ideas on where i can find that information?

Very similarly, I would love to read or get a copy of KayEss's "Worker Moves" PDF as that file is no longer attached in the War Academy.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated, and I am sorry for being 20 years late to the party.

-Rich

 

[tjs282]

Someone posted about this in Site Feedback a couple of months back. Petek (Moderator) located this link, in the Wayback Machine

https://web.archive.org/web/2004122...cs.com/doc/civ3/cracker/civ3_starts/index.htm

It might be a good idea to copy all the pages to your local disk...

 

[rleuchs]

Perfect, thanks a lot. My productivity at work today just went way down ...

 

[tjs282]

Perfect, thanks a lot. My productivity at work today just went way down ...

You're very welcome

Spoiler Shameless self-promotion :

If you're looking for something else to distract you, me and some CFC-cronies of various levels of competence (Monarch- to Deity-level) are in the last stages of an Emperor-level 'succession game' (SG) as the Vikings ("Going on the Pill-age"; linked in my signature).

We're currently at Turn 140 or so (IIRC), but for every one of the preceding 10-turn sets, there's some quite detailed discussion about what each player on the team will/should be doing -- and more to the point, why. Screenshots and information re. game-mechanics abound. You're also welcome to DL the various savegames (to your home computer of course ), to see our progress/ have a go at following along yourself.

 

[rleuchs]

will definately check that out, and DL some saves when I get home. Been meaning to try the Vikings soon anyway, as I wanted to see the pros of the seafaring trait, and the berserkers just look fun to play throughout the middle ages

 

[rleuchs]

tjs - do you happen to know where can i find C'Bob's article about CivAssist II? You mention it in your "Going on the Pill-age" SG thread early on and I am intrigued to know more about the program, features, how it works, etc.

Downloaded it to install later, but all I can find in searching forums are mainly about install and software errors, which will likely be useful when i try to install it. I run Windows 10 and am not a programmer by any means, but looking through the posts I think I can get it to work, and it sounds like it is well worth it.

 

[tjs282]

tjs - do you happen to know where can i find C'Bob's article about CivAssist II? You mention it in your "Going on the Pill-age" SG thread early on and I am intrigued to know more about the program, features, how it works, etc.

C-Bob's article is about playing in an SG, not CivAssist: I can see why you might have misunderstood that from the context though -- my lazy writing, sorry.

CAII's pretty self-explanatory, though -- provided you can get it to install and run properly under Win10, anyway! You'll probably need to give it Admin-rights, and I would advise installing it -- and CivIII for that matter -- in a location not subject to VirtualStorage (which tends to cause all sorts of problems, not only for CAII, but for just about any software which was originally released prior to WinVista). Once you've installed it, you can start CAII at any time before or during a game, and it will then start automatically updating itself every time a new game is loaded, or the current game is (auto)saved (the game-engine generates a new autosave -- overwriting the oldest -- at the end of every interturn).

The specific features of CAII that I find most useful are the (current and potential) Trades-screens and the 'Alerts' box. The former will inform you of new potential trades (Luxes, resources, techs -- buying and selling), who's got lots of gold, and how long any 20T-deal has still to run. The latter will give all that trade-info (albeit in a less parse-able format), but also much more. e.g. You can set it to warn you when a city is about to grow, or riot (due to growth), or starve, or when a building- or a research-project is going to massively overrun, allowing you to minimise disruptions/ wastage (e.g. by adjusting your slider-settings, and/or re-assigning citizens) across your entire empire. And it will also tell you when an enemy unit(s) has arrived on your territory (which can save you from losing your Workers -- or worse, an unguarded city), or when an enemy has finally had enough of you beating them up (or vice versa, if you've been unlucky!).

Apart from that, CAII's Map-function is very useful for planning where you want to place your (permanent) cities, although on my machine I've found that it's better to do this ahead of time, while the game itself is offline, since otherwise the CAII-map is very slow to load and update itself. I don't know exactly how it does it, but it will also associate any such town-plans with a specific (set of?) savegame(s?), so even if you have several different games-in-progress simultaneously (as I frequently do), CAII will remember which town-plan goes with each map from one play-session to the next.

All in all, it's a great little app -- and for non-geniuses such as myself, almost essential for efficient play at any level beyond Emperor.

 

[rleuchs]

Sounds like a very useful app ... already in my first few games i lost a worker in one game, and then an undefended city in a later game because i didnt see the enemy arrive in my territory (learned that lesson fast but this will save me some time scouring the board). Also can't tell you how many times I plan out a few city locations, and then some turns later when i have settlers already on the way and about to send another off i have to ask myself "which tile(s) did i send those guys to? which tile was the one i earmarked for this settler to go to?" and have to figure it all out again. On the plus side its giving me more practice in city placement, but this will be better.

I will try to reinstall C3C in a non-virtual storage location (outside of Program Filesx86 right?) along with CAII. I think i saw some posts that the fact that I have the game via steam will affect or prevent the placement outside of the programfilesx86 folder? I saw some threads on this in the forums, will review them more thorughly than i did at lunch.

Thanks again for all your help. I'm 10 pages into your Pillage SG and been following the discussion so far pretty well and debating the strategies you comtemplate in my own head. Interested to see how it works out for you guys. Gotta go battle the Babylonians and French now ...

 

[Zorrukk]

If you're able to get CAII working plz post how you managed that. I'm running windows 10 and run CAII as Admin.

This is my save game path C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\Civilization III Complete\Conquests\Saves and the only saves I can get to work are COTM 4000 BC saves

 

[tjs282]

If you're able to get CAII working plz post how you managed that. I'm running windows 10 and run CAII as Admin.

This is my save game path C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\Civilization III Complete\Conquests\Saves and the only saves I can get to work are COTM 4000 BC saves

The bold bit is likely your problem. This location on your HDD is privileged, and therefore Win10 may be VirtualStoring anything you try to write to it. If so, CAII might not actually know where to find your saves. You might want to consider un-installing CivIII (and possibly your other GoG-titles, especially those that were originally released prior to WinVista) from that location, and then re-installing them in a non-privileged location such as C:\GOG Galaxy\Games\Civilization III Complete\

My C-drive is an SSD, so I didn't want to be constantly writing to and deleting files from it (such as savegames). I therefore have all my games (including CivIII and CAII) installed on my secondary HDD, in D:\Games\ (my GoG games are installed in D:\Games\GoG\), and I have had no (VirtualStore) problems running any of them under Win8.1. Admittedly, they probably don't load up as fast as they might from the SSD, but most of them are >10 years old (I have very little interest in playing brand-new triple-A titles) and thus relatively undemanding for my system, so the 'delay' is still fairly minimal, and doesn't really bother me.

 

[Zorrukk]

I will give that a shot when I get the COTM finished.

Thanks for the suggestion.