Luxuries = WLTK! First Game Notes

[Peteus]

My first game (at the second-lowest difficulty) has been pretty sweet! The best thing I have going for me circa 1200AD is a set of five different luxuries. Two I found on my home continent, and three I traded for via ports (for three of my luxuries and 200 gold).

I picked up those three luxuries fairly recently, and suddenly all of my cities went into We Love The King celebration! A little investigation revealed something unexpected...it seems that extra lux provide an increasing benefit! That is, the city screens in all my connected cities look like this:
Furs
Spice
Wine
Incense
Silk
...as a result, all of those cities have 9 happy citizens, from 5 luxuries! Makes for a lot of WLTK days!

One thing that's going poorly for me this game is that I missed Republic! I moved on to the Middle Ages before I had researched it - I was having so much fun grabbing everything else up! I'm not sure what triggered the move though?

I played the Chinese, and had a sweet Golden Age triggered when my Chinese Riders got their first kill! The timing was very nice, and allowed me to bulk up on Aqueducts, Cathedrals, Universities, and a couple of Wonders!

My starting spot was hampered by the unplanned-for fact that you can't irrigate with ocean water! (Until electricity, I gather.) You can irrigate around rivers and inland lakes though - and cities beside "fresh water" don't need an aqueduct! But all of your other cities need aqueducts to grow past size 6 now!

Wow...it's a lot to keep up with. The learning curve isn't that steep though, because the play goes much like it did before.

Wheee! It's like Christmas day!

 

[Cunobelin Of Hippo]

Wow, those luxuries sound powerful...9 happy citizens? You'll never have to worry about hapiness again. Sell the temples!

Who did your rider attack?

 

[Peteus]

I think he attacked that Zulu city that was whittling me down with piles of spearmen.

 

[Vinc]

Great news!! CivIII seems as good as we thought it would be

Can't wait to get it!!

 

[chrisk01_uk]

I'm not sure how I'll like the 'age-advancement' thing; *why* can't you develop Republic in the middle ages, or Amphibious Warfare in modern times?

I liked the way civ2 let you have an industrial civ without (say) Feudalism.

 

[The diplomat]

What does the WLTKD do exactly in civ3? it does not give a pop boom anymore, if I remember right.

 

[RobKid]

You can still research Republic. I think there are navigation buttons on the bottom of the tech tree to go back to select a tech from a previous age to research, and I'm assuming it would still be on the drop down on the research complete dialog.

 

[Peteus]

Somehow I ended up getting The Republic - I don't even know how! I have noticed that depending on what you do, your advisors sometimes make production/research decisions for you without consulting. That can be annoying - especially when they decide to throw away hundreds of shields worth of Wonder production and switch to a Granery! (The French completed the Pyramids one turn before me)
I may have been given the Republic for some other reason though.

Back to the Luxuries - I figured out why some of my cities were getting the escalating rewards I described above, while others were only getting 1 happiness per luxury type. Marketplaces!

Oh, and someone asked what the WLTK days do - it seems like they reduce corruption somewhat, and "make your city more resistant to subversion." I haven't tried subverting yet - it sounds like fun though!
Corruption is a very big deal - off-continent cities not all that far from my palace had about 98% waste in Monarchy, which makes it pretty hard to build improvements! Quelling the revolting citizens after I captured a couple of big Zulu cities was quite difficult, but I was eventually able to get them into WLTK day status with my luxury resources.

 

[zandar]

Strategic resources are vital for units, and Luxury resources are vital for keeping your cities happy. Again, Civ III is looking more and more like a resource war game: Those who have them will win. Those who lack resources will lose, because unlike tech, money, culture or trade roads, there's NO WAY to "create" resources, you either have them or don't. All the tech and culture and advanced government in the world means jack if you don't have the resources to make units or the resources to keep your people happy. Be prepared to trade them or take them by force.

 

[chrisk01_uk]

Something that the tech tree (as posted on CivFanatics) lacks IMHO is industrial/modern social advances. Of 'modern' the only remotely social advance is Ecology; Industrial only has Nationalism, Communism and the Corporation (ans scientific method - very welcome). Democracy and Economics are *medieval*.

What about trade unions? the idea of a 'welfare state'? Conscription (Ok, dealt with in the forced labour rules)? Imperialism? An advance to represent the idea that bombing civilians is a good way to win a war? Or any of the political changes that happened to 'democracies' between now and the middle ages? Television?

One of the good things about Civ techs is that they model social as well as technological innovation; shame they've cut that back a bit.

Chris

 

[chrisk01_uk]

sorry, I'm complaining already. Slaps hand.

 

[Devout]

For clarification, I believe it works as follows:

Assuming that your resources and your cities are all connected to your capital by roads, each city will show 1 happy person for each luxery resource you have. If the city has a marketplace, you get additional benefits. The first 2 luxery resources provide +1 happy people each, but the next two resources provide +2 happy people each, and the next 2 provide +3 happy people.

So five luxery resources at a marketplace provide:
+1 +1 +2 +2 +3 = +9

And 5 luxery reosurces at a city w/o a marketplace provide:
+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 = +5

I'm afraid that people may read the above post and think that spices are 3 times better then furs. Thats not true. It doesn't matter which luxery resources you have, only the quantity.

I have only played for a few hours so I could be wrong...

 

[Dearmad]

I think you're right Devout- that's what I've experienced in my game...

 

[Peteus]

No, you're quite right! And it keeps on escalating too! I had 1+1+2+2+3+3+4 at one point I think (not sure if I actually had 7 different Lux - there may only be 6 luxury items available). In any case, +12 happy people in all of my cities provided quite a boon!

Of course, soon after that point AI started cancelling all of our Lux for Lux trade routes, for no good reason but to extort another "signing bonus" from me. After 20 turns, he can cancel a trade route without penalty, so remember that when making trades!! If you trade your maps for spices, remember that you will only be getting those luxuries for 20 turns, pretty much guaranteed. Of course, he gets to keep your maps...

I'm on to him now though - where I used to trade wine for ivory and throw in 100 gold to convince him to make the trade, now I add +4 gold per turn instead! That should make him think twice about cancelling the deal, when he knows it's going to cost him some steady income.

Another related tidbit - gone is the pattern of bonus resources, which left sweet city-building spots in the middle of 4 specials. Now it's common to have four luxury resources side by each in a cluster instead. My first ever city had four mountains with Wine in its radius to the north. Would have been a great SSC until I realised that I couldn't irrigate the plains from the sea!

I discovered that the squares a city can work aren't necessarily just the ones within it's culture bubble (i.e 1 radius for a new city), but rather any squares within your Civ's borders. That means that a new city can sometimes work squares that are in another city's bubble! (Within its normal city limits of 2 radius, of course.)

 

[LoneWolf5050]

There are eight total luxuries in the game, and with access to all eight (hard to do, gotta trade with everyone most likely) and a marketplace, a city will have 1+1+2+2+3+3+4+4 happy faces, making 20 content citizens happy.

Note, you still have to have temples and cathedrals and so on, to make your unhappy citizens content, so the luxuries can work their magic.

This is a crucial part of the game. If you don't have a lot of happy people, preferrably WLTK days everywhere too, then corruption will kill a far flung empire.

--LW

 

[beorhtwulf]

Actually, I think the luxury resources will also convert unhappy citizens to content ones, if there are no content ones to make happy.

But you still need those temples and such to expand your culture, and cathedrals don't get renegotiated after 20 turns. And even one unhappy citizen kills WLTKD, which is _essential_ to keeping corruption under control.

Now how early can I get away from work and back to Civ...?

 

[Peteus]

The manual and Civilopedia state that luxuries only work on content citizens. Not that there aren't plenty of errata to be found - I haven't proven all of the ins and outs of happiness to my satisfaction yet.