Toxicman007
Custom User Title
Ooh baby a new game! Looks like a pretty good start too, that city can churn out a lot of shields.
Nolition's CivIII Chronicle (Now Playing Game 3: Maya, Emperor)
- Thread starter Nolition
- Start date
tjs282
Stone \ Cold / Fish
Well, it can once the Jungle's all gone! Yeah, that's Jungle not Forest (look at the minimap: he's near the Equator, on a very wet map)...
IND+AGRI are (by common consent) the 2 strongest traits in the game, making the Mayans arguably one of the strongest starting tribes (apart from their Jav.-thrower UU, which kinda sux because it comes so early, costs so much, and means you can't build Archers).
But OTOH, the Jav-thrower can EnSlave. And even as an IND Civ, with that start you are gonna need
And if you find a barb-camp which cannot be accessed by another AI-Civ, don't smash it: set your Jav-thrower(s) to stand guard over it: lie in wait NW or SE for preference, so the Barbs can 'see' your unit(s) to attack them, and milk that camp for all the Slaves you can get...
Have you planted your capital already? because if not, it might be worth stepping 1 tile (e.g.) NE and Settling on the Jungle to clear it in 1 turn. That way your capital will have (at least) 3 clear Grass-tiles to work instead of only 2 (if you Settle in place), and so support Pop5, even before all that Jungle is chopped.
Spoiler :
[As the Mayans, Javs defend at D=2, so]* you don't need Spears so much/at all.
*Some vet CivIII players would argue that the part in square brackets is unnecessary...
I was thrilled to see this start, especially after the desert schtick from the previous game.
How do you check which of the random options the game gave you? I don't know how to tell how wet it is. Nevertheless, it does appear to be all forest (with the exception of the marshlands, which are plentiful).
I am not very familiar with this mechanic - but when I read about it, it seems to give you (foreign?) workers fairly reliably when you win. Is there any real disadvantage (other than them being foreign) to doing this instead of building your own?
With those being forests, I decide to remain in place and accept my lot in life.
I do begin with alphabet as an early priority, and get my worker started on building a road+mine. Irrigating is useless here (while still in despotism).
I start with building a warrior, then immediately crank out a Granary. This may have been a mistake (I still don't have a good feel for the early game) but I wanted the city's population to grow faster.
I begin scouting the path that doesn't seem to contain mountains or swamplands, and find grapes, a food resource and a production resource in my close vicinity.
There seems to be a volcano to my west, with a friendly hut having survived its explosion. Strange! This reminds me of the very first thing I did when I got this expansion as a kid: find a volcano and build a city on it, and wait many turns until it erupted and destroyed me. I seem to recall that there was some kind of glitch where if you allowed your civilization to be destroyed by a volcano it would give you a surprisingly high score.
In my scouting mission to the east, I meet my first rival: the Portuguese. They already have Alphabet and Ceremonial Burial.
I am wanting another warrior to send in the other direction, and then possibly will build a settler, followed by some defensive warriors in case of aggressive barbarians.
This was my first thought for where to settle: reasonably close to my capital (leaving no gaps) and with 3 resources in the immediate area.
Toxicman007
Custom User Title
A good spot to settle, but if I remember correctly you can't settle on marsh tiles. You'd have to clear the marsh first, and as we all know, that takes forever with just a single worker.
tjs282
Stone \ Cold / Fish
If you've gone all-Random on your map-settings, the game won't tell you directly.
But on the "Play new world" screen, the Humidity-setting governs the amount of vegetation generated (and possibly also the number of marsh/rivers/lakes, not sure). So if you've Random-rolled a heavily vegetated map, it's most likely that it's 'Wet' rather than 'Normal' (and almost certainly not 'Dry'!).
You can also see the actual map-settings in CivAssist, if you have it working: push the "World-Map" button, right-click within the map-screen, and choose "Properties".
It also occurred to me that the 'conquests.ini' file (which lives in your .../CivilizationIII/Conquests/ folder) is updated every time you start a new game, and therefore would also include the terrain-settings for the last (generated) map played. The .ini-file uses numerical values for all switches, so you'd need to know how to decipher those.
But having just located an old post which (re)lists the ini-file settings (from Mike B.'s original post), it would appear that if you chose "Random", this is what is recorded in the .ini (WorldAridity=3) -- so that's not helpful!
Oops, my mistake. In that case, I take it back: that site is a great start. Much wood. Very wow.
(My excuse, which I'm going to stick to, is that I habitually use @Sn00py's modded terrain, where Forests and Jungles are much more easily distinguished than in the default-Firaxis version!)
The probability of Enslavement is 1/3 victories by an Enslaving unit, and AFAIK it doesn't matter whether the enslaving unit is attacking or defending (unlike the probability of spawning an MGL, which is halved on defence).
So for every 100 fights you win, you can expect to Enslave around 33 Workers(Foreign).
The benefit of Workers(Foreign) is that they cost no maintenance, and therefore do not impinge on your free-unit allowance. The downside is that you need (a lot) more of them to accomplish any given task.
Spoiler Boring detail, which I probably got wrong anyway... :
Because a Slave's work is 'worth' (much) less than a native Worker's, if you have Slaves seeking new employment, one possibility is to send them out individually to road tiles which you may not need quite yet (but will soon), and which will be useful producers after improvement, but take a long time for a single Worker to improve -- such as Marsh and Jungle (and Forests/Hills, to a lesser extent). Once the tile is roaded, you can then move in an appropriately sized gang of your more efficient native IND-Workers, to do the longer job of clearing it (or mining it) in the minimum time. That way, your native Worker(-team)s do not 'lose' any of their turns just getting onto an unroaded tile.
Conversely, with Forest-tiles, it's often preferable for a (native, IND) Worker to clear the tile before roading it (preferably ensuring that the chop-shields will go into something useful/permanent -- like a Granary, hint hint!). One Slave needs 9 turns to clear a Forest (1 turn to arrive, 8 turns to chop), but an IND-Worker would (if I've done my sums right) need only 4T (1T to arrive, 3T to chop) -- and can then road the tile in another 2T.
No! That was fine. Until you have a couple of Luxes hooked, and/or Republic-level commerce, Happiness-management may be problematic, and popping out Settlers may be necessary to keep order in the early stages. But this in turn reduces your only uncorrpted source of income, so speeding up regrowth using a Gran is not at all a bad idea.
Your cap is on a River, and you're AGRI, so Despotic (re)growth will be faster than with a non-AGRI Civ -- but you have no food-bonuses in your capital's BFC, so without a Gran would still take 7 turns (assuming you can get at least +3FPT net, i.e. 2 FPT from every worked tile, and 3 FPT from your city-tile). With a Gran, you can get it down to 4 turns (and once you go to Republic, a couple of irrigated BGrass tiles will allow your cap a perfect 5 FPT, 7 SPT = 4T-Settler-pump).
That would be a great site --but not until after it's cleared. Unlike Jungle, Marsh must be cleared before it can be Settled. The upside here is that the AI is very slow to clear Marshes, so will likely not regard that tile as a viable city-site.
However, if you want a town in that area in the early game, my pick would rather be the Hill 1SW of your marked point (which has a corruption distance from your capital of 4.0, rather than 5.0). Founding on the Hill would also allow you to irrigate the SE Plains directly (giving you 2 food + 1 shield), without having to irrigate via the Grass first (which still gives only 2 food under Despotism); irrigating Plains is also faster (4 non-IND Worker turns) than mining Grass (6 non-IND Worker turns), for the same return-on-time-invested.
This is why I post! I don't know if I even knew this back when I played this game as a teenager, and I certainly did not remember it over a decade later. Thank you for pointing it out - nothing is worse than the frustration of moving a settler into position only to find out that it doesn't work.
Oh, I see how you saw that. It does very conclusively look like it's a wet map, due to the heavy burden of these marshlands.
I should look into this - I also have a ton of difficulty distinguishing.
That's the piece of the puzzle I was missing! It seemed like a fairly useless thing - to pay maintenance for a worker that is half as effective as the ones I build myself (less, actually, with the explanation you provided of worker-actions).
One of my weaknesses is a tendency to under-build workers. I'm going to have to pay attention and make sure that I don't use this industrious trait as an excuse to under-improve.
This is a convincing argument for settling there. I want to avoid the big problem of overcrowding around my capital (from the previous game) but I think that the advantages of this location outweigh the drawbacks of sharing just 2 tiles.
I hope you enjoy following along! I will try to post more frequently.
I feel like I definitely muddled through these turns. Oh, boy...
The friendly hut on top of the volcano spawned a horde of barbarians. They ended up killing the warrior that popped them.
Alphabet is finished, and so the muddle begins. I began researching Warrior Code, thinking that getting an early slaving force would be a good strategy.
I believe I have discovered the Portuguese homelands.
The settler is finished. The barbarians have set up a gathering point just beyond my territory.
My suspicions are confirmed.
It's close, but it's settled now!
Any suggestions on how to use this densely hilled territory? Also: you can see that I switched to Writing, because it leads to Republic. I strongly dislike changing research in the middle of a tech, but by this point I was thinking that Warrior Code was a definite mistake and would not help my economy. Maybe this thinking was flawed and I should have stayed the course.
I can see Madras on the map.
This doesn't surprise me. I feel like my play so far is the worst out of the three games.
I was not expecting those dyes to be hiding in the jungle. I've got my second settler ready to go, and have two different locations in mind.
This shows the southeastern region that I have explored.
Potential site A: still relatively close to capital, grabs dyes, but also has very limited economic potential for many turns due to the thick jungle. I've put another proposed city (later) on this picture.
Potential site B: Double fish, river, further from capital, too many hills for my liking.
I'm kind of feeling like I'm in a bit of an early rut - but things are far from hopeless.
tjs282
Stone \ Cold / Fish
I agree you do need a coastal town-site. Now you have Alph, you can build Curraghs, which can map out coastlines and meet new Civs -- possibly faster than your Warriors will.
But Site B is a better near-term prospect than Site A: if you want a Lux, the Wines near Copán would be much quicker to hook up than the Dyes near Site A. A short-term (or short-sighted!) solution might be to burn that (gold-mining?) Worker to build a Wines-Colony, but a better idea would be to found a 2nd-ring town(s) somewhere beyond Copán, so as to get the Wines inside your borders.
In terms of corruption-distance from Chichén, it's actually the same for both sites: count +1 going NE/SE/SW/NW, and +1.5 going N/E/S/W; both sites are at distance 6(.5). But being on a river, Site B will give you more commerce (to convert to beakers), and it will not need a Duct to get to Pop7. It also has immediate access to more flatland tiles. (Conversely, Site A will require a lot of Forest/Jungle chops to reveal the flatland -- but it has no freshwater).
That said, again, I would rather advise putting the Site B town on the Hill 1NE of your marked point, rather than on the Plains. With so much Hill-age on this map, you should found new towns on Hills wherever practical, to leave the flatland free for food-production. By doing so, you will also convert the Hill's food output from 1 FPT to 2 FPT, or (because Mayans are AGRI) even 3FPT (if on a river under Depsotism; but in all towns under another gov) -- i.e. 1-2 more citizens fed per town. With the Fish, Site B will also be relatively food-rich, so could take over Settler-building duties from Chichèn.
I would also found a town on the riverside Hill 3SE of your capital (just beyond your current borders and about halfway to Site B): this will help fill in the Cultural boundaries between these two towns without building a Temple(s), and 'Site B-tween' will give you a much lower-corruption 1st-ring town with access to the 3 BGrass tiles along the river. Since the Portuguese are still a long way from you, I would plant this 1st-ring town first (also saves 1 Worker-turn on roading to Site B!
), then the coastal Site B town later (maybe with the Settler out of Copán?).There also looks to be a potentially useful 1st-ring site 3S of Chichén Itza: the Hills just north of the Plains (2SE of the fortified Barbs in your last screenie) looks to be alongside a river as well (i.e. it will also not need a Duct, but will then be able to funnel irrigation-water to the Plains). Right-click on the tile and check the Terrain: if it tells you that the tile already gives 1 gold, then it is on the river. This town will stay small for much of the early game (if I've counted right, it can only get 10-11 FPT before rails) but is shield-rich, so could build Barracks (chop down the nearby trees to help?) and then most of your early units.
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