Recent content by SJ Frank

you can re-negociate the peace treaty with someone to leave Mobilization. - press F8 to goto the score's window, and identify the AI with the lowest score. We're going to re-negociate peace with this civ. There is a cost associated with re-negociating peace, and it has to do with the...

From my experience (read: it's not a scientific study :) ), I think AI attacks has more to do with their specific target than the over all strength of the two civs. In other word, if you don't look at an AI war declarition in terms of an attack on your entire civ, but as an attack on a single...

Which cities you attack should depend on the goal of your war. If your goal is to acquire useful territory for yourself, then you should attack those cities that are closer to you, since the further away cities will have too much corruption to be useful. If your goal is to hurt the enemy, then...

How much army is enough in this case? Well, since you're attacking the capital, the best way to find out is to establish an embassy right before you attack. It's a little trick that can save you a lot of grief. In general though, if you're using archers as the main force of your attack, you'll...

All the comments regarding specializing cities, that refers to the expansion phase only. After the expansion phase, most cities will pretty much look the same. While there isn't one build order that will always work, there are a few rule that are almost always true: 1) Commerce buildings...

I hope by "offensive flipping", you mean propaganda attempts. Courthouse increases your defense against enemy propagandas, but does not help against culture flipping. On the other hand, having a large garrison does NOT help against propaganda, but does help against culture flipping. Also...

Another problem with building roads ahead of settlers is that, your workers end up near the more corrupt cities, and far away from your best cities. I find it much better to build a worker immediately from each new city, and have the new worker road his way in. This way, by the time the...

If you're not using bombardment, then it's like you're not using your cannons at all. Just imagine that ship-to-ship combat is actully the sailors boarding each other's ships and duking it out -- in fact, the attack vs. defense odds of this era of naval combat seem to reflect this. The attack...

Expansionsist is a good high level trait, because it benefits trading. Since most lower level players don't trade much, they don't see this part of the benefit. There are two rules with regard to trading and contacts: 1) techs become cheaper to buy or to research as more civ that you know...

First of all, [party] Welcome to CivFanatics [party] About your tips, I think everything else is good except for the first one -- the expansion tips. You're still using Civ2 style of expansion, and it doesn't work nearly as well in Civ3. There are 3 major changes in Civ3's early game...

I still don't think that building no spears is the right strategy for this situaion. Sure, you could be buliding swords instead of spear, but how many swords did you lose to enemy counter attacks? And how would you like to lose spears instead of swords? Spears cost only 20 shields, while...

I think a better way to say it is, "most games don't have to get to the Modern Ages". If you want to, you can stop your conquest at any point and drag the game out to as late as you like. Believe it or not, some of us do like to play "the other half of the game" ;) @homeyg In my...

I think in this case, you won the war dispite not building defenders, instead of because of not building defenders. You could have done much better had you turned those "waiting-for-upgrade" warriors into 3 or 4 spear. That's because you had a stacks consisting of mostly swords and cats. With...

To establish an embassy, you can either double-click on the star next to your capital, or click on the little 'E' button on the lower right corner of the screen. Then the next time your open negociations with the AI, the option to sign alliance will be there. I believe you need spies in order...

A few mistakes that I spot: 1) Communism was changed in Conquest to make it a good government. In Civ3 and PTW, it is the worst government in the game! 2) By delaying the FP until now, you have missed out on its benefit for most of the game. I would say that you lost more than what you...