Recent content by Spoonwood

tjs put "useless" in quotes. I think you've missed a third function. It has a similar function to a factory in a captured city in a highly corrupt area.

Clearing out a jungle or marsh square only yields one more food. With 8 food needed to grow for a city at size 2, that means 8 turns come as needed for the city to reach size 3 when a settler can get produced after clearing has finished. The AI does stack workers before rails for jobs on...

It comes from a debug game. I'd have to check other pictures, but I don't think city investigations enable you to see surrounding units like that. They do not remove the soft shading. Fortunately, I took pictures from the 20k France game I played last year, and we have a city investigation...

The HoF has many different ways of ranking. For example, sometimes people think of improving their position in the pentathlon table. But, some less noticed ranking systems can get imagined by the statistics tables. In contrast to the main tables, the game count table suggests that having...

I've always believed that BlackBetsy is a woman, since I've taken "Betsy" as a nickname for Elizabeth. But just now I'm seeing it has also gotten used as a nickname for Bartholomew. Oh... it looks like I'm completely wrong about "Betsy" as a reference to his/her real name, since I found this...

Thanks for commenting. It's not your coastline, unless it lies within your cultural borders. Pasargade lies close to Persepolis. In addition to supporting units, it produces 4 uncorrupted beakers at size 2! It also could have coal eventually. So, long-term it's not useless, given that the...

The game as it stands motivates artillery type units. That qualifies as good game balancing, because it encourages the combined arms doctrine of rolling in artillery units, firing, then charging at the enemy. Bombers also end up more balanced if the player has a need for armies. But also, I...

Cathedrals are not bad on 80% archipelago maps for human players if Navigation/Magnetism still comes far away. They might also be alright on continents maps for a bit. Their value in comparison to acquisition of luxuries and marketplaces depends on how many luxuries one can obtain easily. I...

Good to see you still around Ruin! I had worried about you getting discouraged recently and not coming back. But, hey, you're here now!

Any civ can pop a settler from a hut on DemiGod (but not under any conditions). Oystein had useful research on that topic. Barbarians just end up probable if your civ has military units and are not expansionist. Also, you need to avoid settlers, so workers as a plant to pop huts. That said, I'm...

According to civ III combat calculator, 8 attack 4/4 units win most of the time vs. 4 defense 4/4 units in a city, almost 70% of the time when attacking 4 defense units with 3 hitpoints, and over 80% of the time if attacking 4 defense units with 2 hitpoints. Those numbers compare to 6 attack...

310 BC - We meet The Byzantines and trade them Construction for 175 gold. Feudalism gets traded for Engineering also. We gift them The Republic so that sooner rather than later we might manage to sell them technology for more gold. They do have a source of furs. 270 BC - Contact with The...

I think you have good advice here, because you suggest planning out worker moves before pillaging. Knowing how many turns it will take a worker or group of workers to road a tile can also help.

I don't understand why you would need to abandon/raze them. Why not just have them use specialists at size 7? 1 gold for an aqueduct gets offset by 2 more unit support, and thus gives you one more gold per turn potentially. A size 7 city needs 14 food per turn. Given that the city center...

You definitely have a good idea about bombarding units before you attack. For units before tanks, if they can pillage, then they have not attacked. I had to check on this, but also, if a unit cannot pillage, that unit cannot attack. I mean, I had a unit pillage a road first, and then it...