CommandoBob
AbstractArt
I hope!
I want to play Civ III well. For some time I have been deliberately playing on Chieftain not only to learn the basics but to become acquainted with how to play Civ III in an advanced/smarter/better manner.
I plan to explain the key components of what I have learned on Chieftain that I think will make me a better player at higher levels.
The Four Part Turn
Each turn has four parts. They are Planning, Building, Warring and Managing. Each appears to have a big idea and smaller discreet tasks associated with it. And of course they are all intertwined and woven together and if you adjust one you adjust the other.
Planning to Fail or Failing to Plan?
Biggest idea: How do I plan to win? And what do I need to do to get there? Conquest, cultural, colonize Alpha Centauri or just survive until 2050?
Factors: Map size and the map itself. Starting position. Neighbors and how close they are. And what civ I am and the traits and UU that it has. (I tend to play with my civ set to random and not to have historical neighbors. To get a random map size, I roll a six sided die; 1 = Tiny, 5 = Pangea. If I roll a six I roll again.)
Variants: A variant is a set of conditions you will play a game with. Self restricting conditions, usually. Common ones are Always War, Oscillating War, One City Challenge and more. (See Arathorns Comprehensive Guide to Variants for a much fuller treatise on variants.) Selecting a variant forces you to play a certain way for a specific goal.
Succession Games (where several people take rotating groups of turns, usually twenty turns at a time, to play a game) are almost always some variant. Their start up description tells what size world, the land mass, the age, player levels, victory conditions, and their special conditions. Many times the Civ is pre-selected and so may be the other Civs. Depending on the game creator, there may be a choice of starting positions. (See Pggars What is a Succession Game for more.) If you are unsure of what a variant looks like examine the starting posts of the Succession Games.
The beauty of the Succession Games is four fold. One, since there are several players, there is a built in learning time of new tactics and strategies. Two, with other people continuing the game where you left off, you tend to pay more attention to what is going on than in a solo game. (You do not want your game playing buddies to think poorly of your efforts on their behalf.) Third, since you only have a few turns at a time, you are forced to plan your moves in advance. And fourth, since you document your activities each turn, you become more aware of what you are doing each turn.
The ugliness of the Succession Game is that it is not a really a fitting place for a Chieftain player. Training games do exist, but most games are played at the Emperor or Monarch levels.
Succession Games are a great place to lurk and see how other people play the game.
The key is to have a plan. It does not have to be set in stone and it may be rather short range. It can change from turn to turn. Whatever it is, it is better than no plan at all. And at Chieftain, it is far too easy not to plan since the AI does not force you to plan.
Early in the game the plan is to
Once you have a good set of core cities (five to twenty, depending) you can begin to make plans on how to reach your victory condition.
Many of the plans are short range: where to put the next city; what tile to improve; where to attack or defend. Others are longer and broader: planning to capture three cities in less than ten turns and then sue for peace and a tech; garrisoning the border to prevent the wandering AI; adding marketplaces to your core cities.
It helps to write the plan down on paper; do not just keep it in your head. The plan you create is to be your guide, not your straitjacket.
In order to plan well, you must know what your neighbors are up to. If they have a tech you want, you need to know what it will cost to get it. And whether you want to buy it or research it. Knowing what techs they have and do not have gives you a clue as to what to research next and sell/trade to them. (For a real world example of how productive dealing with the AI can be, read Trading Tips for Beginners by Bamspeedy.)
With even minimum research, say two beakers of research a turn, the longest it takes to learn a new technology is forty turns. The shortest research is four turns, no matter how many beakers of science you are generating a turn.
You can safely ignore their little snotty remarks about how busy they are, etc. The key is how they respond to you (Polite, Cautious, etc). These settings are only affected by things you do in the game, not by how many times you talk to them in one turn.
The key is to always have a plan; do not coast.
Plan your work; Work your plan.
Building (Up and Out)
Biggest Idea: Make units, not improvements.
There is definitely a time and a place to build city improvements. Just as definitely, it is sometimes too easy to build improvements, especially when there is no real plan to follow. This is to be avoided at all costs. Build city improvements where and when they are needed. Just do not go crazy with them.
How do you know a city improvement is needed? Well, ask the question one of these ways:
My general rule of thumb: if the city has 50% or greater corruption, build units, at least workers or settlers.
I tend to designate some cities for special things, save the game and forget my designations when I come back to play. My solution is to modify the city name to reflect its purpose; i.e. Sparta Science or York Military or Hamburg Settlers. Just something to remind me of what that city is supposed to do. (See my rather fluffy article Ordinal City Naming Convention for another way to rename cities.)
Set the city governor to NOT build wonders, large or small. It is your economy; you decide what you want built. Better yet, give these city officials one task: Maximize citizen production. You create the building orders. Left to themselves, the mayor of every one-horse, two-bit wide spot in the road thinks that their fine people should be building the Pyramids or the Great Library, even if takes 400 turns of a 540 turn game.
Do not get too hung up on the wonders. If you need one by all means build it. Make sure that you do need it, not just want it. Denying it to others is a valid reason. But only try for one at a time. Or build your military and capture it. (See TheDarkPhantoms article A Guide to the Great Wonders and How To Use Them and Isions The Four Rules of Wonder Addiction.)
Especially early in the game, build workers and settlers. Buy workers from other civs if you can, they have no upkeep cost. They work slower, true. But they are working for you, not the AI. Later, build settlers to plant between AI cities. (See Faster Expansion: A key Element of the Early Game by Excilus and Crackers Civ3 Opening Plays Site by Cracker for much more on this important subject.)
In the early game, cities cannot grow beyond size 12. In planning where to place your first cities, keep this in mind. Tiles adjacent to rivers and lakes do not need an aqueduct to grow beyond size 6. Any body of water less than 21 tiles is considered a lake. Plant cities in a CxxxC pattern. When fully roaded, each city is one turn away from help.
Build a Settler Factory city and use it. (See Spotting Settler Factories by RFHolloway.)
Warring for a Reason
Biggest Idea: Know why you war.
Much has been written elsewhere about warfare tactics and strategy. Best overall rule of them, especially early in the game: keep wars limited. (General Points on Modern Warfare by HBdragon88 applies to any war you might have, regardless of the Age.)
Limited War Troops are scare when you only have a handful of cities; do not waste them. Concentrate your forces in one area. Slowly and methodically take cities and territory and resources from foes. Take a few cities and then ask for Peace with Technology. Your opponents technology.
Use the barbarians to promote your Veterans to Elite status. In your wars, use your Regulars/Veterans to bring opposing units down in health so that your Elites can finish them off and perhaps be promoted. And have plenty of troops. Stacks of Doom and Armies.
Build attack units instead of defend units. The AI places more importance on how many times you can hit him than on how many times you can be hit. An archer trumps a spearman. (See Study of the Inner Workings of Military Advisor by ProPain for how this is actually calculated.)
Do not forget to build defenders. Just build more attackers than defenders. How many defenders? In the core cities, depending on the government, one is probably enough, but two is better. In the outer cities, two for sure and maybe three, depending on the neighbors.
Newly captured cities will not do a culture flip the turn they are captured. To quell resistors quickly you will need to have one mobile military land unit (catapults and cannons and such do not count) in the city for each resistor in the city. Injured units are just as strong as fresh units in this count. Ten resistors, ten units. And in one turn the resistors stop resisting and merely become unhappy.
But ten resistors and five units? The five units will subdue five resistors, but the remaining five could cause the city to be liberated by its original, less capable owner. If that happens you lose the units in the city.
Managing the Micro
Biggest Idea: We must manage only three things; sliders, citizens and workers.
Planning, Building and Warring are fine ideas, but in Managing we get down to the brass tacks of actually making it work.
For each city we must identify the most productive tiles and make sure they are being worked.
We must then make sure that our workers are improving the most productive tiles to make them even better producers.
Sliders
Sliders provide a quick, empire wide adjustment to the ratio of income, fun and study. From our income per turn we can allocate so much to luxuries, cash and scientific advances.
This is not always the best way to manage our people just because it is so broad and only moves in steps of ten. Luxuries can be 0% or 10%, but not at 5%.
For a few, critical turns, yes, tweak the sliders. Up the luxuries to keep the people happy when the war goes a bit longer than expected. Up the research to get that desperately needed technology. Drop the research to zero when you can tell you are going to overshoot the number of beakers needed to get the next technology.
As a quick fix, the slider is hard to beat. Much better is to tweak each city to its citizens in the most productive manner.
Workers
In the early game workers are critical to our growth and later overall success. My priority task list for workers is:
In the later game the priorities shift to
The following image is from the thread Workers at 50% by brass 9, post #7 by ControlFreak.
In C3C, Industrious divides by 1.5, not 2.
Foreign workers in bunches tend to get the dirty work; chopping forests, clearing jungles, mining mountains, etc. Mission critical stuff is done by the locals.
Do not automate workers until you get railroads and even then be careful.
I tend to automate for Pollution Cleanup, just because I do not want to mess with it. And maybe Build Railroad To a city. Otherwise, I give them their orders.
When the computer controls your workers it does not use them wisely. It will send a worker that has completed a task on the west side of your country twenty tile to the east (at three tiles per turn with roads) to do some task there. And then send it back to your west coast, two tiles from where it was earlier.
They are your workers. They answer to you. Tell them what to do.
Citizens
The most productive tiles must have citizens working them in order for them to produce food, shields and commerce. (See Terrain Types Table in Crackers article for how to rate the tiles.)
A resource tile, however, only needs to be connected to a city. It does not need to be worked by a city (any city) in order to make use of its resource.
When a city goes into disorder, citizens can become entertainers (clowns). This is probably the worst use of specialized citizens. It is also the most popular because it is quick and easy.
A better way to keep citizens happy is to adjust the luxury slider up a bit. This will reduce beakers going to science. Then go back to the cities, mainly the more corrupted cities, and convert citizens to scientists (geeks) and tax collectors (bean counters). In your core cities, most of the production is going to whatever the city is making. Out in the fringes of your empire, only one shield is being applied to city production. The rest is lost in corruption.
But scientific research is not lost due to corruption. Two beakers researched in the boonies counts just as much as two beakers researched in the capital.
Only city production suffers because of corruption.
This means that your science slider can be a zero and you will still be adding beakers to research.
(See The Role of the Specialist Citizen by Bede for all the nuts and bolts of using specialists. My brief explanation is far from complete.)
Summary
This is what I know and understand.
Have I missed anything?
I want to play Civ III well. For some time I have been deliberately playing on Chieftain not only to learn the basics but to become acquainted with how to play Civ III in an advanced/smarter/better manner.
I plan to explain the key components of what I have learned on Chieftain that I think will make me a better player at higher levels.
The Four Part Turn
Each turn has four parts. They are Planning, Building, Warring and Managing. Each appears to have a big idea and smaller discreet tasks associated with it. And of course they are all intertwined and woven together and if you adjust one you adjust the other.
Planning to Fail or Failing to Plan?
Biggest idea: How do I plan to win? And what do I need to do to get there? Conquest, cultural, colonize Alpha Centauri or just survive until 2050?
Factors: Map size and the map itself. Starting position. Neighbors and how close they are. And what civ I am and the traits and UU that it has. (I tend to play with my civ set to random and not to have historical neighbors. To get a random map size, I roll a six sided die; 1 = Tiny, 5 = Pangea. If I roll a six I roll again.)
Variants: A variant is a set of conditions you will play a game with. Self restricting conditions, usually. Common ones are Always War, Oscillating War, One City Challenge and more. (See Arathorns Comprehensive Guide to Variants for a much fuller treatise on variants.) Selecting a variant forces you to play a certain way for a specific goal.
Succession Games (where several people take rotating groups of turns, usually twenty turns at a time, to play a game) are almost always some variant. Their start up description tells what size world, the land mass, the age, player levels, victory conditions, and their special conditions. Many times the Civ is pre-selected and so may be the other Civs. Depending on the game creator, there may be a choice of starting positions. (See Pggars What is a Succession Game for more.) If you are unsure of what a variant looks like examine the starting posts of the Succession Games.
The beauty of the Succession Games is four fold. One, since there are several players, there is a built in learning time of new tactics and strategies. Two, with other people continuing the game where you left off, you tend to pay more attention to what is going on than in a solo game. (You do not want your game playing buddies to think poorly of your efforts on their behalf.) Third, since you only have a few turns at a time, you are forced to plan your moves in advance. And fourth, since you document your activities each turn, you become more aware of what you are doing each turn.
The ugliness of the Succession Game is that it is not a really a fitting place for a Chieftain player. Training games do exist, but most games are played at the Emperor or Monarch levels.
Succession Games are a great place to lurk and see how other people play the game.
The key is to have a plan. It does not have to be set in stone and it may be rather short range. It can change from turn to turn. Whatever it is, it is better than no plan at all. And at Chieftain, it is far too easy not to plan since the AI does not force you to plan.
Early in the game the plan is to
1) expand
2) plant cities
3) find your neighbors
4) perhaps conquer them
5) trade maps/techs with them
2) plant cities
3) find your neighbors
4) perhaps conquer them
5) trade maps/techs with them
Once you have a good set of core cities (five to twenty, depending) you can begin to make plans on how to reach your victory condition.
Many of the plans are short range: where to put the next city; what tile to improve; where to attack or defend. Others are longer and broader: planning to capture three cities in less than ten turns and then sue for peace and a tech; garrisoning the border to prevent the wandering AI; adding marketplaces to your core cities.
It helps to write the plan down on paper; do not just keep it in your head. The plan you create is to be your guide, not your straitjacket.
In order to plan well, you must know what your neighbors are up to. If they have a tech you want, you need to know what it will cost to get it. And whether you want to buy it or research it. Knowing what techs they have and do not have gives you a clue as to what to research next and sell/trade to them. (For a real world example of how productive dealing with the AI can be, read Trading Tips for Beginners by Bamspeedy.)
With even minimum research, say two beakers of research a turn, the longest it takes to learn a new technology is forty turns. The shortest research is four turns, no matter how many beakers of science you are generating a turn.
You can safely ignore their little snotty remarks about how busy they are, etc. The key is how they respond to you (Polite, Cautious, etc). These settings are only affected by things you do in the game, not by how many times you talk to them in one turn.
The key is to always have a plan; do not coast.
Plan your work; Work your plan.
Building (Up and Out)
Biggest Idea: Make units, not improvements.
There is definitely a time and a place to build city improvements. Just as definitely, it is sometimes too easy to build improvements, especially when there is no real plan to follow. This is to be avoided at all costs. Build city improvements where and when they are needed. Just do not go crazy with them.
How do you know a city improvement is needed? Well, ask the question one of these ways:
What good does this improvement do?
Does this improvement have an immediate impact?
I need this thing because it lets me do what ?
What advantage do I gain from this improvement?
This cost 100 gold to build, take 20 turns and needs 2 gpt for upkeep. Is it needed now or can it wait till later?
Does this improvement have an immediate impact?
I need this thing because it lets me do what ?
What advantage do I gain from this improvement?
This cost 100 gold to build, take 20 turns and needs 2 gpt for upkeep. Is it needed now or can it wait till later?
My general rule of thumb: if the city has 50% or greater corruption, build units, at least workers or settlers.
I tend to designate some cities for special things, save the game and forget my designations when I come back to play. My solution is to modify the city name to reflect its purpose; i.e. Sparta Science or York Military or Hamburg Settlers. Just something to remind me of what that city is supposed to do. (See my rather fluffy article Ordinal City Naming Convention for another way to rename cities.)
Set the city governor to NOT build wonders, large or small. It is your economy; you decide what you want built. Better yet, give these city officials one task: Maximize citizen production. You create the building orders. Left to themselves, the mayor of every one-horse, two-bit wide spot in the road thinks that their fine people should be building the Pyramids or the Great Library, even if takes 400 turns of a 540 turn game.
Do not get too hung up on the wonders. If you need one by all means build it. Make sure that you do need it, not just want it. Denying it to others is a valid reason. But only try for one at a time. Or build your military and capture it. (See TheDarkPhantoms article A Guide to the Great Wonders and How To Use Them and Isions The Four Rules of Wonder Addiction.)
Especially early in the game, build workers and settlers. Buy workers from other civs if you can, they have no upkeep cost. They work slower, true. But they are working for you, not the AI. Later, build settlers to plant between AI cities. (See Faster Expansion: A key Element of the Early Game by Excilus and Crackers Civ3 Opening Plays Site by Cracker for much more on this important subject.)
In the early game, cities cannot grow beyond size 12. In planning where to place your first cities, keep this in mind. Tiles adjacent to rivers and lakes do not need an aqueduct to grow beyond size 6. Any body of water less than 21 tiles is considered a lake. Plant cities in a CxxxC pattern. When fully roaded, each city is one turn away from help.
Build a Settler Factory city and use it. (See Spotting Settler Factories by RFHolloway.)
Warring for a Reason
Biggest Idea: Know why you war.
Much has been written elsewhere about warfare tactics and strategy. Best overall rule of them, especially early in the game: keep wars limited. (General Points on Modern Warfare by HBdragon88 applies to any war you might have, regardless of the Age.)
Limited War Troops are scare when you only have a handful of cities; do not waste them. Concentrate your forces in one area. Slowly and methodically take cities and territory and resources from foes. Take a few cities and then ask for Peace with Technology. Your opponents technology.
Use the barbarians to promote your Veterans to Elite status. In your wars, use your Regulars/Veterans to bring opposing units down in health so that your Elites can finish them off and perhaps be promoted. And have plenty of troops. Stacks of Doom and Armies.
Build attack units instead of defend units. The AI places more importance on how many times you can hit him than on how many times you can be hit. An archer trumps a spearman. (See Study of the Inner Workings of Military Advisor by ProPain for how this is actually calculated.)
Do not forget to build defenders. Just build more attackers than defenders. How many defenders? In the core cities, depending on the government, one is probably enough, but two is better. In the outer cities, two for sure and maybe three, depending on the neighbors.
Newly captured cities will not do a culture flip the turn they are captured. To quell resistors quickly you will need to have one mobile military land unit (catapults and cannons and such do not count) in the city for each resistor in the city. Injured units are just as strong as fresh units in this count. Ten resistors, ten units. And in one turn the resistors stop resisting and merely become unhappy.
But ten resistors and five units? The five units will subdue five resistors, but the remaining five could cause the city to be liberated by its original, less capable owner. If that happens you lose the units in the city.
Managing the Micro
Biggest Idea: We must manage only three things; sliders, citizens and workers.
Planning, Building and Warring are fine ideas, but in Managing we get down to the brass tacks of actually making it work.
For each city we must identify the most productive tiles and make sure they are being worked.
We must then make sure that our workers are improving the most productive tiles to make them even better producers.
Sliders
Sliders provide a quick, empire wide adjustment to the ratio of income, fun and study. From our income per turn we can allocate so much to luxuries, cash and scientific advances.
This is not always the best way to manage our people just because it is so broad and only moves in steps of ten. Luxuries can be 0% or 10%, but not at 5%.
For a few, critical turns, yes, tweak the sliders. Up the luxuries to keep the people happy when the war goes a bit longer than expected. Up the research to get that desperately needed technology. Drop the research to zero when you can tell you are going to overshoot the number of beakers needed to get the next technology.
As a quick fix, the slider is hard to beat. Much better is to tweak each city to its citizens in the most productive manner.
Workers
In the early game workers are critical to our growth and later overall success. My priority task list for workers is:
1) Connecting to a new resource within our borders or one that will soon be within our borders (via a new city or culture expansion).
2) Connecting cities to cities.
3) Improving tiles with road and then either mines or irrigation (generally, irrigate plains and mine grasslands).
4) Connecting to multiple resources within our borders or soon to be within our borders (the second source of iron, spice, furs, etc.)
5) Avoiding jungles and marshes if at all possible
2) Connecting cities to cities.
3) Improving tiles with road and then either mines or irrigation (generally, irrigate plains and mine grasslands).
4) Connecting to multiple resources within our borders or soon to be within our borders (the second source of iron, spice, furs, etc.)
5) Avoiding jungles and marshes if at all possible
In the later game the priorities shift to
1) Railroad
2) Assisting military operations
3) Draining jungles and marshes; maybe clearing forests.
4) Clean up pollution
5) Add to cities
2) Assisting military operations
3) Draining jungles and marshes; maybe clearing forests.
4) Clean up pollution
5) Add to cities
The following image is from the thread Workers at 50% by brass 9, post #7 by ControlFreak.
In C3C, Industrious divides by 1.5, not 2.
Foreign workers in bunches tend to get the dirty work; chopping forests, clearing jungles, mining mountains, etc. Mission critical stuff is done by the locals.
Do not automate workers until you get railroads and even then be careful.
I tend to automate for Pollution Cleanup, just because I do not want to mess with it. And maybe Build Railroad To a city. Otherwise, I give them their orders.
When the computer controls your workers it does not use them wisely. It will send a worker that has completed a task on the west side of your country twenty tile to the east (at three tiles per turn with roads) to do some task there. And then send it back to your west coast, two tiles from where it was earlier.
They are your workers. They answer to you. Tell them what to do.
Citizens
The most productive tiles must have citizens working them in order for them to produce food, shields and commerce. (See Terrain Types Table in Crackers article for how to rate the tiles.)
A resource tile, however, only needs to be connected to a city. It does not need to be worked by a city (any city) in order to make use of its resource.
When a city goes into disorder, citizens can become entertainers (clowns). This is probably the worst use of specialized citizens. It is also the most popular because it is quick and easy.
A better way to keep citizens happy is to adjust the luxury slider up a bit. This will reduce beakers going to science. Then go back to the cities, mainly the more corrupted cities, and convert citizens to scientists (geeks) and tax collectors (bean counters). In your core cities, most of the production is going to whatever the city is making. Out in the fringes of your empire, only one shield is being applied to city production. The rest is lost in corruption.
But scientific research is not lost due to corruption. Two beakers researched in the boonies counts just as much as two beakers researched in the capital.
Only city production suffers because of corruption.
This means that your science slider can be a zero and you will still be adding beakers to research.
(See The Role of the Specialist Citizen by Bede for all the nuts and bolts of using specialists. My brief explanation is far from complete.)
Summary
This is what I know and understand.
Have I missed anything?
