Civ 3 work boats

ZergMazter

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Were you guys aware you can actually make workboats work on civ 3? I borrowed my destroyer to test this. I turned the naval power flag off, and gave it the terraform flag with Quintillus editor, and gave the road option to coastal tiles.

Next thing I knew the destroyer was building roads to connect resources. After it was done building it joined the city. I dont know if it joined due to it being a new game and needing the population for growth. It had nothing else to do, so I assume this was normal.

Sure it looks a little funny to have roads, and railroads like that, but you can minimize the impact by using the special terrain so only coast close to land is workable.

On a premade map you can set invisible trails with the LM terrains, so that you can make ur boats auto-connect trade from one continent to another. If you are like me and play with 31 civs, then you know how much air trade produces lag, so you can finally completely disable it, and instead connect land masses via road paths.

Only one thing to figure out before fully confirming connection of landmasses via LM, is to figure out how to use LM for coast. Otherwise it still works but you'll have roads everywhere your borders are on coast.

Here is what you can and can't do:

1-Roads/rails don't work as on land. They can't be used to travel by naval units.
2-There is no way for ground units to use coast roads.
3-They basically give you all economical benefits you usually get on land.
4-They can be used to build railroad bridges for aesthetic purposes, or for functional trade purposes.
5-It's a good day to be a pirate :lol:
6-A whole new meaning to trade embargoes. Cut up some routes and isolate your enemies.
7-No air trade? No problem, connect that land mass via roads, while still having the added benefit of no lag due to air trade.
8-The AI works as regular workers. They will go outside their civ boundaries to build a road that connects to more resources, or connect distant colonies. (Tested a little bit and partially confirmed)

Enjoy! Now I get to have fish, crabs, whales as consumable resources. I have a plan for them to allow the construction of certain buildings in their host city which boosts food production.
 
If you mark a coastal tile with the road or terraform option (in my case irrigate and mine), you can even wake up a worker on a transport ship and let him work at sea. ;)

There is somewhere here a mod called seasettler, with a settler turned transport.

It worked fine, but, the while the KI was unable to build sea cities themself, they were able to capture it with ships! :eek:

And yes, the player is unable to put defence units in a sea city and is unable to recapture the same. :sad:
 
Ohhhh cool! Thats why you got propaganda I guess. Bomb it to a pulp, then propaganda to flip it lol.

I think the transport settler might work for the AI if the only strategy flag on is the 'Settle' via a hacked editor, the same way I made work boats work.

That's a nice trick with the worker and the transport. Does the AI use it like that regularly?
 
Someone else did this a while back. You might want to look for a mod called "Sea Cities", as he had developed an Undersea Civilization. As I was strictly on a Mac at the time, I could never seem to get the scenario to run, but it should be worth looking at if it survived the port to the new server.

The version for PTW and Conquests is here, under Modpacks downloads:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=7365

The Vanilla Version is here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=7364
 
Thank you, Timerover51,

Sea cities is the mod that I meant. ;)

That's a nice trick with the worker and the transport. Does the AI use it like that regularly?
I do not know. Then I was experimenting with sea settlers and workers (using the firaxis transport as both), I was still using firaxis editor only. There were however never KI foot workers busy at the coast.
 
In my eyes one of the greatest features of the "Quintillus editor" is to provide units of another category with a working AI-tactics and also allowing partly worker jobs.

This is one of the new features of CCM version 2.00 allowing fisher boats and may be other nasty things with workers. I can confirm, that the AI uses boats with all (or partly) worker jobs, when the proper AI tactics is selected - this is one of the big differences to Derft´s old tries with water workers and water settlers, where this was only possible to the human player, as there was lacking an AI-tactics for AI "water-workers".

Coastal oil (and other water strategic and luxury resources) can now be connected via "water-roads" to cities. In my eyes this is an impressive step ahead for C3C and the road-graphics on the sea should be accepted for that feature.

Even irrigating and mining of water terrain now is possible for the AI. Unfortunately for "water-irrigation" the game uses the normal irrigation graphics (what looks bad in game). My tries to substitute the irrigation graphics for "water-irrigation" with the graphics of fishernets from CTP or Civ 4 until now were not successful. Especially naming the terrain "irrigation COAST" didn´t work. Here any help would be highly appreciated.

Giving more food and shields to coastal tiles via "water-workers" also gives a reason for a new line of units of a "merchant marine" from fisher boats up to freighters and oil-tankers, as now they can build roads to connect strategic and luxury resources in water and can improve the output of water-tiles by building roads, irrigating or mining them. These ships now help to improve commerce and production and don´t have the only reason - as it was for more than a decade - to transport troops.

The AI water-cities are still very weired. These are my observations when fiddling with water cities many years ago for SOE (may be some of you can remember the convoies to Russia and Britain, that first were water cities and later I changed them to invisible land-cities) and again with the new Quintillus editor:

The AI can destroy a human water-city, even if it is defended by a land unit, by simply drawing a water-unit on the tile with the water-city. A human water city can be defended by a water unit. When the AI water-unit draws on the tile with the human water-city, the water city is destroyed and if there were defending human land-units in that water-city, these landunits now stand in the water, where only ruins were left from the former water-city.

AI water cities can neiter be conquered by human land- or sea-units. All normal bombard of units inside AI water-cities did fail. Nuclear bombs could destroy units inside AI water-cities.

I never thought about bribing such cities -Zergmaster, this is an interesting aspect.:)
I tried it today several times, but all my attempts to bribe such an AI water-city were not successful.
 
CCM 2.0 Woot! With what I've read so far that will put my modding of my personal mod to an end forever. CCM 2.0 will bring some of the tiny things I like, and the best part is I no longer have to figure out how to implement them hehe.

Just make sure you warn us when its released! I dont wanna miss it.
 
CCM 2.0 Woot! With what I've read so far that will put my modding of my personal mod to an end forever. CCM 2.0 will bring some of the tiny things I like, and the best part is I no longer have to figure out how to implement them hehe.

Just make sure you warn us when its released! I dont wanna miss it.

Spoiler :


I temporary attache one of the CCM v.2.00 DEBUG-screenshots, showing an AI civ improving its water trade (the galley in that testing is a "worker boat" for the Lowlands civ. The screenshot not only shows, that the AI uses the worker boats, but also is building them:




ZergMazter, as you are very creative, please continue to reflect about C3C. :) Per example your thoughts about bribing a water city closed a gap in my own reflections, as I hope that my reflections can close gaps in the reflections of other modders - and together may be we can create something very strong for the Civ series. :)
 

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Sure thing civinator I'll do all I can. I think I have a fix for the AI loading planes into a carrier and loading missiles into a naval ship with a similar technique. I got a theory and I'm gonna go test it.

Man that picture made me happy. I wanna play it so bad now lol.
 
It worked fine, but, the while the KI was unable to build sea cities themself, they were able to capture it with ships! :eek:

And yes, the player is unable to put defence units in a sea city and is unable to recapture the same. :sad:

ah , a great thread and good info . Is that you can't leave ground troops in a city in the city ? If autoproduced do they remain there ? Own ships can not capture but maybe they can defend against ships ? Or is it a case of 8 battleships around every single city ?
 
ah , a great thread and good info . Is that you can't leave ground troops in a city in the city ? If autoproduced do they remain there ? Own ships can not capture but maybe they can defend against ships ? Or is it a case of 8 battleships around every single city ?

That was a long time ago. :blush:

If I remember correctly, I was able to build land units in a sea city, but the KI netherless otherrun them with ships and land units (if next to the shores).

And I am not sure, but I believe that I aborted the idea with sea cities, after my ships did not only not defend my sea cities, but were simply scuttled when the city was taken - even if the conqueror is another ship.

But I will too dust of the idea sometimes with Quintillus Editor and see if at least sea workers will be better now (as proven by Zergmaster and Civinator).
 
I have a short report of todays experiment:

Sea roads do not enable early ships to cross sea and ocean safely, they still get lost in treacherous waters.

Also they do not enable my first generation ships (marked as wheeled) to cross ocean (marked as unpassable for wheeled units) unlike mountain roads.

They enable however trade between cities on different continents over oceans long before Navigation and Magnetism.

Another supplement: It is possible to connect a resource on another continent in teamwork with a "normal" foot worker. Sea worker builds the sea route, while the land worker connects the resource with a normal dirt road and a colony. This could be interresting for uninhabitable islands (mountains) with resources on it. But I doubt that the KI will manage to do that.
 
I wish rails workd on coast, sea, and ocean tiles for space mods. This would break however what is being done to CCM 2.0. Maybe the option to allow a LM water tile to use them for transportation :/
 
I am not a graphic expert, but would it be possible to have coast/sea/ocean have their own road graphics?

My suggestion would be to use Buoys as sea road.

But I assume, that it is as impossible as Civinators fishernets as irrigation. :(
 
On a similar note, airfields also work on water squares. Land units on board transports on a water square with an airfield can airdrop, although it will not show the airdrop animation. On a fixed map, you could use invisible airfield graphics with airfield resources, and have 'amphibious assault' squares to launch helicopter-borne infantry from the sea.
 
Another useful function is to build a sea road to your next invasion victim, in case that their harbour does not survive your bombardement or invasion.



I made the Supply Ship available with Refining. Requires iron, but no oil or coal, since it would be hard to reached some oil fields without this ship. ;) As compansation it is slow.

Another early Fishing Boat is available with Map Making. Again it is really slow (performance of the Curragh). As you can guess from the tracks I used that one to connect my empire (very harsh start on a small resourceless island) before the cities managed to finished their harbours. ;)

As Zergmaster has written before sea railroads have been proven completly useless: They do not even increase trade as on land. What a waste of worker time. :(

OT: Why does allways the most backward nation attack one. The Austrians are the only non industrial nation in the game. And what did they do: land a lone Horseman next to a city full with Tanks and Sipahi. :confused:
 
That looks awesome! The railroads might be useless but they do look like a cool bridge. The roads don't look bad at all. They look like a trade route basically. Instead of calling them roads call them trade routes :)

Wait who made those awesome industrial looking cities? They look similar to Kyriakos work, but I've never seen them.
 
Wait who made those awesome industrial looking cities? They look similar to Kyriakos work, but I've never seen them.

It is the "Definitives Series" from Kyriakos.

There are unfortunatly only two eras (Ancient and Mediveal) available. :(

So they remain unchanged after the mediveal ages.

Back to topic. ;)

As I have written it is possible to connect cities over sea and ocean before the invention of astronomy and so.

But I lost some of my early Fishing Boats doing so in this game. Cruel Sea!

Supplemental: It seems to me that a boat marked as "sinks at sea/ocean" can build a road without risk. So far in the last und current game I have only lost Fisherboats on their transfer, but not during their work at sea. Can someone confirm this?

You may also build relativ safe trade routes to another nation.

Slightly irritating is, that you have to leave port with your construction ship for the "Build a road to..." order. If you are still in port, the order will be ignored (unlike land workers).
 
I am test playing Civinators artillery strategies (no offensive artillery yet :( ) and have build my first sea colony.


It consumed the Supply Ship (worker) as usual. The colony itself does not look so strange (I think Ares de Borg has created it alongside with his terrain).


Somewhat later it was destroyed by a spanish Corvette in the second Spanish-Skandinavian-War. While ships seem to be unable to destroy sea routes, they simply overrun the colony.

I had no ship myself in the colony, so I can not say if it would have defend the colony or that it would have been simply scuttled (like in a sea city).
 
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