There is only one general rule about human-human play:
"in contrast to the AI, the human opponent is quite unpredictable".
So anything you do, might be good/safe/bad or risky...
All depends on the opponent and on the psychology between the two parties...
I'm afraid one can learn this only by own experience, not via the Military Academy... But I will post something on that topic in the other thread in a moment.
Your e-mail to me was very useful. I will find it and put here...
Lanzelot's introduction:
For now only that much:
When I started my first PBEM 1.5 years ago, I was a complete beginner as well and
was afraid the experienced multi-players would run me over with a horde of archers in
2000BC... Well, this didn't happen... With the experience I learned in the GOTM compe=
tition, I was able to play successfully and even win my very first game.
So I guess you have nothing to worry about...! ;-)
(I think that in the beginning people have played MP like that (big stack of archers
instead of developing a core), but then they soon realized that you can run over
a direct neighbor that way, but during that time the other nations will get ahead
of you and you will loose to them in the end. So today nobody plays that way any
more.)
In my experience, around half of the people in the PBEM community do not possess
the same kind of technical skill level that a GOTM veteran possesses. There are
only two people who are really excellent Civ3 players, from a technical as well
as strategical point of view: Calis and muzbang.
However, this does not mean that one can beat the PBEM players as easily as in
a single-player game! There are two more points that need to be taken into
consideration:
1. No matter how good you are as a Civ3 player, you need a friend/ally.
Because what will happen, if you attack another player and become a
"runaway" nation, is that all the others will team up against you.
Usually, the first person to declare war will get dog-piled and loose the
game... Best example is what happened to Spain in the "Age of Discovery" scenario.
Spain is certainly one of the strongest nations in that scenario, and it just
started it's Golden Age around turn 30, but then it was careless and attacked
small Portugal. Immediately Portugal, France and England formed an alliance and
wiped Spain off the map...
2. Psychology is important. A lot of negotiations, forming alliances, making secret
deals, etc is happening in direct email communication. (The F4 screen is pretty
much useless in multiplayer...) You need to know your opponents, help them a bit,
but not too much, etc.
I guess you know the way Lasker played chess, right?
So most of the players are quite good on the "diplomatic" side of the game: Eclipse, Cyc,
TomBxx, and probably more that I haven't played with yet. You should not underestimate
this.
A couple of things are a bit different from single-player:
1. Most important: if you have never played with "Accellerated Production", then
play a little test game in order to get used to that! It changes a lot and certainly
has an impact on micromanagement as well as strategy. You only need half the beakers
for every tech, half the food for city growth and half the shields for production.
In a little single player game with ac.prod. you will get the hang if it.
2. The F4 screen does not give you much information about your opponents. You see only
your side of your table, not the other one. So you can find out, which techs your
opponent does not have, but you can't see which ones he has.
3. Workers work a bit strange: everything is finished one turn earlier than in
single-player, but then the worker stays "immobile" for the last turn.
For example, when building a road, the road is finished after 2 turns, it already
gives you extra gold and can already be used for getting your settler to its
destination faster, but the worker cannot be moved during the 3rd turn.
I used this feature a lot in my micromanagement.
4. Similarly when you use the auto-move feature for units, it will move once during
your turn and then a second time immediately after your turn, before the next
players turn. So it will make 2 moves during turn 1 and 0 moves during turn 2
(stays immobile just like the worker above).
For this reason the auto-move feature is FORBIDDEN in multi-player, because it
would allow you in one single turn to send a spearman into an attacked city from
a city that's 6 tiles away... So most players aggree that this is an unfair
advantage and is therefore forbidden.
5. Battle reports: as the other player cannot see your attacks (as he would in a
single-player game) one is obliged to post a battle report about all moves that
would be visible to the opponent in a "normal" game.
was all of the discussion like this? 
