Civilization III Advanced Tips

[ahman]

One more thing. People usually say expand towards AI first and only after that build cities in your backyard. I don't exactly agree on that. While in later game phase(starting from medieval) the strategic choices are more important(taking land from AI), the first 2-4 cities should almost all the time follow the rule of return of investment. Of course, food is more important(you can do a lot of stuff with food - rushing, workers('storing' population + developing the land), bigger pop when using lux rate etc). When you have solid core, the military takeover is much easier. You will attack other nations, you will take over lands. The only time expansion towards ai is a bigger priority is when you won't wage war for a long time.

Sometimes I like playing with 80% water, to get nice chokepoints. If you get a good start you may be able, using a couple of warriors or even workers, to block the settlers trying to pass through your territory.

In that case, expanding towards the AI first can get you a couple of more towns, each giving 4 military upkeep. That's nice because you can't expect to build many towns on a 80% water map before you get surrounded.

But if i think of it a little more, you can go and block the AI without building a town. So never mind

I want to play at the higher levels, but I get destroyed or, if I am lucky, they are 6-10 techs ahead and twice my size.

On a pangea map, the opponents find each other very fast, trade techs and leave you behind. Try archipelago and a civ starting with alphabet (commercial or seafaring), build a curragh after your first warrior and start finding AIs. You'll be the king of trading through the ancient ages, before they start finding each other, and at that point you should have a nice army to start extorting, or a nice peaceful empire focusing on research.

My experience is that getting happiness from multiple distant, harmless AIs declaring war on you, can give A LOT of extra money. Having the luxury slider at 0% is very nice. It's worth it, because on archipelago they'll send only one galley at a time. Harm the galley with a couple of catapult shots, then kill it with your own galley. Or try to control where they land by leaving one city undefended. Or ally with an AI that's between you and your enemy, and you'll never see them, they will attack the nearest enemy. Free happiness for everyone!

Sorry for the rambling, I'm getting too drunk. I think that most people agree me with though, that archipelago is much easier than pangea on the harder levels?

 

[tjs282]

One more thing. People usually say expand towards AI first and only after that build cities in your backyard. I don't exactly agree on that. While in later game phase(starting from medieval) the strategic choices are more important(taking land from AI), the first 2-4 cities should almost all the time follow the rule of return of investment.

Absolutely agree here, when placing your 1st-ring towns, for sure do it in order of best site(s) first, and relatively close to the Capital.

But when it comes to the 2nd- (or 3rd-)ring towns, if I have the choice of founding in a location that the AI can't (yet) get to easily, or a comparable-quality location closer to the AI's border, I'd go with the latter. Because that will force them to waste their Settlers on the more marginal sites -- and the fewer decent cities that I allow the AICivs to build, the easier it will be to roll over them later (militarily or culturally).

Plus, the AI tends to build very loose, at CxxxC to CxxxxC. This might be fine for the late game, once Hospitals are available, but until then, if I let them settle 'my' land first, that represents a lot of tiles that (1) the AI won't be using for a long time and (2) that I could have been using for productive towns right now. And the AI does not place towns optimally either, e.g. planting them 1 tile away from freshwater, or in a position where they can't actually exploit a nearby bonus-resource. Once I've captured a 'misplaced' AI-town, chances are I'm going to want to enSlave, abandon and refound it anyway. So why not just build my town(s) there first, and save everyone all that unpleasantness later...?

The only time expansion towards ai is a bigger priority is when you won't wage war for a long time.

Which may well be the case at higher levels, since the AICivs start with bonus units, and it may take a while just to get to parity with them, never mind accumulating sufficient strength to fight them effectively. (OK, maybe not so much at Monarch/Emp, but fer shure at DG, my motley crew of rWarriors won't be picking early fights with the German Spears+Archers, or anyone with a 2-MP early UU... ).

 

[Kurgan117]

THANK YOU AHMAN FOR MAKING A SECOND PAGE. I was wondering how it would work. 80% water and/or archipelago, got it. Can I start with pottery? What about continents?
tsj282, I usually place my 2nd, 3rd, and, even my 4th and 5th cities close. If I can see a resource that I don't have near me, but near an AI, than I get it ASAP. Also if my special unit requires the resource.

 

[ahman]

THANK YOU AHMAN FOR MAKING A SECOND PAGE. I was wondering how it would work. 80% water and/or archipelago, got it. Can I start with pottery?

Good question. Masonry or warrior code is more valuable, and I agree with the experts that the republic slingshot is most important, so I don't trade alphabet (or writing) with anyone. Unless they're completely backwards and have almost no technology, then trading alphabet doesn't feel like a threat.

I'd say that it depends on the map size. On tiny with only 3 opponents and research being very easy, I want something more impressive than pottery. On huge, I send out a second curragh, relax and wait to find someone backwards to trade with.

What about continents?

With 80% water, the continents setting becomes sort of an archipelago with bigger islands. Having two or more opponents per island have the big advantage of being able to ally them towards each other to get rid of all the surplus military before you land 10 turns later. An opponent on it's own island gathers A LOT of military roaming around, so the landing procedure becomes difficult. I think there's some good tips in the Military Academy, for example landing only a few units to attract all the AI military to that point, then landing on the other side and take a town and/or land your catapults peacefully (they can't land on mountains).

Landing a big bunch of your best defenders on a mountain, which has 2 times the defense, and letting the AI try to bring you down is my favourite tactic though. You get some elites, the fightning is fun and you can pick your wounded up the next turn. And/or if you have an army generated from previous battles, send it with the landing party and join the three healthiest defenders into the army, then the opponent may even stop to attack you.

 

[Kurgan117]

Does defense bonus 100% mean instead of defense 10 I get defense 20?

 

[tjs282]

Does defense bonus 100% mean instead of defense 10 I get defense 20?

Yes. And that's before fortifying. If you fortify your Infantry on a Mountain, you will get a fortification D-bonus of another 25% (IIRC), so the D-value will effectively become 10+(10*125%) = 22.5. And if you build a Fortress there as well (another +25% D-bonus, IIRC), it will become D=25.

 

[Kurgan117]

Wow, I though 100% meant I just get an extra defense point. I will keep that in mind.

 

[justanick]

And if you build a Fortress there as well (another +25% D-bonus, IIRC), it will become D=25.

A fortress gives +50%, a barricade even +100%. So that would be D=27.5 and D=32.5.

 

[tjs282]

A fortress gives +50%, a barricade even +100%. So that would be D=27.5 and D=32.5.

Even better

 

[Kurgan117]

Is my reputation harmed in any way when I have a ROP(Right of Passage) with a nation back stabs me and takes a city? How about when I Sign a military alliance with a friend against the foe, and the friend signs peace with the foe?

By the way, this is a regent level(HIGHEST EVER), 80% water on continents, highest level of aggression, am the Americans (I chose random) and fighting the Vikings, Japanese, Chinese(traitor), Mongols, Egyptians(traitor), Inca(backed out of MA, aka military alliance), and the Carthaginians.

 

[justanick]

Is my reputation harmed in any way when I have a ROP(Right of Passage) with a nation back stabs me and takes a city? How about when I Sign a military alliance with a friend against the foe, and the friend signs peace with the foe?

I both cases your reputation should remain unharmed(or at least unchanged, if it was trashed before it will remain trashed). The reputation of the threatybreakers however will be harmed. So your foreign adviser will warn you about their bad reputation and other AIs are less willing to sign treaties with those AIs.

By the way, this is a regent level(HIGHEST EVER), 80% water on continents, highest level of aggression,

For future games you might want to try higher difficulty but normal or lower aggresion. Once you go for Emperor or higher diplomacy and military alliances become important as AI will have greater amounts of military units, thus there is the need to create some attrition by making AIs fight each other. At regent AIs still tend to have fairly low amounts of units, so there it is often no necessity for alliances and you can whipe out any AI by your own strenght.

 

[Kurgan117]

Thanks for all the help. I also have trouble with building a military that keeps up with my nation because I have republic and to many workers. Any suggestions for that?

 

[Lord AJ]

Thanks for all the help. I also have trouble with building a military that keeps up with my nation because I have republic and to many workers. Any suggestions for that?

You can never have too many workers until quite late in the game when you have all tiles railroaded and fully improved. Even then you can use the workers for forestry operations to gain Shields in the corrupt towns. But if you really have way too many workers then you can simply join them into less corrupted cities to get it to a metropolis. Also for maintenance problems you can simply place the outer cities in ICS so that you have more towns and raise your important cities into metropolises to utilise unit support.

 

[Kurgan117]

Cities in ICS? I am not familiar with most abbreviations used here.

 

[justanick]

You can never have too many workers until quite late in the game when you have all tiles railroaded and fully improved.

Imo one can have too many workers long before that. In the very early game one can have too many workers by having too few settlers. After that one can have too many workers by having too few citizens working tiles.

The goal is to have citizens working almost only improved tiles. So there is some sort of worker-citizen-balance. The faster your cities grow the more workers you need. Your cities should grow fast but not too fast, else you risk an "unsmoothed" utilization of free unit support and the amount of shields and beakers you can invest per turn might be too low when they are needed most.

As a republic forging towns into cities by increasing their size to 7+ is very important as it triples their free unit support and it halves their growth. Using workers in a highly focussed way to raise one town after the other over the city-size-threshold can be convenient. That will logically start in the low corrupt core cities and move outwards step by step.

Cities in ICS?

Infinite City Sprawl. One might also call it Infinite City Spam. It describes to build cities as close to each other as possible with only one tile between cities.

In many cases such a procedure is not such a good idea.

Thanks for all the help. I also have trouble with building a military that keeps up with my nation because I have republic and to many workers. Any suggestions for that?

For a proper analyses i need to know what you did so far. If you supply some pictures or even better a savegame we could give you proper advise instead of having to speculate and possibly even hind you into the wrong direction. Having a proper worker-citizen-balance is likely the key to the situation at hand. But what is proper depends on the concrete situation.

 

[Puppeteer]

I'm not sure there is such a thing as "too many workers".

Feel free to post a save and we can offer suggestions and play some turns and see if we can make it better.

In Republic you have to better manage troops and commerce. Generally fewer or even no troops in non-border, non-coastal cities (but watch out for fast units later, particularly Cavalry and Conquistadors if Spain is in the game).

You're relying on the luxury slider for happiness, but the effects in each city are therefore a function of corruption, so generally your core cities stay bigger than your remote cities so you can keep them happy with a given luxury slider setting and still have income to support troops.

In Republic, obsolete units aren't good for maintaining happiness or fighting wars, so either upgrade them or disband them because they are just costing money.

 

[tjs282]

Thanks for all the help. I also have trouble with building a military that keeps up with my nation because I have republic and to many workers. Any suggestions for that?

Replace them with Slaves.

Under Republic, you can cash-rush Slaves out of captured AI-cities (after the resistance has been quelled). This trick will generally net you far more Slaves than razing a city on capture would have done, and also removes potentially rebellious 'foreigners' from the population relatively quickly, so flip-risk is also (slightly) lowered, especially while your campaign is still ongoing.

The way I do this (which is no doubt non-optimal ) is to give the captured town just enough food so as to avoid starvation at its current size, either by exploiting enough shield-rich, food-poor tiles to get >1 shields per turn [SPT] (if I can keep all those people from rioting); or by using the minimum number of citizens to work food-rich tiles, and making the rest into Specialists (Taxmen or Scientists -- or later, Civil Engineers). I decide which tactic to use depending on the situation in each city. A new Slave can then be rushed every 2T: 1T to put some shields in the box, 1T to rush. It costs 4g[old] per missing shield, so a large city which can put in 3-4 uncorrupted shields on Turn1, will only need another 24-28g to finish the Slave on Turn2 (if the town's making >5 SPT, you don't need to rush the job!). Even a 1-SPT town will only need 36g to finish a Slave.

"But I've got no money!" I hear you cry (I have good ears!). Well, maybe not to start with, but you have to speculate to accumulate. First, drop your SCI%-slider a notch or two. At Regent, this is very unlikely to cause major delays in research -- also, you can usually drop SCI% on the last 1-2T of a research project anyway, for (much) more gold per turn (GPT) without affecting the turns-to-get-tech. Once you've got some cash to start the enSlavement process, your Treasury will quickly become healthy enough to make further Slave-purchases possible. Why? Well, consider this: Slaves work at half-speed, but are maintenance-free: therefore, for every 2 stacked Slaves (max. cost: 72g), you can add 1 native Worker (back) to one of your towns, without affecting time to complete jobs (except for IND-Civs -- then you'll need ~3 Slaves per Worker under all govs except Demo and Fascism).

This will leave you the equivalent of (at least) 4 GPT better off per Worker added: you'll be saving 2 GPT on unit-maintenance, and if the new citizen now works a (roaded) BFC-tile, he/she will earn you an additional 2 base-commerce per turn (CPT), before corruption -- which can then be converted either to TAX%-income (plus any multiplier-effects from Markets+Banks), or SCI%-beakers (plus any multiplier-effects from Libs+Unis). Even if you just make the new citizen into a Specialist, they'll give you an uncorrupted extra 2 GPT or 3 beakers per turn (BPT). So 2 Slave-purchases will be paid off in max. 72/4 = 18T, and after that they represent pure profit.

 

[justanick]

Replace them with Slaves.

Under Republic, you can cash-rush Slaves out of captured AI-cities (after the resistance has been quelled).

Once i liked to do that, but it is not very efficient in the short run. And it can be much less efficient than available alternatives.

This trick will generally net you far more Slaves than razing a city on capture would have done, and also removes potentially rebellious 'foreigners' from the population relatively quickly, so flip-risk is also (slightly) lowered, especially while your campaign is still ongoing.

For reducing the amount of foreign citizens building foreign settler is a good alternative. Foreign settler cost no maintence, but they are fully functional. You only need to worry about flip risk and during war also about war against home civilization unhappiness. Both can be eliminated by eliminating the home civilization. Than there is nothing to worry about. Also once this is achieved your calculation about slaves instead of workers is "inversed". For each national worker you donnot add to a town you can add ~2 slaves to a town(or donnot recruit in the first place). That can be a big difference, so i generally speaking i cannot advise to recruit slaves. It depends on the situation.

(except for IND-Civs -- then you'll need ~3 Slaves per Worker under all govs except Demo and Fascism).

Technically speaking anarchy is a government aswell. During anarchy all kind of workers work at the same speed of 1. That is prior to RP(Replaceble Parts) that doubles the speed and thus undoes most rounding issues.

 

[Kurgan117]

tsj282, I only have 902 gold in the middle ages, so you are right I don't have any money.
Fine I give in. Here is the save file. I use Civ III complete, so you will need conquests or complete to open it.
I was just back stabbed by the Vikings who helped me when the Chinese back stabbed me. Now the Chinese have an MA with me against the vikings.
I signed ROPs w/everyone, so the Vikings, Chinese, and Egyptians reps are all trashed.

 

[justanick]

Where is this save file?