General questions

1500AD Greeks huge map Monarchy Vanilla CIV 3

I have approx 45 cities and a forbidden palace. Most of my cities have a library and university. I have been in a favorable trade position for a long time trading techs and resources for GPT (~500 GPT at this point). I have the science slider set at 80% and Lux at 20%, because I only have 4 lux resources (I own 3 and trade for 1).

1. Is there anyway to increase the science output and keep my cities from going into disorder? If I go to 90% I have 6-8 cities in disorder. If I turn on the governor I end up turning it off in the big cities which are the problem ones anyway!! If I use scientists I limit the growth of the cities and only seems to help in the areas where I need growth most.
2. The AI seems to be keeping me out of trading for any more luxs. I was trading for Gems and when the offer expired, they wanted a tech that I wanted to sell to everyone. I denied the trade and when it was my turn I went to them and the Gems were no longer available. I suppose they traded them to soemone else. I won’t make the same mistake again… I sold them the tech at huge GPT anyway. Is there anyway to get them to offer luxs to me instead of to the other AI? If I can't figure out a peaceful solution I might just have to "whoop" them and it take it!!

 

Firstly, I hope you're not leaving the slider permanently at 80%, because you can only get a new tech at most each 4 turns. If you leave at 80% when, say 60% would take you 4 turns to get the research done, you'd be wasting 20% of your income each turn. Also, most of the times, you should drop the slider on the last turn so as to not waste the overrun.

Building markets increase the value of each aditional luxury, so building them, even in corrupted towns, help keeping the people happy. On the other hand, building libraries/universities in high-corruption cities is useless, you'll just pay for the upkeep.

As for getting deals with the AI, there's not much to do, really, although CivAssistII can help you by giving you a warning when a trade is available. The thing is that the AI will really just give away to the best deal, and due to the inter-AI discount, it isn't usually with the player.

You do should keep in mind that luxuries have an increasing marginal cost (ie, each aditional lux costs more than the previous) because of the marketplace-mutiplicator. So if you already have more luxs than everybody, they'll always charge more from you.

 

Perhaps you could ally with them against some weakling or distant third party whom they are currently selling luxuries to.

 

I watch it using CivAssist II

I build a library first in each city to get the culture growing. I have built courthouses + police stations in all cities that have much corruption / waste.

It seems like with luxuries, once they start trading with another civ, they won't try to shop it around...Or maybe they just don't like me!!

 

How can you tell who they are selling what to?

 

Where is the Forbidden Palace in relation to the palace? In Vanilla Civ 3, it is best to keep them far apart giving you 2 distinct cores (actually it's best to have your palace out in the middle of nowhere, but most would consider that an exploit). If they are close together consider jumping your palace to somewhere else.

This is pretty much the best answer to any question in Civ 3.

 

The forbidden palace is in a good spot. I used CivAssistII to decide which city to build it in. I should check to see if moving the capital would help... Corruption / waste is not really an issue.