I am still getting settled into the second difficulty setting and learning about all the different aspects of the game, but I figured I would toss some advice to other people. I wish I would have found this advice when I was learning it... would have put me on a larger learning curve.
1) first city.
a - build order.
--warrior
--warrior (or settler if your pop already hit 3)
--wealth or granary depending on if you have pottery.
--spearman. move a warrior to the place your settler chose to build a city.
--stay away from improvements till you fill out all available land. Exception would be temple in new cities, but be careful where you go from there.
b- worker thoughts.
--automate is fine, just realize that they improve land tiles being worked first before building roads between cities, so you might want to leave one for manual control
--move a worker and rebuild in origional city. this worker should go to your new city and first put a road on any tiles being worked first to bring commerce into your city.
2) settler placement.
--dont put them too far from your capital even though there is plenty of cultural room. I reccommend moving your first settler near a food source to help your early expansion. If you cannot find one, go for a river. If you can't find food or irrigation, head for a resource. This city will be largely worthless in early game but will prove very usefull to help your economic situation. If you have tons of food you have found your worker / settler factory.
--always try to make sure that they will be attached to your cultural borders. This helps with corruption and happiness I believe.
3) early wars.
--You got iron first? own yer first non-greek civ... If you have more cities than your opponent, switch all city production to swordsmen and go conquer asap. Greek usually have the 3defense dudes and yer swordsmen will just die... don't pick a fight with them unless they are very small or far behind on tech.
--horses. crap... absolute crap until you get chivalry or military tradition. Stay away from building horsemen, but try to keep your horse option open.
--my enemy doesn't seem to be losing and is starting to pounce me. Yer screwed... try to sue for peace early and start kissing butt and expanding as fast as you can. If they keep out expanding you, they will get revenge.
--walls. worthless. never found any conquered city that would actually be useful to have walls that could actually build walls before the fate of the men I was trying to protect was decided.
4)killed my first civ
--what should I do now? Fill out and improve available land and try to get your tech up to date. Don't pick another fight until you have a significant tech advantage on your foe. IE you got knights and pikemen and they got swordsmen and spearmen. Listen to your military advisor and try to make all contacts with other civs
--ok my techs up to date and I think I could take these dudes to the north (or whatever). Whats important is to never stop your civilization from expanding and learning due to war. If you do, other civs besides your target will catch on and take advantage of you. Start your war, but build roads all the way to the front lines to keep your income vs defender ratio up.
-- income vs defender. enemy knows when they will win / lose / have a good chance. They will purposefully run through trees, hills, across rivers; to give you a disadvantage. To counter this you bring good defenders with your offence. enemy wont jump you if you are accompanied by someone that would overpower their offence. Too many guarding defenders drains your economy and growth... solution = pick a fight you can win, knowing that you will have x amount of defenders escorting your offence.
5--I didn't finish off the enemy to the north. I just made them really mad. Let war weariness calm down a little so your citizens are good little workers again, and quietly build a brute squad. This brute squad will finish off the competition. You do this during peace just as you would if there was no war. Reason being that your civ is more productive if you are at peace with all other civs.
--bastard is still at war with me and he refuses to acknowledge my envoy! = they are too pissed to talk to you. let them come to their senses while building your brute squad. When they will finally talk to you, offer peace treaty without any extortion. You are doing this because you can't win yet. If you could win, you wouldn't be in this situation.
--I can finish them off, how should I do it? With style of course... my favorite is to see how many cities they would offer up to get peace. I usually find that if they won't offer at least 3 of their remaining cities, then you need to keep teaching them a lesson. When they offer at least 3 cities, take them and break the treaty to finish them off. This gives you a bad reputation, but you accomplish so much in a couple rounds that it more than makes up for it.
There is no easy way to finish off an enemy. Either way you are the bad guy. If you let them live they will never forgive you. If you kill them you look like a cold blooded murderer. You also need to realise that the enemy won't ever be nice to you if they think they could take your empire. So do it to them.
This is a pre-emptive assault. If you don't grow you die. Enemy will always outgrow you. Only way to stop them is to snuff them out.
Don't be worried about pissed off conquered population, they will calm down after they have no civilization left. =) they become barbarian workers if you build from a conquered population when this happens =P
6) OK I own my own continent, what should I do now?
choice is yours. If you want to keep conquering you have to do it as soon as your armies are ready. The longer you wait the harder it is to get a city going on another continent. The best solution to this would be to squeeze a city on the coast of the continent you want to conquer, preferrably amongst your future enemy. Once you got a very large army in your new city, start conquering. Stop in between to calm the conquered population and get them semi productive again. Well enough to get a wall or temple finished.
--Not your style? What are your goals? wanna see that spiffy space race finish? then just keep cranking out tech and keep your military equal to the largest opponent's military.
Culture victory? Ain't gonna happen unless you reaaaally crack the whip and conquer bigtime to get your culture to 100,000 total.
Diplomatic victory? There is a strategy called Brokering.
Brokering only works if you are the largest civ. The way it works is you either have tons of resources to sell, or tons of science... or both. You re-negotiate every 20 turns to get a better deal based on what your opponents can afford. Don't be too stingy though. If you squeeze every last drop out of them, they won't consider you friendly and your relationship won't improve.
Relationship and available funds = better deals... re-negotiate after their 20 turns are up, not before... if they got no cash then they won't offer any. Relationship helps. IE a cautious civ will give you 8 gold a turn where a gracious civ might give you 12 a turn.
I've found the best way to become buddies with people is to just let them take a deal they pitch to you. IE if you say 'what will you give me for furs' and they reply '5 gold per turn and 15 gold lump sum' just say yes. Don't barter. The computer knows when you are giving them a beneficial deal and will become your friend. You only accept crappy deals like these when you want your relationship to improve. This has a small twist on militaristic civs as they tend to agro for no reason at all and you have to constantly throw them a bone to make them happy.
People usually think that brokering is an exploit, but it only works when you have a size/tech or resource advantage over everyone else. Computer will demand way more for science or resources than you demand, so don't take it as a cheat. You had to earn your empire to start it, and this is what diplomacy is about. If you could successfully broker all the way to a UN vote, then you could easily conquer these people anyway, so its not an exploit. I think you get my drift =P
--domination. Own 75% of the total landmass. Self explanitory... conquer almost everything but don't kill everyone off neccessarily. This kinda victory gives you a good score based on land mass, but the citizens hate you. If you get this far you might as well finish them off.
7) different eras
--stone age. get all non-dead end techs to advance.
--dark age. go straight for pikemen and maybe knights, then trade your way out of this hell hole.
--industrous. This period just ownz... not too fast, not too slow, and plenty of stuff to do. B-line it straight for wonders or military tradition depending on your bloodthirst. When you get cavalry you basically win the game. I believe you also get destroyers, ironclad, and other naval toys... this can be pretty fun if you get into it. Naval wars are pretty straight forward but hard to plan battles that can get very cool. I suggest playing around with your navy until you get a feel for the right way to use them.
--modern. oh boy... this one is hard... There is still a chance to conquer by the time you get here, but it's so darn hard that I could never offer any good advice. I'm not that skilled in this era at all.
8) difficulty settings
don't play the easiest setting, honestly... it gives you a way wrong perception of what is the right way to play the game. On the easiest setting you can basically conquer everyone by being a big dumb culture factory that can win any war because the enemy could never build replacement units in time. I reccomend this setting only to learn the basics, then switch to the 2nd setting and stay there for quite a while.
I imagine that after you really get a hang of the 2nd setting and all the other aspects of the game, it gets progressively easier to pick fights, win wars, know what to build, etc. Point I'm trying to make is that the comp isn't realistic on chieftan. Just switch to the 2nd setting after your first victory and stay there till you can conquer the entire world by 1500ad. It sounds un-realistic, but I assure you its very possible. Just remember that size = pace. This game grows exponentially in terms of turn length and research. The game also expects you to have a certain sized civ at all different points in the game. The larger your civ is, the easier it is to do anything in this game.
9) cheating - yer just a wimp and you have no finess. there is a trainer for the old boring 1.07 version all over the internet. Brokering is never a cheat, its just an option. Anyone who thinks brokering is a cheat should be shot for stupidity.
10) I really love this game but its too hard. The more you play it, the more you understand and the easier it gets. You won't really appreciate this game until you've at least won 2 conquer victories on the 2nd difficulty setting.
11) What on earth are all the settings for on the map screen. Barbarians - depending on your setting, more barbarians will attack you and your scouts, workers, settlers, etc.
Land type - pangaea = one large land mass, for the most part... look at the picture and you can kinda tell that you won't need a big navy. If you choose continents you will be in semi-realistic territory with scientific advances between wars.
Arid, dry, etc - read manual
age = less mountains and hills on 5 billion, 4 billion = normal, 3 = mountains everywhere
size of map = huge determining factor... the larger the map, the bigger your competition will be and generally the longer each turn will take... I reccommend the standard sized or smaller maps for beginners because the large ones will just leave you confused at first.
12) I'm not having fun. Don't play. Give your CD to a strategy game freak and let them tweak. Civ3 is strategy game all the way and will only be appreciated by a strat lover. Chances are if you are reading this forum though, the game already won you.
My advice to a true newbie:
Learn how to expand and defend yourself as fast as possible. Right-click on your first city and contact governer. Have him manage citizen moods and make it the default. This will save you tons of grief... There's absolutely no reason to micromanage any city down to individual scientist and entertainers... save that for deity mode where you have to be flawless.
Luxuries and improvements make your citizens work harder and steal less. Get furs, dies, etc to make your civ happier. Alternatively if you can't get any luxuries, set your entertainer slider (domestic advisor) from 0 to 10% I don't reccommend this to someone who knows how to obtain luxuries, but this should help a newbie.
Science buildings cost money, but so does research, so might as well build them if yer not at war. This means make libraries, universities, research labs, etc.
barracks make your units stronger but may not be neccessary in all cities, this could be a huge drain on a rapidly expanding civ's economy. IE if you have no roads to bring income in your new cities, but you have a barracks, you might as well sell it and keep the dough you earn for when you are at peace.
don't worry about culture as a newbie... just build a temple and mess with military until you start to get the picture. Later on you will understand great wonders and why they are good to get.
Thats about all I believe I can offer, I'm still rather new to this game.
I don't care about any replies or added info, like I said I wish this was around when I started. Just passing on what would have helped me.
1) first city.
a - build order.
--warrior
--warrior (or settler if your pop already hit 3)
--wealth or granary depending on if you have pottery.
--spearman. move a warrior to the place your settler chose to build a city.
--stay away from improvements till you fill out all available land. Exception would be temple in new cities, but be careful where you go from there.
b- worker thoughts.
--automate is fine, just realize that they improve land tiles being worked first before building roads between cities, so you might want to leave one for manual control
--move a worker and rebuild in origional city. this worker should go to your new city and first put a road on any tiles being worked first to bring commerce into your city.
2) settler placement.
--dont put them too far from your capital even though there is plenty of cultural room. I reccommend moving your first settler near a food source to help your early expansion. If you cannot find one, go for a river. If you can't find food or irrigation, head for a resource. This city will be largely worthless in early game but will prove very usefull to help your economic situation. If you have tons of food you have found your worker / settler factory.
--always try to make sure that they will be attached to your cultural borders. This helps with corruption and happiness I believe.
3) early wars.
--You got iron first? own yer first non-greek civ... If you have more cities than your opponent, switch all city production to swordsmen and go conquer asap. Greek usually have the 3defense dudes and yer swordsmen will just die... don't pick a fight with them unless they are very small or far behind on tech.
--horses. crap... absolute crap until you get chivalry or military tradition. Stay away from building horsemen, but try to keep your horse option open.
--my enemy doesn't seem to be losing and is starting to pounce me. Yer screwed... try to sue for peace early and start kissing butt and expanding as fast as you can. If they keep out expanding you, they will get revenge.
--walls. worthless. never found any conquered city that would actually be useful to have walls that could actually build walls before the fate of the men I was trying to protect was decided.
4)killed my first civ
--what should I do now? Fill out and improve available land and try to get your tech up to date. Don't pick another fight until you have a significant tech advantage on your foe. IE you got knights and pikemen and they got swordsmen and spearmen. Listen to your military advisor and try to make all contacts with other civs
--ok my techs up to date and I think I could take these dudes to the north (or whatever). Whats important is to never stop your civilization from expanding and learning due to war. If you do, other civs besides your target will catch on and take advantage of you. Start your war, but build roads all the way to the front lines to keep your income vs defender ratio up.
-- income vs defender. enemy knows when they will win / lose / have a good chance. They will purposefully run through trees, hills, across rivers; to give you a disadvantage. To counter this you bring good defenders with your offence. enemy wont jump you if you are accompanied by someone that would overpower their offence. Too many guarding defenders drains your economy and growth... solution = pick a fight you can win, knowing that you will have x amount of defenders escorting your offence.
5--I didn't finish off the enemy to the north. I just made them really mad. Let war weariness calm down a little so your citizens are good little workers again, and quietly build a brute squad. This brute squad will finish off the competition. You do this during peace just as you would if there was no war. Reason being that your civ is more productive if you are at peace with all other civs.
--bastard is still at war with me and he refuses to acknowledge my envoy! = they are too pissed to talk to you. let them come to their senses while building your brute squad. When they will finally talk to you, offer peace treaty without any extortion. You are doing this because you can't win yet. If you could win, you wouldn't be in this situation.
--I can finish them off, how should I do it? With style of course... my favorite is to see how many cities they would offer up to get peace. I usually find that if they won't offer at least 3 of their remaining cities, then you need to keep teaching them a lesson. When they offer at least 3 cities, take them and break the treaty to finish them off. This gives you a bad reputation, but you accomplish so much in a couple rounds that it more than makes up for it.
There is no easy way to finish off an enemy. Either way you are the bad guy. If you let them live they will never forgive you. If you kill them you look like a cold blooded murderer. You also need to realise that the enemy won't ever be nice to you if they think they could take your empire. So do it to them.
This is a pre-emptive assault. If you don't grow you die. Enemy will always outgrow you. Only way to stop them is to snuff them out.
Don't be worried about pissed off conquered population, they will calm down after they have no civilization left. =) they become barbarian workers if you build from a conquered population when this happens =P
6) OK I own my own continent, what should I do now?
choice is yours. If you want to keep conquering you have to do it as soon as your armies are ready. The longer you wait the harder it is to get a city going on another continent. The best solution to this would be to squeeze a city on the coast of the continent you want to conquer, preferrably amongst your future enemy. Once you got a very large army in your new city, start conquering. Stop in between to calm the conquered population and get them semi productive again. Well enough to get a wall or temple finished.
--Not your style? What are your goals? wanna see that spiffy space race finish? then just keep cranking out tech and keep your military equal to the largest opponent's military.
Culture victory? Ain't gonna happen unless you reaaaally crack the whip and conquer bigtime to get your culture to 100,000 total.
Diplomatic victory? There is a strategy called Brokering.
Brokering only works if you are the largest civ. The way it works is you either have tons of resources to sell, or tons of science... or both. You re-negotiate every 20 turns to get a better deal based on what your opponents can afford. Don't be too stingy though. If you squeeze every last drop out of them, they won't consider you friendly and your relationship won't improve.
Relationship and available funds = better deals... re-negotiate after their 20 turns are up, not before... if they got no cash then they won't offer any. Relationship helps. IE a cautious civ will give you 8 gold a turn where a gracious civ might give you 12 a turn.
I've found the best way to become buddies with people is to just let them take a deal they pitch to you. IE if you say 'what will you give me for furs' and they reply '5 gold per turn and 15 gold lump sum' just say yes. Don't barter. The computer knows when you are giving them a beneficial deal and will become your friend. You only accept crappy deals like these when you want your relationship to improve. This has a small twist on militaristic civs as they tend to agro for no reason at all and you have to constantly throw them a bone to make them happy.
People usually think that brokering is an exploit, but it only works when you have a size/tech or resource advantage over everyone else. Computer will demand way more for science or resources than you demand, so don't take it as a cheat. You had to earn your empire to start it, and this is what diplomacy is about. If you could successfully broker all the way to a UN vote, then you could easily conquer these people anyway, so its not an exploit. I think you get my drift =P
--domination. Own 75% of the total landmass. Self explanitory... conquer almost everything but don't kill everyone off neccessarily. This kinda victory gives you a good score based on land mass, but the citizens hate you. If you get this far you might as well finish them off.
7) different eras
--stone age. get all non-dead end techs to advance.
--dark age. go straight for pikemen and maybe knights, then trade your way out of this hell hole.
--industrous. This period just ownz... not too fast, not too slow, and plenty of stuff to do. B-line it straight for wonders or military tradition depending on your bloodthirst. When you get cavalry you basically win the game. I believe you also get destroyers, ironclad, and other naval toys... this can be pretty fun if you get into it. Naval wars are pretty straight forward but hard to plan battles that can get very cool. I suggest playing around with your navy until you get a feel for the right way to use them.
--modern. oh boy... this one is hard... There is still a chance to conquer by the time you get here, but it's so darn hard that I could never offer any good advice. I'm not that skilled in this era at all.
8) difficulty settings
don't play the easiest setting, honestly... it gives you a way wrong perception of what is the right way to play the game. On the easiest setting you can basically conquer everyone by being a big dumb culture factory that can win any war because the enemy could never build replacement units in time. I reccomend this setting only to learn the basics, then switch to the 2nd setting and stay there for quite a while.
I imagine that after you really get a hang of the 2nd setting and all the other aspects of the game, it gets progressively easier to pick fights, win wars, know what to build, etc. Point I'm trying to make is that the comp isn't realistic on chieftan. Just switch to the 2nd setting after your first victory and stay there till you can conquer the entire world by 1500ad. It sounds un-realistic, but I assure you its very possible. Just remember that size = pace. This game grows exponentially in terms of turn length and research. The game also expects you to have a certain sized civ at all different points in the game. The larger your civ is, the easier it is to do anything in this game.
9) cheating - yer just a wimp and you have no finess. there is a trainer for the old boring 1.07 version all over the internet. Brokering is never a cheat, its just an option. Anyone who thinks brokering is a cheat should be shot for stupidity.
10) I really love this game but its too hard. The more you play it, the more you understand and the easier it gets. You won't really appreciate this game until you've at least won 2 conquer victories on the 2nd difficulty setting.
11) What on earth are all the settings for on the map screen. Barbarians - depending on your setting, more barbarians will attack you and your scouts, workers, settlers, etc.
Land type - pangaea = one large land mass, for the most part... look at the picture and you can kinda tell that you won't need a big navy. If you choose continents you will be in semi-realistic territory with scientific advances between wars.
Arid, dry, etc - read manual
age = less mountains and hills on 5 billion, 4 billion = normal, 3 = mountains everywhere
size of map = huge determining factor... the larger the map, the bigger your competition will be and generally the longer each turn will take... I reccommend the standard sized or smaller maps for beginners because the large ones will just leave you confused at first.
12) I'm not having fun. Don't play. Give your CD to a strategy game freak and let them tweak. Civ3 is strategy game all the way and will only be appreciated by a strat lover. Chances are if you are reading this forum though, the game already won you.
My advice to a true newbie:
Learn how to expand and defend yourself as fast as possible. Right-click on your first city and contact governer. Have him manage citizen moods and make it the default. This will save you tons of grief... There's absolutely no reason to micromanage any city down to individual scientist and entertainers... save that for deity mode where you have to be flawless.
Luxuries and improvements make your citizens work harder and steal less. Get furs, dies, etc to make your civ happier. Alternatively if you can't get any luxuries, set your entertainer slider (domestic advisor) from 0 to 10% I don't reccommend this to someone who knows how to obtain luxuries, but this should help a newbie.
Science buildings cost money, but so does research, so might as well build them if yer not at war. This means make libraries, universities, research labs, etc.
barracks make your units stronger but may not be neccessary in all cities, this could be a huge drain on a rapidly expanding civ's economy. IE if you have no roads to bring income in your new cities, but you have a barracks, you might as well sell it and keep the dough you earn for when you are at peace.
don't worry about culture as a newbie... just build a temple and mess with military until you start to get the picture. Later on you will understand great wonders and why they are good to get.
Thats about all I believe I can offer, I'm still rather new to this game.
I don't care about any replies or added info, like I said I wish this was around when I started. Just passing on what would have helped me.
