I'd like to know what other players do in war and also want advice/tips on how to do war in Civ3Complete.
Will doing a lot of save/load cycles give us advantage in unit battles? (Save first, then attack, if lose, load the save, if win, save again)
Do we normally focus on capturing/destroying cities in war?
Ok, so I'm
really, really late to the party, and have to admit that I haven't played C3C in about 15 years. I should probably also admit that if you really boiled down my games, I was an Emperor-level warmonger. Sure, I probably had
a cultural victory at some point, and the occasional spaceship victory, but even those were largely won by "crushing da enemy, seeing him dwiven before me, and hearing the lamentations of his women." And yeah, I'm pretty sure I beat Demigod,
maybe Deity once or twice, but success at those levels was really more work for me than play. I seem to recall a post around here somewhere (by scoutsout, maybe?) to the effect of: "I'm a builder at heart. I build barracks, so that I can train veteran troops. I build roads, so that I can move those troops quickly. I build libraries, so that I can learn to built better troops ..."
With all of that said, and to the best of my recollection ... My games were war-heavy in either Republic or Monarchy. At Emperor, you can fight wars almost non-stop, as long as you're careful to oscillate between enemies and focus on capturing luxuries. If you want some support and/or are going All-War, then Monarchy is just fine. I am sure I tried out one or two of the late game governments (Communism or Democracy?), but that second anarchy was just
brutal.
Flinging rocks at the bad guys is great for conserving units, but it also makes for very slow advancement. I always built some cats and trebs, but I never felt like I really made good use of them, at least not offensively. Not like some of the real warmongers around here. I liked having them to defend my cities and my stacks, but for all the hundreds of rocks that I 'pulted at my enemies, I never had a great deal of luck knocking HP off of them. And then, they'd used their move, so I had to leave troops behind to guard them... Nonetheless, I liked having them for defensive purposes, like I said, and ready to upgrade to artillery. Now artillery? That was some fun stuff! Not only could you pummel enemy troops, you could destroy roads, cut off their retreat, deny them luxuries, the possibilities were almost endless.
I fought a ton of wars with swords, spears and archers. Horses were fine, too, but I always felt like in the early game I had to choose between either a sword war, or a horse war. And my luck with horses was never that great, so I often went with swords and archers. I would put a few horses in the stack to take down any strays that the AI left lying about, but the primary force was usually swords and archers. Knights were good. Riders rocked! Once I got to artillery & cavalry, it became a very fast-moving wargame.
My diplomacy really wasn't very good. I tried very hard not to pay gpt for anything. That was just about the only way I could keep my reputation intact. No matter how hard I tried to play nice, if I paid gpt, or exported resources, some goofus third-world worker would invariably end a turn standing on my road and BLAM! there went my trade rep. And then, of course, the only way to get what I needed would be to go back to war ... But if I could pay a lump sum and whatever I needed, including gpt from the AI, I was fine with that. In fact, I spent a fair amount of time and energy trying to drain the coffers of whoever I wasn't currently at war with. Like this: (a) start war; (b) burn down some of their cities; (c) offer peace for gpt; (d) rinse and repeat with next civ.
Everyone has his own feelings about this of course, and afaik it is perfectly legal both under XOTM and HoF rules.
