Originally posted by Captain Pugwash
I have played quite a lot of Civ3 games now and I still dont know what I'm doing :crazyeyes After creating a base of half a dozen strong cities and maybe adding a few more to fill up adjacent land, I wonder what to do next.
In Civ2, I used to conquer all the other civs and keep their cities until I had covered the whole map with my cities. I prob kept one city as a pet while I engineered a high score. This doesnt seem possible under Civ3 where all the cities you capture end up as one-shield ghost towns and the rules even have the concept of "optimum number of cities" = 16 (standard map) built in. It makes me wonder how the authors intended us to play this game.
I have had plenty of victories at lower lvels of difficulty but there have always been rival civs at the end who were more or less untouched. What should my long term plan be ?
Hmm, specifically what is your problem if you have "plenty of victories" at the levels you're playing at? Are you have trouble at higher difficulty levels?
As for an overall plan, I tend to choose one victory type, while having another as back-up. Base your plan around your victory types. For example, I may try to go for a conquest victory, with spaceship as the back-up. What this means is that I must focus my attention on wiping out civs, which means I must have a good producing base to start with. This means you must have a good number of cities at the beginning in order to do this; expand quickly early and try to gain as many decent cities as possible, with a couple of bad spots for potential resources. Shoot for an all-out assault at a certain point in the game, such as when you get knights or cavalry, or even swordsmen. If you have a nice attacking ancient UU (such as immortal or mounted warrior), then you may want to try an all-out assault in the ancient age. By "all-out war", I mean a war of national extinction of a rival civ, so that you can make progress on your conquest while expanding your base. Up until the first all-out war point I go for building up culture and science, while keeping pace militarily (for defense). When your preferred attacking unit has arrived, aim to mass produce that sucker with most of your cities and wipe out an enemy civ. If you accomplish this and still have a great military advantage over another civ, do it again! Also, try to instill wars between AI civs with use of military alliances and mutual protection pacts. Weakened AI civs make for an easier conquest when you finally do turn on them; also there's the by-product that their science and wonder production will suffer as a result (as will yours!). If conquest doesn't look like it's gonna work for me, I'll fall back on the handy science infrastructure I built up earlier, make peace with everyone, and focus my efforts on improving commerce/science, focus my techs towards the modern age, and ignore the unneccessary techs. to go right for the spaceship...
In any case, that was just an example of an overall plan for specific victory goals (conquest, with spaceship backup). Sometimes you can set your victory goal as you go along, but you should have decided what you're aiming for by the end of the ancient era, and have adequate back-up plans should your primary fail. Sometimes you will have to resort to using the histographic (score) as your back-up, so be it
BTW, on higher difficulty levels (monarch +), it is VERY hard to get the cultural victory. I don't play emperor or diety, but everything I've heard basically repeats that point. It seems that most emperor/diety games are won thru conquest and spaceship... On regent or monarch, all victories are still possible, though culture is still quite difficult on monarch.
my 2 euros...
- Windwalker
