Introduction.

[BabyloniusIII]

Greetings!

I've been lurking around this forum for some time now. But it's only been recently (since I installed Civ3 on my new computer back in June) that I've really started to become interested in how to actually play the game effectively. This forum has been a tremendous help!

Obviously, according to my username, I've really enjoy playing as the Babylonians. But, lately, I've been tinkering around with other civs just to see if I can get a feel for playing with different traits - which has been a lot of fun.

Anyway, I'm always willing to soak up information. So, folks, I would greatly appreciate it if someone could analyze a SAV file for me (in PTW - just before a declared Domination victory) and let me know what I've done right/wrong and what I could've done differently.

Thanks,

B.

 

[Elephantium]

Welcome to the forums!

The first thing that jumps out at me is that your core is pretty widely spaced. I usually space my cities in a rough CxxC pattern, making it easier to work more tiles earlier on. More tiles worked = more production and gold coming in = faster research = faster win.

I also notice that not all tiles are improved in your core -- e.g. Namp'o has a full seven unimproved grassland tiles, two forest tiles, and two hills plus one mountain. They're all railed, but they lack mines. I'd have chopped the forests before rails came in; you get the same shields from mined ordinary grassland as you do from a forest, railed or no.

You have a lot of irrigated grassland tiles; I'd mine those for faster production.

There are even un-chopped jungle tiles in your core! Chopping those opens up a lot of productive land -- just make sure you build enough Workers to do the job quickly enough.

I looked at a few cities and saw temples and cathedrals. Those are usually a waste of time; happy faces come more efficiently from hooking up luxuries and using the lux slider. As a bonus, you can turn the lux slider back down when you hook up more luxuries

Finally, look into using Ring City Placement. It's a trick in Vanilla and PTW that reduces corruption if you place your cities in rings at a fixed distance from the capital.

 

[vmxa]

CAII will display the rings in the world map portion. Jusr select properties and then distance ring. Use the ring value you want and it puts numbers on the tiles.

 

[BabyloniusIII]

Thank you for the welcome!

I was using a CxxxC pattern. I figured it would give each city sufficient room to grow, and it wouldn't be TOO spaced out. But I'll keep the CxxC pattern in mind for when I play again. I started chopping down some of the forests, but I was getting irritated having to waste all of that time doing so, heh. I also thought, for some reason, that some forested areas help to reduce pollution? (I'm not sure if I read that somewhere on here, or not). Either way, I guess I need to develop some more patience.

As for unworked tiles, I was keeping a watch on my military units - and not wanting to go over the limit; having to pay so much per turn. So I was trying to balance having a fair-sized army while having enough workers/settlers to build cities, connect cities, luxuries, etc - all while keeping a decent flow of gpt. I guess I never got around to finishing it...

As for the majority of irrigated grassland, most of it was irrigated when I captured the cities - the Iroquois/Rome land especially (which happened considerably later in the game. They had nearly every grassland tile irrigated). At that point in the game, I was more worried about getting rails installed so I could transport my tanks easily, for ease of protecting my newly captured cities - and making it easier to take more along the way.

The temples, I believe, were only in the German cities (they were the first ones I captured) - and I only built those, then, so that I could expand the borders and try to stop some of the resistance. I had Cathedrals built because of the happy faces they were providing in my cities. The lux slider, I've always kept it around 10%/20% - depending on how much gpt I had, and how much I put into research. I guess if I mined more grasslands, I'd have more gpt to play with, huh?

I will certainly look into Ring City Placement. If it's what I think, though, wouldn't it be difficult to achieve if your capital was near the coast?

But thank you for looking at the save. Any info is helpful.

B.

Edit:

CAII will display the rings in the world map portion. Jusr select properties and then distance ring. Use the ring value you want and it puts numbers on the tiles.

What, may I ask, is CAII?

 

[Elephantium]

CivAssist II is a helper program that helps you keep tabs on your empire. It can tell you which cities grew each turn, what the AI has available to trade, when they change governments, things like that. It's all technically stuff you can find out in-game, but it's REALLY nice to have it all packaged up in a nice summary the way CAII does.

 

[Lord Emsworth]

I will certainly look into Ring City Placement. If it's what I think, though, wouldn't it be difficult to achieve if your capital was near the coast?

Well, optimally your capital is inland so that you can get full rings around it. If it is on the coast, you can still do RCP but it won't be as good. With your start, I would probably have placed my cities something like this:


Here the capital is on the coast. (In you save it isn't.) The first ring comes at distance 4, with 6 cities. And the second at distance 8, with 10 cities. That alone will give you eventually 17 good cities, with 7 of them nearly uncorrupt and the other 10 at least decent. (OK, those tundra towns would probably be not so … errr … hot.)

The spacing should be about ok for size 12 cities with only few to no unused tiles.