Need CivIII tips!!

[Chaos]

Hi!

I am enjoying CivIII very much, but I have small problem: Towns are so difficult to capture. I lose quite a few units in the assault. Should I bombard with catapults first or what?


Secondly: Why does AI have to be so dumb? In my recent game, I forged an Alliance with germans against french. I was hoping they would capture the city that was close to them (and out of the way for me) but all they did was to send 1 warrior at a time only to die easily. I eventually had to capture that town myself and now the germans are paying for their insolense of trying to demand gold from me (french are now gone, geramans have one weak city left, british are my close allies (I will eliminate them too eventually ) and there are couple of other civs


Well, bye everyone Happy Conquering!

 

[History_Buff]

Towns are supposed to be hard to capture, so use multiple units.

And for the Ai, just play on a higher level.

 

[Dillo]

LOL, Yeah, send more units in to take the cities, most are pretty easy, but Dfensive forces, like Pikeman and spearman,sitting on a defensive tile, in a town with walls or other defensive bonuses, can be near impossible to defeat at times.It can take some real doing, evern if you are attacking with Tanks.

Dont trust your allies in the game.They have no loyalty to you.They will turn on you at the first little thing they want.It doesnt matter what you have done for them or how you have helped them, they will attack alot of times.Just cause they need, a resource or a square of land across you.So instead of askingm they just try and take.But the point is, the guys are onlyt allies for the moment is the way to think about them.Like Defeat your enimeis,because your allies are generaly your future enimies. LOL. good luck.

 

[Psychlone]

A good way to take enemy cities is use of a combined arms technique. Take along some swordsmen, a spearman or two, an archer or two, and some horsemen. I generally try to have a minimum of 5 units to attack a city, and a whole lot more later on in the game.

Use your horsemen first to soften the defenders up a bit, because they'll retreat if they're not going to win (unless the enemy is at 1 hit, of course). Then send in your archers because they're cheap to build and losing them isn't a big deal. Then use your swordsmen to finish the job if needed, or to occupy the city, because you not only want to take the city, you want to have a strong enough force to hold it until you can reinforce. So why the spearman? He's a cheap unit that will defend your defensively weak archers and horsemen, while keeping your swordsmen fresh to use for attack purposes, because their 3 attack is more valuable than their 2 defense.

For the most part, try to use a unit that has a stronger attack rating than the defense rating of the garrison, but this isn't always going to be possible. Archers vs warriors, swordsmen vs spearmen, etc. Units such as horsemen, while somewhat weak offensively, are handy to have for their mobility and retreat capability. They're great for beating up say, an incoming Roman legionary, even if you doubt they'll defeat it. Often they can hurt it badly enough before they retreat to make the computer pull the unit back to heal, rather than continuing to move in on the attack.

There are lots of ways to out general the AI, just keep experimenting. You'll be whupping computer butt routinely in no time!