[PTW] New City Build Order, Worker Mgmt and Railroads

I dont disagree that early game is not important, because it is, I just dont see the point in continuing the strategy into the late game, which I very much love going into.

Oh wow, I didnt get enough cities to get to that.

I'd say that late game conquesti is my game - get in front of everyone else and get to the top - then dominate wiht god tier units. Idk I like playing like that. I'm not really sure what I want to play like - I'm not really a well developed civ 3 player yet.

Yeah I quite like metropolis, but, point taken, theyre not entirely necessary.

 

Maybe most important for the decision: With cavalry and ocean capable ships you have what it takes to dominate the world before sanitation. If you win before sanition, then you have no chance at reaping the benefits of hospitals.

 

Oh btw, does winning early give you more points on the Hall of Fame thing?

 

Technically that is true, this aspect is based on year rather than turn. In practise the opposite tends to be true, especially on larger maps.

 

I'm surprised you ran out of things to do with only 12 workers! I would have finished roading every tile in my territory and those unclaimed ones just outside my territory before parking workers.

But more importantly, at milestones such as getting out of Despotism and cities hitting max population, it's time to revisit cities and possibly change some tile improvements. Don't need much if any excess food when you're at pop 12. Or you may want to irrigate plain or bonus grasslands in a good government type to grow faster and/or support working hills and mountains. Or work higher-gold tiles if your food and shield production is adequate for the moment.

Certain shield-per-turn milestones can be important for efficiency. If you spend 12 shields building a warrior, 2 shields are just wasted, they don't carry over. So a 7spt town will waste fewer shields (1) on a 20-shield unit like a spearman than it would (5) making a 30-shield unit like a horseman. 10spt is something many cities can usually hit around the end of the ancient age and is efficient for many builds. So if I'm building tons of horsemen early game I look for 5spt, 6spt, 8spt, and 10spt cities to push them out, and 7spt (or 4spt, 5spt or 10spt) cities push out spearmen. In the ideal case. Sometimes this means just shuffling citizens around, and sometimes it may mean changing a mine to irrigation or vice-versa. (If you're a hard-core micromanager you can shift citizens around between turns, too...I rarely do except very early game settler maximizing. Interturn, food is harvested before shields are, so if you can grow a turn earlier you'll get the shields from the new citizen on that growth turn and often grow *and* build efficiently.)

As far as expansion, my play style is to plan rotating mini-wars after all the free land is taken up. I don't aim to wipe out a neighboring civ usually, but I want a city or two, and I'm looking for cities with resources or wonders in particular. Expand, make peace, pick on next neighbor, and by the time that war and the 20-turn peace treaty is up, come back and beat up on the other civ again. So I'm focusing offensive military, and my workers always have work to do making invasion roads and fixing up my newly acquired land/cities.

Playing PTW is interesting. The corruption model is the big difference, and sometimes it's fun to play the old way. Look up "civ3 ring city placement" (RCP). TL;DR you can significantly reduce corruption by carefully placing rings of cities at the same game distance around your capital, and they all have the same corruption as the best one would since they all count as the same rank. Then when you can build forbidden palace you can do the same with cities around it, and you more or less have two highly-productive cores. But it's often a pain to game the system over picking the otherwise-best city spot, so I like C3C better, but PTW if fun to play sometimes if I've gone through the trouble to get it going. (Neither Steam nor GoG versions have a ptw executable .)

Edit: Aw, that German site only seems to have exe's for vanilla and Conquests, not PTW. I guess it's been a few years since I played PTW, and I used my CDs.

 

Thanks a lot for the tips! I personally like to annihilate the enemy outright but usually my military is not strong enough to do that so I end up doing those mini-wars like you.

Huh? I'm pretty sure steam has one, I was rustling thru files and I swear I saw vanilla, C3C and PTW hmm...

 

Apparently the Patchpaket used to have a NoCD PTW .exe as well, but it was removed at some point. A little poison-frog pointed me in the right direction...

The Steam/GOG DL-packages for Civ3InComplete contain the directory structure for Vanilla and PTW (because that's required by the game), and the ruleset-files (civilization3.bic and civilization3X.bix, respectively), and (I think) also both the Editors, but — last time I checked, anyway — not the executables.

 

I still have the ISO from the OG CD my mum bought at some point. I keep it deep in my old games directory

 

Like tjs282 said, the supporting files are there but not the executable. From one point of view this makes sense because the Conquests executable should be able to open and play an old vanilla or PTW game, and the way civ uses files it looks at conquests then ptw then vanilla folders for the various art and such, so the support files are needed.

But after you open an old save with the Conquests executable it plays with Conquests game mechanics and makes new saves in Conquests format, even though the settable game rules, techs, and limits remain the same.

So in various ways you could play PTW-like rules, techs, civs, units, and such, but there are many game mechanics tied to the executable, the biggest (to me) of which is how corruption/waste is handled, especially with non-communal governments, forbidden palaces, and RCP.

Also dinobarbs. Steam version doesn't include the "PTW Extras" (including the dinobarbs units and scenario) that came with some CDs and is in the GoG version. At least that's my memory, but I seem to have dinobarbs available now. Not sure if I put that in there or if it's in Steam now. Actually I don't think I've ever *played* dinobarbs, but I absolutely love the concept.

 

I tried that .bix once. It was a very short game, as I recall: I got stomped (and mauled, chewed, and swallowed) very quickly.