[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.

 

A lot more scientific stuff above, but this is what I do.

My build order is this:
1) temple
2) marketplace
3) barracks (I usually only build these in a couple cities early in the game)
4) library

I almost always build a settler when a city's population reaches 3. Workers are cheap and can be pumped out of decent production cities in a turn or two and I make a lot of them as well. In my current game I have 54 workers, and that's not even counting the ones I captured. Yes, a lot of them sit around doing nothing now that my country is fully railroaded and developed, but I still need a lot so they can go around and clear pollution in a single turn.

 

I'm just getting back into C3C after a several-year hiatus. Also, if I've ever played PTW, it's been years. So, with those two caveats out of the way, welcome to CFC, @HEEL_caT666 ! I haven't read every post in depth, but a few caught my eye that I'd like to address. Once upon a time, I knew a couple of tricks about this game. With that said, let me be honest: I'm an Emperor-level player, at best, with a couple of DG wins under my belt. I can't do those consistently.

One of the oddities of C3C is that Chieftain has its own difficulties. The AI has no money, routinely follows the same research path, and doesn't manage workers well. The result is that the player has to drive all research. I actually find it easier if I move up to at least Monarch, and my preferred level is Emperor. At that level, the AI discounts at least give it something to trade with. I'm never really interested in trading The Republic for 9 gold.

IMHO, if your workers ran out of things to do, you should have freed up more territory. That said, you've avoided one of the most common newbie mistakes, which is "not building enough workers." So congratulations on that.

Those are really hard to answer without context. For my first 3-4 cities, I'll be looking to turn at least one into a settler pump and cranking military units (usually archers and swords, though far better players than I suggest horsemen) out of the others. Squeeze in a worker when possible, and buy them off the AI at every opportunity. (Slave workers do not cost upkeep, if I remember correctly.) For my 183rd city, it might be artillery, and it might be wealth. It won't be a temple.

Never automate workers. You're capable of much, much better worker management than the AI. That said, my usual pattern for railroads has been: (1) connect the main cities and my war front(s); (2) rail the rest of my territory for the yield boosts.

Settle everything in sight. If you can completely cover your continent, it leaves the AI no place to settle. Clearing your continent of any AIs goes a long way to giving you some breathing room. I don't know much about culture victories, but for Conquest, Domination or Space, clearing your continent of all competition goes a long way to giving you some breathing room. If you go Republic, which is a solid choice for Space, you can build a few stacks to defend a few regions of your territory, and skip garrisons.

You're already read Cracker's Opening Plays, I think. Bede also wrote an article on the Role of the Specialist Citizen, which should help sort out specialist farms for you. You might also consider The Four Rules of Wonder Addiction and Multiplier Buildings, A Practical Primer (written by some knucklehead).

Here's how I do it:
1. Decide on the victory condition;
2. Build what you need for that condition;
3. Don't build what you don't need.

I'm a warmonger, so for me, that means:
1. Early wars with archers, swords or horses;
2. Clear my region;
3. Clear my continent;
4. Be sure to take cities, gold and tech in peace deals;
5. Research ways to invade;
6. Clear the other continents.

My infrastructure consists of libraries, aqueducts, barracks, and markets. Maybe the occasional bank. If I want the Pyramids (which are admittedly very powerful), and they're on my continent, I go take them after they're built.

If you're talking about specialist farms, here .... You don't build improvements there because there's no point. Specialist output doesn't go through multiplier buildings. IOW, if you have 10 science from working tiles in a core city, and you build a library, you get 15 science (if memory serves on the %.). In a specialist farm, each specialist produces 3 beakers in C3C, and if you have 3 scientists, you get 9 beakers. If you build a library, you still get 9 beakers, but have to pay the maintenance.

You did well. You should be trying to get out of Despo as quickly as possible and you obviously did so. Staying in Despo is a good way to choke an empire.

Roads, roads everywhere. In Republic, the Despo penalty goes away (obviously), and: (1) any citizen working a tile with a road earns 1 gpt; and (2) Republic adds an extra gpt to that. So every road worked by a citizen becomes +2 gpt.

This dealt with the Pyramids, if memory serves. The Pyramids cost 400 shields. How many swordsmen, archers, and granaries could you have built with those shields? Don't misunderstand me, The Pyramids are very powerful, but you can build a very big stack of units and go take it, at least up to and including Emperor level.

So don't just go explore. Go kick in some doors.

Lots of players enjoy culture and space victories and there's nothing wrong with that. TBH, some players far better than I enjoy those things. If that's what you want to do, go for it. But I'm an old warhorse. If I want to win a space race, I'll kick everyone off of my continent, bribe them into wars against one another, and build a space ship. A more likely scenario is that I'll kick everyone off my continent and then go invade. Culture? Yeah, not my thing.

Again, welcome to CFC, and enjoy your games!

 

Are you suggesting not building settlers out of core towns until granaries are built?

 

If your core towns have no more net food then the potential new towns, then settler before granary becomes more attractive as the effect on net food is the same while unit support and lux sliders favour more towns of lesser size.

Granaries work well if there is high net food and fresh water so you donnot require an aqueduct.

 

It's been pretty rare that I haven't found a granary useful. The only time I can think of is when it either results in one town really outgrowing the rest of my towns, forcing me to deal with a lot of unhappiness in that town and that town alone, &/or wasting a lot of food. That said, getting the timing right on settlers is still important.

 

I think—if I understand correctly—Caesaria from my last Byzantine game is an ideal factory setup (sadly after reading the War Academy article mentioned by Lanzelot I did not utilise it nearly as effectively as I could have). It's just down the road from my capital, so low corruption, and that is floodplain wheat you see: the holy grail of early growth, with plenty of mining to the south.