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

[HEEL_caT666]

Sure, but note that the early game is massively, massively, massively, more important than the late game. One extra food in the early game can be worth thirty cities late game (random example ).
But hey, I don't play as good as I could either, I love building up my cities and filling them with useless buildings I don't need for one. So long as you're having fun, play however you want!

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.

New Berlin 2, New Berlin 3, and so on.

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

Also be aware that 4 turns per tech a threshold you cannot cross. So pending details hospitals will not help you at all to get your spaceship on the way early.

If you move on beyond emperor this changes because research becomes more expensive. But as AI will be more competetive before the industrial age you need a yield oriented settling scheme.

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.

If you like metropolises in the late game, go for them, but it isn't better than keeping to smaller cities.

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

 

[justanick]

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.

 

[HEEL_caT666]

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?

 

[justanick]

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.

 

[Puppeteer]

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.

 

[HEEL_caT666]

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.

Neither Steam nor GoG versions have a ptw executable

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

 

[tjs282]

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.

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...

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

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.

 

[HEEL_caT666]

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

 

[Puppeteer]

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.

 

[tjs282]

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.

 

[Dragon1965]

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.

 

[Aabraxan]

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.

....I then tried to play a game (Chieftain, Germans, PTW) to try out my new skills....

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.

....You can see in the screenshot ive got like 12 workers there doing nothing, and in addition all of my terrain tiles literally everywhere are improved, so now I'm in a situation where my workers are essentially doing nothing because without warring with the Celts (which I'm not prepared for) there is no new cities, and all I can essentially do is build trade links with other civs. My self assessment tells the that I built too much workers early game, which is why I'm here.

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.

....What is (if one exists) the standard build order when you build a new city? How many workers should I build for my city and when? How should I sequence worker, improvement and military unit production? And how many should I garrison?

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.

Side question about railroads - is there like a procedure for it (link between cities first then improve all the terrain tiles f.e.) and should I consider using Automate No Alter (which i assume doesn't change the improvements, but could change railroads?)

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.

Sure I mean I can try settling the next peninsula I guess I'll send them there. I was definetly looking at upping the difficulty later but this is just a trial game.

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.

....Well, how would I be able to do 4-turn tech? I would have to have the bar set on 80% science at all times pretty much... And from what I've heard it gets much harder to do on higher difficulties. Does that mean I have to save as much gold as possible and build as many cities as possible in despot? From this a question arises - which sort of government should I switch to after despotism - Monarchy or Republic? From one point of view the Republic gets much less corruption, but does that outweigh the potential gold losses on unit support? I guess if you have a lot of cities on the fringes that constantly waste gold it maybe worth to stay on monarchy for a while?

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.

....As in, let them grow over their limits ASAP and switch the extra to scientists for research? Why would you not build improvements there though? (and what if they literally have nothing more to build i.e. army too big?)...

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.

UPDATE: I'm on 270 BC now and all is going well. Im a republic with about 10 towns and I'm going strong. The 3 started cities are producing settlers like there is no tomorrow.

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.

....The only bad thing is that I'm struggling a bit with gold management - I'm loosing money! Hopefully these new cities will help with that.

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.

....Well I dont see the problem really, because berlin has nothing else to build, and leipzig is gonna be my settler pump, so?

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.

....Again Leipzig is my settler pump here, It's making quite a lot and those cities have nothing else to produce - making more warriors for no reason than to just explore seems like a waste to me.

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!

 

[Lanzelot]

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

My build order is this:
1) temple

Never build temples. Some say, it's a waste of shields, but I say it's even worse than that...
If you need the happiness, use the luxury slider for that. It costs approx. the same, but you can dial it back, once you have acquired another lux resource. But the temple will be a drag on your economy forever. (Unless you disband it, but then you just wasted 60 shields...)
If you need the culture expansion, use another settler for that, which settles a new town at distance 3. This will also get you the second ring tiles of the inner town into your territory, but instead of costing you gold, it gives you gold (and shields and food).
The only exception is of course when going for a 100K culture victory. Then build temples everywhere...

I almost always build a settler when a city's population reaches 3.

If you are talking about core towns here, then this is a big mistake. You are wasting a lot of resources that way. Better wait, until the town reaches size 6. Then you have much more production and income and can spit out those settlers much faster. The optimum is a cycle that starts at size 5, grows to 6 in 2 turns, grows to 7 in 2 turns and in the same interturn completes the settler and falls back to size 5 (without losing the contents of your granary!). That way you can crank out a settler every 4 turns and your town never is smaller than size 5 and produces lots of money or research all the time. (And food! Usually a town can grow much faster from 5 to 6 than it can grow from 1 to 2.) The time you have to wait till your town reaches size 5, can be used to already prepare roads toward the settler's destination. That way the new town will be up and running not much later than if you had produced the settler for it at size 3.
Look up the concept of "settler factory" in the War Academy.

 

[WeirdoJoker]

If you are talking about core towns here, then this is a big mistake. You are wasting a lot of resources that way. Better wait, until the town reaches size 6. Then you have much more production and income and can spit out those settlers much faster. The optimum is a cycle that starts at size 5, grows to 6 in 2 turns, grows to 7 in 2 turns and in the same interturn completes the settler and falls back to size 5 (without losing the contents of your granary!).

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

 

[Lanzelot]

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

Of course much of this depends on the situation at hand, e.g. if there is a very nice location nearby (cow/wheat next to a river etc.) that would boost the new town, or if there is an important resource (luxury, horses, iron) that you want to get into your territory, before your neighbor does, then it might be advisable to spit out an early settler, even if it hurts the original town.
But in general my rule is: refrain from building settlers "too early" and hurting your progress. Let core towns first become powerful, build a granary in those that have excess food (ideal is +5) and then start building settlers and workers in the granary towns. You will find that this way you will be able to complete settlement of your continent much faster than if you constantly cripple your production and growth capability by building a settler at size 3... (Which is by the way the mistake the AI is committing all the time up to let's say Demigod... It always makes me sad when I establish an embassy and see that the AI capital is still size 1 and has no improvements to speak of, while my capital has already finished it's "settler phase" and produced granary, library, market and barracks.)

I guess starting at Deity, the AI's bonus makes them growing at such a high rate that they can't "destroy" their population fast enough to run into this problem...
At Deity, the AI needs only 12 food for one citizen and at Sid only 8 food, compared to the human player's 20 food. So it's really hard to avoid growing under these circumstances, even for the completely incompetent Civ3-AI... If the AI capital has a Wheat, and the AI even managed to put an irrigation on it by accident, then the town has +4 food and can grow every other turn on Sid level even without a granary. Then it's of course almost impossible to shoot yourself in the foot...

 

[justanick]

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.

 

[Lanzelot]

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

This is of course true, but very strangely the opposite is also true: Granaries also work well, if you have low food and no fresh water. E.g. assume you have no food bonus anywhere near and no fresh water. Then your towns would grow every 10 turns. With a Granary, this is cut down to 5 turns. So especially in such a situation it is a must to build a Granary quickly, if you want to get at least some kind of half-way decent expansion going.

 

[Aabraxan]

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.

 

[Lanzelot]

I wouldn't agree with this piece of advice. Yes, building early wonders slows down your initial expansion phase. But the Pyramids is the one wonder where that's acceptable, because the granaries it gives are such a massive boost to growth. It allows you to catch back up, and the bigger the map, the more that is true.

On a not too big map all towns to be founded are expected to be founded long before the Pyramids can be finished by regular means. The Pyramids are powerful, but only if you get them via SGL. 400 shields take forever.

I agree with justanick here. Building the Pyramids early on will cripple your expansion. If you can get it via SGL (or rather MGL, as this is PtW...), or if you can conquer it from a neighbor, then it's a "nice to have", but you should not attempt to build it yourself. 2-3 Granaries in your food-richest towns suffice completely to get a quick expansion going. And once your cities have reached size 7, the Pyramids become useless anyway, because even with them it takes too long to let your cities grow to size 12. (Especially the food-low production-rich ones, which win you the game...) In that situation it is much better to let your 2-3 Granary-towns build 2-turn workers and join them evenly to the core towns, until they have maxed out at 12. That way a new citizen joins your empire every 2 turns, while if you assume most of your core cities have only +2 food, then it would take them 10 turns to grow a new citizen. So your empire grows 5 times as fast! And the 10 shields for the worker can be neglected, because by that time your core cities that are maximized for production (mainly mines, only as much irrigation as is necessary to support the hills and mountains in reach), will produce anything you need at an incredible speed.
In general I think the Pyramids are completely overrated... I never build them except for when going for a 20K culture victory...

BTW: most of the Great Wonders are completely overrated... The only ones that are not, are:
For a fast military victory:

• The Great Lighthouse (depending on the map of course). On some maps, this is a must for a fast military victory.

For science games (UN or Space victory):

• Hanging Gardens (but don't waste time researching Monarchy yourself, it's an optional. If you can trade it and build the HG, otherwise skip it. You can also capture it, if a neighbor not too far away builds it for you...)
• Bach's Cathedral (all that I said about the Hanging Gardens, applies here as well. And in addition: most of the time, Bach's is not necessary, because by that time usually you already have 5-6 lux resources. Also note that it provides its benefit only on the continent it was built, not world-wide as the Hanging Gardens. So if you plan on letting an AI build it for you, make sure you keep at least one AI alive on your continent... )
  
• Copernicus and Newton. These you absolutely have to build yourself. Plan ahead and have prebuilds ready in your beaker-richest cities.
• Theory of Evolution. You also need to build this yourself.
• United Nations (If you are going for the UN victory, this is obvious, and if going for Space, it may be useful to get it to eliminate the risk of an AI holding an election and winning it...)
  
• SETI (If going for Space)

Note that the Internet is nice, but not necessary. I usually have prebuilds for Research Labs ready in all my core cities, so I can have the effect of them one tech earlier than I could have the Internet. (By that time, shields are usually not a problem, so it doesn't matter, if I build around 15 RLs at 200s a piece (or 100s, if scientific) or one 1000s Wonder.)

For 100K cultural victory:

• Artemis (if you are on a reasonably large land mass)
  As I want to have that one asap, I usually build it myself, especially on the lower difficulty levels, where the AI takes forever to get anything done... But sometimes the AI can build it for you. In a recent game of mine (Emperor) I got lucky and noted that an AI capital (Rome) had started building it very early, and as an Emperor AI needs only 400s for it compared to the 500s I would have to spent, I knew that Rome would get it done as fast as I could, or even faster, so I let Rome build it and took it the turn after it was completed...

And that's already it... All the other Wonders are needed only in a 20K cultural victory.

 

[md4]

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.