Newbie to Civ 3. Numerous Questions for perfecting early game play

I'm a little lax-er than @Aabraxan with my farms — but only a little!

Farms in fertile country are allowed to grow as far as they can: I expect them to max out at Pop4-5 on railed+irrigated dry Plains, Pop5-6 on railed+irrigated dry Grassland, and Pop10-12 near rivers/lakes. I can usually run around half those pop-points as Specialists: food-bonuses/Floodplains will obviously increase that proportion.

Farms in infertile country (Tundra, Desert, Hill-ranges) will immediately have their first citizen turned into a Specialist, and stay at Pop1.

Small, dry farms will get no buildings, unless they're on the coast. In that case they might build Walls, to boost defence.

Farms directly adjacent to a Fish (i.e. no Cultural expansion required!) will get a Harbour, to allow another Specialist (town-tile + Fish = 5 FPT = 1 fisherman + 1 Specialist + 1 FPT; town-tile + Fish-tile + Harbour = 6 FPT = Pop3 = 1 fisherman + 2 Specialists), in addition to those allowed by any land-tile food-harvests.

It's much cheaper (in terms of Settler- vs. building-shields, and building-maintenance) to build two Pop6-ers than one Pop12-er, for roughly the same beaker/gold return, so I don't build Ducts in any newly-Settled farms. However, in already-watered farms (either those founded on a river/lakeshore, or captured towns which already have a Duct), I will consider putting up Courthouses and Markets to help keep order — especially if Luxes are scarce (which can happen on larger maps; or if your trade-rep has accidentally got broken).

I use CivEngs, Forest-chops and (minimal) cash-rushes to get those few buildings up ASAP, then MM for zero FPT once they hit max. Specialists.

Otherwise, I'll usually set farms to slow-build Settlers/Workers while I still have land to fill/improve, but once I hit 55-60% land (if not going for Domination) and/or max. Specialists per town, I prefer Wealth, because then I don't have to keep adjusting tile-assignments as pop-points get turned into units.

And I never build Culture-buildings anywhere in the farm zone (I don't usually play for 100K), but in a long science-game I will happily accept those free Research_Labs from The_Internet.

 

In the farms, as many as it will support. For tundra towns, that often means that their only citizen is a scientist, and they'll never grow. In a town with lots of foot, I can sometimes get 4 in a pop-6 city after rails. Granted, that's the kind of town where I'd consider building an aqueduct. Before rails, I'd consider 3 workers and 3 specialists pretty good. No, I haven't crunched numbers here. I stand to be corrected, as I can't look at the game right now.

In core towns that have markets and libraries, usually none. Gold that comes from citizens working the tiles will go through the multiplier buildings, and will often work out to be more than I could get from a specialist. If a citizen is working a roaded riverside grassland tile in republic, that's 3 gold. 1 for the river, 1 for the road, 1 for Republic. If I'm at 100% science, that's going to turn into 4 beakers. Now multiply that out by 12-15 decently-uncorrupted cities.

I'd say a bit lower. If memory serves, CivAssist II used to tell me exactly how corrupt by cities were, but I haven't been able to get it to work lately. I used to quit building courthouses at about 80%, I think. Now I have to just count shields. If it's capable of 2 shields or more, it's a candidate to get a courthouse. 1-shield towns build rock-throwers, settlers, workers, etc. Cash-rushing gets those units out as needed.

 

Thank you both @tjs282 and @Aabraxan. That helps significantly. I did not know how to build science farms or the best way to use them. This explanation makes a lot of sense. I would just put aqueduct on slow 50T and let those towns go. I do have plenty of workers atm but I should change them to wealth or settlers as needed instead of wasting shields towards a building which is useless and costs 1GPT. If I had been doing that I would have achieved 4T tech much faster and have tons of money to spare.

 

A couple of War Academy articles that might help you understand the hows and whys of farms:
The Role of The Specialist Citizen and
Multiplier Buildings: A Practical Primer (sadly, all of my pictures have disappeared from this one).

 

I just noticed a strange thing: I was switching some of my marketplaces in cities to settler --> "you will lose X amount of shields if you change" --> in the screen before changing it shows 1 T for setter but after change 4 shields are missing and now my settler will produce in 4T instead of next turn!!! Is this normal?

 

Thank you. I will definitely read it.

 

I don't think so. Can you give us a few screenshots?

 

This is happening in all the cities I tried. I even tried to remove the CE and Scientist before changing but am getting the same results. Screenshots:

 

The one with the shield waste popup looks like it's from a different town? But no, if it says you'll waste shields, the smaller build should complete on the next turn. Maybe someone smarter than I has an explanation.

 

Not necessarily smarter, but...

If you've used a CivEng to put shields into a building, you can't use all those accumulated shields to convert that build-in-progress directly to a unit: if you try, all the CivEng-shields are removed from the shield-box.

IIRC, the sneaky way round this is to start a cheap building, cash-rush to completion shortly before it would have completed anyway and then switch to the unit. The cash-rushed shields then apparently 'protect' the CivEng-shields from being removed.

But if you want to convert a building-in-progress to a Settler, you'd ideally be wanting a building which costs 30 shields (e.g. Militaristic-/Seafaring-Harbour, Religious-Temple), so you might not have one of those available; the next-best option would be a 20-shield building (Walls?) plus 10 chopped shields (or disband-shields, I guess, but what a waste...).

We're getting a little off-topic, though. I mean, sure, @ArenE, it's your thread, so we can talk about whatever you want to. But beaker-farming is hardly an early game tactic...

 

Ah-ha! I knew there had to be a reason. It was just one I didn't remember!

 

Is there a way to clear the queue you have set?

 

Hit "delete" to remove one item. Hit "Shift" and "delete" and clear it completely.

 

Looks like I'm not going to have any choice.

Because I sat down to play further yesterday, and the first thing I did was pop up F8 (for this first time this game) to see how close I was to the Dom-limit. But the F8-screen didn't tell me that, nor did it mention Culture, the Space-race, or the UN — from which I infer that "Conquest" is the only victory-condition enabled for this game (or Histographic, I suppose, but who has time for that?). So the crushing and driving has continued, and the lamentations will be loud indeed.

Turned out Ragnar was already fighting Smoke and Henry when I started laying into him as well, and although he signed a PT with Henry, it was too late to prevent the loss of his original heartland (to me). The Mayans are welcome to his American conquests (for now!), if they can take them — but if they can't, I might just have to capture + gift them to Smoke myself (at the moment, they represent a salient too far: I can't defend them adequately with what I've got over there yet). Ragnar's last island-holdout can wait until the mainland is fully secured, though.

Dora, Smoke and Henry all suddenly got MilTrad a couple of turns back (someone sold it around) — and then Dora sold it to me in exchange for Saltpeter, which was... unwise. But my thin-rail net is being built, my core-Factories are about to come online, and I'm now almost at RepParts, so I'll soon be able to upgrade/ build/ ship a stack of Infs + Arty to defend my overseas holdings against Cav-attacks. I'm thinking Henry's towns should be my next acquisitions (he has some nice Wonders — including SunTzu).

Then I'll need to decide between smoking the Jaguar, or polishing off Dora. Her towns will almost certainly be easier to take, but we have some nice deals going, and the potential for more, so her territory might actually be more valuable to me if it stays under her control (for now!).

 

I edited for brevity, but that post was FUNNY.

 

So, looks like I polished off another on Monarch, this time with Maya. I finally have basic understanding of military. Plan on learning more for diplomatic. I finally learned about science farms. Still need to do better like @tjs282 did above. Soon after resting for a day or 2, I was thinking about considering Emperor. Maybe that is a little too early but just wanted your guys thoughts. I did cheat a little on Monarch but it was when I make stupid mistakes ex. deleted by unit accidentally or hit the wrong key and moved my unit to a different location than planned etc. Should I just play Monarch until I don't do those kind of mistakes or should I learn more about diplomacy first?

Later half of the game was mostly learning about war and how often my individual tanks get destroyed when trying to attack rifleman or being destroy by calvary attacking my tanks. Is this type of AI playing (AI calculating better odds) worse at Emperor level?

 

No, that does not depend on difficulty level.

I advise to try Emperor.

 

I say go for Emperor. Individual battle odds do not change with difficulty levels, but build discounts mean that the AI will have (a few) more units at Emp.

 

I would not plan on not making human errors, such as misclicks. Still making them and if you read SG post, so are they. What should happens is you get more familiar with what to expect from the AI. This will let you take fewer bad fights and not have units caught in locations, where they are at risk. That means more combat wins and fewer losses. Move up and if things go poorly, you can drop back for a time. It is fun to gets tough wins and satisfying. GL

 

Tanks are A=16.

A Rifleman's D=6, when fortified (+25% D) in a city (+50% D) effectively turns into D=10(.5) -- even if that's rounded down, your Tank's chance of winning each combat-round is only 16/(16+10), or 62%. So you can expect to lose 38% of your total Tank-HP on every city-assault vs. Rifles, unless you can redline the defenders first using Artillery-bombardment.

It's even worse once the AI can build Infs (D=10, rising to 17 -- or 18? -- if fortified in a city); if you haven't brought any Arty to the party at that point, you can pretty much turn around and go home (or at least, go and pillage their Rubber so they're restricted to building Rifles instead).

Similarly, Tanks have only D=8, and Cavs have A=6. So yeah, the odds of a Tank losing HP to a Cav-attack are pretty good too (6/(6+8) = 43%). And if the Tank has already been damaged during a previous attack, chances are it's gonna die, because it can't retreat.

But look at it this way: if you have Cavs + Rifles, when the AI has Tanks (which will happen increasingly often as you go up in difficulty level!), those odds work in your favour as well...