Can Javelineer Armies enslave, though? I thought I'd read somewhere that an Army composed of a single unit-type kept all that unit's abilities -- I know Berzerker-only Armies keep the Berzerker's Amphibious ability, and Conquistadore-only Armies treat all terrain as roads -- but other unit-abilities don't always seem to transfer.
e.g. In my recent attempt at the Sengoku Conquest (which was eventually successful, but slow), I built a Samurai Arquebusier-Army to cover my assault-units during the late game, and found that it did not have the Arquebusier's ability to bombard (not that this really mattered for my game -- Ninjas rule! -- but still...).
Though....will I ever find use for those workers? last headcount, 33 captured, 6 mine. 14 cities, two more to conquer and two more to buildon the ruins with settlers made from scraped tows...and then Inca and Aztec empires to destroy. And it is still only 500 AD.
Edit: confirmed. Army composed entirely of Javs can enslave.
Though....will I ever find use for those workers? last headcount, 33 captured, 6 mine. 14 cities, two more to conquer and two more to buildon the ruins with settlers made from scraped tows...and then Inca and Aztec empires to destroy. And it is still only 500 AD.
As a rule of thumb one should have workers producing each turn 4 worker points(an irrigation costs 8 points) per city. Regular workers produce 2 points per turn and 3 if your are industrious. Slaves produce 1 point per turn and 1.5 if you are industrious, but 1.5 is rounded down to 1. So if your midsized empire has 40 cities you need 80 regular workers or 54 if industrious or 160 slaves not depending on industrious. Any combination will do fine, too. Once railroads(12 points on flatland, 24 on hills and 36 on mountains) become available having an even larger numbers can be reasonable.
That seems...excessive for pre-RR. I had no problem fully improving my cities before RR with less.
Speaking of improvements...I'm not sure what exactly happens when I automate a worker, because right now I want to improve my road to railroad without altering anything else, and manually...it's going to be one big pain in the...
There is some truth to that. If you play good, than you will run out of really useful things to do with your workers some time before RR. Still the goal is that all citizens use tiles that are as good as possible and all tiles fully improved being used by citizens. Those 2 need to match, that is one of the main chalanges in the game.
Speaking of improvements...I'm not sure what exactly happens when I automate a worker, because right now I want to improve my road to railroad without altering anything else, and manually...it's going to be one big pain in the...
To cut it short: Donnot automate workers ever. You want rails for purposes of transportation and for purposes of substantially higher yields. So start with flat tiles.
I'd say that biggest challenge is the damn micromanaging. I have 29 cities at the moment, and corruption and pollution are making a mess out of it. Not helped by the fact that while "smart" enough to completely rearrange my citizens every time pollution strikes or population changes, governors never put citizens back once pollution is cleared.
Also, 40 cities is medium size? I have almost half of world's pop on Standard with 29 cities, and any more and I'd probably go mad from micromanaging.
What does that tell about the standard size of 100x100/2=5000 tiles? At a standard size map there is place for more than 100 cities, so 40 is still less than half of it.
If you want to learn how to play good choose smaller maps. There is of course a catch. Once you are adjusted to that amount of micromanagement you will never dare to play on larger maps again.
I'd say that biggest challenge is the damn micromanaging. I have 29 cities at the moment, and corruption and pollution are making a mess out of it. Not helped by the fact that while "smart" enough to completely rearrange my citizens every time pollution strikes or population changes, governors never put citizens back once pollution is cleared.
I feel you. Shuffling pollution-busting Workers around the map and putting idle citizens back to work is probably the most tedious part of the late-Industrial-Modern-era game (for me, anyway). But pollution-busting is also why you'll still need lots of Workers/Slaves at that point, especially if you've let your (core) cities grow into metros.
SpoilerDumb governors are another good argument for cities vs metros? :
Firstly, when a city can't grow because it lacks a Hospital, the governor drops its '+2 FPT' rule in favour of a '0 FPT' rule, and shifts citizens accordingly to low(er)-food/high(er)-shield tiles, if available. So if a city has e.g. a free Mountain in its FatCross, pollution-induced citizen reassignments may actually be less disruptive to build-projects than they otherwise might be.
Alternatively, if a 24-FPT city which has only 12 tiles available to work becomes polluted, the city-governor can't shift the 'polluted' citizen to another tile: it has no option but to turn the idle citizen(s) into a Specialist(s), which will likely also cause the city to begin eating into its food reserves. Even if you've modded the pollution graphic to something less ugly/orange, you can therefore immediately recognise which city(s) need(s) most attention on the main map (starving cities' pop-numbers go red); or on the F1-screen, by clicking on the wheat-icon at the top of the food column (which will group together the cities running a food-deficit -- and likely also a [newly assigned] Specialist -- at the top/bottom of the list).
Finally, Pop12 Cities don't generate 'population-pollution', only Metros do that (+1 pollution-point per head over Pop12); but you can't reduce that until you get Ecology (MassTransit) in the Modern era. By keeping your Indutrial-era core cities to Pop12, the only pollution will therefore come from Factories (+2 pollution), Coal Plants (+2 pollution) and possibly Commercial Docks (+1 pollution) -- which you don't need to have built everywhere -- so the actual pollution probability per town stays fairly low (1% per pollution-point, total probability applied to each land-tile in the city's FatCross -- admittedly, Cx[x]xC placement does therefore increase pollution-risk for any given tile within the FactCross-overlap).
SpoilerDo you know this trick? :
In the Industrial era, it is also very easy (at least up to Emperor-level) for the human player to build Hoovers, and eliminate their Coal-Plant pollution. Even if you're not the first into the Industrial, the AI-Civs almost invariably all get hung up researching the (completely optional) 'Nationalism --> Communism/Fascism/Espionage' branch of the tech-tree. That leaves you free to pursue the 'Steam --> Scientific Method' beeline (preferably with a quick detour to RepParts) while also (pre)building Theory_of_Evolution. When it's finished, you then take AtomicTheory and Electronics as your 2 freebie-techs, and if you've planned things properly, you also have a simultaneous prebuild going for Hoovers, timed to complete just after ToE, so you get both Wonders almost simultaneously.
Not only can you now sell any Coal Plants you already built, but if there are any semi-powerful AI-Civs still left on the board at that point, you might also be able to convert your monopoly on those 2-3 now-'useless' Wonder-techs into a huge pile of cash + useful techs.
And once you have a Civ-wide rail-net in place (i.e. all cities connected, at the very least; although ideally all worked [core-city] tiles should be fully railed ASAP), you can minimise the tedium involved in pollution-busting by keeping a few Worker-/Slave-stacks fortified near your capital (Industrial-era jobs generally require workers to be stacked in any case -- except e.g. when clearing+roading vegetated tiles). For 1-turn cleaning after you have Replaceable Parts (assuming non-IND, non-Fascist -- not that you should be Fascist, but if...), you need 6 Workers per flat tile, 12 Workers per Hill/Forest, or 18 Workers per Mountain (4/8/12 for flat/hill/mountain if IND; double all manpower-requirements for Slaves; adjust as needed if Fascist).
When you get the pollution warnings during the interturn, just go to your capital (press 'H'), and activate sufficient Worker(-stack)s to deal with it. Then, still on the main map, (zoom out and) use the stack-move command to take the Workers along your rail-net (you did build it already, didn't you?) directly to the affected city/ stained tile. When the tile(s) is clean, go straight into the affected city, and put the 'idle' citizen(s) back to work.
SpoilerMinimising micro... :
You'll have lost the output from the tile on that interturn, so if you've been running a tight 'Anti Pork-Barrel' policy, the town's current build might have been messed up. Even if so, you might still be able to salvage/ minimise any resulting wastage by switching to a (slightly) more expensive project (e.g. changing a 79-shield Artillery build-in-progress to a Tank), or 'short-rushing' the shields you lost (= cash-rushing shields into an intermediate build between what you have and what you want, then immediately switching to the intended build and using the next interturn's normal production to complete it). It should be noted though, that micro-managing every last one of your cities every turn, does become a lot less necessary in the mid- to late game (at least below DG/Deity), when (small) shield/food-overruns represent a much less significant loss to your Civ's total output.
SpoilerAnd regarding automation... :
If you own your continent, and have a rail-net in place, then automating Workers to clear pollution becomes much less 'risky' in terms of losing them to AI-capture, but it does still tend to be inefficient, since the game's Worker-AI routine will spread out available workers evenly: e.g. if it has 10 RepParts-Slaves available, and 2 flat tiles to clean, it will put 5 Slaves on each (=3T to clear), instead of 6 on one (=2T to clear) and 4 on the other (=3T to clear). Similarly, while you ideally shouldn't leave the city-governors switched on over the interturn, if you have multiple cities which need their citizens re-assigned after pollution has been cleared, you could reassign all your towns simultaneously, by switching the governors on, and then immediately switching them off again, using "Manage moods"="Yes" in "All cities", and then "Manage moods"="No" in "All cities". But the results will not necessarily be what you'd like.
That said, automation is probably still relatively harmless at Warlord, possibly even Regent, but not recommended for anything beyond that, so it's not a good habit to get into...
OK, it's still a bit of a click-fest, but at least you don't have to go chasing round the map to find enough lone Workers to collect into a stack to finish the job quickly/efficiently. And it should go without saying, that if you don't have enough free Workers to get the job(s) done in 1 turn, then prioritise cleaning the food-tiles in your core -- you don't want to have those cities losing citizens to starvation.
Also, 40 cities is medium size? I have almost half of world's pop on Standard with 29 cities, and any more and I'd probably go mad from micromanaging.
To cut it short: Donnot automate workers ever. You want rails for purposes of transportation and for purposes of substantially higher yields. So start with flat tiles.
But, but, but... the 'Rail-to ...' automation does start with the flat tiles...
SpoilerSeriously though... :
As soon as you got SteamPower + Iron + Coal, if you wanted to minimise Worker-management you could set off an automated stack of 6 (or 12 or 18) Workers to rail from one end of your territory to the other -- provided of course that you don't care that the AI-pathfinding routine will simply pick the 'quickest/shortest' route between the Workers' current position and the end-point (and they'll all follow that same route), and won't prioritise rail-connections to your highest-yielding tiles, or even your intervening cities (even if doing so wouldn't have made your transcontinental railway any longer than it would have been anyway)...
By the way: you don't need to micro-manage all of your towns. Doing it for the first and second ring is enough. The rest can be set up as "farms" once, and then left alone for most of the time. (I only check them once in a while to make sure the governor didn't do anything stupid on growth or on culture expansion.)
It's a typical application of the "20-80" rule: with 20% of the effort you already get 80% of the yields. The remaining 80% of the effort are then for the "fanatics" (or when playing Sid)...
Is it a good idea to fortify units on your city, or should you keep them spread about the territory? I find myself always having stacks of units that I'm not quite sure what to do with when I'm not at war.
Keep some of them for military police wherever relevant and (especially if you have a poor road infrastructure or, later on, no railways) you should keep them near resources or important cities. Especially where there's no mountains/hills to stop invaders.
Also, keep in mind that if you have overseas colonies you'd better keep a standing army there, as otherwise the AI might attack simply because it considers the place weaker. With good reason, too.
Keep some of them for military police wherever relevant and (especially if you have a poor road infrastructure or, later on, no railways) you should keep them near resources or important cities. Especially where there's no mountains/hills to stop invaders.
Also, keep in mind that if you have overseas colonies you'd better keep a standing army there, as otherwise the AI might attack simply because it considers the place weaker. With good reason, too.
That actually happened in my game. Celts, second weakest AI in my game, dropped a galleon load of troops next to my overseas city, next turn declared war and attacked. But really, medieval infantry, celtic swordsmen and musketmen don't stand a chance attacking my infantry.
I'm a couple of turns from nukes...time to go Gandhi on them
Only two times I use any form of worker automation:
Pollution cleanup, within my own territory: Keep a stack of fortified workers near a city where I can find them. Wake the whole stack, and use shift-D to send them out over the rail network to clean up the orange goo. They will also zoom to the next spot, if it pops up the next turn, and will wait for further orders if it is all cleaned up. I can then stack-move them back to their "campsite" to wait for the next out break.
Building the first transcontinental rail link: Right after I discover the tech, my first priority is building a rail link from my core cities to the frontiers, so that my troops can move quickly to where they are needed. I tend to leave lots of interior cities undefended, with a small stack of rapid deployment forces in case an AI galleon shows up that I wasn't expecting. Choose a spot about 5 squares away, "Rail-to" that spot with a stack of 4-6 workers or slaves. When they finish that that spot, choose another waypoint and "rail-to" that spot. Repeat until the main trunk line is finished.
Both of these use cases minimize the risk of un-intended improvements and the most boring of worker management tasks. I'm much less disciplined about finishing the railroading in my core or chopping big swathes of jungle to combat disease.
yorlon, I recommend that you adopt the strategy of building one coastal railroad so as to be able to destroy any landing force quickly. They will, by necessity, all be unable to attack and pillage/spread out there.
Sarin, how did the 100% peaceful nukular research result?
Oh, shiny...actually, kinda glowy. Half of the world declared war on me, gave me opportunity to try out how some late game thingies, like AA defense, work. Not that they actually can put a dent in my defense now.
Well, at risk of sounding like a jerk, the best way to achieve that, would be to 'git gud' There's plenty of information in the Civ3 War Academy here on CFC about how to improve game-play, allowing faster/earlier victories, long before the timer appears...
Failing that, you could try turning off the 'Histographic' (Score) victor condition (VC) on the 'Choose your Civ' game-setup screen (if that's possible? I usually play with default rules). I'm not sure if that will also prevent the countdown-timer from appearing, though, because (even if you can turn off the Histo VC) AFAIK the game will still run for the default 540 turns — and possibly then report an Embarrassing Defeat if none of the other VCs have been reached by that point.
Otherwise, elimination of the countdown-timer is only possible by modding.
For example, you could replace the relevant .pcx (graphic) file with a 'transparent' (all-magenta) .pcx file (IIRC, someone already produced one and uploaded it to CFC, but you'd have to go looking for it in the Civ3 Creation&Customisation section); and you'd probably also need to edit the labels.txt file, to replace the line 'Turns left in game...' with a blank line. This wouldn't prevent the game from counting down the last 20 turns either, but should render the countdown-timer invisible. Such graphical/labels mods are also immediately applied to a game(s) in progress, and would not affect a game's eligibility for your Hall of Fame (HoF).
Or, if what you want is just to play a longer game, without running up against the 540-turn limit, then you would need to use the Conquests Editor to increase the turn-limit in the conquests.biq to e.g. 1000 turns (IIRC, the max. possible is 9999 turns), to ensure that one of the other (Cultural/ Scientific/ Military) VCs will likely be reached (long) before the turn-counter makes its appearance. Caveat: any game using a modded .biq is ineligible for the HoF.
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