Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

Overall, in Civ3 land is king. More land means more resources, more space for cities, more tiles to be worked that produce commerce. Commerce is filtered thru the sliders to become science, gold, and happy faces.

Many experienced players recommend warring when you have an advantage, especially after completing a key tech to enable your military like Military Tradition for cavalry. On many maps, it is easier to conquer the territory where the resources are, rather than trading for them.

At the same time, selling your excess luxuries for gold-per-turn will slow down the AI's economies and tech speed, while giving you excess gold for rush-buying units for a future war.
 
vorlon_mi said:
Overall, in Civ3 land is king. More land means more resources, more space for cities, more tiles to be worked that produce commerce.
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Yeah, thalassocracies, which were historically great powers (be they Athens, Carthage or the VOC) would be very difficult to represent in Civ3. Even so, Hegemon provides just the right scale to enable establishing thalassocracies, albeit land powers are still represented and a land attack by Macedon or Sparta cannot be countered by seaborne operations in the way that they were in real life.
 
I'm throwing this out here: has there been any documentation on how Paratroopers, airdrops, helicopters and the like (don't) work?
 
Takhisis said:
I'm throwing this out here: has there been any documentation on how Paratroopers, airdrops, helicopters and the like (don't) work?
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Can you be more specific about how they don't work?
 
ı once saw Al in a Lord of the Rings based scenario use an Eagle to land some Elven spearman into orc territory after taking of from some airfield . So , they work but so rare that you might have to reload to understand what did just happen .
 
With Flintlock´s C3X_R10B (or R10) the configuration can be set, that paratroopers (etc.) don´t end their units turn after being airdropped.
 
Vuldacon said:
Can you be more specific about how they don't work?
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I put the word ‘work’ between parentheses because what I meant is documentation on how they work or not.

My point is, basically, that Advanced Flight is something that I never bother to research. I just get it as filler from some AI that I need to keep on my side or as an excuse to subsidise it as my proxy in a war. Like Ironclads, really.
My ideas are a bit disorganised at this time of day, but here we are:

From the AI's POV paratroopers are 4.9 units so even regular infantry (6.10) is better to build. The AI will hardly ever build them.
Also they cannot be upgraded to anything.
As for helicopters, the AI seems to never use them at all.

Paratroopers cannot realistically attack with a 4 attack stat and they cannot retreat, unlike knights; also they cannot actually launch an airborne operation; they only occupy undefended tiles (I'm reading that they can at least occupy cities that have been deprived of defenders –does anybody know whether they can take unprotected artillery, scouts, workers or settlers?) and then, on the next turn, fight. By which next turn I could simply have destroyed ground troops with bombers and/or artillery which I could have built instead of the paratroopers.
What Civinator says:
Civinator said:
With Flintlock´s C3X_R10B (or R10) the configuration can be set, that paratroopers (etc.) don´t end their units turn after being airdropped.
Click to expand...
could make the paratroopers far more useful, i.e. actually mobile, capable of attacking or retreating or entrenching (building a fortress in normal civ parlance).

Knights are better attackers because they can retreat; crusaders can help fortify the line and their 5 attack stat is great for mopping up those weird piles of chariots and tank-proof spearmen the AI sometimes seems to build. Cavalry can actually cross your own borders and conquer a city with red-lined defenders with little loss.

The tech is badly placed. It gives you comparatively weaker units and isn't even required for progression to the next age when you could be trying to rush the UN wonder for victory or SETI or the Internet, both of which give you an edge in the culture and space races.
 
Takhisis said:
I put the word ‘work’ between parentheses because what I meant is documentation on how they work or not.

My point is, basically, that Advanced Flight is something that I never bother to research. I just get it as filler from some AI that I need to keep on my side or as an excuse to subsidise it as my proxy in a war. Like Ironclads, really.
My ideas are a bit disorganised at this time of day, but here we are:

From the AI's POV paratroopers are 4.9 units so even regular infantry (6.10) is better to build. The AI will hardly ever build them.
Also they cannot be upgraded to anything.
As for helicopters, the AI seems to never use them at all.

Paratroopers cannot realistically attack with a 4 attack stat and they cannot retreat, unlike knights; also they cannot actually launch an airborne operation; they only occupy undefended tiles (I'm reading that they can at least occupy cities that have been deprived of defenders –does anybody know whether they can take unprotected artillery, scouts, workers or settlers?) and then, on the next turn, fight. By which next turn I could simply have destroyed ground troops with bombers and/or artillery which I could have built instead of the paratroopers.
What Civinator says:

could make the paratroopers far more useful, i.e. actually mobile, capable of attacking or retreating or entrenching (building a fortress in normal civ parlance).

Knights are better attackers because they can retreat; crusaders can help fortify the line and their 5 attack stat is great for mopping up those weird piles of chariots and tank-proof spearmen the AI sometimes seems to build. Cavalry can actually cross your own borders and conquer a city with red-lined defenders with little loss.

The tech is badly placed. It gives you comparatively weaker units and isn't even required for progression to the next age when you could be trying to rush the UN wonder for victory or SETI or the Internet, both of which give you an edge in the culture and space races.
Click to expand...
Did you read the link above ^? I have not tried it (this decade at least :P), but tanks can advance 2 tiles/turn and paratroopers can advance 6 from an airbase created with a worker on railroad on the front line. If you have enough bombers to red line/kill all the defenders it does not matter if they are only 4 attack. So if you are powerful enough the fastest advance you can do is with paratroopers.
 
tried something like the linked some years ago but it is agonizingly slow . Rather have 10 modern armies with 4 units each and hundred workers . As long as the AI has build roads you can advance indefinitely .
 
Samson said:
If you have enough bombers to red line/kill all the defenders it does not matter if they are only 4 attack.
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AFAIK, even if all the garrisons are gone, Paras still can't be dropped directly on cities.

About the best they could do (before the patch) was to be dropped on the AI's resource-tiles after any defenders were killed, but unless you dropped like 20 of them, it's still very unlikely that any would survive over the interturn to be able to pillage it.

Would be different now, but Takh's right that the AI still likely won't see the value of building them when 6.10.1 Infs, 12.6.1 Marines and/or 12.14.1 TOWs are also available. So if anyone wants the AI to have some Paras, it would probably be best to make them autoproduced out of e.g. Airports...
 
Samson said:
Did you read the link above ^? I have not tried it (this decade at least :p), but tanks can advance 2 tiles/turn and paratroopers can advance 6 from an airbase created with a worker on railroad on the front line. If you have enough bombers to red line/kill all the defenders it does not matter if they are only 4 attack. So if you are powerful enough the fastest advance you can do is with paratroopers.
Click to expand...
If you're going to send workers in you just railroad the whole lot of tiles and move mechanised infantry in.
Also, if for whatever reason you have a lot of artillery and tanks/mech inf but few bombers (if Flight is the last tech you research before moving onto the next age) you can just use the mech inf units to attack the redlined defenders outright –nothing short of other mech inf will stop them.
 
In Civ1 and Civ2, I used paratroopers a lot: kill the defenders with bombers and then drop a parachuter into the empty city to capture it. But with Civ3, this no longer works: the parachuter dies, even if landing on an empty city. So I stopped building them, just didn't seem useful anymore. And if I ever research that far, then I'm going for diplo or space, so the extra optional tech only slows me down...

I never tried helicopters. But seems to be a similar story as with parachuters?! Or can they unload into empty cities?
 
Takhisis said:
If you're going to send workers in you just railroad the whole lot of tiles and move mechanised infantry in.
Also, if for whatever reason you have a lot of artillery and tanks/mech inf but few bombers (if Flight is the last tech you research before moving onto the next age) you can just use the mech inf units to attack the redlined defenders outright –nothing short of other mech inf will stop them.
Click to expand...
IIRC, Mech Infantry comes in the Modern Age, not the Industrial Age. So the guide is talking about late Industrial warfare with normal Infantry and normal Tanks (not Modern Armor).

I can't think of many situations where I desperately need to leapfrog over enemy troops to get to a particular city, or to a particular resource. My invasion is going to get there at the speed of my tanks and cavalry. Paradropping over an inconvenient mountain range or patch of jungle would be faster, I guess.
 
The thing is that the game effectively presents you with the choice between a tech that gives you two niche units that are not better than already-available ones and is not required to progress into the next age or do anything else and acquiring any one tech that gives you access to better units, resources, improvements or wonders. What would you choose?
 
Is there a list somewhere of the relative aggressiveness of the different Civs?
 
^We're discussing that on Discord so if anything comes out of it I'll be sure to let you know.
So far, as I remember off the top of my head, there is not much in the way of that as there would be in later (i.e. other and, therefore, inferior) civ games.
There's cultural groups and favoured/shunned governments, but what really drives the AI in civ3 to declare war is the possibility of acquiring territory, preferably with resources (the AI will insist on taking some random spot which only in the latest game you'll find out has uranium, but by then you'll've won a diplomatic victory) at the minimum cost. I remember that once, in the late game, I kept watching an AI column try to sneak across a no-man's-land of a border to start a war and my railroads just meant a stack of mechanised infantry and modern armour units was too near for them to attack outright. After quite a few turns the AI finally had enough and attacked, but it was hilarious -and, at the time, I still hadn't learned massed artillery tactics.
 
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