Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

[Theov]

I gave the early ships 'wheels' by making then wheeled units in the editor, and then made oceans upassable by wheeled units.
This way, early ships cant enter ocean and it takes away the early far away settling phase, equalizing the human and ai players.

Makes the early phase until magnetism/navigation (astronomy for Portugal) much more local and interesting.

A side effect is that these ships cant traverse mountains either, but I'll take it.

 

[Fergei]

I gave the early ships 'wheels' by making then wheeled units in the editor, and then made oceans upassable by wheeled units.
This way, early ships cant enter ocean and it takes away the early far away settling phase, equalizing the human and ai players.

Makes the early phase until magnetism/navigation (astronomy for Portugal) much more local and interesting.

A side effect is that these ships cant traverse mountains either, but I'll take it.

Nice. I'll steal that also. I've ended up trialing a 2 move curragh that can carry 2 units, but is only available to Expansionist and Seafaring Civs (so it makes a bit of sense and buffs a couple of the weakest AI traits). In theory I don't mind if these Civs get a huge advantage colonising new territory and with making sea impassable to curragh it curtails the AI madness that it might engage in (hopefully).

 

[Takhisis]

Expansionist as a weak trait? You never get bad pops from goody huts and you get scouts to complement that, come on! I recently played as the Unitedstatesians and I wanted to gain control of an iron mine and just happened to pop a city two tiles away.


Edit: and with the Portuguese I built a city and two turns later I had another and it was a double settler pump.

 

[Jivilov]

Expansionist as a weak trait? You never get bad pops from goody huts and you get scouts to complement that, come on! I recently played as the Unitedstatesians and I wanted to gain control of an iron mine and just happened to pop a city two tiles away.


Edit: and with the Portuguese I built a city and two turns later I had another and it was a double settler pump.

Really. Two of my three wins on Demigod were with expansionist civs: Arabs and Mongols (Mayans were the other). And yeah, both times their Scouts popped either a Settler or Village from a Goody Hut. There's no better way IMHO to balance the AI's advantage of TWO Settlers to start.

 

[Civinator]

Nice. I'll steal that also.

Fergei, you steal here nothing. This very useful setting for early ships is done by hundreds of modders since far more than one decade, at least since the times of DyP. Even mods like RAR, RARR and CCM are using these settings. But don´t set both ocean- and seaterrain to be unpassable for units with the wheeled flag, as this will sometimes result in crashes of those units into foreign harbor cities or to freezes of the game due to conflicts of ships with the wheeled flag transporting land units without that flag in certain situations.

 

[Civinator]

Really. Two of my three wins on Demigod were with expansionist civs: Arabs and Mongols (Mayans were the other). And yeah, both times their Scouts popped either a Settler or Village from a Goody Hut. There's no better way IMHO to balance the AI's advantage of TWO Settlers to start.

Yes, I agree. And additionally these scouts offer frequently a cornucopia of early contacts to other civs for trading techs. These advantages are becoming much smaller, when the game is played without goody huts.

 

[Theov]

Nice. I'll steal that also. I've ended up trialing a 2 move curragh that can carry 2 units, but is only available to Expansionist and Seafaring Civs (so it makes a bit of sense and buffs a couple of the weakest AI traits). In theory I don't mind if these Civs get a huge advantage colonising new territory and with making sea impassable to curragh it curtails the AI madness that it might engage in (hopefully).

The idea is to make ocean impassable. Not sea.
Sea, you can keep the "sinks" option.

Fergei, you steal here nothing. This very useful setting for early ships is done by hundreds of modders since far more than one decade, at least since the times of DyP. Even mods like RAR, RARR and CCM are using these settings.

True.
But I think "steal" here means "use that idea".

 

[Takhisis]

Really. Two of my three wins on Demigod were with expansionist civs: Arabs and Mongols (Mayans were the other). And yeah, both times their Scouts popped either a Settler or Village from a Goody Hut. There's no better way IMHO to balance the AI's advantage of TWO Settlers to start.

Yes, the AI's advantage of extra units for faster exploration and extra settlers is just insane. The next time that I try moving up to Demigod I shall either start as expansionistic or get the Aztecs and spam Jaguar Warriors. As it is, the only time I even made some headway was when I played as the Greeks, because I had super-defenders from the start.

 

[Civinator]

Yes, I think,too, that this was intended by Fergei´s use of that term and my reply to his post. I only wanted to make clear, that this setting of early ships is nothing new.

Edit: Here something went wrong with the reply function after editing my post.

 

[Takhisis]

Did a post get deleted just now?

 

[Takhisis]

Just for the record, stealing is what the greats do.

 

[Jivilov]

Just for the record, stealing is what the greats do.

Isn't that how history works? Hee!

 

[justanick]

Yes, I agree. And additionally these scouts offer frequently a cornucopia of early contacts to other civs for trading techs. These advantages are becoming much smaller, when the game is played without goody huts.

Or when playing at Sid mitigates the usefulness of goody huts significantly: No techs, no cities, no settlers.

Probabilities of goody huts, C3C

I made an excel file to calculate the probabilities of goody huts. You can check on/off the option that are not posible, and the table will be updated. Or you can look at the picture and calculate yourself. The upper table are for expansionists, and the lower for others. Condition needed...

forums.civfanatics.com

 

[Takhisis]

Actually a bunch of 50-gold slugs helps quite a lot. More than it would to get monarchy if I was going for republic, for example.

Tech:
--Player must still be in Ancient Times.

This specific bit is weird. Is it 100% tested? I recently got either a very late tech from the ancient age (e.g. construction) and got catapulted into the mediæval one OR an actual mediæval one, can't remember.

 

[justanick]

This specific bit is weird. Is it 100% tested? I recently got either a very late tech from the ancient age (e.g. construction) and got catapulted into the mediæval one OR an actual mediæval one, can't remember.

You can only get ancient techs from goody huts. But you can get such a tech when you have left the ancient age.

Bonushütte (Civ3) – CivWiki

wiki.civforum.de

 

[Takhisis]

It's surprising how much I got from a first glance when my German studies were interrupted by coronavirus, but unfotunately I didn't get to learn much technical stuff like mathematics, so I'll have to go through it more slowly tomorrow.

 

[WeirdoJoker]

Ok, never seen this one before ... I used the LUX slider (pre-Marketplace), which affected one of my towns just enough - but it switched back when I raised the SCI slider, it moved it back without changing the LUX%. I.e., the SCI% affected mood. Why would that happen?

 

[Samson]

Ok, never seen this one before ... I used the LUX slider (pre-Marketplace), which affected one of my towns just enough - but it switched back when I raised the SCI slider, it moved it back without changing the LUX%. I.e., the SCI% affected mood. Why would that happen?

A way this can happen is changes to the way the the commerce is rounded. If you have say 80% sci, 10% gold and 10% Lux you can get more Lux in a city that if you have 90% sci and 10% Lux.

 

[Lanzelot]

Yes, I have seen that often myself. Must be rounding effects.

 

[tjs282]

Does anyone here know if anyone has ever documented a full game of Civ III where they deliberately restricted themselves to the large strategic decisions (e.g. city-placements, unit-deployments, slider-settings, who to trade with, who to fight), but turned over all micromanagement to the game-AI (e.g. taking all their advisors' advice with respect to build-projects, research-targets, tile-assignments, automating Workers, etc.)?

If so, can you remember who did it?

(Or suggest some good key-words for a site-search? Because apart from this game, which wasn't finished, my searches of Stories & Tales came up empty)

If not, given a random-everything-except-map-size start, at what difficulty-level do you think you might still have a >50% probability of winning such a game (allowing any and all exploits that you are in the habit of using)?

(For myself I'm thinking maybe Monarch — but only if I rolled one of the "good" Civs with useful traits and/or a strong UU!)