Hi all, I searched the web for this but saw very little input regarding the usefulness of specialists in Civ 3 Complete/Conquests.
The definitive discussion is here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-role-of-the-specialist-citizen.108789/
Bear in mind, though, that it was originally written for Vanilla CivIII, not Conquests/Complete, so the screenies are often not representative of the latter, except where indicated.
Does anybody regularly use the Specialist citizen types? If so, which ones and in which situations?
Yes, I use them in both epic-games and mods.
If a town(s) is about to riot (i.e. the unhappy people now outnumber the happy people), and it is not yet worth raising the LUX%-slider just to preserve order in that one/few town(s), then one or more unhappy citizen(s) can/should be converted to a Specialist(s), and the town's worked tiles micromanaged if necessary to avoid starvation.
Since all Specialists are counted as "content" citizens, this removes the excess unhappiness which would have caused the riot (and thus nullified the town's entire output for that turn), at the cost of losing only that one citizen's contribution to the town's total yield.
If a Specialist is required in the early game (in the epic game), I will usually use a Scientist, who gives 3 beakers per turn. This is the highest available Specialist-output, and thus preferable to both the Clown (who gives only 1 Happyface), and the Taxman (who adds only 2 gold per turn to the Treasury).
In the late game, I may also selectively use Civil Engineers to get important improvements (Courthouses, Aqueducts, Marketplaces) built in marginal towns; or a mixture of CEs and/or Policemen in core towns (depending on what improvements those towns already have, and/or what I need them to build, and/or what shield-targets I want them to hit).
If War-Weariness gets really bad, I may
consider using Clowns at least as a stopgap (e.g. if I get a jump in WW over the interturn which causes rioting in my capital, I may set the Governor to manage happiness in all towns, just to preserve order in the remainder of my core), but will look for a better solution ASAP (on the following turn, if possible).
I never feel the motivation to use specialists, outside of the occasional entertainer to stop unrest, because I feel like the specialists do not provide high enough bonuses. What am I missing?
A lot!
What more do you want them to do?
Specialists can be
incredibly powerful in the human player's hands, e.g. by "Beaker (or Gold)-farming" in the 90%-corrupt areas, you can convert excess food directly to beakers (or gold), in far greater quantities than you would have obtained by putting all those citizens to work on tiles instead — because you would obtain little to no benefit from running their (90% corrupt) commerce-output through the SCI% (or TAX%)-slider conversion.
But as with a lot of things in CivIII, the AI uses nearly
all Specialists incompetently: e.g. it will tend to use Clowns to keep order, even when raising LUX% would actually be a better option (and even if using Clowns would cause the town to starve).
So adding even more Specialists into a Mod (as some mods do) may actually be counterproductive, at least in terms of making the AI a better opponent.