Today I Learned (about Civ3)

[Lanzelot]

Kind of awkward because it meant I could never link up the two portions of the island by road.

I once had a similar case, where my only source of coal within reach was located on a small island (2-3 tiles) which consisted entirely of mountains. I was able to build a road and even a colony on these mountains, but no settlement; so I was unable to connect the coal to my trade network. (No harbor, no airport....)
Once I discovered Flight, I put an airfield onto that island, but that didn't help either. (Lesson learned: airfields are cheap replacements for airports in almost all respects, but they don't provide a link to the trade network, as airports do.)

 

[timerover51]

Hmm, in the standard game, as long as a civilization still has one settler, it is not destroyed. (Which is the cause for the common "settler on a boat" problem.) And as far as I know, the workers disappear just like the military units, when a civ is destroyed.
Perhaps this is caused by a side-effect of the modding you did?

I have no idea if my modding effected it, but I have a lot of workers from civilizations no longer in the game.

 

[tjs282]

Any Workers+Settlers(Foreign) which you captured in the field, or built from captured cities, are counted as your units, so they will not disappear just because their original parent Civ has been knocked off the board.

 

[timerover51]

Any Workers+Settlers(Foreign) which you captured in the field, or built from captured cities, are counted as your units, so they will not disappear just because their original parent Civ has been knocked off the board.

Thank you. Can I safely use the settler units to build cities without the city promptly revolting?

 

[justanick]

Thank you. Can I safely use the settler units to build cities without the city promptly revolting?

Once their home civilization is gone they can no longer revolt to their home civilization. So in that sense it is safe.

Even before that the risk is very manageable. If one foreign citizen is the only reason for a flip risk, then the flip risk is very limited and can be reduced to zero by a few units military police or just one unit military police, depending on culture ratio.

 

[Lanzelot]

There is one big advantage of settlers built/cash-rushed from cities with a different nationality (no matter whether that nation still exists or not): they do not cost unit maintenance! Therefore I tend to build a few, even if all territory has already been settled, and then keep them in stock for the next war to be used as "combat settlers".

This is similar to how captured catapults, cannons etc. with foreign nationality don't cost unit upkeep. If you manage to capture lots of artillery type units from the AI (and then upgrade them), this is a good way of keeping a large standing army without having to pay an arm and a leg in upkeep. (And contrary to captured workers, which only work at half speed, captured artillery attacks at full strength... )

(Though this may be a significant factor only on the upper difficulty levels, where the AI actually manages to built enough artillery that the human player can capture...)