War Academy Repairs Completed - Open to New Articles!

[Quintillus]

Over the past few months, the War Academy has had virtual orange barrels around it - repairs have been going on to fix the problems that had arisen over several decades and forum migrations, primarily broken formatting, but also broken links, which had rendered quite a few of the articles difficult to read and make use of. The goal being to restore the presentation quality of the War Academy to what it was in its heydey, and make it a valuable resource for Civ III players for the next decade.

I'm pleased to announce that the last orange barrel has been removed today, and the restoration work of the approximately 121 articles is complete.

The full list of repairs is in the following spoiler:

Spoiler :

- [Fixed] Restored Civ3 jargon file that had been missing from the main War Academy page since time immemorial
- [Done] https-ized links to the forums/HOF/GOTM/etc. from the main War Academy page
- [Fixed] Repaired formatting on Monarch to Emperor: The Great Leap
- [Fixed] Fixed forum article link on Trading Tips for Beginners
- [Fixed] Made the formatting of the Ailing Civilization Strategy great again
- [Fixed] Repaired links to other articles on the City Placement article, modernized link to forums
- [Fixed] Repaired formatting in Diplomatic Victory - Deity Level. First time automating conversion of broken bold tags, it works! That'll speed things up, thanks Notepad++!
- [Fixed] Repaired formatting/forum links in Effective Commercial Management. Also fixed quite a few typos, including in the title.
- [Fixed] Minor formatting fixes for Expansion Tip - Outside In
- [Fixed] Formatting in Fascism vs Communism
- [Fixed] Formatting in Free Tech Tricks
- [Fixed] Formatting in Guide to Single-City 20K Cultural Victory
- [Done] https-ized forum link for How to Pop Rush in Republic/Democracy
- [Fixed] Major formatting fixes for How to Win on Deity Builder-Style, also repaired links and changed non-fixable link to save files that used to be on Apolyton to a link to the discussion thread at CFC
- [Fixed] Formatting fixes and restored a missing image from Multiplier Buildings: A Practical Primer
- [Fixed] Minor formatting on Other Uses for Workers
- [Fixed] Fixed formatting in Ring City Placement (the missing illustration is original, the author never created it)
- [Fixed] Fixed formatting and typos in Spotting Settler Factories (while leaving correctly-spelled-by-British-standards spellings)
- [Fixed] Fixed formatting in The Case for Food (by Jon "Trip" Shafer!)
- [Done] Modernized a link in The Road to Diplomatic Victory
- [Fixed] Major formatting fixes for The Role of the Specialist Citizen
- [Done] Minor formatting improvements to We Love the King Day Defeats Corruption
- [Fixed] Fixed forum link in Zero Percent Science
- Below here starts the Game Mechanics Section
- [Fixed] Major repairs to formatting of A Study of Espionage Mechanics, also cleaned up spelling errors and a couple grammatical issues
- [Fixed] Fixed formatting in AI Attitude Study
- [Fixed] Formatting for Cost of the Palace for C3C
- [Fixed] Addressed formatting corruption in Everything About Corruption: C3C Edition
- [Fixed] Minor formatting repairs to Everything You Wanted to Know About Power Plants
- [Done] De-shrunk the first image in Free Palace Jump
- [Fixed] Formatting repair for Fundamentals of Mobilization Revealed
- [Fixed] Formatting in How Does War Weariness Work?
- [Fixed] Formatting in How the Demographics Works
- [Fixed] Forum/attachment links in Probabilities of Goody Huts
- [Done] https-ized Sinking Chances and Study of Inner Workings of Military Advisor, added H3 headers to the former
- [Fixed] Repaired formatting on The Inner Workings of Resistance Revealed
- [Done] https-ized Trading Reputation and What Will the AI Research Next?
- [Done] Restored KayEss's Worker Moves articles from the Internet Archive, and linked to it from Worker Moves

- Civ Specific Articles
- [Done] Updated the formatting on all the Civ-Specific articles (including the Rule Britannia and Rating the Unique Units ones), and added links to their Civilopedia entries

Military Strategy & Tactics
- Repaired bullet list formatting and URL links in Capitol Isolating War Strategy
- Improved formatting and https-ized links for Cracker's GOTM9 Japan Campaign Site
- Repaired formatting in "Creating and Using Leaders"
- Repaired formatting in "Death from Above"
- Minor formatting tweaks in "Early Industrial Intrusion" to make it similarly clear on Wordpress as on the forums
- Repaired formatting on "Everybody's Unique Unit: The Marine"
- Repaired formatting on "Expansionist Chariot Gambit with ICS Topping" (an interesting gambit, I must say)
- Repaired formatting and images on "Fort Cities"
- Fix forum link and minor formatting repair on "General Points on Modern Warfare"
- Repaired formatting and fixed typos in Holy Jihad!
- Fixed forum links and typos in "How to wage an effective war with a democratic government"
- Repaired formatting in "Invading AI Continent in Modern Age"
- Fixed forum link and minor formatting improvements to "Punishment Strategy"
- Repair forum link and minor formatting improvement to "Rogue State Strategy"
- Repaired formatting and fixed typos on "The Lazy Man's War"
- Repaired formatting, restored image, and fixed typos in "The Pillaging Offensive Strategy"
- Restored forum link on "Tips on Managing Chokepoints"
- Repaired formatting in "Using Explorers Revealed"
- Repaired formatting in "Warfare: Attacking & Defeating Enemy on Another Continent"
- Major formatting repairs to "Warmongering 101"
- https-ize forum link on "WW1 Style Artillery Rush"

Multiplayer
- Repair external link to Civ3Players Ladder League, remove mysterious whitespace caused by CSS formatting at the top of the article, and https-ize forum link for "A Guide to Online Multiplayer (C3C)"

Miscellaneous
- Fixed "A Rank Corruption Discovery & Exploit": https-ized forum link, added links to Alex's corruption thread, and restored the link to the example save that had been broken for 20 years (thanks, Internet Archive!)
- Repaired link to the Downloads Database for "C3C Bonus Disk Strategy Guides" (one of which was authored by CFC's own Chieftess)
- Fixed forum link for "Catch the Runaway AI"
- https-ized forum links in "Comprehensive Guide to Variants"
- Fixed forum link for "Finally Winning on Deity"
- Removed extra whitespace at the top of "How to Win: A Short Guide"
- Fix broken external link, apply proper header styling, and modernize forum link in "Managing the World: The Machiavellian Doctrine"
- Repaired forum link for "Recovering from Last Place"
- Restored the totally missing PDF article on "Strategy Compilation". Thanks, Internet Archive!
- Improve formatting on "Strategy for Emperor and Deity" to be better than it ever was, and repair forum link
- Repair forum link for "The Island Start: Fortress or Prison?"
- Fixed formatting and repaired forum link for "Your AI Opponent"
- Repaired external and forum links for "Zachriel's Strategy Guide"

In additional to the War Academy, the online Civilopedia and Reference page have been repaired. Work continues behind the scenes to incrementally repair issues with other sections of the Civ3 pages, and at a slower pace, pages for other Civ versions. But the War Academy is particularly noteworthy for its collection of information on Civ3 strategies, and that due to the timing of when it was created, it had accumulated quite a number of issues over the years.

With that, I'll also open the floor to nominations for additional articles for inclusion in the War Academy. A few notes:

• The goal is not to replace any article, in part because part of the goal of the War Academy is to present different ideas, so replacing an article with an arguably "better" strategic article generally does not make sense
• Quite a few articles are outdated in terms of Vanilla vs Conquests changes, so updates to make an article Conquests-relevant do make sense
• I'll implement a general policy of requiring a nomination for an article by someone other than the article author.

It's probably been 15 years since the last article was added to the War Academy (the article count has not been updated in at least 16 years), so there likely are good articles not yet added in the Strategy Articles forum. Nominate your favorites!

 

[justanick]

Duration of anarchy

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/frequently-asked-questions-civ3-play-the-world-conquests.170282/ The FAQ states that the anarchy duration of non-religious tribes in C3C can take values between 3 und 9 turns. That is correct. It does however also claim that at a given amount of...

forums.civfanatics.com

This could be incorporated in some way. Existing reference material seems to get it wrong. One example:

Civilization III: Governments - CivFanatics

This article covers Civilization 3 Complete V1.22. Click here for the discussion thread What you should know: Town: 1-6 population City: 7-12 population (requires fresh water or an aquaduct) Metro: 12+ population (requires a hospital or the Shakespeare's Theatre wonder) Hurry Method: you can...

www.civfanatics.com

 

[Aabraxan]

Goodness gracious! It's hard to believe that the article I wrote 17 years ago is still up.

 

[tjs282]

But it's still useful!

 

[Spoonwood]

Goodness gracious! It's hard to believe that the article I wrote 17 years ago is still up.

The multipler buildings link in your signature doesn't work unfortunately.

Good to see around as always Aabraxan!

 

[Aabraxan]

The multipler buildings link in your signature doesn't work unfortunately.

Good to see around as always Aabraxan!

Thanks, @Spoonwood! I assume you're still hammering the HoF?

I've been lurking now and again. Haven't had a computer that would run C3C in years, and I kind of miss it.

Link fixed.

 

[Spoonwood]

Thanks, @Spoonwood! I assume you're still hammering the HoF?

I've been lurking now and again. Haven't had a computer that would run C3C in years, and I kind of miss it.

Link fixed.

Yes, I'm still playing games for the HoF.

These days I play civ III via GoG on a modern windows operating system. I don't use disks, though I still have them.

 

[BlackBetsy]

Thanks, @Spoonwood! I assume you're still hammering the HoF?

I've been lurking now and again. Haven't had a computer that would run C3C in years, and I kind of miss it.

Link fixed.

I wrote a post about how you can run Civ3Complete on Windows XP through Virtual Box. You can buy the game on GOG and you get a download backup you can install on your WindowsXP virtual machine. I play on my Windows device but I run C3C with Mapfinder on the virtual machine.

 

[Quintillus]

Thanks for the replies! Yes, 17 years is basically since the early Bronze Age in Internet time, but there have been enough Fanatics here to keep the lights on.

Anarchy updates would fall in the Civilopedia section, as you linked, or perhaps Info Center. But as you also noted in the linked post, the source post doesn't have a reliable citation. There has been enough high-quality investigations into mechanics over the years that I'd want updates to be well-sourced/researched. I'm also going to stick to a "nominated by someone other than the author" policy.

"How to run Civ III on modern systems" definitely should be added to the Info Center once it is updated (although even if I were accepting self-written nominations, I haven't been able to find your post yet, BlackBetsy). It will take a while until the Info Center is fully updated, but that is in progress.

For the War Academy, the focus is really on strategy articles, including how to make use of the mechanics to come up with (arguably) better strategies. Traditionally they were written in this forum (link is sorted by start date), but I suspect there are good posts in the general Strategy forum as well as the C&C and Hall of Fame/GOTM forums that could make for nice additions to the Academy as well, and indeed several articles were inspired by such posts, and a couple articles are essentially links to write-ups of classic after action reports.

I may take a look through the more recent Articles threads myself at some point, but if you know of a really good one, or you saw a really insightful write-up of a strategy somewhere else, all the better!

 

[Aabraxan]

I wrote a post about how you can run Civ3Complete on Windows XP through Virtual Box. You can buy the game on GOG and you get a download backup you can install on your WindowsXP virtual machine. I play on my Windows device but I run C3C with Mapfinder on the virtual machine.

Thank you. Unfortunately, my current life situation doesn't include much game time, much less figuring out a "virtual machine." No, I'm not in prison. Just very, very busy. If I can ever get life settled again, I may pick C3C back up. Who knows?