Well I have won once or twice but generally I get way behind in technology and get bowled over in the end. Any advice?
What ruleset are you playing? World conquest?
Yeah, stop wasting your time and pick up Civ 4!
I have thought about it.
I’ve wonder if the gradations in Civ III are a little extreme. As I understand it,
Civ IV gives you a lot more control. Is that right?
Domination and Conquest only
Sometimes I find myself thinking of going back to Civ III… There’s just something not quite right with Civ 4, can’t put my finger on it though.
Civ II is the true prophet.
One of the best things about Civ 4 is the mods, particularly Fall from Heaven which is effectively Master of Magic 2.
Basically, you have to cheat. Well, not exactly cheat, but around Monarch you need to start using all the ridiculous exploits, because the A.I. will start cheating like a bored French housewife.
I went straight from Civ to Civ III and then Civ IV, so I never got a chance to try that one.
I picked up the add on for Civ IV, so I may try a few mods and maps from Civfanatics.com
You seriously SERIOUSLY need to check out fall from heaven, it rocks quite spectacularly. Try out FFH1 and once you’ve got the hang of that try out FFH2 which is better but several orders of magnitude more complicated.
I’ve sunk some serious hours into both, you won’t be disappointed.
Are you referring to Civ III or IV? I dont’t know what your referring to if you mean Civ III.
I’m not “referring” to anything.
The computer cheats, plain and simple.
Civ IV is great, the expansion pack Beyond the Sword’s Rhye’s and Fall of Civilization is the reason I missed last November.
I think he meant the “ridiculous exploits” he’d need to use to beat the cheating computer.
There’s really only one way to win:
(1) Research asap to Swordsmen and severely weaken/kill the nearest Civ.
(2) Get to the Great Library and build it.
If you gradually take over the nearest Civ you can get the upgrades through forced diplomacy. In other words, declare war, take a couple of cities, and then get all the technology you can. Rinse and repeat. Hopefully you beat everyone else to the Great Library after this. Then you can never fall too far behind.
A couple other tips:
(1) There’s no hope in defending your cities. Keep a warrior in each of them, and if someone declares move every available unit to that border. There’s no way to keep up with the computer’s building speed early. You just gotta hope you can achieve local superiority despite the CPUs overwhelming global advantage.
(2) As with 1, when you attack you will never have the theoretical strength to defeat the CPU. If the CPU weren’t retarded about unit distribution, it would smack your army around. You need to position yourself to get local advantages on your attack route, and the CPU’s likely invasion route. Try and get 1-2 cities and then negotiate for peace.
(3) Bribing your neighbors to declare war on the Civs that declare on you is tremendously helpful.
(4) It’s a tremendous advantage to build along rivers. Do so when ever possible.
(5) You need to “steal” important resources whenever you can. It’s worth it to build a city solely to get iron, coal, gun powder, oil, or horses if you can’t get them elsewhere. Don’t be shy about building your city really close to an enemy city in order to take one of those resources.
(6) The time to attack is as soon as possible after you get Swordsmen, Knights, Cavalry, and tanks. It’s not necessary to attack at each of these steps, but if you do attack you should do it at this time.
(7) Upgrading your units is a very good strategy. Turn your research down to 0 and rack up the gold for a couple turns. This might be your only hope in defense at times.
Another concept involves not using the Great Library - it’s really cheezy but it works. Get a trireme early and find as many opponents as you can. On YOUR turn (not the AI’s), sell a technology to all of them. Or buy a tech (at inflated prices) and sell it to everyone. You get the tech and some cash, and you can leave your research at 0.
I think this was raised in another Civ thread a few years back. Basically the computer will start responding to things you do that its Civs shouldn’t be able to see. It will know where you are building certain units and where they are moving even when out of range of its own units.
And good advice from treis, the Great Library is fantastically useful.
I agree. I think one of the things that bothers me is that I don’t see marked results of the Wonders, like the aforementioned Great Library. When you build that in III and start getting new techs every few turns, that’s a vivid result. And is it the Great Wall that you can force peace with? Anyway, the Wonders don’t seem as usefull in IV. Too subtle for me, perhaps.
They also don’t build things in their cities very often, but seem to have no problems doing without. Which really ticks me off, because when I capture that city, I have to waste precious time and money bringing it up to be something usable. :mad: