Although if you draft too much you get citizens chanting “Hell no, we won’t go!” That’s a metaphor, of course; you don’t really hear them chanting but that’s what it says when you click on an unhappy worker.
I found that whole “war weariness” thing a little disturbing as far back as Civ 1. It seemed to me that a distinction should be made between waging wars of expansion or domination (i.e. Vietnam, from a U.S. perspective) and waging wars of defense (i.e. against the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, also from the U.S. perspective). A simple fix could have been made: the citizens show war weariness if you started the war, but they also show patriotism and increased productivity (at least in the short term) if you were attacked without warning by someone else.
Civ III tried to address this with the “Mobilization” setting (productivity up, but science down), but I find it does more harm than good.
Actually, I think I confused Mobilization with the “Fundamentalism” from Civ II. In Civ III, mobilization gave you a bonus to production, but only let you build military units.
Naturally enough, this means that when the war weariness sets in, you find you can’t build any temples to take the edge off. Mobilization is only useful for very short periods (during which the benefits can be pretty slight) or as a desperation move (by which time you’re almost toast anyway).
Agreed.
At least war weariness is at its worst in captured cities while you’re still fighting the rest of their former country.
I believe your citizens do indeed make a distinction between wars that you start vs. being invaded. Your war weariness will take longer to set in if you are attacked.
Race. I have the same problem with you in keeping up in techs. I play regent level as that is the most even-handed setting, but the AI civs merrily trade techs among themselves leaving you in their tech dust. Stealing techs should be a lot less expensive than it is. I wish they would put in the same deal as the previous games, where when you captured a city, you’d get one of their techs. Perhaps modify it such that if you take a size 6 city or larger, you get a tech.
A lot of your success hinges on where you put that forbidden palace. You want it as far from the capital as you can but still near enough so you can build it in a reasonably short time. What I like to do if I’m really lucky is use my second Great Leader to rush a forbidden palace as far away from the capital as I can. If that is on a second continent, so much the better. I reserve the first Great Leader to make an army, so that I can build the Heroic Epic and hopefully get another GL and also pave the way for the Military Academy/Pentagon small wonders.
Yes, it can be frustrating at times. But that’s why I’m gaming. I’m constantly trying to find ways around problems. A few random notes:
Anyone thinking of buying Civ3, should pick up the expansion pack ‘Play the World’ at the same time. So many things that are annoying will vanish with PTW.
Three factors give points toward your final score: Size of territory, size of population, culture points. This seems logical to me. The bigger the area, and the bigger the population, the heavier the impact is on the world. If the culture is strong, that projects across the world too, in the game, as in real life.
So, getting culture cranked high is going to win the game. Building the great library will crank out 6 culture points for every turn and it never stops. Putting up temples, libraries, cathedrals and Coliseums also raise the cultural level, giving you a better score. It will also expand your borders.
I don’t bother with research. I usually have it a 10%, and go for happiness (less revolts and corruption) and taxes. With a war chest with 60.000 gold, you can buy any technology from a neighbour. And even at 10% research, you will be at about the same level as the other guys.
Some wonders are extremely important to build, becuase they will keep giving you advantages over the competion that’ll help you crank out ‘Modern Armor’ in the 1200’s and send them against longbowmen. That’s fun stuff.
Pollution is annoying, which is why I never build a hospital (letting your cities ghrow beyond size 12) before I can build ‘mass transportation’. They’ll reach big size quick enough anyway, and I don’t have to keep sending of my workers cleaning up, when they should be building railroads.
You cannot have too many workers. Keep cranking them out. I can have a 100 guys going and still find stuff to do for them all.
Do NOT build the forbidden palace early. Wait till you have a humungus empire, and locate it so it’ll help your original palace keep corruption in check.
And of course the AI cheats. How else could the game get harder as you move up in levels?
Well, in a perfect world, it would do something like… oh, I don’t know, play intelligently. As is, the AI is a horrendus monstrosity that should have been put out of our misery, and the only reason they survive at all is because they cheat like mad.
OK, first this site seems the best of the (many) Civs sites in answering questions, tactics, resources, units, etc.
Civilization Fanatics Center
Second, did anyone else really like the ‘Modern Era’ background music enough to pull it out (I believe it’s ‘Smash.mp3’) and put it in his/her music folder?
No? Oh well then…
Okay, here’s what I don’t like about Civ3 (that maybe someone could help me with). In good old Civ2, after playing many games and seeing how different strategies worked, you could always feel like you had a chance to “get back in the game” no matter how bad things went for you. For instance, you could use a bunch of veteran spies to go on an espionage blitz to get you even in the tech race, you could use a whole lot of weak units to smother a key rival city. Even if you were destined to lose a game, you always felt like you had a chance.
But with Civ3 there are times when it just seems hopeless, and no tactic or strategy will do you any good. It seems like in order to stay “in the game” you have to start out well, and stay that way. I don’t see any catch-up strategies.
For example, I’m playing a Monarch level game with 7 rivals. As I pull into the middle ages, I see by the scoreboard that I’m running 3rd out of 4 known Civs, but the numbers are close. I’ve fought off a couple of invasions, picked up a city or two, and my culture is rising - not too bad. But then I send off a trireme to find the other 3 civs, and discover that they are all more advanced than any of us. Now I see I’m in 7th place out of 8, with hundreds of points between me and the leaders. I can see no possible strategy to get me back near the leaders. Might as well start over.
Can anybody suggest any catch-up strategies?
Or, it could be that you’re just too fucking stupid to understand what I’m talking about. Or what the average six year old is talking about, for that matter.
Christ, what’s the Board coming to when you can’t talk about a fucking video game without some asshole turning it into a personal attack?
The way I found to reduce this phenomenon, is to drop your taxes and research to 0, raise your luxuries to 100 and as the last action of your turn, change governement. It reduces anarchy to levels similar to those of Civ II.
Eternal and Miller, personal attacks are not tolerated in this forum.
Miller, next time you have a problem with a member’s post, email the mods instead.
You have both been warned. A repeat of your behaviour could cause you to lose your posting privileges.
-xash
Moderator.
Speaking as Moderator:
Ok, STOP, right now.
Smiley bandit, your sarcasm is like putting one toe over a fuzzy line, and is not needed.
Eternal, your comments can be read as a personal attack, which is not permitted in this forum – please consider your wording more carefully in the future. You’re fairly new around here, so consider this an early warning: personal insults are a violation of the rules of this forum. You can attack the ideas, but not the person. Get it?
Miller, your personal attacks are unwarranted and completely out of line. You have been here long enough to know better. This is Extremely Stern Warning.
Play nice, or don’t play.
OOps, sorry, xash’s comments were on page 2, I didn’t see them until after I’d posted mine.
Usually, one moderator jumping on misbehaviour is sufficient. I apologize for being redundant.
All in all the game is too hard (I play as a mere regent) and sucks up an entire weekend.
The scoring system is odd. I can be going like gangbusters and still not get on the high scores list. Other times (when I expand more militarily) I get lots of points.
OTOH, I seem to keep coming back to it.
No, the Space-race victory movie is NOT worth it.
Anyone know if a Civ IV is in the works?
I apologize for my rash earlier comment, especially now that, re-reading Eternal’s post, I see that it might not have been as unambiguously antagonistic as I first thought. To Eternal and the rest of the board, I’m sorry for snapping like that. There’s no excuse for it.
Especially since I broke the board rules while complaining about people breaking the board rules. Yeesh.
I’ve put the bombardment command to good use. One of my favourite dirty tricks is to have a stack of units near a city, bombard a square until the first “layer” is destroyed, then end turn. The AI will send a bunch of workers out of the city to repair it, then you just slip in with your units to capture them.
In multiplayer games, it works even better. If a player is using “turtle” tactics, you can just destroy all the roads around a city, keep capturing all their workers as they try to repair and eventually starve the city out. With no luxuries or food going in, and you destroying all the improvements inside the city, even a capital with 50 defensive units stacked in it will turn to mush.
Also, I always build a huge stack of cruise missiles. I’m not much of a navy man, so instead of slow-moving, expensive and vulnerable battleships or carriers, I have 50 cruise missiles in reserve, and if a ship or transport gets too close to my shore, I can just blow it up without any trouble.
In a Civ4, I’d like to see more complete diplomacy. In SMAC, my favourite thing was pounding an enemy so hard that they’d surrender and give you all their stuff and act like a lapdog. In Civ3, there’s no surrendering. It’s even stupider when if you’ve nuked a country, they’ll never, ever give you peace, even when they have no units left and you have 5 tanks surrounding every city. Lame. I wish you could nuke/bomb/bombard a country into submission, so even if you don’t capture any cities, they’re getting pounded so hard they can’t take it any more.
Customized unit building NEEDS to go back in. Building a spearman is stupid in the year 2010 because you don’t have time to wait for an infantry. Being able to design cheaper/faster or slower/stronger units would add another layer of strategy. Also, all “outdated” units should be automatically updated. PTW added the guerilla unit so you could build SOMETHING realistic when you had no money/resources, but it should have auto-replaced all bowmen/spearmen/etc.
More WMDs. Nukes are fun, but underpowered. They should have several types of nukes: tacticals, which damage units and cities to a certain degree, but not overkill, and big 'uns, that are actually capable of destroying a city entirely, like in Civilization: Call to Power. The nerve gas was also fun in SMAC, and would go well with customized units. They need to add more atrocities like that, along with stuff like the bio-terror attacks from Call to Power, or conventional missile attacks (that have a more realistic range than 2 spaces) that you can click on cities with and choose whether you want to target military units or civilian structures. Smart bombing would be fun too, so you could select the exact building you want to fire a missile at. There’s no excuse for a stealth bomber or modern jet randomly hitting population, buildings, units or nothing at all.
They need to have some way to “Obselete” an entire class of units. Like in Master of Orion 3, if I built a ship class called the Devastator, then developed a Devastator II later, I could retire all the old ones with a couple clicks and not build em anymore.
I don’t know if anyone brought this up but Civ III is an excellent game but I sorely miss the scenarios from Civ II. Supposedly Play the World allows for scenarios but I haven’t seen any yet, nor have I checked for them in awhile though.
If anyone knows of any PtW scenarios available could you post where? Thanks.