Hi, I’m planning on getting Civilization III pretty soon, but was wondering something about the game mechanics. How doesn’t combat work? Is it like Civ I where it’s all or nothing, Civ II where it’s based on Hitpoints and Firepower along with Atk/Def, or is it like Alpha Centauri which seems to be a hybrid of both?
I bought it last week but I’ve only had time to play it for a couple of hours so far. The HP of Civ2 is still there, but it looks like the firepower factor is gone. 
I was playing on Chieftain level to get up to speed with the new interface, and was doing pretty well, my tech was far ahead of everyone else. I got Riflemen, fortified them in my cities (all protected by walls). Everyone else’s defensive unit was spearmen.
The Persians had oil resources in their territory, and I didn’t, so I start invading with my Riflemen. They proceed to get slaughtered by the computer’s men with pointed sticks!
Then the Persians attack with Knights. And they waltz all over my Riflemen! On Chieftain level! I can understand if Riflemen, a defensive unit, do poorly on offense. But they should be able to repel Knights without breaking a sweat!
I have no idea what I’m missing, so I can only assume that the unit balancing is seriously out of whack.
Along the same lines…
I was playing a game last week were I was attacking French cities defended by spearman. My attacking units were modern armor (conscripts, though) and every 2 or 3 defending spearmen destroyed a unit of my modern armor. What?!? Pointed sticks versus tanks and APCs and whatnot? Give me a break! I really think this game as make with little thought given to warfare. I’ve played the better part of 3 comlete games without any combat against another civ, except for my war against the French, which I started.
Novus
Combat seems to be “fixed,” i.e. it isn’t as random as before. The old trick of saving your game before you attack a unit and reloading if you lose doesn’t seem to work. I still end up losing nearly all of the time.
Yah, this is getting a bit ridiculous - I’ve had the game for two weeks, and have played about four nearly complete games - without an instance of combat with another civ. On Civ and Civ II I avoided combat like the plague until the end of the game, but this is getting ridiculous.
Sua
Wow…I’ve had the opposite experience. I get attacked all the freaking time. That’s what I get for expanding quickly and having all the resources, I suppose, but when 10 Warriors beat my 3 defending Riflemen, I get a little pissy.
Or, maybe it’s just that I’ve had the Aztecs, French, and Germans show up randomly in all 4 games I’ve played.
I finally decided I just had to wipe out any other civilization on my continent before I could play in peace. It’s worked so far.
I hate the Aztecs.
Fenris
[hijack]
Novus, did you get your name from a UO shard or is just latin coincidence?
[/hijack]
What is the relative level of experience of your riflemen vs. the attacking luddites?
I haven’t played the game yet, but I can remember Alpha Centauri placing high priority on unit skill. Very experienced basic infantry could mop the floor with green troops carrying much better weapons and armor.
Just a thought…
That’s part of the way it works now.
Number of Hit Points is directly tied to unit experience. Conscripts (drafted units or found in goodie huts) have 2, Regulars (normal units) have 3, Veterans (units created in a city with a barracks) have 4, Elite have 5.
Combat has fallen back to the old “Unit A’s Attack / Unit A’s Attack + Unit B’s Defense = Chance of Success”, with successes taking Hit Points from Unit B and failures taking Hit Points from Unit A. No Fire Power or Hit Point Factors anymore. That means a Conscript Rifleman can still be knocked out- with relative ease- by veteran Knights (Knight- 4 Attack, Rifleman- 6 defense, but the Knights have twice the HP).
Still, you can get around this pretty easy if you go for combined arms- like SMAC, artillery (and catapult) units don’t directly attack but rather bombard and knock away hit points. So before hitting an enemy city, you bombard a bit to knock the defenders down, giving you a much easier chance of rolling them over.
Now, if I could just get the #^$&# movies to work. If I don’t hit the Space Bar immediately before the opening splash screen, the game freezes. And the one time I won a game (Monarch Level, Huge Map, 16 Civs, yes, you may touch me) the Spaceship Victory movie started and froze the game.
Also, wait just a bit for the patch. The patch might change the way combat is done, but more likely, it’ll at least fix the fact that airplanes, air defenses, and coastal fortresses don’t actually do anything for the human player but work fine for the computer. According to sources, the patch may be out next week.
I love the Aztecs! They are my best friends in every game, always going to war for me, and annihilating my enemies w/o anyone in my civ getting grumpy. They haven’t once turned against me, nor even remotely threatend me. I could do without that damned Cleopatra though, she likes to waltz her units through my territory and then has the gall to declare war when I tell her to take a hike. However, with my loyal Aztec friends, Cleopatra quickly sues for peace.
Related question: are they going to fix the espionage functions? I mean, what’s the point of infiltrating an AI civ if they’re all immune to propaganda? Imagine my frustration when I’m finally successful in infiltrating someone’s capitol but am unable to gain resources in some village’s area of control by not being able to influence its population to change sides.
Armies seem to be much more random than normal units too. My 3 elite swordsmen in an army get almost killed by spearmen and then go around and kill riflemen easily.
Question- are they all Democracies? One of the advantages of being a Democracy is that it’s immune to propaganda.
In addition, success in propaganda is determined by culture; the stronger your culture in relation to the enemy’s, the more likely that propaganda will be successfull. Unless you’re nearly double his culture, don’t expect much success in propaganda.
Rye,
Nah, I got my name from the Tool shirt which reads “novus opiate seclorum” or “the new age of opium”. I did play UO, though. Back in the day, before OSI queered it up… I miss it though.
R.I.P Finat T’valius 5x GM Warrior
Novus
Ah, I wasn’t aware of this benefit of Democracy. Next time I’ll be sure to check my target’s governemnt first. I shouldn’t have any problems with not enough culture. I like to build up my settlements, especially when trying to gain a foothold on another continent in order to secure resources before they’re too deep in an opponent’s territory.
I’ve seen a lot of complaints that Riflemen or Spearmen (or whatever) should have no chance of defeating armor. While in general that is true consider the odd victory of a Spearman against armor not due to his spear poking a hole in the tank but because him and his buddies dug a tank trap or other clever means of stopping a tank without blowing it up.
Also, a note about city walls. Any city with a population of 7 or higher doesn’t need walls (all cities above size 7 are considered to have the same defensive benefit of walls whether they were actually built or not). As a result I only build walls on frontier towns earlier in the game. New cities in my interior don’t bother and place their resources elsewhere.
I’m amazed at the people who’ve never fought. The AI goes after me pretty regularly. However, it only does so if there is really half-a-chance of success. I trounced the Aztecs in one game but left a few of his cities alive to act as a buffer between me and another civ. The rest of the game the Aztec commander hated me. He would call me names if I didn’t give him what he wnated and regularly sent troops into my territory but it was Archers against Mech Infantry so he left well enough alone. The Indians and British, on the other hand, got uppity towards the end of the game when it was clear I was winning. The British rumbled a bit but left me alone after a timely treaty between us which left me free to stomp India. An aircraft carrier or two with stealth bombers and a few battleships bombarding cities settled the Indians down pretty quick (I took a few cities for good measure).
For all that I’ve played it however I still have a few newbie questions of my own that are somewhat embarrassing to ask since I probably should know this (and I did RTFM).
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How do you setup your build queue in a city?
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I can’t get espionage to work (and yes…I had the appropriate advance behind me). Stealing tech was the only thing I could manage (and my guy actually failed at that). I could not figure out how to use propaganda against a specific city and I can’t figure how to use counter-espionage when I think a city has a spy (which I suspected in one city that kept rebelling without any dissenters, a smallish population and every happy-face feature built I could manage…a nearby city with a bigger population was doing just fine with the same upgrades).
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Building a hydro/nuclear/solar power plant (or the Hoover Dam wonder which effectively gives all cities on the same continent a hydro plant) supposedly replace any other power plants you possess. However, after building the Hoover Dam wonder my cities showed both a hydro dam and my original coal power plants in the same city. I ran around and sold all my coal plants but with the hydro plant running does my coal plant still contribute to pollution? Does it still contribute to production increases (effectively giving me 2 increase…one from the coal and one from the hydro)?
Good Tip Section:
I picked the following nifty trick up online somewhere…
If you are fighting another civ and can’t or don’t want to go all the way to their destruction on the same continent try the following.
Capture one of their cities along your border. Rather than holding it trade the city for something you want with another civ (like a Tech Advance). Other Civs LOVE new cities and will part with a lot for them…even crappy small towns. You needn’t worry too much about allowing another Civ into your backyard since that city is so isolated from the main hunk that it has a hard time growing. Now make peace with your enemy Civ if possible. Your former enemy will now focus its attention on the Civ that holds one of their former cities and cause them to waste resources dealing with each other and (hopefully) leaving you relatively free to expand without too much interferrence from them. Sometimes the city changes possession back to the original owner pretty quickly but if you’re lucky it’ll hold out for a long time.
To queue up production, hold Shift then click on the item to add.
My biggest beef with this game is that they took away the menus. I suppose they were trying to make the game more immersive or something, but it pisses me off when I have to look up a key command in the manual because there’s no corresponding button to click on. This does not help my sense of immersion, to say the least. Combat is almost as bad now as it was in Civ I. I can see spearmen beating tanks once in a while with pit traps or whatnot, but losing a transport full of marines to spearmen, or even musketeers, is outrageous. I do like the culture aspect, though, especially when foreign cities decide to join you. The diplomacy is much better, too.
Whack, I know you had espionage, but did you build the Intelligence Agency? If you never have the option to build a spy when you click on your capital, then you can’t perform any espionage. When you build one, you get to pick which civ you’re going to place him in. After that, you can click on the target city-usually the capital-and you’ll get a whole array of options to perform.