Very basic Civilization 3 questions

Cafe Society
21

I haven’t played nearly as much of Civ III or IV (yet) as I have of II, but here’s a good strategy for rapid expansion: 1. Build a city. 2. Build your best defensive unit that won’t take more than a few turns to produce. Alternatively, have a unit already built from another city and on hand for immediate defense of the new city. 3. If the city will grow faster than it takes to build a settler, do that. Otherwise, build a temple first; when that’s done, you should be able to build a settler, unless you are on very marginal land. If that’s the case, just focus on improvements. 4. Once you have your settler, go settle already!

Picking spots for cities is a somewhat difficult task. In Civ II, I felt it was important to have every bit of land within city radii, to prevent things like friendly AI civs building on an unclaimed spit between two of your cities and screwing you up. This is less important with the addition of cultural borders, so instead you should focus on maximizing coverage of usable land - especially with special resources - and minimizing overlap. I like having at least my core cities have a population of 20+ as soon as possible, because with the right mix of terrain, improvements, and Wonders, you can get massive research bonuses, pop out tanks and battleships in 4 turns, build the spaceship in 16 turns, stuff like that. If you can’t get a city to grow large enough to use all the land around it, you will have a much harder time pulling off those kind of feats.

22

A small island may be doable if you get very lucky. I once played a Civ I game where I started on an island that would hold no more than 4 cities, but because it had excellent terrain I advanced quickly to the modern age and rolled across my much larger foe.

23

This approach was a viable one in Civs I and II; however, it won’t work in Civ 3 unless you’re on a really small map, because

  1. Civ 3 AI players are viciously expansionist and will exploit every square inch they can get. The name of the game is expansion, and

  2. Civ 3 introduces strategic resources, which are very limited. The likelihood that you will end up with critical strategic resources like iron or oil is directly proportional to the amount of land you control; until you discover the relevant technologies (Iron Working for Iron, Refining for Oil, Replaceable Parts for Rubber, etc.) you cannot “see” the resource. If you limit your expansion, you increase the likelihood that you will not have a critical resource. And if you lack iron or rubber and someone with those resources and the attendant units declares war on you, goodbye. Unless you’re playing Tard level, you’re toast.

24

George:

Glad you find our tips helpful.

If you feel now like you’re beginning to get the hang of getting cities to function, I’ll give you a little more advice.

First, regarding terrain: you can think of each type of terrain as possessed of certain amount of power. Different kinds of terrain can be ranked in terms of how much power they possess. To determine a terrain’s power rating, simply add up what it produces when unimproved. For example: an unimproved grassland tile produces two wheat. By comparison, an unimproved grassland tile beside a river produces two wheat plus one commerce (rivers generate commerce). The first tile has a power value of 2; the second has a power value of 3. Which one should you develop first?

The most powerful unimproved tile in the game is the grassland + shield + cow resource beside a river, which gives two wheat, two shields, and one commerce, for a total power rating of 5. If you’ve got one of those within your city radius, its gravy, baby.

Secondly, regarding city placement: unfortunately, Civ III favors extensive city production. There is even an infamous civ-building strategy know as Infinite City Sprawl (or ICS). Using this strategy the player simply pumps out settler after settler, and places cities in a very tight pattern, maybe one or two squares away from each other. You wind up with a small civilization of small cities, but the very large number of cities gives you an overwhelming population and production advantage, especially in the long run.

My advice to the beginner: place your cities 4 or 5 squares away from each other. Industrial civs can afford slightly more distant placements, because their workers improve tiles and connect cities faster. For other civs, I recommend 4 spaces. This will cause a certain overlap between city radii, but also reduces the number of tiles your civ must develop fully . Also pay special attention to rivers and lakes: cities built on sources of fresh water don’t require aqueducts to grow past size 6; they expand naturally to size 12, which is a tremendous advantage as the game progresses into the middle ages.

Finally, build order. Under despotism you can support 4 units per city. Even if you don’t play ICS, settler production (and defence) should be your first priority. During the early “expansion phase” of the game you’ll want to build as many cities and grab as much land as you possibly can, before your opponents block you off. This means doing some careful timing and planning.

I generally use my capital city as a kind of “settler factory“: to the extent it’s possible, I build nothing but military unit, settler, military unit, settler, military unit, settler….long after my other cities have built infrastructure, my capital is still pumping out settlers. Mind you, that’s just one possible approach, there are others. But you should focus on expansion, like this:

Warrior (sent out to explore, mark spot for next city)
Warrior (garrisons capital city)
Settler (when produced, city sinks to size 1)
Spearman
Warrior (sent out to found spot for next city)
Settler

Repeat….

And that’s how you kick butt in Civ III.

25

Not only that, if you see a tile that you want worked but it isn’t currently being worked, you can click on it, which will take a worker off another tile and assign her to the tile you want worked.

26

Okay, the tips have helped immensely. I have a Zulu civ up to 3 cities.

Some more questions…

  1. How do I harvest the bonus resources? I have access to iron, by building a road to the space with the ore. But how do I harvest, say, sugar?

  2. What does a worker have to actually DO to work the space he is on and gather the food/shields/gold? Right now I have my workers building roads or irrigating the moving to the next square.

I think that covers it for now…

George

27

  1. Bonus resources, such as sugar, are production/food/trade bonuses. All you have to do is make sure that square is selected as being worked in the city menu.

  2. A worker unit is different from a worker in a city. As I said, just make sure such a square is selected in the city menu. An actively-worked square will have little pictures on it–shields, bushels of grain, and/or coins–depending on the terrain and any improvements you have made to that square.

28

Bonus resources don’t work the same as luxury or strategic resources. You can’t trade them the way you trade the other two. A tile with a bonus resource simply produces a couple extra food, shields, or money every turn. You don’t have to do anything special with the tile to get this bonus, just build a city nearby.

Workers, the units that move around on the map and build roads and such, don’t “work” the tiles to produce money and so forth. The city itself does that automatically, one tile per size of the city. When you double-click on a city, the picture in the middle of the screen shows which tiles the city is currently working. The game defaults to producing food in favor of any other resources: when the city grows, and can work a new tile, it will automatically start working whichever free tile produces the most food first.

29

Thanks, the fog is lifting :slight_smile:

G