Episode: 4170
Title: HPR4170: Playing Civilization III, Part 5
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4170/hpr4170.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 20:40:15

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,170 for Friday the 26th of July 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Playing Civilization 3 Part 5.
It is part of the series' computer strategy games.
It is hosted by Avukha and is about 13 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, we wrap up our look at the details of playing this game.
Hello, this is Avukha, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our ongoing series on strategy gaming.
And I'm going to wrap up on this one, our discussion on Civilization 3.
What I want to do is just add a little bit to what we did last time and give a few more
fine points on combat and managing wars and things like that.
So hope you'll find that interesting.
The first thing I want to bring up is the topic of difficulty levels.
When you start a game of Civ 3, you have various difficulty levels.
I've put a link in the show notes that is going to show you what all the difficulty levels are.
So it matters because the AI, as it's called, that powers the other Civs in the game,
is definitely artificial, but not particularly intelligent.
There's only one set of algorithms that it uses, regardless of the difficulty level.
This basically consists of a series of if-then statements in the code, and the AI cannot learn or adapt.
So this is the edge an intelligent human player has.
Now that said, the code was written by people who really understand on a deep level what the game is all about.
So you should not expect to just start winning right away, particularly if you are new to the game.
Let alone new to the whole 4x genre.
It does take time.
So what does distinguish the difficulty levels?
Well, the first two, Chieftain and Warlord, the thumb on the scales benefits you, the human player.
At the region level, everyone is equal.
At higher difficulty levels, the AI players get advantages.
Now, the factors here are the cost of building units.
It's higher for the AI at low levels, lower for the AI at higher levels.
The AI can get free units at the higher levels, and so on.
Now, I mentioned the list, a civilization wiki, you can see more about it.
So if you want to learn the game, you might want to play your first game at the Chieftain level until you can easily win.
Then if you want a bit more challenge, move up to the Warlord level, then Regent and so on.
And remember, playing games is supposed to be fun.
There's no reason to move to a really high difficulty level unless that is something you really enjoy doing.
Now, the next thing I want to talk about is managing units.
And this is an area where you as a human can outthink the AI, because they're not terribly bright.
And managing your units in combat, remember that normal military units have three hit points,
veteran units have four hit points, and elite units have five hit points.
Some units have more strength on defense, others on offense.
And the AI will tend to behave predictably since it's controlled by algorithms.
In that line, there is a revealing story from the early days leading to micropros.
Bill Steely and Sid Meier were co-workers at another company and went to a conference in Las Vegas,
where they found an arcade game involving flying a jet fighter.
Now, Steely was an X-Air Force pilot, so he went first in this game and racked up a good store.
Then Sid took a turn and significantly beat Steely's score.
The reason is that while Steely was playing, Sid was watching and figuring out the AI algorithms.
Now, after that, Sid said he could write a better game, and they founded Micropros to publish flight simulator games
before Sid got the idea for the first civilization game.
In any case, a good player will manage units by taking advantage of terrain to improve the odds of survival.
Attack from forest or hill terrain, or just fortify in place in good defensive terrains.
The AI will tend to keep attacking even if it is losing units.
It may succeed in taking down your unit, but at a cost of two to three of its own.
And that's the kind of trade you should like.
Also, a good player will pull back the unit that is down to one hit point and switch to a unit that still has all of its hit points.
The idea is to save a unit, because they will heal in a few turns and get all their hit points back.
The AI tends to overlook this, but you shouldn't.
Now, as to managing wars.
There's more to war than the tactics of unit management, important though that is.
There are strategic considerations.
And the first of these in any war is to have clearly defined war aims and then stick to them.
For example, suppose one of the other Sivs planted a city in the middle of your area, blocking you from land you could use.
And that Siv is not all that strong.
You can go to war and get that city, but once you've done that, do you stop?
Possibly you should, if that city was the only reason for the war in the first place.
Of course, it may depend to some degree on what victory type you're going for.
If you're aiming at a military victory, such as a conquest or domination, that will probably push you towards wiping out the opposition.
But if you do, make sure you are the stronger party here.
Long wars can create two problems.
First, while you are cranking out military units and fighting, the other Sivs in the game are researching texts, developing their cities, exploring and settling cities, and leaving you behind.
Now, if you're so strong that you can crank out units and simultaneously keep up your research and develop your cities,
well, you're probably already well on the way to a domination or conquest victory and don't need to worry so much.
Now, the other factor is something called war-wearingness.
This was a mechanic that was introduced in Civilization III, and that changes things from what it was in Civilization II.
In Siv II, each unit had to be supported from a specific city.
And that support required a shield.
This meant that you were limited in producing units because each unit reduced your ability to produce anything in a city.
Then they added a mechanic that said that units not in a city would make citizens unhappy, and this could throw the city into a riot.
And all activity there would stop.
In Siv III, they changed that around.
Now units are not supported by specific cities, but are supported by your empire in general.
You get a certain number of units free of support, then they start to cost you gold each turn.
And the longer the war goes on, the more discontent your citizens experience, until they go into riots and shut everything down.
When that happens, you need to get the city going again if you want to get anything produced, and you have only four options.
The first is give them entertainment.
Now this removes a citizen from productive activity and assigns them to being an entertainer.
That means that any food, shields, and gold they might have produced when assigned to a tile are no longer being produced.
Your productivity might go down, your treasure it could suffer, you may go into starvation or even population loss.
This is not the best option, I would argue, but it is the one the game pushes you towards.
When a city goes into riot, a helpful screen pops up offering to give them some entertainment, which might, you know, you might look at that and say, well, I guess that's the obvious choice.
But if it's due to war weariness, you're taking the first step on the downward spiral.
Soon another city will riot, then another.
And the root cause has not been addressed at all.
Your people are sick of being at war and you're ignoring them.
The next thing that you could do in place of that is to change the revenue slider.
Go to your domestic advisor screen and at the top is a revenue slider.
The first slider allocates revenue to science, the second one allocates revenue to happiness.
Think of it as buying the things that make life worth living.
Now this is the first place I would go to solve a happiness problem.
Note that the slider changes this for your whole empire, but you know, what starts in one city frequently happens in others as well.
No, another thing you can do is find some luxury resources.
These help make people happy and the effects are spread over your whole empire.
If you have luxury tiles within your empire, make sure they are linked to your city by roads.
Now, if you want to see a list of luxury resources, there's a link in the show notes to the civilization wiki, and you can look that up.
If you don't have any in your empire, see if you can trade for some with other empires.
If you have a capital to capital correction, connection via roads, harbors or airports.
All trade in Civ 3 requires this kind of connection.
If you have one city in your empire that is not connected to the other cities, it won't get the benefit of the resources those other cities has.
As I said, you will want to develop your road network for a variety of reasons.
And finally, build some happiness promoting buildings.
Now, this is a longer term solution.
It isn't a bad one if done properly.
But depending on the building, it might take 5, 10, 15 or more turns to build such a building.
And building a happiness promoting wonder would take even longer.
It has the advantage of resolving your long-term problem while keeping your city productive.
But a city in riot cannot produce anything at all.
And you can't even hurry purchase a building when your city is in a riot's condition.
Okay, so for war goes on too long and your population goes into riot, you're in danger.
And if you start by trying to buy happiness or diverting revenue from science to happiness, you could start a long downward spiral.
Your best bet is probably to use the slider to stop the riots, make peace with the other guy, and start putting your empire in order.
Build some cathedrals or coliseums to promote happiness and let things quiet down.
Now, you were wearing a stops being active as soon as you make peace.
But it's still there under the surface.
It dissipates over time, but it can take 43 turns to completely dissipate.
Now, there's a chart in the Civilization Fanatics website that's linked in the show notes.
So, the two rules for managing wars boil down to.
Number one, do short, sharp, victorious wars, then make peace.
Know your war aims up front and don't go past them.
Number two, if you're going to do a conquest or domination strategy, prepare for it up front
by making sure to get some happiness wonders and by building happiness buildings
and grab all of the luxuries that you can.
So, this concludes our look at Civilization 3, very fun game.
There's so much more we could do, but, you know, a complete look at every aspect of this game
would be a book, and I'm not really interested in writing a book at this point,
and you're probably not interested in hearing me talk that much.
And meanwhile, we've got more games to talk about.
So, this is Hookah for Hacker Public Radio,
signing off and is always encouraging you to support free software.
Bye-bye.
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