Episode: 4150
Title: HPR4150: Playing Civilization III, Part 4
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4150/hpr4150.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 20:16:32

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This is Hacker Public Radio, episode 4,150, for Friday the 28th of June 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Playing Civilization III Part 4.
It is part of the series' computer strategy games.
It is hosted by Ahouka and is about 16 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, we continue to look at the details of playing this game.
Hello, this is Ahouka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
We're in our ongoing series on computer strategy games and we are still looking at Civilization III.
And this is going to be, I think, a fun topic.
And it is all about conquering the world.
Two arms.
We'll start with a little quote from Sunsu.
War is a matter of vital importance to the state, a matter of life or death.
The road either to survival or to ruin.
Hence, it is imperative that it be studied thoroughly.
Well, it gets us off to a good start on this, doesn't it?
Now, in Civ III, there are actually two ways you can achieve a victory through the use of your military.
Now, the first is you can just wipe out all of your opposition.
That's always been available in Civ from the very first.
It's called a conquest victory.
So, just build your armies, go out and wipe out everyone else in the game and you win.
You can also win by domination, which is a little bit different.
That means that two thirds of the world's land is within your borders.
And two thirds of the world's population is within your borders.
Now, if you think about it, even if you are trying to get a conquest victory,
you will hit the conditions to trigger a domination victory long before you get there.
So, why are there two victory types?
Well, when you set up a new game, you have the ability to decide which victory types are allowed.
And you could decide not to allow domination, so as to let yourself go all bloodthirsty on a helpless world.
We're not judging you here. This is a valid way to play.
And even if you aren't going for a conquest or domination victory, you will probably need to take up arms at some point.
So, it helps to understand the basics. And I do mean basics.
You could write a whole book on the military strategies in Civilization III.
Now, let's start by looking at the three numbers that define each unit.
They always appear as the first unit being the attack strength,
the second being the defense strength, and the third number being the movement.
And you'll see that when you're building one.
When you build your first city, your only military unit is the warrior.
And that is a 1-1-1 unit.
Has a attack strength of one, a defense strength of one, and can move one tile in a turn.
Now, a land unit with a movement of one can move three spaces as long as it's on a road,
because roads only use one-third of a movement point.
So, when you get to a unit with a movement of two, those units could move as much as six spaces as long as they are on a road.
So, having roads connecting all of your cities and towns is a strategic priority for war and defense,
in addition to providing a commerce bonus.
Now, military experts talk about the benefit of having interior lines of communication,
and you should take advantage of this.
For example, the first mounted unit available is the horseman,
and the horseman is a 2-1-2 unit.
So, nothing special on defense, but enhanced attack strength and enhanced movement.
So, a group of horseman units can move six tiles along roads in one turn, or 12 tiles in two turns.
This could be enough to get them where they are needed on time,
as long as you have good defensive units in your border cities to hold up an attacker,
until your horseman arrives for the counterattack.
Now, the first enhanced defense unit is the spearman,
and the spearman is a 1-2-1 movement.
So, only an attack strength of one, but a defense strength of two.
And you should aim to get at least two of them in every border city, at the very least,
if not all cities in the early going.
And for any city that is no larger than size 6, a city wall can add to the defensive strength.
City walls give a defensive strength of 8 against bombardment,
but also add 50% to your unit's defensive strength,
so that spearman, when behind a city wall, now has a defensive 3, not 2.
Of course, you won't always be sitting in a city,
and terrain can add to your defense as well.
Tiles that can give a defensive bonus are marsh tiles, that's plus 20%,
forest plus 25%, jungle plus 25%, hills plus 50%,
volcanoes plus 80%, mountains plus 100%.
You can also get a bonus from being across a river from the attacker,
or from fortifying the unit, and all of these bonuses are additive.
Now, taking advantage of these bonuses can mean life or death for your units.
The way combat works in Civilization 3 is based on hit points.
Every normal unit starts out with three hit points,
but a veteran unit will have four hit points, and an elite unit will have five hit points.
By building your units in a city with barracks, they will start out as veteran units,
thereby having that extra hit point.
Otherwise, there is a chance that any unit that survives a combat will gain a promotion.
And if an elite unit survives a battle, there is a chance that a great leader will be produced.
In any case, combat is done between units in a series of rounds,
where the attack strength of the attacking unit is compared to the defense strength of the defending unit,
and then a random number generator feeds in one algorithm that determines who lost that round.
The loser loses one hit point.
This continues until one unit has run out of hit points and is then dead.
Now, the exception to this is that there are certain fast movement units
that have the ability to withdraw from an attack if they get down to one hit point.
Now, understanding the mechanics of combat can help you win more victories.
For example, if you have a warrior, remember this is the lowest unit, one, one, one.
And an enemy horseman is bearing down.
Moving that unit onto a mountain and fortifying it can be just enough to give you the edge in surviving combat.
Now, as you progress through the tech tree, you'll discover techs that unlock the capability to build new units.
The earliest example is that the discovery of bronze working unlocks the ability to build spearmen,
and then the discovery of horseback riding unlocks the ability to build horsemen,
but only if you have horses and so on.
You can find a good table of all of this at the Civilization Wiki,
and I've put a link in the show notes for that.
But one nice thing introduced in Civilization III is the unique unit.
Every civ in the game has one unique unit, and it can be an important consideration.
For example, the Iroquois has a unique unit called the Mounted Warrior.
It takes the place of the horseman, and is also unlocked when you discover horseback riding if you are playing as the Iroquois.
The two units both cost the same to build, which is 30 shields.
But while the horseman is a 2-1-2 unit, the Mounted Warrior is a 3-1-2 unit.
So it is 50% stronger on attack.
And since it comes early in the game, the Iroquois are one of the easiest civs to play,
since you can be very successful for early on in wiping out any nearby civ and taking your cities.
The unique unit of the Americans, on the other hand, is the F-15, which comes very late in the game,
and thus, in my opinion, is not terribly useful.
Now, in general, any civ that gives you a powerful unique unit early on is probably easier for the new player.
Now, if you want to see the unique units for each civ, again, there's a link in the show notes to the Civilization Wiki,
where there's a page that outlines all of that.
Now, the unique units are worth taking advantage of, but one thing they cannot do is upgrade.
Many normal military units have an upgrade path that allows you to spend gold to upgrade units
when you discover the tech that unlocks the new unit.
The upgrade path is different for each unit, depends on what kind of unit it is.
So, defensive units have one path, foot soldiers, another, and so on.
And this is another reason to have built at least a few barracks, since upgrades can only happen in cities with a barracks,
or for naval units, cities with a harbor.
As an example, an early unit, the archer, and the archer is great because he can do distance bombardment.
And that can upgrade to a long bulmin when invention is discovered, but that is the end of the path.
Our spearmen, for instance, though, can upgrade to a pikeman.
A pikeman can upgrade to a musket man. A musket man can upgrade to a rifleman.
A rifleman can upgrade to infantry, and infantry can upgrade to mechanized infantry.
So, you could, in theory, have one unit that defends your city from the stone age up to the modern era.
That said, is it the right thing to do? That depends on your situation.
I think it is important to upgrade your defenses as technology improves, since the other civs will be looking at your strength in deciding whether or not to attack you.
But if you do it by upgrading units, that will cost you gold.
Now, the amount of gold can be reduced if you've built the wonder called Leonardo's workshop.
But if you don't have the gold, or for some reason don't wish to spend the gold, then your other path is to just build new units.
And if you disband the old ones in the city building the new ones, they will add shields to the build so it happens faster.
So, in other words, if you disband a unit, you get back some of what you spent building it.
I don't know that that logically makes sense, but it's the way the game works.
Now, I generally prefer to put my gold into maximizing my science output, so I tend to build new ones and disband old ones.
But, you know, I can see situations such as ongoing conflict where the speed of buying an upgrade is the most important consideration.
So, you should decide what makes the most sense to you in each situation.
Now, one of the changes in Civ 3 is stacking units.
And this is very different from Civ 2.
Now, in Civ 2 you could stack units, but the problem was in Civ 2.
If any one unit in a stack was killed, the whole stack was killed.
In Civ 3 that is no longer the case.
Now, does that mean you should build huge stacks?
Not necessarily.
The main virtue of having a stack is that you can have a mix of defensive and offensive units, and that can help you survive in a war when your stack gets attacked.
But you need to be careful that you don't attack with the stack, because the computer may decide to start the attack with your Pykman unit instead of your knight.
And the Pykman is most often going to die when used for attack. It does not have much attack strength.
Now, stacking can be useful for moving a bunch of units, because you can send them as a single stack instead of doing it one at a time.
But don't attack as a single big unit.
Now, in Civ 4 the stacks of doom became a standard strategy, and that led to it being nerfed in Civ 5, where you no longer can have more than one unit on a tile.
Now, armies, there is a way to combine units into more powerful ones, and that is armies.
And the way that works, if an elite unit survives combat, there is a one-sixteenth chance that it will generate a great leader.
Great leaders have two uses. First, they can be used to hurry up wonder production, and this is the only way to hurry wonders in Civ 3.
You cannot pay cash. There are no caravan units that you can add like in Civ 2, and if you disband a unit in the city that is producing the wonder, nothing gets added to the production box.
Now, the other thing a great leader can do is create an army. Armies can have three units combined, and the army gets the combined hit points of all three units, making them much harder to kill.
Now, armies cannot be broken up later, so it is a one-way transformation, and units within an army cannot be upgraded.
So, if you were to create an army of swordsmen, all you ever have is swordsmen, and even with the combined hit points, it will start to lag by the time other players have cavalry.
So, this is a brief look at all the mechanics involved in military, fighting, conquering, and all of that good stuff.
So, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, and is always encouraging you to support FreeSoftware. Bye-bye!
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