Episode: 4110
Title: HPR4110: Playing Civilization III, Part 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4110/hpr4110.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:42:20

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,110 for Friday the 3rd of May 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Playing Civilization 3 Part 2.
It is part of the series' computer strategy games.
It is hosted by Avocad, and is about 15 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, we continue to look at the details of playing this game.
Hello, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, and inviting you to join me in another
exciting episode in the series I've been doing on strategy games, and continuing our
look at Civilization 3.
So I want to start with today is the early game, and this is the first 100 turns or so.
And if you want to be successful in playing Civilization 3, mastering the early game is really
important.
This is where attention to detail can really pay off.
After this early sequence, you start off with a settler unit, and one or two other units
depending on your civilization type.
Expansionist SIVs would start with an explorer, for instance, while all SIVs start with
a worker.
You may want to look around and see if the tell you're on is the best place for a city.
Now my own rule is that unless I see a clearly better site within one tile of where I am,
I settle in place by pressing the B button, B is for build a city.
You don't want to spend a lot of time wandering around looking for the perfect spot while
the other SIVs are already settled in building units.
Some people say you should never not build in place because you lose a turn of production
by doing that, but I think that's a bit extreme.
I think missing one turn to get a city that will do better is a good bargain, because
you'll get the benefit of the better city for hundreds of turns.
In any case, by the end of turn two, you have your city in place.
Now what?
Well, since you have a worker, you can begin developing your city.
Your ultimate objective is to turn out another settler unit, but that won't happen right
away.
Your city right now has a population of one, and producing a settler unit uses up two units
of population.
That means you have to get to size three before you can pop one out.
Meanwhile, you have no time to waste.
First take a look at your city.
At this point, it is a three by three square with eight workable tiles.
Now the center tile is automatically worked by the game, so you don't need to worry about
that.
And for your eight workable tiles, you have one worker, one civilian population unit, and
we're going to be careful here because there is a unit called the worker that goes around
building roads and irrigation and so on, and then your citizens that will work the tiles.
So we need to be careful looking at that.
So what should that citizen be working on?
If you just let the game, in other words, the governor, we'll talk about the governor later,
decide at this point, it will probably make the right choice, but you want to be sure.
Which tile has the highest food yield?
If you have a grassland or floodplain tile, or maybe a tile with a special resource
like wheat or cattle, that will give you the most food.
And at this point, none of your tiles is developed.
When you think that you know what it should be, open up the city screen by clicking on
the city and see what the game picked.
Did you agree?
If not, what do you think the game was trying to do?
Do you miss something?
Your center city square, for instance, is the one that's automatically going to be worked
and you don't have to worry about it.
And that will, for your first city, always produce two food, one shield, remember, shields
designate production, and three gold.
So you'll be able to start producing units or buildings, though with only one shield
it may take a while.
A bonus grassland is the perfect tile in this situation since it gives you one added
shield, doubling your production, plus two food, which means you are building population.
For one citizen consumes two food, but you get that from the city center.
So the two you get from the bonus grasslands tile go right into the food box to grow
a new citizen.
Now let's consider government type.
At the start of the game, your government will automatically be despotism.
So we're talking about ancient Samaria kind of level.
And you cannot get out of that until you've researched other governments further in the
tech tree.
Now, don't worry about that too much right now.
We're still talking about the early game, but one of the parameters for being in despotism
is that any yield above two is reduced by one.
So if you put your citizen to work on a flood plain tile, you don't get three food.
You only get two food.
And if you irrigate a grassland tile, you similarly only get two food.
So irrigating a grassland tile is a waste of your workers time.
Now this leads to the rule for the early game, mind green irrigate brown.
Why do you mind the green because you're going to get the two food anyway?
And by putting a mind there, you're going to get an additional shield.
Irrigate brown, you know, with the brown, you're only going to get one food.
But if you irrigate it, you'll get two.
In other words, what we're trying to do is get as much food as possible as our first priority.
And that is because the food is what will give you more citizens and more citizens means
you can work more tiles and so on.
So it's a very important concept.
Now let's say this is what you do in the early game.
In the late game, you could have your workers go around and change things.
But if you've played your game well, by the time you get to the late game, tile yields
are not your biggest problem anyway.
Now let's see how this works with two tiles.
One grassland, the other plains, in an early game where you have two citizens.
If you do nothing, you have the plains gives you one food and one shield for a total of two.
This land gives you two food and one shield for a total of three.
Total from both tiles, five.
Now if you irrigate the grassland and mine the plains, which you might be tempted to do,
your plains tile, with a mine on it, one food plus one shield plus one shield from the
mine for a total of three.
Grassland, two food plus one shield, and then plus zero food from irrigation because you're
in despotism and you can't get more than two.
So the total now for both tiles is six.
Now if you mine the grassland and irrigate the plains, the rule mind green irrigate brown
you get from plains, one food, one shield plus one food from irrigation for a total of
three.
Grasslands, two food, one shield plus one shield from the mine for a total of four and
now the total from both tiles is seven.
So you get a net of one additional shield from following the mine green irrigate brown rule
and that is one additional shield every turn, which could mean up to double the speed
on building your first units.
In the early game this is really important.
Now the next concept we want to look at is revenue.
Now remember going back to the very early first version of civilization said, Myers always
said it was always about the money.
That's still an important concept in Civ 3.
So we've seen how we can improve our production on tiles through micro management.
But we've only looked at two of the three things that tiles can give you.
What of the third?
Gold?
Or also known as commerce?
Now there are two types of tiles that produce gold without any improvement.
Coast tiles and sea tiles.
Gold that coast is immediately adjacent to land and sea is roughly equivalent to the continental
shelf, shallower water in a lighter color.
Now sea tiles produce one gold and coast tiles produce two.
But what about land?
Your city center will generate some amount of gold which can vary but it will be at least
one.
And like all city center yields, that comes automatically without any citizen being assigned
there.
Now to get more gold though, you need to build roads.
For each tile that has a road and which has a citizen assigned to work it, one additional
gold will be added to your revenue.
Now that said, in general gold is not your first priority, particularly in the early game.
In a new city, I would first move my worker onto a tile that I can irrigate since that
adds food and you need food to generate more citizens.
But once I've done the irrigation, I would build a road before doing anything else because
it uses up a turn for your worker to move.
And since you're already on the tile, it is most efficient to build the road right away
before moving.
Once I have done that, my next priority would be to build a mine to get increased shields
and again as soon as the mine is completed, I would put a road on it.
So the suggested rule here, never let a worker leave a square without building a road in
it.
It wastes worker moves and you will want to put roads on all of your squares eventually
anyway.
Now the third thing we want to look at here is resources.
Okay, there's more than just food shields and gold to think about.
There are also tiles that contain special resources of one kind or another.
And you will want to grab those resources whenever you can.
Now there's a list of all these resources at the Civilization Wiki site, but the short
version is that there are three kinds of resources, strategic, luxury and bonus.
Strategic resources are the ones that enable you to build certain kinds of military units
and they're revealed at different times in the game when you discover a key technology.
For example, when you start you only have warriors as military units and they have the one
comma one, common one designation, which means they have an attack strength of one.
The first number is always a attack strength.
A defense strength of one because the second number is always your defense strength and
a movement of one because the third number is always your movement.
So this is the bottom of the military tree.
To move up, particularly in terms of mobility, you need horses.
And to get horses, you first need to discover the wheel.
Now as soon as you discover the wheel, then you will see horses appear on certain tiles
on the map.
But for you to have those horses, you need to build a road that connects them to your
cities.
Do this successfully and you will get a pop-up message congratulating you for doing so.
Note that the horses do not need to be within the BFC of a city, but they do need to be
within your empire.
So in other words, getting horses, you don't have to work a tile to get horses.
You simply need to connect whatever tile the horses are on to your city.
The next major strategic resource is iron.
And you need to discover iron working first.
Once you do that, it will appear on the map.
Now for this, you do need to have the tile within your city build a mine on it and assign
a citizen to work it.
Now these resources continue up until finally you get to aluminum and uranium.
So there are always new ones to find as you progress.
Now the next key resource type is luxury resources.
These have two effects.
They can add happiness in your cities, always a key consideration.
And also add commerce, in other words, gold.
Like horses, they need to be within your empire, but not necessarily within the BFC of a city.
You can also access these by building a road to connect the resource to your cities.
And examples of these include dyes and wine.
Last category is bonus resources, which adds to the yields on a tile.
Examples of these include wheat, which adds to food.
And whales on sea tiles, which adds one food, one shield, and two commerce.
To gain the benefit of these bonus resources, they do need to be within the BFC of a city
of yours, and you need to put a citizen to work on the tile.
And these bonuses are added to any other yields.
So if you have wheat and also add irrigation to a plain style, you can get four food.
And because it's a plain style, one from the irrigation, and two more because of the wheat.
So that's a good deal of stuff to cover in one episode.
So this is Hookah for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, and is always encouraging you to
support FreeSoftware.
Bye bye.
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