Episode: 4130
Title: HPR4130: Playing Civilization III, Part 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4130/hpr4130.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:57:09

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,130 for Friday the 31st of May 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Playing Civilization 3 Part 3.
It is part of the series' computer strategy games.
It is hosted by Ahuka and is about 20 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, welcoming you to another exciting episode
on my ongoing series about strategy gaming.
And we're continuing with our look at Civilization 3, a very nice game.
What I want to look at now is the expansion phase in our previous episode.
We looked at the early game, and we're, as you proceed the ideas, you're going to expand.
It's not until you get to Civ 5 that they really start putting in things that disincent
of too much expansion.
But in Civ 3, an earlier expansion is an important part of this, and that means settling
more cities as quickly as possible.
And you also want to explore.
So you build your first city, and most people would say build two scouts as quickly as possible
followed by a defensive unit.
Now while this is going on, your worker unit, remember everyone starts with one worker
unit.
You can build more, but you start with one.
And that worker unit should be developing the tiles within the BFC, the Big Fat Cross.
And you need to get your population up to three before you can produce a settler unit.
But note that you don't need to hit a population of three before you can start building the settler
unit.
Your build pop-up will tell you how long it will take to build a settler unit, and your
food box will tell you how long until your population grows.
So if it will take you 12 turns to produce a settler, you can start as long as it will
take 11 turns or less for your population to grow to size three.
Again, this is micro management, but in the early game, micro management pays off.
Meanwhile, your two scout units are exploring the surrounding area.
Now you're looking to accomplish three things from this.
First, you want to find the lay of the land so you can pick good spots for your new cities.
Because you're going to be wanting to build settler units and settle new cities as quickly
as you can.
Second, you want to find other civilizations around you so that you know where they are
and who they are, both of which are important.
If one of your neighbors is the Mongols, you're going to be forced into building military units
faster than you might otherwise as an example.
And three, you want to explore what we call the goody hunts and see what you can pick up
from them.
Now you can focus your scouts on this while building a warrior to defend your city.
This should be safe because barbarians don't appear right away.
And other sieves are not likely to be sending around military units this early.
Now once this warrior is done, you press the F button for fortify to have it stay in your
city and defend it.
By now you should be checking to see if you're ready to start building your settler.
If not, build another warrior since you'll want to protect your second city as quickly
as possible.
And also because you take a risk if you send a settler unit out without any kind of military
escort, it can be captured by barbarians or by other players.
Now as soon as you have a settler unit, look for the best location for another city.
And it should be around three to four tiles away from your first city.
You don't want to go all the way across the map with that.
You want to keep your cities close to each other reasonably close so that they can help
each other with defense.
Now so you're looking for a tile reasonably close, you want to look for things like fresh
water, rivers, lakes, high yields tiles, extra resources and so on.
Now don't worry if there's some overlap between the BFCs of these cities.
A completely filled BFC would mean a population of 21 and that happens rarely in any case.
I find it works better to keep the cities fairly close.
So three tiles between the city centers is pretty optimal.
Now if you already have that second wire, put it in that second city and fortify it.
If not, you can gamble that no one will attack and start with a worker unit and if you've
not yet seen any barbarians or met any other sieves, it's probably a safe gamble.
But even so right after the worker unit, you'll want to make sure you have a warrior unit
there for defense.
Now you'll want to develop this city the same way you developed your first city.
Make sure your citizen is working a high food tile to start with so that you can grow
your population.
Use your worker unit to add irrigation in a road and now as the city grows, you'll want
to produce another settler here as well and you should probably start to think about
having a warrior unit to accompany the settler from now on.
As I said, sending settlers out without a military escort is taking a big risk.
You put a lot of resources into building a settler unit.
Many turns of production goes into them and then having them captured by someone else's.
It's not good.
Now as you locate other sieves, you need to consider that you will be competing for good play
spots.
Now if there's a good spot between you and the other guy, you may want to be the one
who gets their first and snaps it up and if you've other land behind you, so to speak,
with no other sieve in that direction, you can settle that last.
This is something that we refer to as forward settling and the best players will do this routinely.
Your goal should be to get to about 10 cities as quickly as possible.
Maybe you come up a little short or maybe you get lucky and get a few more, but this
is the objective.
Now I put a link in the show notes to a site that I think is an excellent guide to this
phase of the game, crackers opening play site.
So check out the show notes and read up on that.
Now the next thing we need to look at is city improvements.
We've been talking so far about units and the three units we've looked at are warriors,
workers and settlers.
Obviously, as time goes on, there will be others, but that depends on how you've researched
the technology.
But the other thing you do in cities aside from building units is to add city improvements.
These are like buildings that you can build within a city that will give you certain
benefits.
Now there's only two city improvements I would generally build early on in this game.
And the first is the granary.
Now the granary helps you grow your population and the way it works, if you do not have
a granary, you need to fill the food box all the way before you get another citizen.
And when you do, that empties the food box completely.
With a granary, you'll still need to fill the food box to get your next citizen.
But when you do, it doesn't empty the box all the way, it only empties it halfway.
So in other words, it only takes half as much added food to produce the next citizen.
This is even more important when pumping out settlers.
I wouldn't delay getting the first couple of settlers for this.
But somewhere around having three to four cities, I might build a granary to improve my
efficiency.
Ultimately, I would probably build granaries in every city to help build up my population.
But this kind of game is all about balancing competing demands.
So if you spend time building a granary in every city as soon as you settle it, you might
now build as many cities as you should.
So you have to balance all of these.
Now the other city improvement that I'm going to build early on is a barracks.
You don't need to build one in every city unless you have nothing better to do.
But I would build barracks in maybe two to three of my first cities.
This allows you to build military units that start out with veteran status, making them
stronger.
Now with a few barracks in a few cities, you can turn out veteran units to defend your
cities.
And when you're ready to go on the offensive, you can build up a stronger set of units
to attack with.
Again, this is just early game.
Other improvements will come along.
You may be in a situation where city walls are needed to add to your defensive strength,
for instance.
And as you move forward in time, at some point you will start building libraries to promote
your research.
But this early stage, what I would do is I would build the barracks and maybe designate
a couple of cities as being the ones that have barracks and use those cities to build units
that I can then send to any other cities I have to be defensive units.
Specialization of cities is not a bad thing.
Now the other thing you could be building at this point are wonders.
These are the big cajonas, like the seven wonders of the ancient world, the pyramids,
the colossus of roads, things like that.
And they will give your civilization or your city certain benefits.
They tend to take a lot of time to build.
My general feeling is I don't focus on wonders in the early game.
They can be very nice.
But in the early game, I feel like I'm going to do better in my game if I have more cities
rather than more wonders.
And you need to consider that if you conquer a city that has a wonder in it, you will
get that wonder.
So if I've done it right by the mid game, I should have the largest civ on the map and
can then build wonders and possibly have conquered a few as well.
Now the last topic that we get of building up our picture of this is the technologies.
Technologies and research, let's go together, research is how you gain technologies.
Now one of the things I would point out, you can get technologies from research, but you
can also get it through trade.
You can trade technologies with other players.
And I'll tell you, the other players that the other civs that are being run by the AI,
they're going to be trading text with each other like crazy.
And so you should do the same.
One of the reasons your scouts are all over the map looking for other civs is so that you
can do technology trading.
And you really need to, since if you don't, you will fall behind in technology.
I would focus on trying to obtain as many texts as possible.
Now some text you will get from the goodiehuts you explore.
Some you may get from your own research activity.
But you should try to get as many as possible from other civs.
Some players fall into this trap of thinking, oh, this is a critically important tech.
You must hold on to it and make sure no other civ gets it.
Well, you know, we're all looking at the same research tree.
If I don't trade it, someone else will.
And very possibly on the very next turn.
So the other civ gets it anyway, but I don't get anything because I didn't get into a trade.
Now I'll also consider buying a tech from another civ if it is as affordable.
And I can't get it by trading.
What I won't do is sell my text for cash since my objective is to be the tech leader in
the game.
Now I've put in a couple of videos from a guy named Swade, civ3, who is a huge civ3 guru
on YouTube.
There's some links in the show notes that talk about the expansion phase and all of the
things that we've been looking at, technologies, wonders, city improvements, etc.
So if you take a look at the show notes, that will get you links to stuff that will help
you.
Now our very last topic in this episode are the different victory types that you can have.
So how does this work?
Now by the time you've gotten through the initial expansion phase and have your approximately
ten cities, you should have some idea of your possible path to victory.
Civ3 introduced some new victory conditions compared to what Civ2 had.
And this is something that will continue to evolve through future versions of civilization.
The first thing is to evaluate your geography.
Do you have easily defended borders?
Terrain like mountains or swamps may slow down attackers.
An amount of coastline on your border is good for slowing down attackers as well.
Using a seaboard invasion is tricky and it is particularly hard to transport and land
large stacks of units since the transport capacity of early units is low.
The first naval transport unit is the galley and it can move to units.
That's good if you want to settle on another land mass since you can transport a settler
and a military unit to defend the city.
But two units won't go far in an attack.
If you're surrounded by other players and have long land borders, it's going to be
a little trickier.
Now you need to look at your neighbors.
Some are known to be more aggressive.
Russia, Persia and Babylon come to mind.
And you can gauge them by the interactions you have.
If they are moving troops around your borders, something is definitely up.
And if they start making demands like money or tech from you, they are certainly planning
on war.
And if your neighbors are headed that way, you don't have a lot of choice.
You need to start preparing for war yourself.
Now if everyone seems peaceful, you can instead try one of the other victory conditions like
science, diplomatic or cultural.
Now in Civ 3, the science victory is the same as it was in the first two civilization
games.
All to Spaceship, to send to Alpha Centauri.
The rank on Civ 3 is that you win as soon as the Spaceship is launched.
You don't need to wait for it to actually arrive.
Diplomatic is a new one, based on being elected leader of the United Nations.
And for that, you need to be on friendly terms with the other, so if you've been a bully
to the others and then try and get elected, well, I'm going to work.
Civil is based on metrics of how much culture your city is generating, and it is another
new victory condition in Civ 3.
Now these victory types are a bit harder to master, so I would suggest for the new player
that you either go for a military victory or a science victory.
Now that said, even if you're going for a science victory, make sure your military
strength is good.
If your military is weak, the other civs will cast hungry eyes in your direction.
Now for a science victory, I first make sure I have a good road network, both to produce
revenue and even more importantly to move units around.
One of the things that people may not be as aware of now as they were back in the day
was that when Eisenhower was president and developed the interstate highway system
in the United States, his primary reason was to help provide to the defense of the country
that we needed highways that could move troops around quickly.
So a good road network is an important thing to have.
Then I would try to have two good veteran defensive units in each city and upgrade them
as the technology progresses.
So early on, in the very early stages, your best defensive unit would be a spearman, defense
value of two.
Then by the time you get up towards the medieval time, you get pikemen, defense value
of three.
By the renaissance, you've got musket men who have a defense value of four.
Then comes rifleman with a defense value of six and finally in modern period infantry
with a defense value of ten.
So you don't want to be in the modern era with spearmen defending your cities in other
words.
That's not a good idea.
Now there are two possible ways of doing this.
You can be building new units all the time or you can use money and spend money to upgrade
the units.
It's just a matter of which is going to work best for you.
For border cities, I would add city walls.
Now city walls are really only used for first smaller cities, population of no more than
six.
So you should be selective about building them since building ones you don't need simply
waste 20 shields of production.
So this has been a look at a continuing look at Civ 3.
This is a hookah for hacker public radio signing off and encouraging you as always to support
free software.
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