Episode: 4070
Title: HPR4070: Civilization III
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4070/hpr4070.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:15:40

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,070 for Friday 8 March 2024.
Today's show is entitled Civilization 3.
It is part of the series' computer strategy games.
It is hosted by Ahokad and is about 16 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, we start our look at the next game in the Civilization franchise.
Hello, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio and I'm happy to be here for another exciting
episode and our ongoing series on computer strategy games that I've played.
And today I want to start a discussion of Civilization 3.
Now, last time we wrapped up our look at Alpha Centauri and I made a claim that it represented
one possible path to go forward after Civilization 2 and the other path was represented by Civilization
3.
Both games are excellent and still fun to play today, even if they're not the latest thing
to hit gaming.
I hope to give you an idea of how to play Civilization 3 and maybe make a case for why you should
give it a try.
First a little history.
In the year 2000, Brian Reynolds left for access to found big huge games where he developed
a game called Rise of Nations.
Well, it's good for him, but that means he has now left the story as far as Siv is concerned,
Rise of Nations was a pretty good game too.
But the mantle for Project Leader for Siv 3 really fell mostly to the Foraxis CEO Jeff
Briggs.
Now Jeff Briggs got his start creating music for the MicroPros games, but he moved
in the game design.
Now assisting Briggs on this project was the game programmer, Soren Johnson.
One of the things we see with this story of MicroPros in Foraxis is that many people participate
in creating these games, not just to people to get top line credit.
As before, Foraxis functioned as a game design studio.
The production, distribution, marketing, etc. was handled by a company called InfoGrames,
which had acquired the rights to the civilization name for computer gaming.
Now as always, some things remain the same.
It is still a turn-based game.
You still will start with a nomadic tribe settling down in the year 4000 BC.
You still have to decide whether to expand or defend, and you still need to start researching
technologies.
It's the one third that never changes in Siv, but other things do change.
For instance, in previous Sivs, building a settler in a city reduces the population by
one, representing the people added to the settler group.
But in Siv 3, it reduces the population by two, which makes it more difficult to crank
out masses of settlers.
This may be a deliberate attempt to inhibit a strategy that many people, including me,
used in Siv 1 and Siv 2, to just expand all of the AI players by cranking out settlers.
In fact, I remember a game in the Siv 1 where I would just settle a city and build one
defensive unit then build a settler.
And that one would go out and settle the city and build one defensive unit and then send
out a settler, and it was done as like a grid pattern.
And it was very successful, but it's also pretty mechanical.
So taking that out maybe gives you a chance to experiment with some more interesting approaches
to play the game.
In any case, definitely reducing the population by two when you build a settler does slow down
your expansion in the early game.
And as we saw with Alpha Centauri, one of the new developments is that each Siv in the
game has unique features.
Each Siv has their own special abilities and their own special units.
For instance, the Japanese Siv has the samurai in place of the knight.
Well Rome's unique unit is the legionary which replaces the swordsman.
The unique units are a bit stronger than the units they replace.
You can see a list of the unique units in the civilization fandom site, and I've put
a link in the show notes for all of these references.
Now, each Siv has their own unique unit and it is a somewhat stronger unit.
So that's basically what that's about.
Each Siv in the game also has strengths that give it advantages.
A complete list of the strengths can be found again at the civilization fandom site.
For instance, one of the best is agricultural because it means you produce more food and
more food means more population, particularly in the early game.
And because a settler takes away two population from a town or city, you have to get size three
before popping out a settler.
If you produce more food, you'll get the size three much quicker and get the jump on
Siv's that don't have this strength when it comes to settling land and establishing
towns and cities.
These traits also can affect the production of buildings.
For instance, a religious Siv can produce temples more cheaply, while a militaristic one
produces barracks more cheaply.
And building wonders that match the traits of a Siv can trigger a 20-term golden age
once and only once for each Siv.
This is all explained at the civilization fandom site.
What's a golden age for that 20-term period, you're stronger, your research goes faster,
you pull in more money, you can see this all explained in the Siv fandom site.
Now, each Siv also starts with two texts already researched, and that can boost certain
strategies in the early game.
These are all early game texts, but if you have them already researched, you could
use them right away instead of waiting until the research has been done.
For example, the Americans get pottery and masonry, while the Germans get warrior code and
bronze working.
You can see the list of different Siv's and their unique units, strengths, and starting
texts on the civilization fandom site once again, again all these links are in the show
notes.
Now, I'll put it all together and it makes for a major change since Siv and Siv too.
In those games, there really wasn't a big difference between the Siv's, and you could
use pretty much the same strategy with any Siv and be successful.
But in Siv 3, you want to consider all the aspects of a given Siv and develop the right
strategy.
For example, you would not want to pursue a production-oriented strategy with Germany because everything
about Germany screams military.
Its strengths are militaristic and scientific.
Its starting technologies are warrior code and bronze working.
But Americans would fit a production-oriented strategy very well.
Their strengths are agricultural and expansionist, and their starting texts are pottery and masonry.
So what the game is doing is making you consider what kind of victory path is suitable for
the Siv you are playing as.
Now if you let the game give you a random assignment, you would need to make a rapid adjustment
when you start.
Or you can decide to try a certain strategy and select a Siv to play that fits that style.
But your choice of Siv is now very important to how the game is played.
And this all connects to the map type you select.
If you're on a Pangea map, then Pangea means one massive continent, maybe a few small
islands, but most of the landmass is one big continent.
Having Sivaring strengths is almost useless.
But an archipelago map, which is one in which there's no large continents, just lots of
islands, various sizes, then the Sivaring strength is absolutely essential.
Now another major change is the role of culture in Siv 3.
In Siv 2, cities had a fixed size, and borders didn't really exist except by inference.
In Siv 3, each city has a border, and the border expands outward, taking in more territory
as the city develops its culture.
Even as you add cities in their boundaries expand, they merge into a single border.
So obtaining culture to expand becomes important.
Now you do this by building certain buildings and wonders that give you culture.
Buildings include the Cathedral, Coliseum, Library, Palace, Research Lab, Temple, and University.
Now the palace is rather special.
You only have one palace, but when you start the game and you try in 4000 BC settles your
first city, that's where the palace is at that point.
But you can build a palace in another city to move your capital, or if someone conquers
your capital, you might want to build one to get a new capital going.
How wonders are another thing to look at wonders all give you culture, but the amount varies.
Even the Pentagon gives you one additional culture.
And culture not only defines borders and limits your expansion, it can also cause cities
to flip from allegiance to one Siv to a different one.
So prioritizing the building of military units over other things can cause problems since
military units do not provide culture.
Now culture can help keep your people happy and make it less likely that your cities
will flip, perhaps even let you flip someone else's city.
And you generate culture points every turn from buildings and wonders, and these accumulate
over the course of the game.
Now another way to keep your citizens happy is with luxury resources, like incense, dyes,
and furs.
Having any of these in your empire can make your citizens happy, but you only get this
effect from the first unit.
So if you have two units of dyes, as an example, you should look for a chance to trade the
second one away with another Siv, and maybe get some gold or other resources in exchange.
So that trading thing is another big advance.
Another significant change in Siv 3 has to do with settlers and workers.
Now in Siv and Siv 2, settlers not only created new cities and towns, they also built roads,
mines, irrigation, etc.
In Siv 3, these functions were split.
Settlers only build cities and towns, they don't do anything else.
A new unit, the worker unit, now is the one that can build these improvements.
On Siv 2, if you built a settler unit, you could use it as a worker, but as soon as you
used it to create a new town, you no longer had that worker.
It had transformed.
In Siv 3, you can create workers and use them throughout the game, and you need to.
Irrigation provides increased food, which can help grow your population.
Roads provide quicker movement between points and increase your commerce revenue, and mines
can provide additional resources to help your production.
Now, what about the victory conditions?
There's a detailed discussion of this at the Siv fanatics website, link in the show notes,
but the summary is you can get a domination victory.
And for that, you need to control two thirds of the land surface and two thirds of the
civilian population, so you have to satisfy both of those conditions.
That's domination.
Diplomatic victory.
You can win an election in the United Nations, so that's a whole new wrinkle.
You can get a culture victory.
Basically, this means a mass more culture points than anyone else.
This can be done in several ways, but it's a little more in the weeds than I want to
get in this overview.
There's the usual science victory or space victory.
Be the first to launch a spaceship to Alpha Centauri.
Now, the difference here is that being the first to launch gives you the victory.
In Siv 2, you needed to be the first to land your ship.
The reason that mattered is that if you had launched your ship and it was going to take
20 turns to get there, one of your enemies could say, well, I'll just capture your capital.
And that'll destroy your spaceship, just because that's the way the game mechanic worked.
In Siv 3, that's not an issue anymore.
You can get a conquest victory, and that's the same as it's always been, just wipe out
everyone else.
And then there's a histographic victory, which is essentially who has the highest score.
It's only used if no other victory has happened, so think of it as kind of a tiebreaker if
no one has managed to achieve any of the other victories.
Now there were expansions, so play the world was published in 2002 and added multiplayer
to the game, as well as a few additional Sivs and units.
Sivs was published in 2003 and added nine more historical scenarios, such as World War
2 and the Pacific.
Some of these scenarios added new government types as well.
Now, how do you obtain this?
Siv 3 is no longer in print, but you can still obtain it in a variety of ways.
First you can buy it used at the usual places, such as eBay and Amazon.
Then you can get it at good old games.
They offer the Siv 3 complete version, which includes both expansions for $5.99.
Steam has the complete version for $4.99, so you can get a great game for very little
money.
Now personally I have a lot of games on Steam, I recognize it is not for everyone, but
for me it seems to work pretty well.
So I'm going to put a few links to additional information in the show notes, and now I'm
going to sign off.
This is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, and as always encouraging everyone to support
FreeSoftware.
Bye-bye.