Civ3 is way too hard!

[centennial_gnu]

I'm a wimpy wuss.

Many moons ago, I played Civ 1. Always on "Chieftain". The first thing we built were the old-school Pyramids, we then switched to democracy and for the next 1,500 years did nothing but expand moderately and research like crazy.

In the year 1600, we crushed the infidels with our armor, battleships and nukes.

I only played the game every other month or so, but this was great fun every time and very relaxing.

And now? I spot this Civilization 3 edition on Amazon, remember the good old times and do the 1-click.

Pah! As if!

Civ3 is hard. Way too hard for me. In my last game, my struggling Greeks invented "Flight" in 2008, constantly harassed and threatened by a bunch of "furious" AIs with Warsaw-Pact-sized armies and flotillas of ironclads all around my archipelago. I still have all wonders and awesome culture, though.

Having said that, Civ3 is a beautiful game. I appreciate all those new features and detail. But how can I recreate my Civ1 experience?

I used the scenario editor in Conquests to choke the AIs ("cost factor 60"), but even in my newfound peace I am unable to equal, let alone beat, the timeline of science in the real world. I cannot get to "Flight" by 1903, no matter how hard I try.

What am I doing wrong? C'mon, this cannot be that hard - it's still only "Chieftain" after all.

In my life, I played and won at least a hundred games of Civ1 and Colonization, I cannot suck that much.

Please help! Any input is welcome.

[Kloreep]

At Chieftan, especially with the AIs choked so much, you're going to have to do a lot of the research on your own. That in itself may be the biggest factor in the problem; in most games, the AI speed the Ancient and Mideval era along, and contribute money to the human's research, if nothing else, in the Ind and Modern. But they can't really do either very well on normal Chieftan, much less with a cost factor of 60.

As for what you can do on your end under these conditions: Post a save or at least a screenshot. Chances are you're placing your cities too far apart, for one thing. Posters here can give much more specific advice if they can look at your save.

[centennial_gnu]

in most games, the AI speed the Ancient and Mideval era along, and contribute money to the human's research, if nothing else, in the Ind and Modern.

Really? What's the rules behind that? I must've missed it in the manual. Can you point me to the relevant section?

As for what you can do on your end under these conditions: Post a save or at least a screenshot.

I would, but I angrily deleted all saves of the last game immediately after retiring.. Next time!

Chances are you're placing your cities too far apart, for one thing.

How far should they be apart? I try to make sure every city gets its 21 squares for itself, but that's about all.

[Kloreep]

Originally posted by centennial_gnu
Really? What's the rules behind that? I must've missed it in the manual. Can you point me to the relevant section?

It's not a rule, it's just the result of having strong AI empires in the game. In your game, you are basically the only researcher. So if each empire is 1 point of tech speed, you are proceeding through the tech tree at 1x speed.

In another game, where let's say there are two other strong AI empires that can begin to approach your research capacity, you'll have a lot more progress being made for everyone, so long as the human trades their tech around in exchange for AI tech. As a result, you'll be going at 3x speed and probably will have already either researched or bought Flight well before you hit the 2000s.

Originally posted by centennial_gnu
How far should they be apart? I try to make sure every city gets its 21 squares for itself, but that's about all.

That's too far, especially if you want a powerful empire for speeding up the tech tree. By doing Optimal City Placement, as it's called, you'll be leaving a lot of tiles unworked till the Industrial Era and Sanitation make it possible; Optimal City Placement isn't really optimal. Placing them closer together means more tiles worked; plus, placing your initial core in close to your palace means less corruption in the early game.

BTW, another common loss of efficiency is from not building enough workers. Ideally, you should have every tile your citizens work improved with a road + mine or irrigation. That ideal probably isn't achievable in the early game, but it should become so as you build more cities and found some worker pumps.

[Muad'Dib]

The game has an Auto Save file from your last 5 turns. So unless you deleted those files too, you have a saved game to send us.

Check out my relpy in the Civ3--Strategy--I AM Desperate thread.

Hope this helped.

[vmxa1]

The formula for research is such that as any civ you know learns a given tech the cost for researching that tech goes down.

This means you pay full bearker price for being the first to research a given tech. The ones that learn it later get an ever increasing discount.

So if you do a tech first and the AI does another first, you can maybe trade for that tech or at least research it cheaper.