please help me

[johncmcleod]

I am having problems in succeding in Civ 3. In my first game, I rarely built any towns, and the land filled up. I had no access to resources. I lost when the end date came up. My second game, I decided not to let this happen. As soon as I researched iron working and horseback riding, I built a town near each resource. They were the closest strategic resources together. Besides that, I had a capital about equidistant from the 2 cities. Besides that, I had another city close to one of the ones with resources. I now had resources. I built roads connecting them and courthouses in 2 of the cities. But I am being KILLED by corruption. I have had to cut back on science funding a ton because of all the money I was losing due to corruption. And, the city with the most corruption is one of my cities with courthouses! I am now very far back in technology. I really need help.
John

[Syucan]

It sounds like you have several issues. Try to place your cities around evenly, and take advantage of natural resources, such as hills, cattle, wheat etc beyond just building near early strategic resources. Remember, later on in the game when vital things like oil and rubber pop up, you have no idea were they will be. So it makes sense to build as many cities as you can in decent areas that are a contiguous whole.
Corruption is a *huge* problem in this game, I think they made it far too strong. Besides building courthouses, the Forbidden Palace small wonder acts like a second capitol, and reduces corruption around there. Police Stations will also reduce corruption. Personally, I felt like these weren't enough, so I went into Civ3Edit and changed it. Open civ3mod, go to world sizes, choose the size map you are playing on, and up the "optimal # of cities". I personally play on huge maps and changed the optimal # to 120, which means there is still corruption (which is realistic) but not crippling (which is not). If you want to completely do away with it, raise the number even more. Be careful when using civ3mod though, as too much tweaking can unbalance the game. You may even want to make a copy of the file and save it somewhere else before tinkering. Hope this helps.

[Willem]

Another option is to create more improvements that will reduce corruption, especially ones like the Forbidden Palace. Personally, I don't mind the corruption, however I don't feel they gave us enough improvements in order to help combat it. Courthouses and Police Stations just aren't enough. Another thing to do as well is checking the "Reduces Corruption" flag on other improvements, i.e Temple, Cathedral.