This is really hard!

[Jim0322]

I played a lot of Civ1 and never Civ2. I used to win fairly consistently in Civ1 at the 3rd level of difficulty (prince maybe?).

In any case, I have been trying Civ3 at the second to easiest level and keep getting brutalized. Early on I devote almost everything to research but find that by the time I have all the ancient techs I am a backward society and rarely can build an ancient wonder because someone always beats me to it. About that time my neighbors get aggressive and gang up and destroy me.

Diplomacy seems 1-sided, they always insist on trades that are heavily weighed in their favor. I have established embassies but can't figure out how to spy. Also, when I find get the opporutnity to establish embassies I do so, but when I make contact with new civs the box does not come back up. How do I build an embassy for the new civ?

Another question, I did get a leader created once and tried to use him to hurry construction on a wonder but I could not find the option. How do you use a leader to build a wonder?

Thanks,
Jim

[Nimokmai]

There are a few schools of thought on this, but expansion in the early game seems crucial. If you don't build enough cities early on then you tend to fall behind. A foreign civ will take a look at a few things when contemplating a trade with you:

1. How much power you have (ie # of units)
2. How large you are
3. How valuable is the thing that you want vs what you will give up
4. How nice you have been to them before
5. How "jealous" they are of you
6. General tendancies of the civ (England is more conservative for instance)

So therefore, if you are relatively the same with the same number of troops then all else being equal, they will want equivalent value for what they want to give up. Trick is to be good to them early on and they are more willing to trade later. The computer will try to get as much out of you as they can. If you are more powerful than them then they might be more willing to trade with you (assuming you haven't been kicking the sh . . . I mean stuffing out of them. If you "give" away some stuff to civs they seem to be more inspired in having better trades with you.

Establishing an embassy is a good way to get a civ to like you a little bit better. To build an embassy (I believe the keyboard control is Ctrl-E) you go to your capital and double click on the star to the right of the name.

For spying, look at the bottom right of your screen. There should be the "Main Box" that lists your current unit, etc. To the right of that there are 5 small boxes each containing a letter (don't recall offhand what they are). One of them is the espionage button. Until you build the small wonder "Intelligence Agency" you will not be able to do much. I have found this to be one area that is lacking in CIV III, but maybe I just havn't figure out how to work it correctly yet.

You can do 2 things with your leader. When you have a leader, click on him to select him as your current unit. If you look in the bottom middle of the screen you will see the action buttons. One of the action buttons is "build army" (looks like 5 matches) the other is "rush building?" (looks like a brick structure). I don't recall offhand what the keyboard control is for either - sorry. I hope this helps.

Nimo

[Willem]

The keyboard shortcut fort hurrying a wonder with a Leader is Ctrl-H. I'm not entirely sure about the build army, but I think it's just "B", or at least some combination thereof.