When to mine, or road, or irrigate?

[sboog]

After reading the thread on how to win the early game, I am a bit comfused on when to mine, when to road, and when to irrigate.

Now we assume the early game is in despotism for a while. So improving any square so that it gets 3 of anything will be reduced to 2. Right?

I need a primer on the basics of when and where to mine and what benefits it brings. Also I need the same primer on when and where to road, when and where to irrigate and why.

Also, what effect does making an improvement on a square that has a special resource have. If you have gold in your city will mining it help?

Playing Civ3 is like peeling an onion - layer after layer. Maybe that is why it is such an interesting and challenging game

sboog

[Arrian]

Road: 1st priorities are roading tiles in use (these should be grassland and plains tiles) as well as connecting your cities and hooking up luxuries and resources. Later you can deal with roading hills/mountains. Forest is a case-by-case sort of thing. Jungle is my early-game nightmare.

Mine: All grassland you're gonna use. The bonus grassland tiles are the ones you do first, because they will give you 2 shields once mined. Under special circumstances, you may want to mine desert or plains (in the case of a city that has a bunch of wheat on floodplains). Hills aren't worth it yet (though I occasionally mine a hill w/gold because if I'm going to work the tile, I want it mined).

Irrigation:

Cows on plains - always
Cows on grassland - maybe (you can mine them too... both actions will produce more)
Wheat on plains - almost always (there are situations were I could see mining instead)
Wheat on grassland - maybe (similar to cow on grass)
Wheat on floodplains - the only option is to irrigate
Plains - yes
Grassland - no
Floodplains - yes
Desert - only if you really need too, otherwise don't waste your time. Desert will produce 1 food irrigated, and thus isn't worthwhile to irrigate until RR's, which up it to 2 food.

-Arrian

[fittstim]

Good advice Arrian...

To compliment what you said, and maybe adjust a few things:

1) Under Despotism (we are talking about an early win here), you don't get any irrigation bonus. So spending a lot of time irrigating instead of building roads early on is kind of a waste of time. Thus...DO NOT IRRIGATE unless you anticipate becoming a Monarchy within the immediate future.

2) Chop down some forests - preferably chop down ones on grassland over plains. You might get lucky and find a grassland with a shield. If not, you can always re-forest the tile if necessary. Note: if you only have one or two forests and no hills with the city limits, ignore this advice.

3) Avoid building cities early on near jungles. You'll spend the whole game clearing them.

4) Build roads everywhere, as long as the are within a city's production area. One thing to think about, however, is leaving newly built cities with a one-tile gap from the road network. This will allow you to, for example, initially build a quick and cheap spearman, connect the city and upgrade the spearman instead of, for example, spending the time or money to build a musketeer. But maybe that's not relevant for "early victory" scenarios.

[Moonsinger]

Re: When to mine, or road, or irrigate?

Originally posted by sboog
After reading the thread on how to win the early game, I am a bit comfused on when to mine, when to road, and when to irrigate.

I always mine all grassland and irrigate all dersert/plain and railroad everything until I got Mass Transit. That work fine for me becuase I really hate seeing pollution turnning my beautiful grassland into desert.

[Arrian]

You cannot mine floodplains.

-Arrian

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by Arrian
You cannot mine floodplains.
-Arrian

Sorry, my mistake! Editing...removing floodplain from my previous post. If I could mine floodplain, I would.

[fittstim]

Originally posted by Arrian
You cannot mine floodplains.

No that's true. But speaking of mines...

I think that stationary and invisible mines (landmines or seamines, not ore-mines) are something that could be "wicked cool" in the game.

They could have an area of control and, e.g., only be built near ports (in water) or at the outer edges of your civ's area.

Probably too complicated, though...

[sboog]

But what about iron in my city. Should I mine that?

Sometimes I right click on a terrain and it indicates that it had lots of gold or shields. (usually mountains or hills, I think.) Shouldn't I start mining them right away?

I appreciate the help you all have given me.

sboog

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by sboog
But what about iron in my city. Should I mine that?

You don't need to mine iron in order to get iron. Just build a road to your iron and you will get iron.

[Catt]

Originally posted by sboog
But what about iron in my city. Should I mine that?

Sometimes I right click on a terrain and it indicates that it had lots of gold or shields. (usually mountains or hills, I think.) Shouldn't I start mining them right away?

I appreciate the help you all have given me.

Mining adds a shield to a tile. Iron, coal and uranium (could be more - this is top of my head stuff) cause a tile to generate a lot of bonus shields - the mine adds to it. A mined and RR'd iron hill for example will produce a lot of shields. Since you can't irrigate hills and mountains, a mine (and a road/ RR) is definitely the way to go.

But you need to be observant and careful about when to mine your hills and especially your mountains -- they each take a long time to mine and road, which represents a lot of worker-time investment. In addition, especially in the early game and at higher difficulty levels, your cities may not grow all that large (producing settlers and workers, expanding your empire and/or keeping pop lower than possible for happiness reasons). Since early population growth is often desired, you may not set any of your citizen laborers on working a 1-food hill or a zero-food mountain.

Too often the early mining of hills and mountains will represent a lot of worker time almost completely wasted since your city laborers won't be set to work those improved tiles for many, many years - until the city is producing enough food to support city laborers on all the grassland, coastal or other terrain, plus the low food-producing but high shield-producing mountain tiles. In most (but not all!) cases you will be better off allocating your scarce worker time to establishing a decent road network and just mining the 2-food grassland squares around your cities.

Catt