pacaveli

Hey i just got the 3 set box thing, and it's a pretty awesome game, i just figured most everything out, but im still "mastering" it. Any tips on it?

meepa

In the beginning, don't be afraid to make as many cities as you can (as efficiently as possible, ie no overlapping work zones) because if you aren't aggressive, neighbors will claim all the land too quickly.

Unless you're playing on an easier mode that lets you tech way ahead of the other civs, you can just sell each tech you get to all the other civs. But remember: sell it to all the other civs on the same turn. If you don't, then they will sell to each other and you lose out on profit. This strategy often works really well because you can keep your research funding really high and get the techs first, then make up the gold by selling it. In turn, the other civs will keep their research low to gain back the gold they spend on you.

Also, if you have a tech and a civ doesn't have any gold to buy it; give them gold and then sell it. You will get the gold back + the extra bonus of them liking you more for the gift.

Don't ever go to war on a whim or even plan for a long drawn out war. Unless you can't avoid it, you need to just build up a huge force in peacetime and then do one insane blitzkreig "lightning" war move. This is great when the civ is on land and is often your neighbor. Once you have sufficient forces, you get everybody ready on the border, and then charge in and take all their most populous and important cities in one or two turns. If you're lucky you can even split them in half and their productivity and capabilities will have been completely shot to hell.

At this point you garrison the captured cities with your injured troops and can either a) take out on the little cities without any real fear of them offering serious resistance or b) make peace and string them along for all they are worth. By this I mean once you have completely broken the civ's will, you can sue for peace and make them give you all the technologies and gold that they have. Then when you're ready, take over more cities and repeat the process. This will make other civs wary of you though.

Always make temples and libraries in your cities ASAP because they will accumulate insane culture points for them. This will aid you in either annexing neighbor cities or at the very least prevent them from annexing you + giving you culture points for high score.

If you're going to race for any wonders early in the game, the two best are probably the pyramids and the great library. The pyramids give you a free granary in every city on the continent which really helps growth in the early stages of the game. The great library gives you popular techs for free that other civs have that you don't (it eventually goes obsolete though).

As for terrain improvements, you can basically just make a bunch of workers and put them on the 'auto' funciton and they do a pretty good job of making roads, irrigating, and mining in an intelligent manner. When you get to the appropriate age, I stress that you get the tech to make railroads ASAP. They give you unlimited movement in your territory which is really an invaluable help for when you're trying to move around a large army or send reinforcements up to the edge of your civ.

Lastly, I tend to save the forbidden palace wonder until after I conquer the first major civ/swab of cities next door. What tends to happen is your civ is clustered in one area, and your new territory is all off to one side, and thus over half the cities are so far away from your capital that they are too corrupt to do anything useful. Use this opportunity to place the forbidden palace in the center of your "new" civ area and watch it become as efficient as your core cities. If you're on a smaller island/continent and this isn't much of an issue, you can save it for another land mass as well. I normally don't even bother keeping cities that are on another continent because of inefficiency problems.

Normally I try to win by other means that conquest if I have to resort to using a navy and transporting across the oceans because it's so annoying. But if I do go over, I normally just raze everything to the ground and station units around to make sure nobody builds anything new.

That's all I can think up for now. Good luck!

MPower

After you take some enemy cities, send troops out and cut the rail lines and roads. If they want to start the war back up they will fly into your territory. Double-edged sword really, cause it cuts down on your invasion time, but you can rebuild later. Also, if you have the cash, send spies into an enemy city and have them incite disorder, then buy the city for half price. Plus you get all the troops and workers associated with the city.

An addition to the wonders Meepa mentioned. Mid game try hard to get the one that upgrades all you troops, leonardos workshop I think it is. And adams smiths trading wonder will free up a lot of cash so you can inprove your research.

rival

Do not break deals with the other Civs. If you're under any agreement with another Civ, even a simple trading agreement, don't start a war. If you break a deal you'll get raped after that when you try to trade.

Xenomorph

If you're particularly good at being brutal and don't mind ending the game before the world gets to the medieval age, go with the horse-rush. It only really works on pangaea or continents games with just a few players, but if you race to horseback riding and beat the hell out of your citizens under despotism, your neighbors are there for the taking if you send a stack of 5 ponies out to to each of them.

I prefer to let the game get to the later ages, though. Nothing crazier and more difficult to conduct than a limited, 2-sided nuclear war.

__________________
The facehugger is short-lived outside the egg which normally protects it. Armed with a long grasping tail, a spray of highly-concentrated acid and the single-minded desire to impregnate a single selected prey using its extending probe, it will fearlessly pursue and attack a single selected target until it has succeeded in attachment or it or its target is dead

Eight

Cracking game. Not played it in a while I think I'll have to pick up the add on packs and try it again.

Use to love waging long drawn out wars but it takes a lot of resources to do so. Could never master winning any other way

skills1

Listen to Xenomorph

Eight

Never had a all out nuke war. More like massive tank battles with Modern Tanks and Mech Infantry. Only thing that did disapoint me was the lack of new units. Call to Power 2 had a much better selcetion of units but lacking in the game play side of things.

Xenomorph

I rather liked the way they focused more on balancing the units they had in Civ 3 as opposed to making a bunch of new units (abolitionists!?!) that weren't worthwhile or were too overpowered like they did in the Call to Power games.

All-out nuke wars are tough to come by. The game makes you work pretty bloody hard for even a limited-range '60s-esque tactical nuke, let alone a modern ICBM...plus everyone has first strike capability at all times. I really, really would like to see some sort of 'launch retaliatory missiles while theirs are in the air' feature in a future Civ installment. I see the nuclear weapons as more of a means of destroying the enemy production capacity than of attacking its military...although that's certainly possible if you're such an industrial giant that you can afford to blow a big'un on a couple mech infantries.

__________________
The facehugger is short-lived outside the egg which normally protects it. Armed with a long grasping tail, a spray of highly-concentrated acid and the single-minded desire to impregnate a single selected prey using its extending probe, it will fearlessly pursue and attack a single selected target until it has succeeded in attachment or it or its target is dead

Eight

I'm sure I've read some were that Civ 4 is on its way but cant find the dame site/link

Yea some of the units in CTP were a bit useless but I like a lot of choice Some of units from the future. War Walkers were cool

MPower

My only nuke exchange, I ran a few transports of tanks next to the coast, then nuked 7 or 8 enemy citys and ran the tanks down the railways and into the unoccupied citys. Plus I nuked any ships I saw. Worked ok except for the pollution and the fact the the citys I missed nuked 3 or 4 of mine. Wouldnt have done it but the ai was ahead of me in the space race and I had to bring his production to a halt.

If you have conquests and plan on the horse-rush, build the temple of zeus, it will churn out troops every 5rnds.

Xenomorph

Eh, I'm not so sure about the temple of zeus. You can't kill your citizens to get them to complete it, which is a vital part of the plan. Not only does it take a long time to build the thing compared to force-completing regular horsemen, but every 5 rounds is pretty slow relative to the speed you have to act in order to win the game outright before they can put up hoplites or pikemen or whatever.

If you're going for a bit of a more long-term plan, though, that's what the zeus wonder was built for.

__________________
The facehugger is short-lived outside the egg which normally protects it. Armed with a long grasping tail, a spray of highly-concentrated acid and the single-minded desire to impregnate a single selected prey using its extending probe, it will fearlessly pursue and attack a single selected target until it has succeeded in attachment or it or its target is dead