I shall not confront the user interface as an enemy, but shall accept its mysteries as gifts to be cherished. Nor shall I crudely seek to peel the layers away like the skin from an onion. Instead I shall gather them together as the tree gathers the breeze. The wind shall blow and I shall bend. The sky shall open and I shall drink my fill.
Yeah, the "confirm odds" screen is the way to go. However I wish all turn-based strategy games could implement that screen in the way Battle for Wesnoth did - with a histogram showing possible outcomes.
Just wanted to say thanks for introducing me to this amazing game, I'd probably call it one of my favourites now. Was wondering if for a video you might discuss formers and terraforming, when do I plant forests over building farms? Or how do indentify good city locations? Those kind of topics and questions, or maybe something on unit design in the workshop, just some ideas!
I loved the moment where you talked about supply crawler hotkeys. It was very much a "You press the ... *checks notes* O key" - a human moment that speaks to the at times unwieldy UI.
Funny that it reads that way! But no, it's all scripted, but when I tried to speak with my usual speed and cadence it just didn't sound like I was talking about the letter? "Press the Okie Dokie" and all that
@@suedeciviii7142 I hear that! Reading scripts as naturally as possible is such a skill to cultivate. Hey, at least you're getting to the point where the slight time it isn't feeling natural it makes for some dramatic effect!
Thanks for the video! I think a great companion to this would be on automation in SMAC. Stuff like setting patrol routes with boats/aircraft to catch early attacks, using auto-explore and saving/loading build queues. But especially terraforming. You can save yourself a huge amount of micromanagement just by knowing how to properly automate your formers and what you can do with that. Sadly I've never gotten base automation to work as well as I'd want it to (aside from saving build queues). Maybe I should tackle that again some time!
Not only is Blind Research on a good bit easier for new players, but it makes diplo a lot more fun and meaningful. When factions start splitting off into pacts, it creates really fun tech disparities (chaos gun anti air destroyers fighting missile equipped jets) and makes probes more useful
Agreed. And there are just so many egregiously stronger techs, along with techs that are relatively weaker but still interesting that you'd otherwise ignore
Its funny, seeing you describe some of the strange UI choices that Firaxes made does show that it can be tricky but having played this for 24 years I never really realised it before
Hey Suede, Im now beyond 70AD on the same non-exploit Iroquois Sid difficulty map you played a few months ago, only playing as the Celts. 70AD was the end of your 3rd part in the series. I'm still doing well so far. I've completely conquered the Arabs by now (thanks to help by the Aztecs and Babylonians), and took the Temple of Artemis, Statue of Zeus and Hanging Gardens. I have two armies containing gallic swordsman, and Forbidden Palace already rushed. I've now turned on the Babylonians, and did a military alliance with the Aztecs against them, with our huge amount of units battling each other atm. Babylonians were first relatively weak since they didnt had iron, so pretty much only spearman and bowman for them, but now have medieval infantry. Zulus, Arabs and Sumer are wiped out, Mongols only have the islands left to the west (which I dont currently bother taking over due to bad terrain). Iroquois and Germans are many techs ahead. Egypt and America still intact on their islands. Anyway, there are 15 tips I can give you based on what I've concluded by comparing your game to mine: 1) Build more libraries and tech more: where you focused a lot on taxing and trading techs, I focused more on teching, and it paid off. By 70AD, I'm a few techs ahead compared to you, and I still have plenty of gold left to tech for. And by trading all that precious gold, you also make the AI civs stronger. In your game, I can clearly see AI rivals are further in teching compared to mine, and the resistance you encounter becomes stronger the longer the game goes on. Thats bc they use all your precious gold to tech, trade stuff and upgrade their units. Remember, techs are x2.5 times more expensive for you than they are for AI. So every gold you trade away can be used more for upgrading units, diplomacy, teching etc by the AI. With teching at 70-80% in Republic, I'm able to obtain new techs about every 10 turns. And as said, when I tech, that gold does not end up with a rival, which doesnt end up me making them stronger. Even if you did not lose your trade reputation, I think you never would have been able to keep up in tech to AI. Your behind every civ, with exception of the Aztecs. Im scientifically somewhere along the middle of the current surviving AIs. Iroquois and Germans are about 6 techs ahead, but I'm confident I'll tech ahead of them somewhere in the mid Industrial Era, without making use of the GL elevator exploit (I almost cant even anymore since I nearly have Education). Also, a side-effect of libraries is that they also make it easier for you to prevent cities from flipping, which takes me to the next tip: 2) Build more settlers and raze more cities instead of taking them over: city flips are calculated by number of non-resisting citizens + BFC tiles being under control of foreign civs + 2 * resisting citizens * total culture ratio (AI civ divided by yours) * distance to capital (capped by 4 times), all once more multiplied by 2 (since local culture is always far higher than when you take it over). Yes, WLTKD and riots also impact the chances, but are pretty much never relevant. You simply need to focus building more settlers before declaring wars. In short, I only take over AI civs when they're at the right spot, the chances of them flipping are quite low, or the civ in question is almost destroyed. I always make sure I have at least one designated city popping out only settlers, preferably two, with them having granaries. On higher difficulty, AI total culture in general is simply too high compared to yours to make it feasible to take cities over. 3) Having the luxury slider too high for too long: In my game, I only had the luxury slider at 10%, max, at any time. I kept up to 2 regular warriors in my core cities, with 10 warriors total. With the rest pretty much always going to as high as science as I possibly could. Once I had sufficient luxuries, it went to 0% for the rest of the game. In your game, you still had the luxury slider at 20% most of the time, where I had it already at 0%. This is completely futile, since only your capital marginally benefits from this. In my game, with 0% luxury slider, my capital could crank out a gallic swordsman once every 4 turns, just being size 7, and every 3 turns under Golden Age. If it would've been size 12, no other city could've been anywhere near that size quickly (due to the lack of bonus food). And because of the luxury resources I had, then those smaller sized cities wouldnt benefit from the extra luxury slider, too. It would've been more perfect if you combined producing Mounted Warriors with producing settlers. That way, you could have produced more settlers once your capital turned size 7, which would have led to you not having to raise your luxury slider higher than 0%. That means more gold for teching. And then you could've afford to raze and plant new cities. So basically, having your cities closer together around the same size, leads to better total output, rather than having your capital at a far larger size, combined with some luxury slider output. 4) Switch to Republic earlier: By the time you were already mining hills and mountains, and already had plenty of tiles roaded, you still stuck with Despotism for too many turns. Those were a lot of wasted shields and commerce, even food. 5) Build the Forbidden Palace earlier, preferably in the city Centralia, by rushing it with a Military Leader, thereby raising your total shield and commerce output. 6) Relying too much on forced labor: forced labor is only useful in a very low amount of cases. Basically, even if you have sufficient luxuries, forced labor is only useful in cities that produce a lot of food, have quite low shield produce, are working unimproved tiles, have tiles that are considered low-value at that moment (like many jungles/marshes/tundra/mountains), is size 6 max, and have preferably a granary. In my game, there was only a single city where I whipped three citizens for a library before I went to Republic. In all other cities, it was simply just better to make use of the extra citizens working improved tiles in cities where corruption was also on the lower side. You want your city to keep producing high-value stuff, without it suffering from a large amount of citizens working low-value tiles. Something can be said for using forced labor in high-corruption non-center cities, but personally I find its just better to grow those under Republic if possible, and then combine it with building workers/settlers/artillery units and scientists before the Industrial Era. 7) Send off 1 or 2 warriors to the opposite side of the continent at the start of the game: this would've led to you discovering AI civs much earlier. Then you would've been able to trade techs and such with more civs. 8) Unit selection and upgrading: I only built gallic swordsman, and when they were obsolete I went on building knights. I dont bother upgrading the gallic swordsman, ever. I'd rather have them die in combat under Republic in the Middle Ages, which also keeps unit support cost low. I also used ten regular warriors as military police on higher-populated cities, but disbanded them when I went to Republic. I didnt even bother to upgrade them, which means more money for teching, leading to better units and abilities and such. The Iroquois are already teching 4 times as quickly than I do in my game. I dont ever bother building medieval infantry, longbowman, spearman, pikeman, musketman etc. I also think you could've used a few more workers for the jungle territory at the southern part of your empire.
9) City placement: there was fantastic plains terrain just northeast Salamanca, which were not being worked on by any citizens. 3 plains tiles were out of any BFC, and some others surrounding were still not worked on by 70AD. You could've planted a city there very early on, which would've yielded very low corruption shields and commerce. These are not being worked. Under non-communal govs, the value of terrain lowers the further you get from your capital. But in general, I'd say your city placement is on point. 10) A bit minor, but building some extra workers in the bad jungle terrain you conquered from the Mongols: Yes, jungle s*cks, but it can lead to a lot of scientist citizens giving you extra tech, or plenty of engineers in the early Industrial Era, once you've cleared those and build a lot of irrigated and railroaded tiles. They can also be used by then to build plenty of settlers or whatever. 11) This one we may disagree more on, but I dont put as much as value on catapults, trebuchets, cannons, and even artillery as you do. I have about 10 trebuchets by now, but they're very slow, and contributed only marginally when I took over the Arab capital. All other cities I conquered with my gallic swordsman. Since fast units already have a chance of retreat, I often soften up cities with using weaker gallic swordsman, and then finish off weakened ones with elite ones, which also reliably gets me more military leaders. And even in defense, I just rather put my gallic swordsman and knights on the mountains at the edge of my territory, or sign military alliances where the enemy units kill each other off instead. Yes, not waiting for catapults/trebuchets will lead to me losing more units in the short term, but it also enables me to conquer their nations in a short amount of time, which in the end likely led me to losing less units. Also, all those cannons will already cost a huge amount of gold to upgrade to artillery. With even more cannons to upgrade I will lose even more gold. Gold I much rather spent on teching or military alliances. Plus, I'd rather have a veteran gallic swordsman than two catapults. And captured catapults cost no gold, whereas ones you build, do. 12) Make use of military alliances where you make sure their large armies destroy each other first, and then you can take the remaining cities before they do. And as a bonus, if they are Republic, they rank up a lot of war weariness, which will destroy their economy since AI is generally too stupid to switch to another gov, even when war weariness is 100%. However, this war weariness is bugged: in human vs AI battles, ai will generally only rank up war weariness when the human play does. In AI vs AI battles, only one of them will (the other does also rank up WW points, but it will not affect them). 13) Never trade strat resources, and only trade techs for techs: even just iron basically makes an enemy 50% stronger on defense, and salpeter can do up to 100% from spearman. Horses and coal also make the enemy far stronger etc. Only Aluminium may be worth trading away. And techs should only be traded away for other valuable stuff. Getting a tech lead is a very sure way to victory. And its even possible on Sid difficulty without using exploits. 14) Consider stealing techs from the mid Middle Ages: just be sure its against an enemy you dont have to fear being destroyed by. And extra benefit if a high gpt deal to them gets cancelled bc of them declaring war. 15) Dont chop some forest tiles until you have railroads for non-high corruption towns/cities: forest tiles give an extra shield compared to plains and regular grasslands. Often when city hits size 6 or 12, you over produce food on some tiles, and therefore will produce extra shields by citizens working forest tiles. When city size hits 6 or 12, given sufficient happiness, all that food excess will be wasted anyway. Its better to leave some forests for the extra shields, which may be enough to shorten unit production by a turn. When railroads become available however, forest tiles should be chopped. Final, if you do another Sid Pangaea run, why not do a large, warm and wet one with 30% land? Or a standard, warm and wet of 40% land? Both either 4 or 5 billion years old? And then also stronger civs like the agricultural ones, Persians, Ottomans, Chinese, Japanese and/or India?
#2 was a complete oversight from me. Aside from that, I'm not really convinced by your tips. Most of them sacrifice a bunch of tempo, or cost gold or shields. Stuff like going for the Forbidden Palace is debatable, short term vs long term. But a lot of the stuff you claimed here flies in the face of things I know that the CFC pros do, like A) Not teching, buying from the AI. B) Using artillery etc. It seems like you just had a run with smooth sailing and fewer early mistakes. Whereas mine was good at first (good RNG on leaders early) but I completely screwed my tempo with the Mongol war. And then I got bad luck with Sumeria snowballing so hard on their side of the map, which I couldn't really control.
4), 5), and 6) make good points. I thought he had an initial warrior out scouting? I don't remember exactly. But... "On higher difficulty, AI total culture in general is simply too high compared to yours to make it feasible to take cities over." This is simply not true. I have plenty of high level games on record where cities get taken over as a general rule rather than razed and replaced. There exist other games like those by Moonsinger where she takes over cities and does well. Much better than SirPleb who used raze and replace. Taking over cities ends up better for score, because it increases the number of tiles in one's cultural control faster. Playing raze and replace also implies fewer happy or content citizens than playing capture and keep/later disband. Also, AIs can grow cities faster than we can at high levels, especially if they have hospitals and/or enough of their territory railroaded.
Also with respect to early artillery type units, I kind of agree. The combined arms approach can end up slower than fast units. And horse type units have the auto-retreat sometimes, so they don't suffer heavy losses. But, cannons more come for picking off AI units that come at one's cities or picking off stragglers outside of recently captured AI cities. Also, they can soften units for elites to try to spawn a leader/not lose as much/not suffer as much damage from the battle. However, if we have artillery proper, it makes for a different story and enough artillery ends up better than more cavalry. Rails + artillery proper + cavalry + combat settlers (those used to shift borders so that artillery can move into range) IS faster than pure cavalry charges for the most part. I don't know how it would work out better to not upgrade artillery units. Tanks by their selves aren't better than a good combined arms charge. Look up the probability of a victory on the civ III calculator of a 4/4 tank vs. a 4/4 infantry, and a 4/4 cavalry vs. a 1/4 infantry. If infantry get bombarded down to their last hitpoint, cavalry can toast infantry. A 4/4 cavalry vs. a 1/4 fortified infantry in a metropolis on flatland wins 59.7% of the time according to the calculator. A 4/4 tank vs. a 4/4 infantry wins 29.9% of the time for a similar defender. Even if you need to get to the modern era and have to fight with tanks, modern armor, etc., you STILL can use artillery proper in full force, and with a good rail network all of them can fire just about every single turn of a war, unlike how cannons or trebuchets can lag behind. So, as the saying goes, God fights on the side with the best artillery.
@@Spoonwood I'd have to check again, but I think the scouting is a case of me playing blind and him playing with info. I sent a unit east and got pathed in another direction. Interesting assessment on artillery. I'll keep that in mind. I think maybe you're right that if you're gearing up for a switch into republic, it might not be worth it.
I shall not confront the user interface as an enemy, but shall accept its mysteries as gifts to be cherished. Nor shall I crudely seek to peel the layers away like the skin from an onion. Instead I shall gather them together as the tree gathers the breeze. The wind shall blow and I shall bend. The sky shall open and I shall drink my fill.
Deirde OP
Just leaving a comment to support Alpha Centauri content.🎉
Yeah, the "confirm odds" screen is the way to go. However I wish all turn-based strategy games could implement that screen in the way Battle for Wesnoth did - with a histogram showing possible outcomes.
Just wanted to say thanks for introducing me to this amazing game, I'd probably call it one of my favourites now. Was wondering if for a video you might discuss formers and terraforming, when do I plant forests over building farms? Or how do indentify good city locations? Those kind of topics and questions, or maybe something on unit design in the workshop, just some ideas!
Great ideas.
I'd love a light remake with simple QOL adjustments.
But still Alpha Centauri is my favourite game!!!!!
I loved the moment where you talked about supply crawler hotkeys. It was very much a "You press the ... *checks notes* O key" - a human moment that speaks to the at times unwieldy UI.
Funny that it reads that way! But no, it's all scripted, but when I tried to speak with my usual speed and cadence it just didn't sound like I was talking about the letter? "Press the Okie Dokie" and all that
@@suedeciviii7142 I hear that! Reading scripts as naturally as possible is such a skill to cultivate. Hey, at least you're getting to the point where the slight time it isn't feeling natural it makes for some dramatic effect!
Thanks for the video!
I think a great companion to this would be on automation in SMAC. Stuff like setting patrol routes with boats/aircraft to catch early attacks, using auto-explore and saving/loading build queues. But especially terraforming. You can save yourself a huge amount of micromanagement just by knowing how to properly automate your formers and what you can do with that.
Sadly I've never gotten base automation to work as well as I'd want it to (aside from saving build queues). Maybe I should tackle that again some time!
Not only is Blind Research on a good bit easier for new players, but it makes diplo a lot more fun and meaningful. When factions start splitting off into pacts, it creates really fun tech disparities (chaos gun anti air destroyers fighting missile equipped jets) and makes probes more useful
Agreed. And there are just so many egregiously stronger techs, along with techs that are relatively weaker but still interesting that you'd otherwise ignore
MORE SMAC!!!
Its funny, seeing you describe some of the strange UI choices that Firaxes made does show that it can be tricky but having played this for 24 years I never really realised it before
People who grew up with games from the 2000's onwards are spoiled, honestly
I also tell folks to turn off the automatic designer for units, and try creating your own if they haven't already figured that out.
Yay for heavy armored needlejet colony pods!
Hey Suede, Im now beyond 70AD on the same non-exploit Iroquois Sid difficulty map you played a few months ago, only playing as the Celts. 70AD was the end of your 3rd part in the series. I'm still doing well so far. I've completely conquered the Arabs by now (thanks to help by the Aztecs and Babylonians), and took the Temple of Artemis, Statue of Zeus and Hanging Gardens. I have two armies containing gallic swordsman, and Forbidden Palace already rushed. I've now turned on the Babylonians, and did a military alliance with the Aztecs against them, with our huge amount of units battling each other atm. Babylonians were first relatively weak since they didnt had iron, so pretty much only spearman and bowman for them, but now have medieval infantry. Zulus, Arabs and Sumer are wiped out, Mongols only have the islands left to the west (which I dont currently bother taking over due to bad terrain). Iroquois and Germans are many techs ahead. Egypt and America still intact on their islands.
Anyway, there are 15 tips I can give you based on what I've concluded by comparing your game to mine:
1) Build more libraries and tech more: where you focused a lot on taxing and trading techs, I focused more on teching, and it paid off. By 70AD, I'm a few techs ahead compared to you, and I still have plenty of gold left to tech for. And by trading all that precious gold, you also make the AI civs stronger. In your game, I can clearly see AI rivals are further in teching compared to mine, and the resistance you encounter becomes stronger the longer the game goes on. Thats bc they use all your precious gold to tech, trade stuff and upgrade their units. Remember, techs are x2.5 times more expensive for you than they are for AI. So every gold you trade away can be used more for upgrading units, diplomacy, teching etc by the AI. With teching at 70-80% in Republic, I'm able to obtain new techs about every 10 turns. And as said, when I tech, that gold does not end up with a rival, which doesnt end up me making them stronger. Even if you did not lose your trade reputation, I think you never would have been able to keep up in tech to AI. Your behind every civ, with exception of the Aztecs. Im scientifically somewhere along the middle of the current surviving AIs. Iroquois and Germans are about 6 techs ahead, but I'm confident I'll tech ahead of them somewhere in the mid Industrial Era, without making use of the GL elevator exploit (I almost cant even anymore since I nearly have Education). Also, a side-effect of libraries is that they also make it easier for you to prevent cities from flipping, which takes me to the next tip:
2) Build more settlers and raze more cities instead of taking them over: city flips are calculated by number of non-resisting citizens + BFC tiles being under control of foreign civs + 2 * resisting citizens * total culture ratio (AI civ divided by yours) * distance to capital (capped by 4 times), all once more multiplied by 2 (since local culture is always far higher than when you take it over). Yes, WLTKD and riots also impact the chances, but are pretty much never relevant. You simply need to focus building more settlers before declaring wars. In short, I only take over AI civs when they're at the right spot, the chances of them flipping are quite low, or the civ in question is almost destroyed. I always make sure I have at least one designated city popping out only settlers, preferably two, with them having granaries. On higher difficulty, AI total culture in general is simply too high compared to yours to make it feasible to take cities over.
3) Having the luxury slider too high for too long: In my game, I only had the luxury slider at 10%, max, at any time. I kept up to 2 regular warriors in my core cities, with 10 warriors total. With the rest pretty much always going to as high as science as I possibly could. Once I had sufficient luxuries, it went to 0% for the rest of the game. In your game, you still had the luxury slider at 20% most of the time, where I had it already at 0%. This is completely futile, since only your capital marginally benefits from this. In my game, with 0% luxury slider, my capital could crank out a gallic swordsman once every 4 turns, just being size 7, and every 3 turns under Golden Age. If it would've been size 12, no other city could've been anywhere near that size quickly (due to the lack of bonus food). And because of the luxury resources I had, then those smaller sized cities wouldnt benefit from the extra luxury slider, too. It would've been more perfect if you combined producing Mounted Warriors with producing settlers. That way, you could have produced more settlers once your capital turned size 7, which would have led to you not having to raise your luxury slider higher than 0%. That means more gold for teching. And then you could've afford to raze and plant new cities. So basically, having your cities closer together around the same size, leads to better total output, rather than having your capital at a far larger size, combined with some luxury slider output.
4) Switch to Republic earlier: By the time you were already mining hills and mountains, and already had plenty of tiles roaded, you still stuck with Despotism for too many turns. Those were a lot of wasted shields and commerce, even food.
5) Build the Forbidden Palace earlier, preferably in the city Centralia, by rushing it with a Military Leader, thereby raising your total shield and commerce output.
6) Relying too much on forced labor: forced labor is only useful in a very low amount of cases. Basically, even if you have sufficient luxuries, forced labor is only useful in cities that produce a lot of food, have quite low shield produce, are working unimproved tiles, have tiles that are considered low-value at that moment (like many jungles/marshes/tundra/mountains), is size 6 max, and have preferably a granary. In my game, there was only a single city where I whipped three citizens for a library before I went to Republic. In all other cities, it was simply just better to make use of the extra citizens working improved tiles in cities where corruption was also on the lower side. You want your city to keep producing high-value stuff, without it suffering from a large amount of citizens working low-value tiles. Something can be said for using forced labor in high-corruption non-center cities, but personally I find its just better to grow those under Republic if possible, and then combine it with building workers/settlers/artillery units and scientists before the Industrial Era.
7) Send off 1 or 2 warriors to the opposite side of the continent at the start of the game: this would've led to you discovering AI civs much earlier. Then you would've been able to trade techs and such with more civs.
8) Unit selection and upgrading: I only built gallic swordsman, and when they were obsolete I went on building knights. I dont bother upgrading the gallic swordsman, ever. I'd rather have them die in combat under Republic in the Middle Ages, which also keeps unit support cost low. I also used ten regular warriors as military police on higher-populated cities, but disbanded them when I went to Republic. I didnt even bother to upgrade them, which means more money for teching, leading to better units and abilities and such. The Iroquois are already teching 4 times as quickly than I do in my game. I dont ever bother building medieval infantry, longbowman, spearman, pikeman, musketman etc. I also think you could've used a few more workers for the jungle territory at the southern part of your empire.
9) City placement: there was fantastic plains terrain just northeast Salamanca, which were not being worked on by any citizens. 3 plains tiles were out of any BFC, and some others surrounding were still not worked on by 70AD. You could've planted a city there very early on, which would've yielded very low corruption shields and commerce. These are not being worked. Under non-communal govs, the value of terrain lowers the further you get from your capital. But in general, I'd say your city placement is on point.
10) A bit minor, but building some extra workers in the bad jungle terrain you conquered from the Mongols: Yes, jungle s*cks, but it can lead to a lot of scientist citizens giving you extra tech, or plenty of engineers in the early Industrial Era, once you've cleared those and build a lot of irrigated and railroaded tiles. They can also be used by then to build plenty of settlers or whatever.
11) This one we may disagree more on, but I dont put as much as value on catapults, trebuchets, cannons, and even artillery as you do. I have about 10 trebuchets by now, but they're very slow, and contributed only marginally when I took over the Arab capital. All other cities I conquered with my gallic swordsman. Since fast units already have a chance of retreat, I often soften up cities with using weaker gallic swordsman, and then finish off weakened ones with elite ones, which also reliably gets me more military leaders. And even in defense, I just rather put my gallic swordsman and knights on the mountains at the edge of my territory, or sign military alliances where the enemy units kill each other off instead. Yes, not waiting for catapults/trebuchets will lead to me losing more units in the short term, but it also enables me to conquer their nations in a short amount of time, which in the end likely led me to losing less units. Also, all those cannons will already cost a huge amount of gold to upgrade to artillery. With even more cannons to upgrade I will lose even more gold. Gold I much rather spent on teching or military alliances. Plus, I'd rather have a veteran gallic swordsman than two catapults. And captured catapults cost no gold, whereas ones you build, do.
12) Make use of military alliances where you make sure their large armies destroy each other first, and then you can take the remaining cities before they do. And as a bonus, if they are Republic, they rank up a lot of war weariness, which will destroy their economy since AI is generally too stupid to switch to another gov, even when war weariness is 100%. However, this war weariness is bugged: in human vs AI battles, ai will generally only rank up war weariness when the human play does. In AI vs AI battles, only one of them will (the other does also rank up WW points, but it will not affect them).
13) Never trade strat resources, and only trade techs for techs: even just iron basically makes an enemy 50% stronger on defense, and salpeter can do up to 100% from spearman. Horses and coal also make the enemy far stronger etc. Only Aluminium may be worth trading away. And techs should only be traded away for other valuable stuff. Getting a tech lead is a very sure way to victory. And its even possible on Sid difficulty without using exploits.
14) Consider stealing techs from the mid Middle Ages: just be sure its against an enemy you dont have to fear being destroyed by. And extra benefit if a high gpt deal to them gets cancelled bc of them declaring war.
15) Dont chop some forest tiles until you have railroads for non-high corruption towns/cities: forest tiles give an extra shield compared to plains and regular grasslands. Often when city hits size 6 or 12, you over produce food on some tiles, and therefore will produce extra shields by citizens working forest tiles. When city size hits 6 or 12, given sufficient happiness, all that food excess will be wasted anyway. Its better to leave some forests for the extra shields, which may be enough to shorten unit production by a turn. When railroads become available however, forest tiles should be chopped.
Final, if you do another Sid Pangaea run, why not do a large, warm and wet one with 30% land? Or a standard, warm and wet of 40% land? Both either 4 or 5 billion years old? And then also stronger civs like the agricultural ones, Persians, Ottomans, Chinese, Japanese and/or India?
#2 was a complete oversight from me. Aside from that, I'm not really convinced by your tips. Most of them sacrifice a bunch of tempo, or cost gold or shields. Stuff like going for the Forbidden Palace is debatable, short term vs long term. But a lot of the stuff you claimed here flies in the face of things I know that the CFC pros do, like
A) Not teching, buying from the AI.
B) Using artillery
etc.
It seems like you just had a run with smooth sailing and fewer early mistakes. Whereas mine was good at first (good RNG on leaders early) but I completely screwed my tempo with the Mongol war. And then I got bad luck with Sumeria snowballing so hard on their side of the map, which I couldn't really control.
4), 5), and 6) make good points. I thought he had an initial warrior out scouting? I don't remember exactly. But...
"On higher difficulty, AI total culture in general is simply too high compared to yours to make it feasible to take cities over."
This is simply not true. I have plenty of high level games on record where cities get taken over as a general rule rather than razed and replaced. There exist other games like those by Moonsinger where she takes over cities and does well. Much better than SirPleb who used raze and replace.
Taking over cities ends up better for score, because it increases the number of tiles in one's cultural control faster. Playing raze and replace also implies fewer happy or content citizens than playing capture and keep/later disband.
Also, AIs can grow cities faster than we can at high levels, especially if they have hospitals and/or enough of their territory railroaded.
Also with respect to early artillery type units, I kind of agree. The combined arms approach can end up slower than fast units. And horse type units have the auto-retreat sometimes, so they don't suffer heavy losses. But, cannons more come for picking off AI units that come at one's cities or picking off stragglers outside of recently captured AI cities. Also, they can soften units for elites to try to spawn a leader/not lose as much/not suffer as much damage from the battle.
However, if we have artillery proper, it makes for a different story and enough artillery ends up better than more cavalry. Rails + artillery proper + cavalry + combat settlers (those used to shift borders so that artillery can move into range) IS faster than pure cavalry charges for the most part. I don't know how it would work out better to not upgrade artillery units. Tanks by their selves aren't better than a good combined arms charge. Look up the probability of a victory on the civ III calculator of a 4/4 tank vs. a 4/4 infantry, and a 4/4 cavalry vs. a 1/4 infantry. If infantry get bombarded down to their last hitpoint, cavalry can toast infantry. A 4/4 cavalry vs. a 1/4 fortified infantry in a metropolis on flatland wins 59.7% of the time according to the calculator. A 4/4 tank vs. a 4/4 infantry wins 29.9% of the time for a similar defender. Even if you need to get to the modern era and have to fight with tanks, modern armor, etc., you STILL can use artillery proper in full force, and with a good rail network all of them can fire just about every single turn of a war, unlike how cannons or trebuchets can lag behind. So, as the saying goes, God fights on the side with the best artillery.
@@Spoonwood I'd have to check again, but I think the scouting is a case of me playing blind and him playing with info. I sent a unit east and got pathed in another direction.
Interesting assessment on artillery. I'll keep that in mind. I think maybe you're right that if you're gearing up for a switch into republic, it might not be worth it.
You delivered
Where Civ 3? I NEED CIV 3! 😭😭😭
neat