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dr. blackclove
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Gainesville, FL (USA)
Jan 1970
time: 05:16
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For warlike conquering people like mine, here are the biggest changes from Civ II to Civ III:
1) Conquering neighbors is much harder. Because people resist you and you have to "quell" the rebellion by garrisoning troops there, your conquest is slowed down a lot. Fighting is very random so I lose a lot of tanks to spear chuckers. Worse, when you conquer a region, the neighbor often still has high "culture" while your captured cities have been ground into dust. Sometimes my cities have again rejoined the other nation, or lost territory to the higher-culture central cities.
2) Military expansion much more directed by resource and territorial needs. A lot of times you need a scarce resource and can't find it in your nation. That means conquering a particular enemy city is really, really important -- so you go to war for that resource. This is especially true when the other nation isn't as advanced as you. Medievalists can't mine aluminum for you, for example. In my current game, the French had the (mis)fortune to be sitting on all of the world's rubber and aluminum, key ingredients for high-tech weaponry and structures. Since they were medieval they couldn't "see" it -- and you don't see the resources until you discover they're useful through science, either, so you may not know you lack an important resource.
3) Pillaging is actually useful. I found that wiping out enemy terrain improvements around big cities was often helpful -- more so than bombarding the city itself. I could send them into starvation and slow production without having to actually fight.
4) Ships suck now. My days of rush building battleships and pounding away on coastal cities are over. They are great for destroying terrain improvements, but bombarding cities is more likely to wreck the city than to kill the defenders. In fact, you can't even wipe out units entirely with naval bombardment as far as I can tell. You usually barely damage them.
5) Siege weapons are great on defense. Catapults and cannons and things get a free shot at invaders, which means defense may matter for an attack unit as well. This makes the most difference for things like longbowmen, who have 4 attack and 1 defense... catapults squish them. I also found it useful to have some artillery, which can fire 2 squares, in some of my coastal cities. I could blow up invading ironclads without them taking out all of my hard-won cathedrals. I sometimes keep a few of my outdated spear chuckers to draw catapult fire before I send in the modern troops. 
6) Destroying big cities is often better than capturing them. For whatever reason, nobody got upset when I liquidated Paris. Destroying Paris and Orleans, both French size 12 cities, kept them from using their "cultural influence" to retake my conquered territories, and gave me time to install our own temples and libraries and things.
7) Moving through enemy territory is harder than moving through your own. This also serves to greatly slow invasions and makes air units much more useful than they used to be.... I think.
8) Civs are rarely worth elminating entirely. Unlike in previous Civ games, I have only rarely managed to destroy an enemy civilization completely. Usually, either the war discontent, rebellions in cities, lack of units or resources, or some other thing forces me to make peace before I can end their existence. Also, often they hop to islands if you conquer their home region. I often find it better to fight a limited war, capturing a few cities and razing to the ground all the neighbors to create a "culture-free buffer zone" to be a better policy than trying to defeat an enemy nation entirely. Give them a few techs and some luxuries and they usually make peace with you again after you kill their capital.
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09-11-2001 01:31
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