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Path: mailer.cc.fsu.edu!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!doc.ic.ac.uk!uknet!bhamcs!bham!bhamvx!stanworthdjh From: stanworthdjh@vax1.bham.ac.uk (<RUBICON>) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic Subject: CIV FAQ - edition one Date: 4 May 93 21:00:29 GMT Organization: University of Birmingham Lines: 1497 Message-ID: <1993May4.210029.1@vax1.bham.ac.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: vax1.bham.ac.uk Welcome to the CIV FAQ. Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the game, we would like to thank personally a few people who without their help, this FAQ would not be possible. In No particular order:- Garth Sweet, Roger Kemp, Bryce Harrington, Earnest To, Ralph Betza (FM), skipmeister (laus@midway) and Ronald Bense. James Ollinger, Mark Lilback, David Gosselin, Devin Ben-Hur and Albion. A special thanks is due to Maurice Schekkerman for sending us a large collection of posts that he had collected before we started searching. If we have left anybody out, we are terribly sorry, but we really appreciate all the stuff that has been given. This is NOT the definative version, but more of a preview of what we would like the FAQ to be. We do not take credit for the information contained here, as all we have done is collect it together into one document. If you have any questions, comments, criticisms, or tips please post them to us at stanworthdjh@bham.ac.uk [Dave] or aev@dcs.kcl.ac.uk [Alex] What is civilization. I consider it more than a game, it is more a way of life. Just ask anyone who has played it. The aim of the game is to take a tribe, settle them and try and create a civilization from them. Along the way you develop new sciences, meet other tribes (some warlike, some not), visit new continents all for the aim of trying to get into space, and/or be the dominant civilization. A lot of the information in the FAQ is design to give not only the new player an insight into the game, showing the various strategies and tricks, but to also provide the experienced player with information on how to make his civilization stronger with the aim of getting a higher score. In compiling the FAQ, we have both found numerous new things that have enabled us to really enjoy the game further and tell us EXACTLY what a certain city improvement or wonder does. We will Now proceed.... A GENERAL 1) How can I tell which version I have ? 2) Which is the best version of CIV ? 3) What is the advisory bug ? B CITIES 1) How do I make a city? 2) How do I make my city grow? 3) More cities or less ? 4) Is there a limit to the size of my city? 5) How do you keep a city from getting unhappy ? 6) How do I make an Elvis (Taxman or Scientist) ? 7) How much money does a taxman collect ? 8) How many lightbulbs does a scientist create ? 9) What is the difference between subvert a city and revolt ? 10) How does the computer cheat ? 11) How do you calculate pollution ? 12) What is the highest population for a single city ? C DIFFERENT GAME STRATEGIES 1) In general Which is the best Govt type Despotic Conquest Democratic Ostrich Flexible Evolution Republic Pyramid High Tech Rich Balanced Peaceful High Tech Conquest Hide in a Corner Archipelago Diploblitz Trading Cities Take No Prisoners The Helping Hand The Rock Replay 2) Colossal City Strategy 3) What is the best way to take an enemy city 4) What are the best wonders to build 5) Final score 6) Lightbulb formula 7) Misc. tricks and tips D CHEATS 1) Shift 1-8 cheat 2) Movement cheat 3) Settler cheat 4) Ship movement cheat 5) Convoy cheat 6) Unloading ships cheat 7) Save game cheat 8) Settler movement cheat E THE FUTURE 1) Will there be a CIV II? 2) What would people want in it? *************************************************************************** G E N E R A L *************************************************************************** 1) How can I tell which version I have ? ---------------------------------------- When you run CIV it asks various setup questions. The version number is on these screens. The number is 474 plus an increment, so version 5 is shown as 474.05. If you have an older version, you can get the latest version by anonymous FTP from some of the big game sources such as wuarchive.wustl.edu. 2) Which is the best version of CIV ? ------------------------------------- There has been much debate on Usenet about the various pros and cons of the different versions. The only two versions worth considering are 474.01 and 475.05 (versions 1 & 5). The easiest of the two is version 1. If you are playing with version 5, and not having much luck, try to get hold of version 1. This is also the version that allows the "shift 1-9 cheat", that can be a good way of learning the ins and outs of the game. Originialy it was the Beta copy for the playtesters and they didn't remove the cheat. However, if you like a challenge, then ver. 5 is really the only one to play. A further impetus to buy the game is that version 5 contains far less bugs. If you do get the latest version, the chances that the game will not crash are far greater. :) . The big problem is the Instant Advice. This is known as "advisory bug". Fixed in one of the latest versions of CIV. Can be temporary avoided by turning advisory off. Get the latest update of CIV. On almost all msdos anonymous servers. --- Version 1 : Came with the game. Version 2 : Attempted to fix the Advisor bug. Fixed the tundra bug. Fixed the Civ score bug. Removed %^ cheat. Version 3 : Attempted again to remove the Advisor bug. Added some new pics and Very Happy people. Removed disbanding a city by buying a settler at 1 population. Version 4 : No bug fixes, just made the game harder for veterin players. Version 5 : Finaly fixed the Advisor bug (They think). Version 5 does not include version 4, but does include all other fixes in other versions. ---[Albion] If the above is correct then those people moaning about Ver.5 being too hard are getting confused with Ver.4 If you need further Advice or information about the game, there is a book called 'Rome on 640k a day'. =========================================================================== Wilson, Johnny L. Sid Meier's Civilization, or Rome on 640K a day / by Johnny Wilson and Alan Emrich. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 1-55958-191-3:$18.95 1. Computer games. I. Emrich, Alan. II. Title GV1469.15.W55 1992 793.93'2-dc20 91-42148 CIP Quantity discounts are available from the publisher, Prima Publishing, P.O.Box 1260 CIV, Rocklin, CA 95677; telephone (916)786-0449, On your letterhead include information concerning the intended use of the books and the number of books you wish to purchase. U.S. Bookstores and Libraries: Please submit all orders to St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Ave. New York, NY 10010; telephone (212)674-5151. =========================================================================== 3) What is the advisory bug ? ----------------------------- I have never met this bug, but it is know by Microprose, and has been reported by a number of sources. Supposedly fixed by version 5. ----- Scrambled oceans? Extra "land" at the north pole? Screen goes crazy if you try to move a unit there? I have this *every* time I look at the "Civilization Score" So I don't do that any more. The problem, once it occurs, corrupts the save files as well, so there's no recovery. If you *must* see your "Score" then do a save _first_ and restart _after_ You can see the corruption in the small map - some of the "people" from the score screen get left drawn on the map, and apparrently they distort the .map file as well. Often, there's lots of new grassland around the north pole, and even some "mystery" houses. You can, in fact, go get the $50 prizes, if you care to go to the trouble. Or maybe my system's more forgiving than most. -----[Bob O'Bob] *************************************************************************** C I T I E S *************************************************************************** 1) How do I make a City? ------------------------ Apart from RTFM, take a settler unit and find a suitable place to build a city. It is my opinion that you should always look around your continent before building a city, especially at the begining where you are very vulnerable. When you have found the site of your city press the 'b' key to build the city. 2) How do I make my city grow? ------------------------------- The only way to make a city grow in terms of population is to feed it. The best way to feed a city is to provide squares with as much wheat in them. The best way to do this is to irrigate and build roads in the squares and then change to a republic/democracy. Your cities will have an explosion in population. Remember you can change you government to suit your needs. So after you change to the republic/democracy you can change back, although it is not really worth it unless you want to have a military campaign. 3) More cities or less ? ------------------------ I think the general view is MORE, MORE, MORE !!! I never play with more than about 30 cities as it gets boring trying to look after them all, but some people just love 70+, and one person has mentioned having over 250 !?! Here are a few comments from others. a) Mark Lilback More!! My normal strategy is to build as many cities as possible before attacking anyone not in my immediate vicinity. When you have 60+ cities, it's very hard not to win the game. (I also stay in despotism and build cities 1 square apart from each other, just so they are production centers for military units when I do go to war. Until then, I just build settlers.) b) James Ollinger More. A lot of cities close together are easier to defend, since you can move attack units quickly between them to whichever cities are in trouble. Second, more cities mean greater population growth, which tends to be critical in CIV. Greater population = more of everything + higher score. Spin off as many cities as you can early in the game, and then "perfect" them later on. c) David Gosselin More, the more the merrier. With more cities you can get more of everything: resource, population,tax,science...Oh yeah, pollution and unhappy people too. But the advantages certainly offset the disadvantages. 4) Is there a limit to the size a city can be created? ----------------------------------------------------- If you look at the window around the city it seems that the maximum size a city can attain is only about 15-20. However it is a BIG mistake to assume this. So how does one make LARGE (around 40) cities:- Food production is the primary problem, although if you're in a democracy and have "we love..." days, your food production is really unimportant, as long as there is enough to make them grow. Pollution does become a problem as your city grows, and the following things have a knwon impact: Mass Transit (at about size twenty) Recycling Center (Needed at about size 30) Nuclear Plant (Needed around size 28-30) It's funny, but a Nuclear plant increases production, yet decreases pollution. I've had a city size 30 that had 6 smokestacks (60 tons) of pollution being produced and minimal production (about 20-30 shields) I built the Nuclear plant, and the pollution vanished. Obviously it is a real pain building a nuclear powerplant in each city. An alternative (which will affect all your cities on that continent) is to build Hoover's Dam instead. It has the same effect as the Nuclear Plant, but it acts on all cities on the continent, doesn't have the risk of meltdown (before Fusion) and can be built at an earlier stage (req. Electronics) A final method of building big cities is to remove the most hostile opposition. Taking the Zulus is sometimes a good strategy, since it removes the most militaristic civilization from the planet. What is most important in developing the assets of a city - irrigate, build roads, trade, mine, ?? What else can you do to a sqaure other than mine or irrigate? I've found that roads and irrigation are most important. Roads not only give you trade, but they make your units move faster, which makes it easier to amass firepower between cities for a common defense against invasions. In other words, if one city looks like it will be attacked, it is far easier to bring out the knights/catapults/cannon/armor/whatever to the city's defense if there is a good network of roads. I also give higher priority to irrigation. Irrigation means wheat, which means population. Population increases trade, coins, and lightbulbs. A city with a lot of mines and no population will watch those mines go unused. But a city with a lot of wheat production grows fast. Generally, I find it best when a city has maybe one or two forest squares, one or two mining areas, and the rest are irrigated. And everything has a road/railroad on it. 5) How do you keep a city from getting unhappy ? ------------------------------------------------- When playing Republic or Democracy it can be very difficult keeping cities from revolt. The obvious things to do are to build temples and coliseums, but these cost to build and are a steady drain on finances. Another way is to create some entertainers, but the loss in trade (from the unused square) can make things even worse. Here are a few tips from various sources: 1)Mark Lilback Raise your luxury rate and build wonders. If you go into republic or democracy, you should have at least a 20% luxury rate. The increased trade values makes up for the loss of raising the luxury rate. 2) James Ollinger It can be tough. Look at how many military units are away from the city (shown on a panel on the left side of the screen. All military units that are away from the city have little black sad faces on them) and try and reduce that number. If your units are garrisoning another city, make those change their home city (with the H command) to wherever they're located. Units that are in action will have to be dealt with differently. Try and get one or two units from each city so that all the cities have one or two units out--it spreads the burden around evenly. Also try and buy (bribes) as many enemy units as you can. When you buy an enemy unit and you aren't close to one of your own cities, that unit will have a "NONE" home city. You can field a decent army of units that won't create any unhappiness this way... Also make sure to get the WOWs that make people happy--WOMEN'S SUFFERAGE and J.S.BACH'S CATHEDRAL are the best. 3) David Gosselin Well, set luxury rate higher, send out as many canavans as possible to *large* enemy cities overseas and establish trade routes. If the other civilization is also under Republic/Democratic, 3 trade routes can get you close to 30 trades (only happened to me once). With more trade routes you can also put some luxury back to science. WoW are important too, Bach is a must especially on large continents, Woman's Suffrage is even more important, especially if you want to fight a war under Republic or Democracy. And, primarily use diplomas as your attacking force, buying enemy cities really pays off since you will get defending units right away and with city improvements. Finally, remember that when playing Republic, the further your city is from the capital, the higher the corruption rate. It can sometimes pay to build a courthouse instead of a temple, or even to move your palace to a more centralised position. 6) How do I make an Elvis (Taxman or Scientist) ? ------------------------------------------------- RTFM !!! To make an Elvis (entertainer) look at the city portion of your city screen and click the mouse on one the squares around your city which you are currently using/drawing-resources-from. The little wheat/shield symbols dissapear from that square and suddenly you have an Elvis in the top left hand corner. This probably made a person happy (turned them light blue) or got rid of an unhappy person. This is also how you change the squares that you are currently using. Turn a square that you are using into an Elvis and then click on another empty square to get rid of the Elvis and make use of the resources in that formerly-empty square. To make a tax man or scientist, make an Elvis and then move the mouse up to the Elvis symbol and click on him. He then turns into a scientist. Click on him again and he turns into a tax collector. Once more and he's an Elvis again. 7) How much money does a taxman collect ? ----------------------------------------- A tax collector collects $2 (3 if city has marketplace; 4 if city has a bank) 8) How many lightbulbs does a scientist create ? ------------------------------------------------ Each scientist you make in a city adds 2 lightbulbs to your total count. If the city making them has a library they're worth 3, (4 with university too) But if the square you are abandoning by making the specialist had 3 trade arrows (ocean) I don't think you come out ahead. [Roger Kemp] 9) What is the difference between subvert a city and revolt ? ------------------------------------------------------------- If you revolt an enemy city, you loose some of its units, some of its improvements and have an unhappy populace. However, if you subvert it you keep all the installations and all of the military units, and the city tends to stay happy. Also, revolt tends to break any peace treaties where as subvert doesn't. 10) How does the computer cheat ? -------------------------------- The computer is known to cheat in a number of ways. a) Computer triremes are allowed to move as sails. This means that they don't sink when out at sea. b) Wonders are built randomly, whenever the computer feels like it. c) Improvements (at Emperor level) for the computer are at 1/3 normal cost. d) Technologies are achieved at silly rates with only a couple of cities. e) Cities that are suffering civil disorder do not have production penalties. f) Caravans are *teleported* to remote cities immediately. g) Computer opponents make contact with any piece, not just diplomats. There a probably more, but these few show how difficult it can be to beat the computer. It is also a good excuse for some to use the various *human* cheats without feel guilty. 11) How do you calculate pollution ? ----------------------------------- The book "Civilization - or Rome on 640K a Day" gives the formula for calculating the probability of pollution around a city each turn. According to the book: Each city has a "tolerance" for 20 Smokestack Points (SP) per turn. The SP are a sum of industrial pollution (IP) and population pollution (PP). SP=IP+PP IP= (# of shields generated by city) Divide IP by 2 with Hydro or Nuke plant OR (XOR) divide by 3 w/ Recycling Center PP = (population of city)*(technology multiplier) (tech. mult.) = .25 (w/ Industrialization), .50 (W/ Automobile) .75 (w/ Mass Production), 1.0 (w/ Plastics) The bottom line for all this is Build Hoover's Dam before anyone else does and your pollution problems will be manageable. [Roger Kemp] 12) What is the highest population for a single city ? ------------------------------------------------------ In theory 55, but in practise there are reports of cities between 39 - 44. For the 55 monster you would need all squares to be irrigated, railroaded oasis. Each of these squares would give off 7 wheat icons!! Not likely without cheating, so here are some other comments. Size 44. To get enough food to support a monster like this, you need to be positioned in an area where all of the surrounding squares are either Grassland or River. They should all be irrigated and Railroaded. Cities like this look nice, but are really quite useless towards the end, since there is nothing left for them to build, requiring a switch to build/sell SDI defenses. (Does ANYBODY use these?) Only the first 8 specialists do anything for you; the others look like taxmen but produce no money. Therefore, a city of size 29 is no better than a city of size 28, except for the final score; and except that you can also use such a city to spin off settlers, bring the population back down to 28, and use the settlers to build new cities, all the while keeping the city "maxxed out". If you change byte 10 (0x0a) of the save file to a 7, you'll be playing at a difficulty level 3 steps harder than Emperor. There is a little bug at this level, and computer-owned cities grow limitlessly. I [Ralph Betza] once owned a city with a population of 110, which I bought from the Chinese. Starvation followed, of course... *************************************************************************** D I F F E R E N T G A M E S T R A T E G I E S *************************************************************************** This next section is being compiled using a *single* post from Ralph Betza. Although many people have mentioned one or two strategies Ralph really does cover the lot! [QUOTE] a) In general In the middle-early days, say after you have started 4 or 5 good cities, in order to keep science at 100% and still have money, build a few cities in resource-rich and food-poor places, and have them build and sell barracks. Don't waste that oil square down in the tundra, Build a tiny city! This kind of city should have a stable population of 1 or 2. Later on, don't forget to build the SETI Program. Everybody always mentions the other important Wonders ( suffrage, Bach, Hoover ) but SETI is just as important at the stage of the game where it becomes possible. b) Which is the best Govt type This really does depend on your strategy. For a detailed look at the different pros and cons, look at the strategy section. However, there are two main options. If you are playing a military game, with the aim of destroying the competion as soon as possible, then stick with despotism. Although resources are generated slower, your armies do not take them up as fast. This means that one city can generate huge armies without much penalty. Any other strategy really requires Diplomacy. This govt helps to increase trade, which in turn increases science and money. The only problem is that each military unit away from home causes two unhappy people, and if a city revolts twice in succession, you have anarchy for about 6 turns. Republic is a useful government if you have a compact productive island. If your capital is located somewhere near the center of the island or in your best knowledge town the corruption is not too much of a problem. Once you develop women's suffrage, being in a republic is like having a license to kill. In this government you still get the growth and trade advantages that democracy gets. Most importantly you can still celebrate We-Love... The knowledge advances don't come quite as fast as democracy but you still get armor quick enough that you can go take over the rest of the world. c) Despotic Conquest Maximum city size is 6 at Emperor level. Build many cities, build no improvements except barracks; possible exception: a few libraries near the palace. Another exception: Cities of 5 or more that aren't near the front line may be better off with a temple instead of 2 phalanxes. Begin with science 100%; develop bronze, wheel, iron, math, writing, navigation, magnetism (optional), then stop and set taxes 100%, science 0%. You now have all the tech you'll ever need, so don't waste money on research. ( And be sure not to develop gunpowder! ) Build lots of phalanxes, chariots, legions, catapults, ships, settlers, and diplomats. Let me clarify that: by "lots of ...", I mean "infinite numbers of them". A dozen ships might be enough, but you can never have too many chariots. Use the "goto" command to simplify moving them around. Attack at all times. Build no Wonders, build no caravans; never stop building spears and swords, and never stop using them. Ignore all treaties and entreaties, but make peace whenever possible ( peace might protect your units from attack until you break the treaty; and you just might collect some tribute ). Don't worry about your losses, just keep attacking; a bloodless turn is a waste of time. When you capture a city, sell all its improvements and starve the city down to a manageable size. When you invade by ship, build cities on the new landmass. If they survive, the military units they build will be helpful. If not, so what? You have more where they came from! Best result: beat 12 other civilizations, world conquest 900 B.C.; ( I finished the game in one evening! Without staying up late! ) if the last reincarnation hadn't been in such an inconvenient place, would have been 1200 B.C. Usual result: circa 400 B.C. You can always play Despotic Conquest, regardless of the world you find yourself starting with, and always can win without using any of the mant ways to cheat. When you choose any other strategy, you are deliberately risking a loss in order to make the game more interesting. Winning the same way all the time is boring. If you don't lose sometimes, you are doing something wrong. Note: halvorsen@nbivax.nbi.dk, in message <1992Nov27.115044.1089@nbivax.nbi.dk>, does it differently, and conquers the world later but with higher scores. He likes to go with Monarchy, Hanging gardens, and no barracks. You can probably find a different way to do it... d) Democratic Ostrich You find yourself alone on a landmass large enough to support 5 or more max-sized cities, with decent city sites. Build them, and start making roads and irrigation. Try to keep all cities at roughly the same stage of development. Research bronze, democracy; become democratic. Build Bach's Cathedral!!! Now you can have one military unit outside each city. Research Steam Engine; patrol your shores with ironclads. After railroads, it gets easy. You can choose to build a spaceship or to go out with transports plus battleships and conquer everybody. Most important trick: every so often, boost luxuries way up high for a few turns, and make your cities grow ( "Presidents' Day Sale" ). You don't need granaries because of this, and the occasional famine is easily repaired. Finances: You will have many city impovements to pay maintenance on. You have to take some taxes in cash. Libraries, universities, markets, banks, all are important. Stockpile caravans when in doubt. Once you build Suffrage, things get really easy. Note: Monarchy is often a useful intermediate stage. e) Flexible Evolution You find yourself with neighbors, on a landmass of unknown size. Play as in Despotic Conquest, but build your cities farther apart, so you can change over to democracy if you want to. After you get the continent to yourself, consider how many military units you have left, the state of your cities, and how far advanced your technology is compared to the date. You may be forced to continue with Despotic Conquest; or you may be able to change to monarchy and then democracy if you prefer. The mechanics of the change are interesting, so I choose democracy when there is any doubt -- at the risk of losing, of course! f) Republic There are several things about Republic that make it an interesting alternative to Democracy; and you can develop the Republic much sooner than Democracy. First of all, civil disorder won't make the government fail. All you lose is the output from the city that's in disorder. You can use a disorderly city to support a small army in the field... Secondly, military unhappiness is less. You can have one unit out without disorder, even before you build Bach, just by making one Elvis. If this stabilizes the city's population, just make that city a barracks-factory. Third, once you build Suffrage, military units cause no unhappiness. You can enjoy a high-tech Republican Conquest! You might not get a great score, because it's likely to be after 2000 A.D. when you finally conquer the world, but it's fun... Fourth, if your empire is geographically small, so that everything is near the palace, you get just as much trade with the Republic as you could with Democracy. g) Pyramid You just captured the Pyramids! If you're in Monarchy, quickly change to Communism. The only thing that changes is that you have less corruption. In the long run, communism doesn't give you enough trade to support all the city improvements, and you have to change again. What else are the Pyramids good for? Perhaps you'd like to go democratic, but haven't developed it. In theory, you should be able to take advantage of the Pyramids by changing governments often, to suit changing circumstances. I haven't been able to make this happen yet. h) High Tech In the Republic or in the Democratic Ostrich, keep your treasury small and science high. The goal is advances every turn, and see how early you can launch the spaceship. You'd like the game to be peaceful... The problem with this is that I have read that launching the spaceship before time runs at one year per turn is risky; if the spaceship lands "between turns", it is effectively lost. Therefore, I always wind up waiting around until 1750 ( or is it 1850 ?) when the time-scale changes the last time. i) Rich In any form of government, keep science at a minimum. If Ostrich, use cash to help build cathedrals and factories in the resource-poor cities. If Conquest, use the cash to subvert enemy cities. j) Mercenary While playing Rich, try to buy as many enemy units as possible so you can have a whole army owned by NONE. k) Balanced Advances every 6 to 8 turns are all you really need. After you build SETI, you can get advances every 2 turns with no trouble. Keep your taxes and science balanced. In the Ostrich, the difference between Rich, Balanced, and High-Tech might be just a matter of 10 per cent. l) Peaceful Try to get through the whole game without fighting a war. I managed this in only one game, where I cheated, edited the save file from 3980 BC, and started out with a huge London that had population 49, all improvements, all Wonders, a few extra settlers owned by NONE, two battleships from NONE, $4000 cash, and every technology I wanted to have. I pumped out diplomats by the score, played Mercenary to the hilt, and kept all 6 other civilizations at one tiny city each for the whole game. They never even met each other, so *nobody* fought any wars! Except for the barbarians, it was a completely bloodless game. I've tried very hard to have a peaceful game without cheating, and I'll try again; but they always sneak-attack me, or make unreasonable demands. The only way to stop them is to intimidate them, it seems; so things never get peaceful until I'm so strong that the computer civs are afraid. m) High-Tech Conquest High-tech war involves larger numbers of stronger units than you use in Despotic Conquest, and can get quite interesting. Usually, I run these wars half-heartedly, but one time I was bombing the Romans with half my cities and lackadaisically building a spaceship with a few others, and the Babylonians built a small ship and launched it! I had 17 years to take Babylon, with no forces near it, and it wasn't even on the coast! I succeeded with the last-minute help of a nuke ( build manhattan project, next turn buy the nuke in a captured Babylonian city, next turn boom! and walk in, just in time), but it was hectic. Another time, a Babylonian battleship got me really mad, so I changed the production of all my cities to nukes, and nuked them repeatedly, an average of 5 explosions per turn for 20 or more turns; 6 cycles of global warming! I finally managed to destroy all 8 of their cities without capturing any -- nuke the same city several times in one turn to get its population down to 1, then run in with a Mech Infantry unit. I got a lousy score, thanks to all the pollution. In order to get into these situations, you have to leave the enemy alone. Several of the computer civilizations will develop high tech, but they are all weak at the beginning of the game. Choosing 6 civilizations seems to help, as well; both the Indians and the Mongols seem to be stuck on Conquest -- if you put the Mongols and Babylonians on the same landmass in 4000BC, the Mongols win every time. I often choose 6 and play pink in order to have the best chance of getting a high-tech opponent. The Romans always get high tech, but never build enough cities or enough units; the Babylonians seem to be consistently the most interesting. The light blues rarely survive into the A.D. years, so the yellows are the second most interesting opponent. n) Hide in a Corner Once in a while, instead of trying to build as many cities as possible as quickly as posible at the start of the game, try sticking to one or two cities for the first 1000-1500-2000 years. Not until you have reasonably powerful cities do you send out an expedition, either a colonization expedition with two settlers plus a few phalanxes and legions, or an army of conquest, at least 4 chariots with more to come, plus a settler to build a military road. This strategy is indicated when your first explorer finds that you are stuck in a lousy corner of what looks like it might be a large land mass, and there are no decent city sites near you. One advantage of waiting is that the enemy cities can grow large enough to be really worth capturing, and might contain a few WOWs. I had this work out well just recently. My first explorer went a long, winding way and saw a road; I pulled it back, and it seems that nobody noticed my visit. The Romans and Zulus wiped everybody else out and lined up against each other; the distance was so great that my first wave of chariots took 200 years to arrive, but thanks to the two settlers building a road, the second wave was right behind. Because all their military units were out in the field facing each other down, their cities were lightly defended. What a surprise when my hosts swept down upon them! Zimbabwe and Caesarea ( each of which was larger than both my cities put together ) were mine at the first stroke, and their vast armies in the field vanished. Rome held out for hundreds of years after the rest, but after it fell, I had more than a dozen good-sized captured cities, decent technology due to captures, and despite having waited 1500 years before beginning the conquest, I was still on track to go Democratic with my captured Pyramids and bulging treasury. The rest was boring... o) Archipelago You find yourself alone on a small island with room for only 1 or 2 cities.... Actually, I have done the Ostrich with just 2 cities; but they were resource-rich city sites. The disadvantage of islands is that two important Wonders work only on cities on one landmass. If you get a foothold on a major landmass, you can just convert to one of the other plans; but if the first thing you find is another island, you're in for it. After 3 or 4 islands, you might as well deliberately avoid the mainland and instead scout out as many small chunks as you can find, just to make things interesting. So far, every time I have customized for small land mass, I wound up on the biggest chunk around, with neighbors. Maybe the game deliberately avoids putting you on places that are too small. p) Diploblitz After Ostriching for a while, you eventually become very rich. Your treasury doesn't collect interest, so you might as well use it. If you just land a few diplomats, the enemy may sneak attack and kill them all; so what I do is fill up 3 or more transports with diplomats and land them all at once. You can usually unload 5 diplomats per turn per transport without stacking them; bribe any units that happen to be standing on the shore. If you unload 15 diplomats in one turn, at least some will survive! As the first wave moves inland, the second is unloaded. The first wave buys any military unit it sees, and of course subverts any city it can. The transports go back for more diplomats. You can conquer a whole civilization this way, in just two or three turns; which is fun to watch on the replay! If you don't have enough cash to buy a city, industrial sabotage is nice. Doing it just once per turn is almost useless, though; the computer can buy back whatever you destroy. The right way to do it is to hit one city with 6 or 8 diplomats in one turn -- when the cathedral, bank, city walls, and factory are all gone in one turn, what's poor Caesar to do? In short, the idea of the diploblitz is not to use diplomats by ones or twos, but by bucketloads. q) Trading Cities You find yourself woefully behind in technology. The enemy is spreading out over a large continent. Scout around the edges and find a small city you can afford to buy. Post a bunch of diplomats nearby. Steal a tech and buy the city, thereby gaining two advances. Now make the population into taxmen, sell the improvements, and leave the city undefended. When the enemy takes it back, steal another tech and buy the city again! It will be cheaper to buy it this time -- you sold all the improvements and the population is smaller. Repeat as needed until the city is completely destroyed. Find another small city and do it again. r) Take No Prisoners Your homeland is full of big, beautiful cities. Your army has overrun the enemy but you don't feel like managing any of the crappy cities the computer built. After you kill the last defender, don't take the city! If the computer has any money left, it will make a new defender, which you can also kill -- it won't be fortified, after all. Hit the city with a DiploBlitz and keep it empty. Eventually, you may get it down to a population of 1, and can then simply destroy it. Otherwise, maybe some barbarians will come along... Here's an interesting goal: try to get a whole enemy civilization into this state! If its treasury is empty and every city is in disorder, can it ever recover? s) The Helping Hand You have lots of bombers or battleships handy, but no ground units nearby; besides, you don't feel like dealing with any new cities. If a different enemy civilization has a unit near the city, or if barbarians are on the way, just kill all the defenders and watch what happens. You can weaken the strongest enemy this way. By the way, the enemy civ that takes over the empty city will *not* feel any sense of gratitude. t) The Rock Sometimes you can throw a monkey wrench into an enemy civ and take it completely out of the game by posting one lousy phalanx on top of a mountain. This only works at an early stage of the game, and the victim must have no open land for expansion -- either on an island, or blocked into a corner. Instead of building triremes and settlers, and instead of advancing quietly, the enemy civ builds lots of cavalry and legions and chariots, surrounds the rock, and keeps moving its units around. It's fun to watch them riding around your mountain, brandishing their swords, waving torches, and shouting imprecations. Eventually they sneak attack, and lose dozens of units. Then they make outrageous demands, tell you to prepare for war, ride around and shout, and eventually attack and lose more units. By the time they destroy that phalanx, you're ready to put a rifleman up there, and they're still undeveloped! This depends on the leader's personality; it works against the Russians and the French, but not against the Romans or Chinese. Of course, to ensure against losses, you want to scout around their coast and find as many rocks as possible, because if they manage to get rid of all your outposts, they'll start behaving reasonably again, but one phalanx on a mountaintop is all you really need to make it work! u) Replay Always make a save file in 3980 B.C.; as soon as you finish the game, consider starting over in the same world but following a completely different strategy. In the replay, you have the advantage of knowing more or less what the world looks like, which spoils things a bit; but in compensation, you have the chance to change history. A diskette full of old 3980 B.C. save files is nice to have, especially if it contains interesting worlds. After a while, you don't remember much about the world, and can replay without spoiling the mystery of discovering the unknown. When you get an interesting world, you may also want to share it with someone. Note: you need both the CIVIL?.SVE and CIVIL?.MAP file! [UNQUOTE] 2) Colossal City Strategy -------------------------- I have deliberately kept this separate from the other strategy section as it really is a game apart. Once again I hand the subject over to Ralph Betza: [QUOTE] The long-awaited Colossal City strategy is not a strategy. Instead, it's just a simple trick that makes any high-tech strategy work much better. It's this simple: build the Colossus and Copernicus' Observatory in the same city. Of course, you want that city to be your capital, so that there's no corruption; of course, you want it to grow big and have a university and lots of nice trade routes. Of course, you want to build the Colossus as soon as possible. ( I have done it by 2800 BC without cheating! Lucky villages and ( ransom from barbarian leaders did the job. Building it with ( caravans alone, 2300 BC is good; and perhaps the resources you ( invested building it so early would have been better spent ( making more settlers and more cities... ) Therefore, you want to develop trade as soon as possible. Note: since the computer cheats in building its Wonders, if someone else builds the Colossus first it's not unreasonable to use the save-game cheat to stop them. Combining the Ostrich strategy with the Colossal City makes it possible to reach future tech before 1 AD without cheating; if you have a gold mine and a swamp in the Colossal City's zone of influence, that's all ( almost all ) the good luck you need. Building these two Wonders, and building a Cathedral and University in one city while the others are small, is hard to do unless there are a few resource-rich cities near the Colossal City. In fact, this does force a Colossal Strategy for the early part of the game. Build as many cities as possible; the outer ones fight wars and build more cities, while the inner ones just build caravans. All but one of the cities stays small; the Colossal City must grow, grow, grow, so it needs a temple and a granary and a library and a university and a cathedral. The division of labor, with different cities doing different things, makes it interesting. Customizing for "Large Land Mass" is helpful. To reach Future Tech by 1 AD, go to democracy as soon as possible, and set luxuries to 30%, taxes 30%, science 40%; research will slow down for a few years, but you'll collect a lot of money with which you can build cathedrals, marketplaces, banks, acqueducts, and so on, and very soon you'll be up to "advances: 1 turns". 30% luxuries is just enough to keep everybody happy all the time, and to cause occasional "we love the president" days, in cities that complete their markets and banks and get trade routes. To play a strategy that wouldn't work without the Colossal City, stay in Despotism until you build Suffrage and then go to Republic -- you'll only be up to Automobile or so by 1 AD, and your scraggly little cities will have trouble building those expensive armor units, but you'll have fun winning. Keep building caravans, keep science at 100% as long as possible, make factories in a few cities ( using the caravans to do so ), and pay the rent by building and selling city walls, and by sacking enemy cities. You may *need* to follow this plan if you have a land war against a tough opponent on a huge continent. This plan is fun because you don't have to go into a shell ( like the Ostrich ), and you don't have to concentrate singlemindedly on military affairs ( as in Conquest ); instead, you get to do a little bit of everything. [UNQUOTE] 3) What is the best way of taking an enemy city? ------------------------------------------------ Sure fire way for musket/cannon level cities with city walls: 1. Build lots of cannon, diplomats (4-6), and settlers (2-3). 2. Move a vetran musketeer adjacent to the city to take and fortify. 3. Move a settler to the musketeer and build a fort around him. 4. Use other settlers to build a road to the musketeer, if necessary. 5. Stockpile several cannon and diplomats in the fort. 6. When you are ready, have the diplomats sabotage the city walls, if any (it may take several tries). 7. Bombard the city with the cannon until it is yours. 8. Move the Musketeer into the city to take posession and be its first guard. I personally believe the best way to take a city is with a diplomat, by subverting the city. Just keep all military units for defensive purposes. Then once the city has been bought then build (Buy) a diplomat as the first thing you make. 4) What are the best wonders to build? -------------------------------------- I like the Pyramids. I build them as soon as possible, and build no other ancient wonders. Then I switch to communism. You get the higher production of monarchy, and corruption is significantly reduced, but you also don't have to worry about unhappy units from units outside the home city. Also, you can instantly change to any other government type (even democracy) without any anarchy in between. I also like Shakespear's Theater. Build it in you highest producing city with lots of capability for supporting units. Don't waste effort building cathedrals or collesiums in the city. Once the wonder is built, station as many units as possible out of that city, and switch to democracy. You will get all the benefits of democracy without the pains of having too many unhappy people. Build this city up with resource increasing items like power plants, etc. I conducted an entire war this way, with no problem. I had 20-30 units stationed out of this city! Bach's wonder is the best if you have a lot of land on one continent and a lot of cities. You get two unhappy people made happy. Pretty good! Another good one, as I'm sure you've heard, is Women's Sufferage. It reduces the number of unhappy people caused by out-of-city units by one. Great if you have republic. To remove the problem of pollution, it is best to build hoover dam as soon as possible. 5) Final score --------------- There are many factors to the end score, but the main bonuses are described below (courtesy Roger Kemp): There are two different ways that percentages are calculated: a) If you take over the world, your score is determined SOLELY by the date in which you finish. Wonders, pollution, population etc. have no effect on the score. I believe the exact formula is something like: you get 1000 points for taking over the world by year 2000 and you get an extra 2 points for each turn (not year) in advance of the year 2000 if you finish the game early. Take this score and divide by 10 to get your percentage. This means that the maximum resonable score you could get (taking over the whole world around 2000BC) is somewhere around 180%. There is also some sort of reduction modifier if you start with less than seven initial civilizations. Note that if you play on a lower level your final percentage is also multiplied by .2, .4, .6, or .8 depending on whether you play chieftan, prince etc. b) If you launch into space (I don't know why anyone would bother playing the game and pursue this course 8-) you can get those 300% scores that people brag about. You'd just have to kill off all but one enemy city and keep peace while you filled the world with people. What a boring game 8-) Finally remember if you can't be touched, try and develop as many future techs as possible since they add 15 to your score at the end. 6) Lightbulb formula --------------------- Here's the formula from _Sid Meier's Civilization, Or Rome On 640K a Day_: LightBulbs = PreviousAdvances * DifficultyModifier * TimeModifier DifficultyModifier = 6, Chief 8, Warlord 10, Prince 12, King 14, Emperor TimeModifier = 1 if Year <= 0AD, 2, if Year > 0AD In addition the first advance always requires at least 10 lightbulbs regardless of difficulty level. 7) Misc. tricks and tips ------------------------- Here are few tips and tricks that I have collected from Usenet over the last few months. a) Structures (temples etc.) are cheaper than units that move (ie. military, settlers...) If you want to buy a quick rifleman to defend a town it's much cheaper to select a temple, buy it and then change back to a rifleman. I use this regularly in the beginning because the third person in a city (on emperor level) is pissed so I switch over to a barracks (same number of shields as a settler) buy it and immediately switch it back to settlers. b) You can use caravans to build things other than wonders. When you take over an enemy city you usually need a cathedral or walls or something of the sort so I throw a few caravans in the transport with my armors. When I take over the city I switch what it's building over to a wonder, contribute the caravans to the wonder and switch it back to the cathedral. You can use this on your own cities as well. If you have a fabulous production town and want to kick start the other cities, build caravans and throw them into the other cities wonders and switch them to whatever you want. I build a lot of factories this way. Building caravans is like putting money in the bank. c) You can use a bomber to protect a vulnerable city by parking it in the air outside the city. It appears that when moving it's pieces the computer moves them in a set order (probably the order in which they were built). This often means that it moves half of its ground units (which can't get past your bomber) before finally bringing out a fighter to kill the bomber (if it ever does actually attack the bomber). This can give you time to fortify the city. d) Once you have railroads take a settler into a transport onto one of the fish squares that is being used and activate the settler. Press 'r' on the settler for making a road (on water!!) and then 'r' again for a railroad. You now have a railroad on the fish which gives you the increased production and trade that railroads normally give. Unfortunately you can't walk pieces onto the square as if it were a bridge. e) Apparantly, units are stronger if they haven't moved before an attack. Take an armor, move it next to another unit, and then attack. It seems, from my experience, like some penalty is assessed from attacking "on the move". I've experienced much greater losses doing this (something like 5:1) then moving next to the piece, waiting a turn, and then attacking. I've also noticed that if you attack a city with 4 defenders, this doesn't seem to enter after the first three have been defeated. (does the computer take some sort of moral into account? I've not seen it documented anywhere, but once they lose two or three units, the rest seem to loose disproportianately, even if they're all the same type of unit, and they have barracks [ie all are vets]) f) Stack units in forts that have been created by settlers, and if you lose a battle you only lose one unit. g) If your opponent gets nuclear technology then don't meet with any of his ambassadors. I have found that he will not strike until AFTER he has told you that he has NUCLEAR POWER. This has only been tested at king level in ver.5 so if you know different contact us! h) When you are at advanced technology levels and attacking cities, have two bombers that alternate turns in sitting above your attacking force. The enemy can only attack you with fighters because there is an air unit in the square and attack 4 vs defence 13 for a fortified, veteran mech. inf is a good bet, besides fighters are very expensive. i) Always use nucs on enemy battleships and carriers at sea - no polution. *************************************************************************** C H E A T S *************************************************************************** There are lots of ways to cheat, but most of them make the game less interesting. The one exception is editing the save file. I play most games honestly, and don't edit the save file just for the sake of winning; sometimes I edit the save file in order to create unusual and interesting situations. ( I try never to cheat at all, but occasionally can't resist using the fast-settler. ) Editing the save file just to give yourself huge amounts of cash is boring. Be creative! Give the Romans a battleship in 3980 BC and see if you can still beat them! Try playing difficulty level 5, which is worse than Emperor, but start yourself with extra advantages to make up for it. Edit the unit definitions and play with different kinds of military units. Be the barbarians. At difficulty level 6, you have no contented citizens at all, even when your city size is 1 (one!). The computer does not labor under such a disadvantage; its unhappiness is still Prince level, I think. The computer builds a militia with about 3 or 4 resources. You need a lot of extra advantages to win at difficulty level 6. To play at difficulty level 6, you must change the tenth byte of the save file to a 6. There is always a chance that the game will crash when you save, because the difficulty level is used to index the strings "Chieftan"..."Emperor". So far I never had a crash. To play the barbarians, change byte 2 to a zero. If there are no barbarian units, you get a "Centuries Later..." ending; this means you need to give yourself a Barbarian settler, by writing, at offset 0x26c0 of the file, 00XX YY00 0300 ff00 ff00 ffff where XX and YY are the latitude and longitude; try 2020 as a start. I described above a game where I edited the save file to give myself an incredible advantage, and then set myself an unusual goal in addition to the normal goal of just winning. Another time recently, I was getting too many barbarians. I was handling them easily, but got tired of them. I don't like the barbarians, and I wish CIV had an option to turn them off. I saved, quit, and deleted all the barbarian units! I got a 400 year breathing space out of that... The most famous ('infamous') known cheats are:- 1) shift 1-8 cheat ------------------- This is the shift 1-8 (sometimes shift 5-6) cheat, only available in version 1.0. It was the player-test mode for Microprose playtesters. Refresh the map after pressing Shift 1-8 (by moving the cursor or pressing t twice) and you will see the map of the whole world. You can click on the cities of other players and unfortify their troops and sell their city improvements F7 will show you the development profile of each civ, showing you all their advances and allowing you to see if thhey have a vendetta against you. F8 shows you the powergraph and allows you to see a replay up to that point. F9 shows numbers representing the attack points, defense points, and 3 of the cities the computer uses to calculate battle, on each contient (along with giving the size of each continent in land squares. F10 shows a complete world map. The other function keys sometimes do their normal functions, but they mess up the diplay a lot of the time. Just a word of warning. 2) Movement cheat ------------------ Any piece that sentries in a town before the end of its movement can be unsentried and REGAINS ITS FULL MOVEMENT for the turn. What this means is that if you have roads linking your cities together and a chariot in a city on one side of your continent, you can move it all the way to the other side of the continent in one turn. All you do is sentry it in each city along the way (as long as each city is <=5 squares away). In fact if you have some invaders to kill, you can kill one, sentry it in a nearby city, unsentry it, kill the second, move into the city again all in one turn. This is how I defend 10 cities with 4 chariots 3) Settler cheat ----------------- (Spoils the game) Most settler functions take from 2 to 12 turns to accomplish. Any of them can be accomplished in one turn by putting the settler a square, pressing R or M or I or whatever, clicking on the settler to make it blink again (which seemingly aborts the function) and pressing R again. Keep repeating this process until the road or irrigation is finished. If you put on the End-of-Turn feature this helps you perform the desired function in one turn. Otherwise you could just keep some nearby piece blinking so that the turn doesn't end before you've milked the cheat for all it's worth. Irrigating swamp takes 10 or 11 turns so this cheat is real handy. 4) Ship movement cheat ----------------------- With two ships (Sail, Frigate and Transport) you can move anywhere in the world, provided you have one ground unit aboard. The process is to move one ship (needs to be able to take one unit) until it has one MP, place it in sentry mode, move the next ship (the one with at least one unit in it) next to it and "unload" the unit into the sentry mode ship. Then place the just unloaded ship (with most likely 1 MP) into sentry mode and repeat with the ship just loaded (It will have its normal MP restored, wonders are not included). Repeat this process until you get where you want to go. (Note: sometimes the computer will flash "end of turn" after placing a ship into sentry mode, even though you just transfered a unit and the other ship should be active. Just click onto the supposedly active ship, hit a key/button, and the ship should become fully active again. I've also noticed what appears to be a glitch after doing this for a while in one turn. It seems the computer knows you're doing something not quite right, or the programming is straining with the large number of moves. Note: Does not work with triremes!! 5) Convoy cheat ---------------- You can make enough transport-type ships, string them along in a convoy, just enough spaces apart that you use up the full MP of each one, and start from one shore, move the ship on top of the next, use that ship to go to the next... and your troops will move with the active ship, provided it can carry them all. 6) Unloading ships cheat ------------------------- This one is when you wish to unload units in a city. Dock the ship, and go into the city description screen (click on city) and then click on the units in sentry mode you just delivered. They will then have full MP restored, and you can continue to move them normally at this point. (With Railroad (RR), this cheat allows for faster deployment across continents between your cities and/or ships.) Note that a unit can have several full moves in one turn this way. 7) Save game cheat ------------------- Apart from the obvious reasons for saving regularly. It is well known that the computer cheats when it comes to World Wonders. They appear to be awarded randomly to any city the computer likes. If one gets awarded, it is possible to go back to your last save, and the chances are that it won't be awarded again for a while. 8) Settler movement cheat ------------------------- Move the settler 2 squares along a road, then tell it to do something. Now wake it up and move it another two squares. This means you can move a settler a minimum of 13 squares along a road before the development of railroad. If you move them along a mountain range where it takes a long time to build mines, or across swamp you can move about 19 squares in one turn (tell the settlers to mine the mountain/hill or clear the swamp). As a final word to cheating, there are a number of utilities available from FTP sites that allow you to completely customize your civilization. *************************************************************************** T H E F U T U R E *************************************************************************** Microprose have no plans at the moment to produce a sequel to civilization. However with so much interest on the Net and If people push and hassle them enough, who knows... As I see it, we could have either Civilization version II, which would be the current game plus important improvements, possibly using the same save files, or we could have "Civ II", a whole new game written from scratch as a sequel to CIV. In other words, I would call the current game "Civ I, version I". There are two areas of improvement. The first is that of the system itself. The second is improvements to the game, (i.e. more wonders, better units etc.). There is No real order to this, rather it was who sent mail first, got his/her stuff incorporated first. 1. The System ------------- Improve the user interface. When I hit F4 or F1 or F5 and get a list of cities, I should be able to go to any city by clicking on its line. When I'm looking at a city, I should be able to go to any of its units by clicking on it with the "other button" -- leave the city and center on the unit. When I click on a unit, if I click the "other button" (OB) on the box that appears, I should go to that unit's city. When I hit F10 and get a worldmap, I should be able to go anywhere in the world by clicking. When I list the wonders of the world, I should be able to go to any city on it, that I know about, by clicking. When I do demographics, I should be able to go to a city with smokestacks by clicking on pollution. There should be a menu/keyboard command to find polluted squares!!!!!!! Fix the dratted "goto" command. Make it find the most efficient route, as Perfect General does. The only reason the current version needs the magic caravans and unsinking triremes is because "goto" doesn't work. Give it the ability to play a bit more sensibly. I'm not asking for a really good AI, just not quite so stupid. A really good AI would probably be too difficult to do. Provide a startup option for a fast game: everybody gets several settlers and has many technologies. Kind of like the fast form of Monopoly, where you deal out the deeds instead of buying the properties. Provide an "undo" command, for when you hit the wrong key. Provide an option NOT to go to the next unit! The next unit would blink and be activated, but the viewpoint wouldn't shift until you hit "C". Reason: I want to do more stuff in the area where I just moved, like unfortify a phalanx to move it into the city I just conquered, for example. How about a "no barbarians" option? The save-game cheat is tedious. Provide a "load game" command so that I can study my old save files ( maybe the map editor should be used for this ) and prevent the save-game cheat by subtracting 10 points from the score whenever the game is manually saved in a turn not divisible by 5, and prompting "You can save now" whenever saving is "free". 2) The GAME ----------- Diplomacy is such a loss in the current version. Needs more negotiation options ("We *demand* tribute"; "You're asking for too much"; "Here's a free technology for you"; "declare war"), plus the ability to "train" a computer civ (like you train your dog in Hack) to be permanently well-disposed towards you. Units away from home shouldn't start to cause unhappiness until they've been gone for a move or so; and they shouldn't cause unhappiness if they're still right near the city. And, it's a little bit ghoulish how if you lose a battle, all the brothers and mothers of the boys who got killed celebrate because they're not away from home anymore! Victories, not losses, should cause greater happiness! Perhaps there's no room in the current save file for the info you'd need. Allow more cities and units. Grab a section of the save file, the units table from a dead color, and use it as an extension area. Advanced ships are too darned slow. They should be faster, and air transport should be available. (You can provide for both of these things by editing the unit definitions in the current save file.) Allies can carry each others' forces in ships, for example, or use a railroad passing thru each others' territory, or move freely around each others' forces. Even in a democracy, pieces should be able to patrol right next to the city or maybe two hexes away even without causing unrest. This idea is more reasonable. In addition, I suggest the military units (except settlers, caravans, diplomats) should be well supplied, i.e., a supply line should be able to reach such units. I was once playing a game where certain enemies units surrounded by my legions completely, but they still can stand for serveral ten year, which should be impossible in practice since all their supply lines should have been cut. Also, more kinds should be added, esp. for land and air units in the modern age: Land: engineers, scouts (to check enemy units' damages, etc.), headqarters (so the armies belonging to it will surrender or reduce in combat value, when the hq is destroyed), supply troops, red cross, etc. Air: air transport (for airborne warfare and supply), satellite (for increasing trade, enemy informations, or even the star war project against the nuclears), space shuttle (for carrying satellites), and so on. Spies, divide Diplomats into Spies and Diplomats. Sentries/Explorers, little units whom are easy to produce, have 0 offense,0 defense, but 2 movement. Useful for exploring or leaving in the far reaches to alert you of invaders. I also suggest the addition of space lab (for increasing light bulbs), space factory (for increasing shields) as city improvements. Satellite should be able to increase happiness by providing more informations and entertainments through TV to the people. Forts are a good thing in the current game; more kinds of non-city structures would be nice, but I can't think what they might be. Boundary markers? Customs stations? How about an aqueduct? -- instead of irrigating all the squares between here and there, you build a pipeline, much cheaper. An oil pipeline -- extending the city's reach. An airport, so planes could land without a city. None of these seem like really great ideas. Different countries should have different commodities. For instance, the Chinese should have silk, porcelain, while the others do not have. Also, these commodities should have some function. For example, silk and porcelain can increase happiness, and you need to give money to certain Chinese cities to obtain them through caravans (or merchants). Actually, I don't like money and happiness are increased through simply increasing the arrows as present. More complicated economic system instead of the 'arrows' will make the game more interesting. Different kinds of food should be produced in different cities so trading between cities through the new economic system will be enhanced. How about *prospecting* and *drilling* for oil? The obvious oilfields that you see in the early days get used up; you need to find and develop new ones. Likewise gold and coal, of course. More terran types, more kinds of special squares. As tech increases, you can replace Caravan made routes with Airline routes, fly the plane to the enemy city a just like Caravan's you get a self-maintained invisible airline route. But it makes you more money. Have more ifra-structure, your country is pretty much a collection of stand alone cites, if you could get some way of joing cities in some way, through inter-coutry trade routes perhaps. IE you can have food moved from prosperous cities to lesser cities. Truck or Train routes with roads/rails perhaps, only not soo complex as to overshadow the rest of the game. More useful stuff to build, by 1 AD I'm usually down to making barracks and selling them because there's nothing better to do. Instead of just mines/farms around cities, perhaps have suburbs that would increase happiness (for free) or research centers, etc. Spies, divide Diplomats into Spies and Diplomats. Sentries/Explorers, little units whom are easy to produce, have 0 offense 0 defense, but 2 movement. Useful for exploring or leaving in the far reaches to alert you of invaders. Power chart should be available all the time :-) 3) More civilization advances ----------------------------- 1. Calendar, requires astronomy and writing increases the yield of foods once developed. 2. Paper, requires invention increases the effect of library and university greatly 3. Printing, requires invention increases the effect of library and university even more greatly, allows the building of bookstore (new city improvement which increases happiness in the city) 4. Modern Communication System, requires electronics allows the building of TV station (new city improvement which increases happiness in the city), allow building of radar station which increase the intelligence. 5. The addition of space lab (for increasing light bulbs), space factory (for increasing shields) as city improvements. 6. Satellite should be able to increase happiness by providing more informations and entertainments through TV to the people. 7. As tech increases, you can replace Caravan made routes with Airline routes, fly the plane to the enemy city a just like Caravan's you get a self-maintained invisible airline route, But it makes you more money. 3) The Extras ------------- 1. Provide a map editor, like Populous has, and more choices on the world-customization menu. If worried about people faking high scores by editing their games, put a byte or bit in the save file that says "game was edited, not eligible for hall of fame", and a checksum to make tampering harder. If you just *look* at a world, because this is like doing the shift-56 cheat!, but nothing can be done about that -- if you set the "ineligible" bit in the save file, that proves nothing: there could be another copy of the save file! That's Really about it. Again if there are any comments, criticisms or bits we have left out, give us an email at:- aev@dcs.kcl.ac.uk or STANWORTHDJH@bham.ac.uk Thanks for reading and have fun :) -- Dave [Rubicon] .sig deleted due to good taste