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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

You leave your cities undefended? Your capital? You don't have at least one unit in every single city? Rookie mistake

Where Civ 3? I NEED CIV 3! 😭😭😭

MORE SMAC!!!

One thing I hated about alpha centauri was the map being mostly red... My default strategy was to plant forest everywhere, which is actually a decent one

You delivered <3

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.

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

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!

Just leaving a comment to support Alpha Centauri content.🎉

I'd love a light remake with simple QOL adjustments. But still Alpha Centauri is my favourite game!!!!!

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!

I suggest learning shortcuts, especially for formers, most are logical and then as well F1, F2, F3, F4, E-social engineering, U-Workskop. These help a lot and game is much more enjoyable when you can play it smoothly. Also Thinker mod or WIll to Power (based on thinker) have lots of quality of life in them to help smooth play.

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.

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.

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.

"We want to avoid building happiness buildings since they are useless when we get punishment spheres" 😂 Imagine this coming from a politician

Thanks for helping keep this game alive. I really enjoy it.

lol dumb idea but you mentioning you liked the sound the Chariot makes when attacking inspired me The Chariot Challenge, win using only regular Chariots on as high a difficulty as you can manage

as an economist you believe in the Kuznets curve? very fun game regardless

I think you perfectly surmised why i only played civ5 like once and don't have any interest with civ6, but i still play civ 3 and 4 to this day I wish they'd go back to the 3/4 version of having just a collection of generic traits everyone gets two of instead of every single goddamn civ and leader having completely unique abilities Sometimes less is more

Fun game. Those are the best ones…when you think you are too far behind but your teaching kicks in! Never underestimate that tourism gold

I have some important insight into Civ3 5 years after this vid was posted: "Hurry method" reads like "Horny method" on 360p. Thank you for reading my analysis.

I grew out of 4X games, is what Idve said 10 years ago, now it's more like you can remove the 4X. But what I always preferred in Civ3 o ver 4 is that it feels way more like planning and managing a civilization rather than constantly optimizing an archipelago of cities and planning new public latrines for every one of them. What great man of history did that?

I dont know if ots a running gag i missed, or if Civ3 is one of tjose persnickety games to revord, but you can use OBS to screencap only the game. There should be a option under same dropdown for audio/text overlays that says Game, or you can use Window Capture and select the open window you want to capture only.

This game was scrappy as hell and incredible content, bummer that the Inca couldn't give you a few turns to breathe at the end but very impressively fought nonetheless!

gg - off to vote up for the other map next week!

this is yang propaganda posting. WE MUST DISSENT!

What do you think about Civ7 ?

Don't you think it would make more sense to count a speedrun in turns taken rather than time spent?

2:06:45 I wonder what is the advantage of planting a forest on the tile with cow?

NOTE: I go on a lecture at some point here talking about corruption, and spout a bunch of stuff that's not true. Check this article for proper details www.civfanatics.com/civ3/strategy/game-mechanics/everything-about-corruption-c3c-edition/ But the point I made about scaling is absolutely correct. All other things being equal, higher pop cities with more buildings and better land benefit more from courthouses

Civ II is one of my fav games ive ever played. Does anyone know a way to play with out a windows XP? i loved playing the WWII Scenario and others as well.

Well, you somehow made a job of stupid CIV3 games... and i love it! ;)

This is possibly your greatest thumbnail ever

Wow wow WOW! WTH?????? Palace is the best thing ever and how even I can't... what?????

Please please please make more SMAC videos There are literally no other videos except for Let's Plays (hyperbolic) Great video btw cheerio!🎉

TIL that rushing something at zero shields costs extra, how tf did I not realize that for so long I think the info here will help immensely, ty :)

would paratroopers be better if you could directly attack cities (or troops) with them, via airdrop? or would this be too busted?

You forgot that units still have different values for attack or defense. This make the strategy much more interesting that just having one value for all. You construct differents units if you need to protect or if you need to conquer a city or attack other units

What about unique units?

Played this game when i was a kid, rebought it because of your channel and i 100% agree. Love this game

14:55 :)

Moar alpha Centauri plz. Any content is good

Went back to Civ 3 earlier this year after probably a decade away. I was surprised at how great it still was. There was a lot to get used to (I actually had to read the civilopedia every turn for a while), but it's a really tight game. I think the base game is a bit long, but diplomacy was more useful than in 5 and 6 and combat was just fuzzy enough to be challenging. I'll definitely look into some mods, and I do recommend the game for anyone who's a fan of the franchise. Oh and also: the point about representing things rather than being things was great; I hadn't thought about it before and Civ 3 doesn't have the readability issues if its successors

How would you change Civ 3 to have matches last anywhere from 3 to 20 minutes?

Great video! I'm new to Suede, but have been a Lemon guy for a while, and I also enjoy both Civ3 and EU4. Small world, mostly populated by game nerds and suffering peasants... ;D

Man, I miss Civ 3 and didn't think anyone else liked this game. This video literally made me download it.

One thing you might mention is the value of early snowballing. I've found that playing as Miriam (I like to dissent, sue me!) if I rush out a whole bunch of bases and formers fast, I can build up an unassailable lead. Research mostly just military techs, as I'm going to steal the others...

This is a very interesting take on complexity in strategy games, and I don't quite know how to respond to it, because I am in the midst of getting into Dominions 6, and that game is _ludicrously_ complex. There, it doesn't feel like a problem, though, since its complexity pretty well is its core mechanic (I suppose 'map game with simultaneous move and building/upkeep' is technically its core mechanic, but 'Fantasy _Diplomacy_ with simulated battles and a culture victory' doesn't quite do justice to the madness. Or - maybe it does?) But in Civ 6, you've got all the core 4X stuff, _plus_ districts (which could have been the new feature just on their own), which is already very robust - and then there are all these extra layers on top of it that don't really do anything spectacular; everything I've seen of it reminds me of a fantasy 4X, but without the game-imbalancing high-end stuff you usually unlock in those by trading off the core 4X gameplay to go on quests or build circles of magic towers or whatever.