Sid Meier's Civilization III: Complete Beginner Future Guide

Why Play Future?

Why play future? Well, maybe these super cool screenshots will convince you.

Intense air and sea combat!

Crazy productive cities!

Action all over the map!

Watching Antman die a sudden and explosive death!

TLDR/Cheat Sheet

Here's a quick reference guide. You can alt-tab to this in game if you forget any of the core stuff. I'd recommend you read this whole guide, but in case you don't have time, this can also serve as a TLDR.

Go into Anarchy, switch to republic

Science at 0%

Happiness at 30% (Adjust it as needed to stay out of disorder while drafting).

Chop forest with worker for an explorer

Build a granary

Irrigate the tiles around your capital so you can grow one per turn

Draft tows to protect yourself

Expand, and hook resources

The First Few Turns

On the first turn of a game of future, go to your domestic advisor, and switch governments. Republic is the best choice.

In future, you spend the first few turns in anarchy. So you have a 1-2 turns to move around if you’d like, finding the best spot for your capital, without missing much (your commerce and production would be zero anyway). Scout a little with your king. Generally, you want a spot with high food and a few forests nearby, so you can chop them for shields.

The palace in your capital serves as an aqueduct. So there's no need to plant your capital next to fresh water.

Communicate your location to your team, using the grid. In the above picture, we are at D56.

The first thing you should do with your worker is move to a forest tile within 2 squares of your capital, and chop it.

After planting your first city, set production to an explorer. When your worker finishes chopping the forest, your explorer is built. This should be the first thing you build, every single game.

You can only adjust your sliders after you plant your first city. To do that, go your domestic advisor. Set your science at 0% (It’s future, you have all the techs you need), and happiness at 30%. As your capital grows, and you draft units, you may need to raise the happiness slider more, maybe as high as 60-70%. Don’t be scared, the happiness slider is always more efficient than using entertainers.

So, a recap:

Switch governments to republic.

Communicate your location to your team.

Move your worker to a forest tile, then start chopping.

Plant your city

Switch Production to explorer.

Set science to 0%, happiness to 30%.

Got it?

Popping Cities

"Popping" refers to getting a settler or city for free from a goodie hut.

The reason why explorers come first in our build order is because in future, huts often give free cities. You can explore a bit with your king, but don’t pop huts with him, because unlike your explorer, the king unit will often spawn barbarians from the hut. And be sure to return your king home before too long, otherwise your enemy may find and kill him. In future, you are allowed to lose cities, but if you lose your king, you die.

In the above image: Yay! We popped. Now walk the settler to a nice location and build your city. Generally a high food location is best, and close to your capital if possible.

Just a few notes about popping free cities: you can’t pop a free city until everyone has planted their starting settler. Check the top right corner, if a player has a score of 0, they haven’t planted yet, so wait before taking the hut. You also can’t pop a settler if you have a settler under your control, or being built. So take all the huts you can find before you start building settlers.

The Early Game

The next thing you build after your explorer is a granary. Always, always, always. Do not build a worker. Do not build a settler. A granary is always the second thing you build, not doing so will put you at an enormous disadvantage. To do so, chop another forest with your worker. If it’s slow to build, consider paying gold to hurry it.

Chopping to build a granary. Note the city on the right, which was popped using an explorer.

After it’s done, start irrigating and roading grassland tiles. Ideally, you should have about 4 irrigated grassland tiles in your capital. This, in combination with your granary, ensures your city can grow 1 citizen per turn, at least until you hit size 7.

Your city should look something like this. There's only 3 irrigated tiles here, but the fish gives extra food if needed.

After building your granary, it’s generally a good idea to build a second worker. But after that, the safest thing to do is to not build anymore workers or settlers until you are at size 7. This is because workers and settlers cost population, and you need to grow your capital in order to draft. Instead, build something like a library (they provide happiness in future), a temple, a marketplace, or a colosseum. Once you hit size 7, draft, and then draft again. You have 2 tows now, enough to protect your capital, and your pop city.

So great, what do you do now? Well, that’s the nice thing about future. There’s no set build path. Consider expanding and building more cities if you can do so safely. Maybe build some buildings in your capital: like happiness buildings so you can afford to draft more, or a factory. Maybe build a galleon, put your explorer on it, and scout other islands. Or, settle a far away resource by sea. Consider finding and hooking resources, typically oil and aluminum are the most useful. Trading resources to your allies is a great way to help your team.

This city might not look like much, but it's supplying oil to the english. Note the airbase. It allows the English to airlift units in to defend their oil.

How To Hook Resources

1)Settle a city next to the resource. Make a road between that city and your capital. This is the way you are likely used to.

2)Build a road between the resource and your capital, and found a colony with your worker. Often resources are located in the middle of the jungle or tundra, so why waste a settler. It’s also a good idea if you’re worried about an opponent attacking. They can seize your city, but if they take your colony, the colony is just destroyed.

3)By sea. Build a harbour in your capital or a city connected by road to your capital, and a harbour in your resource city. As long as there is a visible path over water tiles, not blocked by enemy ship or fog of war, these two cities can trade.

4)By airport. If you have two cities with an airport in them, they can trade, no exceptions. But airports are expensive, so typically the other options are preferable.

What NOT To Do

Since there are so many viable strategies in future, I will list the few that aren’t viable.

Flaks: flaks have some niche uses, like guarding airbases. But generally if you’re being bombed, build SAMs, since they can intercept. Flaks guard one tile, SAMS can intercept across 25 tiles. Enough said.

SAM missile batteries: In future, when people say "SAMs", they mean mobile sams, the military unit, not the building. I’ve never seen a SAM missile battery work, usually they are the first thing that gets destroyed when your city is being bombed.

Regular tows: Your army should primarily consist of drafted tows/mechs. If you find yourself relying on regular tows, you’re doing something wrong. Think of it this way. A tow costs 100 shields. A colloseum costs 80 shields, and in future provides 4 happy faces. That means that by building a colloseum, you can draft 4 times every 20 turns if you manage your growth effectively. Which would you prefer, 4+ drafted tows, or one regular tow?

A recycling center/mass transit system: Just build more workers to clean up any pollution you face.

Courthouse/Police Station: Not worth it.

University: Libraries provide happiness in future. Universities give nothing.

Hospitals: All wonders in future act as a hospital. If you wanted to grow past size 12, a wonder would be a better investment. Although…

Wonders: In future, wonders are principally used to get a golden age. But unless your nation is big and well developed, they aren’t worth the effort of building. So don’t build them unless your teammate recommends it.

Wartime And The Out Of War

Wartime is available after researching nationalism, which you start with in Future. It significantly increases production when building most military units (notable exceptions: bomber, helicopter, stealth bomber, and artillery do not receive bonus production). But wartime reduces culture by half, and does not let you build civilian buildings.

To enter wartime, click the button circled above.

You cannot exit wartime until you broker peace with an enemy, or a civilization you are at war with dies. Obviously the former will never happen in a team game. So to exit wartime, we declare war on our allies, and immediately make peace with them.

Beyond using this to build military units, it can also be used to build peacetime stuff. For example, start building a battleship in wartime. When your battleship is a turn away from being complete, get an out of war (OOW) from your ally, and switch to a factory. You just got the production bonus from wartime while building a peacetime building. Similarly, when building a bomber, it’s best to start by building a tow (or something else which receives the wartime production bonus), then switching to the bomber at the last second.

To declare war on an ally, conduct diplomacy with them. Click on "active deals", then click on "peace treaty".

You can only do this every 20 turns, so for more frequent OOWs, you want to have an explorer in your ally's territory (or vice versa) so you can declare war on each other upon request.

Golden Age

Most civs, aside from America, Germany, and often Portugal and England, can’t get their golden age through regular combat with their unique unit. So instead, they will either build a wonder, or use their ally. The flak is often used for this purpose. You bring your obsolete unique unit to your ally, place it on a mountain for extra defense bonus, and they attack it with a flak. You win combat with your unique unit, and you get your golden age!

Me and Halu giving each other Golden Ages. I attack his Musketeer on the mountain with my flak, then I move my rider onto the mountain, and he attacks it with his musket.

Defense Bonuses

When attacking a unit on a mountain, the defending unit receives a 100% combat bonus. 50% for hills, 25% for forest, etc. You also get 25% for fortifying, and 50% for being in a city (Size 7+).

These are very significant bonuses, so be careful attacking units in any of these places. Try to bait them down from the mountain/hill, or soften them with artillery/bombing.

Airbases are often placed on mountains for added defense. Remember, if someone takes your airbase, you lose all the planes you had in it. So the added defense on an airbase is crucial.

The Defensive Bombard Bug

Two draft tows stacked on top of each other. Pretty much the cockroach of future. Small, pesky, and way too hard to kill.

This is unique to multiplayer. Defensive bombard is amplified in multiplayer, more with each additional player in the game. At 6 players, it results in pretty much instantaneous death for the attacking unit. This bug also affects cruise missiles. While cruise missiles are very underwhelming in vanilla civ 3, in multiplayer they are much more powerful, especially in games with more players. A single cruise missile can kill small stacks in a game with 6+ players.

Tow infantry, especially drafted tows, will make up a significant portion of your army because they have defensive bombard, and require no resources. A popular early game strategy in future is to send 2 or more tows on a boat, and drop them off in enemy land. There, they can pillage, and take undefended cities, and can be very difficult to kill. If you have aluminum, or oil, the simplest way to deal with them is with bombers, or cruise missiles. Both have lethal bombard, and can kill units outright.

The early game tow galleon.

If you don’t have those resources, you best bet is to play defensively. Guard each of your improved tiles with a single drafted tow. Artillery helps here. Although artillery doesn’t have lethal bombard, and can’t kill units outright, it can weaken the enemy tows. Guard your workers too! If they are taken, the enemy can use them to found an airbase, and bomb you.

One Per Turn Growth

It is incredibly important to be able to grow 1 citizen per turn, every turn, in your capital in future. Otherwise, your expansion and drafting will be slow. Let me walk you through it.

Note the number to the right of “Beijing” (2). That’s how many turns until the city grows. If you have a granary and at least 3 irrigated grassland tiles, that number should always be 1, at least for the expansion phase of the game.

Double Click on the city.

Citizens consume 2 food per turn. Beijing produces 14 food per turn, meaning we have 4 surplus food per turn. We need 5 food to grow.

Notice a number of the tiles have food, shield, and commerce icons on them. Those are the squares your citizens are working. Five tiles are being worked in Beijing (plus the city center), because Beijing has 5 population.

To fix this, click on the tile with a low food yield, in this case the forest tile.

Your citizen is now not working any tile.

Click on a new tile to assign him to it, one with a higher food yield, like that bonus grassland.

Great. See in the bottom right that surplus food is now 5, and we need 5 to grow.

As soon as we exit the city screen, we’ll see Beijing growing 1 per turn. That’s all there is to it!

Help! I'm Being Bombed!

Don’t panic. First, try to recognize when someone might bomb you. Scout them with their explorer and look. Do they have oil? Do they have a city within bombing range of you (bombers have a range of 10)? Could they be building an airbase near you? If they come by with a boat, steal your worker with a tow, and immediately put the worker back in the boat, this is a huge red flag. They likely plan to build an airbase with that worker.

The correct response to being bombed is anti air defense while guarding tiles with land units too. Start drafting as hard as you can, if they start bombing your irrigated tiles you might not have a chance later. at least one tow in every city: otherwise, they can steal the city by airdropping units from a helicopter. If you have extra tows, place them on key tiles. That way, bombing the tile will damage your tow, not your land. Consider building more workers: to clean up the damage, or maybe to turn them into a radar tower. If you have oil, start building fighters/jetfighters. If not, build SAMS. Switch to wartime to speed up your production.

In the above screenshot, Babylon is bombing me. As soon as I saw that airbase go up, I knew I was about to get bombed, so I did two things. First, I set production in all three cities to fighters, to shoot down his planes. Second, I drafted, and moved my tows onto my roads, to protect the supply line to my oil.

Keep at least one tow in each city. Your enemy can use the recon mission that fighters/helicopters have to see what's in your city. If it's empty, they can airdrop units in at end of turn to take the city.

End Of Turn Combat

In civ 3 multiplayer, players will typically execute any attack that would benifit from surprise at the end of the turn. That way, the opponent has no time to react before they can move again. So if you leave your city empty, they can drop off a unit by boat at end of turn, and take the city 2 seconds later at the start of the next turn. This is called a "double move".

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! Be sure to leave a comment below if you have any questions, or if anything wasn't clearly explained.

If you think you're up for the challenge, take a look on this more advanced and detailed guide

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=772527038

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=773801119

Beginner Future Guide