Glossary for Civ3 Strategy on Apolyton

[bsklepzig]

I'm a newbie to the Civ experience and have been greatly enjoying the game and the thoughtful posts in this section of the BBS. (kiss, kiss)

Trolling around, though, there are a lot of acronyms and inside references that are confusing to newbies like me. I trolled a bit more and started a list of possible glossary terms. Where I wasn't sure, I added ???s to ask for help or confirmation.

BTW, IMHO, we don't need to cover common Web shorthand, just Civ-specific stuff. (ROFLMAO!!!)

Care to edit correct or add?

Ben



AI – Artificial intelligence. The “brains” behind rival civs.

AV – Attack Value

Client-State – A nearby civ that you have made war on in the early game and completely stifled his growth. The civ is now a smallish, backwater state. Not technologically advanced at all and the perfect customer for your older, unwanted resources (horses and saltpeter specifically, and any runoff luxury items that you can’t trade more profitably to a larger civ). These guys start off being furious with you (cos you attacked them early on), but with care and attention, you can change their minds. These are the civs you can carefully groom, nurture and grow into viable junior partners for yourself (perhaps even allowing them to “graduate” at some point by catching them up in tech—assuming you have found another civ to dump your horses and saltpeter on!). These are the real gems of the late game…sturdy, reliable allies you can count on when it’s down to you and a couple of other big sharks in the water. (Borrowed from Vel’s Strategy thread.)

DV – Defense Value

FCC – Five City Challenge? Win the game while limiting yourself to five cities?

FP – Forbidden Palace

GG – Glowing Goo (pollution)

GL – Great Leader. Can be used to rush a Wonder or form an army.

Goody Huts – Barbarian settlements in early stages that may contain techs, gold or units (or mean warriors).

HP – Hit Points

ICS – A popular strategy from Civ2???

IFE – Infinite Forest Exploitation. Lumberjack a square of forest to get the ten shields for the nearby city. Replant. Repeat. Not permitted post-patch.

LJ – lumberjacking forests for the 10 shield bonus

Metagame – See Vel’s description on this page.

MP – Multi-player. The fabled, someday element of Civ3. Some strategists are already theorizing for it.

MPP – Mutual Protection Pact. A mutual defense deal struck with rival civs in diplomacy. Available mid-game.

MW – Mounted Warrior (Iroquois UU)

OCC – One City Challenge. Win the game while limiting yourself to one city.

Oscillating war - Intentionally NOT focusing on a single civ to that civ’s destruction. Instead, fighting a series of “pruning” wars, taking each civ near you down a notch, one at a time. The end result is that you get big at everyone’s expense, everyone gets correspondingly smaller, and thus, easier to control (if you focus on just 1-2 civs and beat them down, sure, you’ll wipe them out, but while you’re busy with that, the civ you haven’t been messing with is building up his position….better to hit them all incrementally!) (Borrowed from Vel’s Strategy thread.)

Paired City Strategy - ???

Pruning - Attacking a Civ not to destroy, but merely to weaken. You grow at his expense. (Borrowed from Vel’s Strategy thread.)

REX – A style of settlement in early stages designed to grab territory quickly. Rapid EXpansion? Grab cities at the far reaches of your first planned empire and back fill?

ROP – Right of Passage agreement. Agree to let rival civ wander in your territory without repercussion and visa versa.

rush building units - Despotic and Communist governments sacrifice the lives of their citizens (or at least they desert the city) to finish projects quickly. Democracies and Republics must pay cash.

SMAC – Sid Meier’s Alpha Centuri. Space-based relative of the Civ series.

SS – Space Ship

Turtle – Build your civ to a point, then focus on passively building.

UU – Unique Unit. Each Civ has one. (Greeks & Hoplite, etc.)

Vassal-State - A nearby civ that you beat up on in the early game to force them to give up techs and money. Commonly employed to achieve tech parity on Monarch and above. (You can safely assume that these guys will be none too fond of you up until the day you decide to end their lives! These guys are your punching bags!) (Borrowed from Vel’s Strategy thread.)

[Aeson]

Paired City Strategy - Using a "worker factory" in conjunction with 1 or 2 "unit factories"

Worker Factory (Size 6 Strategy) - city with fresh water access and a granery, uses the doubling of the food box at size 6 to 7 to build a worker every turn.

Unit Factory (Military Camp) - city dedicated to pop-rushing military units, later disbanded by building a settler.

GL is sometimes used for the Great Library as well as Great Leaders. Also could refer to the Great Lighthouse, but haven't seen it used that way.

ICS is where cities are founded very close together. I forget the wording exactly. Infinite/Incrimental? City Sprawl

[solo]

What a great idea having a glossary, as I was a bit dazzled by abbreviations a year ago when I joined Apolyton. It was those universal abbreviations that threw me the most. IMHO helped me figure out IMO, and it took a long time to decipher IIRC, and dare I confess that ROFLMAO still has me puzzled in spite of having so many letters in it as clues?

[Skanky Burns]

REX = Rapid Early Expansion - Pump settlers out as fast as you can

[steelehc]

RO(T)FLMAO=Rolling On The Floor Laughing My A*s Off

[Frog_Gamer]

Shall I dare ask: IMHO????


HELP please

[bsklepzig]

Okay, we'll get into Web-shorthand as well ...

IMHO = In My Humble Opinion (IMO just loses the humility)

BTW = By The Way

LOL = Laugh Out Loud

... and what DOES IIRC mean? I guessed it was Web-ese and not Civ-specific, but it does have me puzzled ...

Ben

[Platypus]

IIRC = If I ReCall

[bsklepzig]

Originally posted by Platypus
IIRC = If I ReCall

Oh man ...

We're supposed to figure THAT out? Maybe it's easy if you're some advanced strategy player ... but no way newbies like me get that ... I'm just not that smart ...

[DeepO]

actually, I like to think that IIRC = If I Remember Correctly

not that there's much of a change in meaning, of course

[Hermann the Lombard]

"IIRC = If I ReCall"

Originally "If I Remember Correctly"

ICS has a variety of translations, from the one you got above thru "Infinite City Strategy" to "Infinite City Sleaze." The translation varies with your style of gaming.

[Frog_Gamer]

Thanks to you all for the contributions to this thread. INVALUABLE

[Alcatraz]

IIRC=If I recall correctly
AFAIK = As far as I know
ROFLMAONICW=ROFLMAO Naked In Cheeze Whiz

Is there an abbreviation for AI cheats or horridly lopside combat die rolls?

[Eric S]

The one that throws me for about 10 seconds every time I see it:

GA = Golden Age.

[bsklepzig]

Just saw a new one:

SSC - Super Science City. A high producing city with two or three of the following: Colossus, Copernicus' Observitory, Newton's University. Cranks hard on researching techs for you.

RE: "an abbreviation for AI cheats or horridly lopside combat die rolls"

How about:

TFIIWTAHBITPMAE - The Fix Is In Worse Than A Heavyweight Bout In The Post-Mohammad-Ali Era

... hmmm ... might be too cumbersome ...

After this thread had run for a bit, I may post a corrected/condensed one ...

Ben

[bsklepzig]

I can't believe I forgot this one!!! It's one of my faves ...

WLTKD - We Love The King Day. Also WLT*D where * is a variable for whatever your culture's Title of preference (when I played the Aztecs it was We Love The Chief Day). Happens when ALL citizens of the city are happy. You get production bonuses from the citizens while it lasts. Strongly implied in other threads that it can be engineered by the player, though I haven't seen exact recommendations on how.

Ben

[bsklepzig]

Any experts surfing this thread?

I've seen these acronyms/short hand associated with multi-player:

XP (as analogous/related to Multi-player (MP)?)

Hotseat

PBEM


Can you help decipher?

Ben

[SanPellegrino]

XP = Expansion Pack (I think)

Hotseat = Playing with two or more persons on one computer

PBEM = Play by email

[bsklepzig]

Another We-ese I've spotted:

OTOH - On the Other Hand

Since posting on this thread has cooled, perhaps I'll consolidate the posts into one Glossary.

Moderator, should I start a new thread with the ammended Glossary or should I edit the first post here?

Ben

[KLIN-TONN]

...NTTAWWT

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

[embermage]

[Sirotnikov]

DMS - Dodgily Massacaring Settlers. A tactic of kreeping up to enemy settlers, waiting for them to build a city and taking it immediately (whether conquering it, or bringing in your settler instead)

[Ribannah]

YWNTPTGTFO = you will need to play the game to find out

[La Fayette]

Glad to see you back!
Have you decided to bring some might and magic to the solution of deity problems in civ3?
YWNTPTGTFO!

[kilane royalist]

ICS - Infinite City Strategy aka "Chinese" strategy.

In Civ I, it was possible to build cities right next to each other. Because of the free road/railroad, and the free extra square of production, one strategy was to connect big cities with small cities of size 1, which pumped out settlers. Settlers were then pushed out, building more 1 unit cities, which built more settlers etc.

The strategy was so effective that abutting cities were not allowed in CivII. However, ICS lived on, as setting up a rolling wave of junk cities was still resource effective. The additional incentive was the ability of small cities to act as "home cities" for military units, spreading around the unhappiness burden. Large cities made big bad killer units, and then small cities would host 1. Improvements in the AI, the lessons of the OCC and better improvements made ICS a powerful, but not overwhelming choice.

In various multiplayer games that followed however, against other humans, ICS proved over and over again to be a lethal strategy. It was low maitenance, unlike many other strategies, there were fewer chances for one mistake to kill your game, it was effective against a variety of other strategies. In the end it became pretty clear that ICS could easily take over a game, and the most effective solution was to have an agreement among other players to immediately go after anyone who employed it, or even looked like they might be getting ready to employ it. In a sense, ICS was the default strategy of the MP games, and only concerted action would stop it. The best defense against ICS other than concerted action, was ICS. But, since many people liked playing other strategies than ICS, it was usually pretty easy to get people to simply stomp the first "virus" society to show up.

Enter the first release of CivIII with its flog hack of pop-rushing, and for a while ICS was back with a vengence. Everything the Civ team had done to butt **** big city strategies, and there is no other term for it - such resource problems, worse corruption, harder unhappiness, more aggressive AI civs, less effective research for players than for AIs - made ICS ever more attractive. The new crocks didn't make it any harder to build a city and did not make it much harder to keep it happy enough to produce. ICS didn't care about corruption, since all builds were made with food. ICS didn't care about how hard it was to keep big cities happy, since all cities were death camps anyway, pushing out an endless flow of military units to crush other civs. In fact, the ability of a few squares to supply a whole civilization made it more attractive, since there was no drain on the economy. Rush builds of culture items held back the AI's attempts to Borg your society.

ICS allowed you to control important resources, and hold enough space so that new resources would be in your territory when they appeared. In otherwords, building ones civilization on bones was an end run around all the crocks. Each crock made the end run more attractive.

The new patch weakens ICS a bit, but on the top levels, it is just about the only strategy that works reliably. Your cities are garbage anyway, it will be ages before you can do anything about it anyway. Maybe you will get luck and find in enough Lux squares, but generally the AI knows where they are and sends unsinkable galleys right to them. So why not go with the flow and just have garbage cities with military defenders?

The recent patch is like a late Beta of a working game, the first release was like an Alpha. ICS is a good maker of how well play tested a civ version was. It is an obvious, easy strategy, like "imp" from corewars, that crushes more elegant and complex strategies. If it works too well, then the version hasn't been well thought out.

[kilane royalist]

One City Challenge

Largely a creature of Civ2, the One City Challenge began as a strategy inside an empire building thread - building a "Science City" Col,KO,SINC and ST - it would grow large, produce much trade, and much science. This evolved into the "One City Strategy". Because Civ2 was essentially a game won by reaching certain unbalancing technologies first, one way to win was just ot get to Robotics, and then begin a campaign to conquer the world. The One City Strategy was to stay at one city - surrounded by 4 special squares - until well into the modern age. Then, begin an aggressive war of conquest that would put the entire world under your boot.

What was realized not long there afterward was that with aggressive use of progressive building, it was possible to win the game with one city. That's right, build the starship and win. Hence the OCC was born, along with a few additional rules to make it more of a challenge. Maps were created to bring out different variations on it, until the "concentric mountains" map showed that, even without contact from anyone else, one could finish the starship by 1932 AD against almost any defense by the AI.

But the lessons of the OCC had a ripple effect - they helped large city strategists of all kinds against the AI. Progressive building, trade tactics and wonder selection gave alternatives to the tried and true - get crusaders, crush one enemy, get frigates, crush two more enemies, get artillery crush one more enemy, get robotics and kill the rest - pattern, the pattern of the "Roman" strategy of many mid sized cities with a bargain basement economy.

[La Fayette]

kr
I nominate your posts for the GL (if someone starts one for civ3 ).

[kilane royalist]

Rolling Invasion tactics use the capture of a city to strengthen the attacker.

Of the tactics of Civ2 of the changes to CivIII have changed the way attackers have had to exploit captured cities. In CivII rolling invasion was fairly straight forward: move over his own road network, make sure the actual unit entering the city was badly damaged, so it would be fully repaired, assign this unit to the new city as "home" to shift the burden of upkeep. Sell off at least one useless improvement. Set entertainers to keep the city from being in disorder the next turn, and disband a cheap unit, then, use gold to build a new high powered unit - if short on gold, and able to wait two turns, using a progressive build strategy (buying a cheaper unit completely, then switching production to a more expensive unit and allowing the city to finish it in 1 turn with its own production). Another "rolling invasion" tactic was selectively buying cities with spies that were loaded with his best military units - a battleship or bomber being the prize of prizes. Rolling Invasion doctrine stated that one should put a spy in the captured city to prevent reversion, especially a purchased city since the former owner had one turn to retake it at 1/2 cost. It stated that one should move ones own forces in to a captured enemy barrack city and have 2 "lines" of attacking units. A line would attack one turn, move to be repaired the second turn, and then wake up refreshed the next turn to be ready to attack.

In Civ2 captured cities were basically part of your empire with 2 turns.

Other aspects of rolling invasion were the use of plundered gold to finance the attack - something even the AI was capable of doing, and was even expected in the WWII scenario - and instantly making use of captured wonders in ones own civilization. The classic example of this last is selling off cathedrals after getting Michelangelo, or granaries when getting the Pyramids.

The net effect of "rolling invasion" was that late on in the game, once one could crack the outer defenses of a large AI empire, the empire would implode quickly - the attacker would be gaining gold, the defender losing it, the attack would be spreading the burden of his military out, the defender contracting, losing defensive units not stationed in the city as well as the dead defenders, the attack would have a greater and greater thrust towards the enemy capital, which would be the target of the drive. Within 3 turns, most AI empires would succumb to rolling invasion. Similarly taking one AI empire in a rolling invasion would generally mean that within 5 turns, it was almost as integrated into your empire as cities that had been yours for generations.

It is very clear that the designers of CivIII wanted to get rid of rolling invasion at almost all cost. Rolling Invasion was part of what made Civ2 a game of "get to unbalancing tech, attack for all it is worth, wait" game, and reduced the number of strategies available, since it still all boiled down to who got Crusaders, Frigates, Battleships, and the modern war package: Artillery/Engineers/Espionage/Tanks and finally Howitzers.

The new rules on population loyalty - where former members of a city remember who they were - and on long term unhappiness, particularly when the former masters applied the whip liberally - and on road use change the way one views a captured city change all of this. While the game itself seems not to have stabilized - 1.17 is essentially a different game than the original Civ3, and it still doesn't work the way the programmers envisioned it, in that there is really only one strategy that works, albeit with a larger choice of how that strategy works - the outlines of Civ3 rolling invasion are becoming clear.

The problem with the original release was that poprushing was broken - one could capture a city, even a rather trashed one, and simply liquidate its population for military units. Instead of providing one repaired unit, one new unit next turn, and shifting upkeep for one unit - which saved either gold or shields, many captured enemy cities could provide 5 or six top quality front line units instantly. With no home citiy problems, there was no incentive not to do it, and with the amount of rebuilding that a bombardment required, there wasn't anything left to save anyway. Send in fresh settlers, scatter the inhabitants to the four winds to be conscripted or fed to the factories.

Another first release of CivIII rolling invasion tactic was to sell the city back in return for technology or peace. Again, with the new AI philosophy of "there are only two players, the AI and the human, and the AI controls all the other civs" this is less effective in a warlike situation.

With the new poprushing rules, this is less effective, but still a workable way to run a rolling invasion. Another viable tactic is to keep the shell of a city - one unit - and pop rush into it, disbanding it next turn.

But the most viable rolling invasion tactic left is new to CivIII - cultural imperialism. A city converts, and then the new owner goes to great lengths to make it a powerful cultural center, often going so far as to relocate his capital to improve cultural pull, and quickly building culture improvements in it. I have had games where a single defection allowed a tendril into the AI civ, and his heavily guarded border cities were then surrounded by unmilitarized converted cities, which then had military poured into them.

In brief - rolling invasion is what wins the game, the Civ designers have basically disallowed the old rolling invasion, but did not realize that that had left an opening. This opening now closed, new rolling invasion tactics are being developed.

[Alex]

kilane: Nice posts.

Imagine a thread with kr and Vel arguing about Civ strategies...

[kilane royalist]

Vel has written a great deal of very high quality material about CivIII strategy.

I've watched these forums improve tremendously in quality over time. When they started out, most of the advice was brute force: "if you want to invade an island have 30 spies and 40 howitzers with at least 2 MechInfs per target city supported by bombers from a carrier." type of post. What is being written now is worlds above that, and Vel is one of the reasons why.