I'm consistently getting my ass handed to me in Civ3 even on the easy modes. How do y'all manage? How do you play the first 10 turns? What civilization do you play? How do you handle the AI?

C'mon..let's help out a poor soul in need here, shall we?

- Light.

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"Brevity is the soul of wit"...(yeah, right)

Hmm....the best rule is to expand QUICKLY. Start off with a warrior (or scout, depending on your civ) and use it to start exploring territory. Then build settlers as fast as your first city is able early one. This keeps the size of your first city down, which is good because it'll keep going into civil disorder at sizes 5 and 6 anyway.

No matter how well you manage your cities, you'll fall behind if the others Civs outnumber you by a great margin. You need to at least be able to compete with them. Plus, the territory you control affects your score to a great extent. Expansion is key.

I can't help beyond that, though. So far I've won on the upper levels only through the space race victory, and that was damn hard to do. I'll be damned if I can figure out how the other Civs discover tech so damn FAST early in the game, no matter what. This is true from the Regent level up; I can keep up only by trading for the tech, then building wall street before anyone else & letting my treasury build so I can research at a really fast rate (wall street has your civ collect 5% interest from the treasury). This usually happens around the Industrial Age, which allows me to catch up and win the game through the space race.

I've yet to win any other way.....I could use advise myself regarding how to win some other way than hanging on by a thread.....

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