WINNING THE LAND WAR IN ASIA
or Tips and Tricks for Call to Power...
By William Westwater
May 11, 1999

note: This is the Developer's Corner, a part of the C:CTP section of Apolyton, where members of the C:CTP development team express their views on ctp-related topics. Feel free to send your comments at civilization@activision.com or post on our forums.

A Good Week for New Things
For many of you, this week is E3 week. If you're here in LA, you've hopefully lined up a pass to the show, and if you don't have a chance to go, you've set a web shortcut to your favorite gaming magazine. For the rest of you, who put the dreams of Call to Power over dreaming of future games, I thought I'd share a few strategies that might make Call to Power a whole new ball game.

By the way, stop reading now if you don't like getting hints :-)

River, Forest, City
Getting to know the value of our new tiles can take some time. If you haven't already noticed, rivers rule. You can never go wrong with a river. Period. Forests are pretty awesome too, but can't be improved easily. However, you'll also notice that city tiles can't be improved at all!

So, what of it? Well, since you can never improve a city tile, you might as well pick the best basic tile that you can find - the forested river. Early on, this combination can produce considerably more than the next best tile combo - nothing to sneeze at to be sure.

Gold, Gold, Gold
Of course, you may not have access to the forested river. Even if you do, you might find the forest surrounded by grassland or by plains. You can farm these grassland and plains, and your city will grow very quickly. In fact, your city will grow so quickly that you may suddenly find yourself facing the greatest problem in managing your civilization - lack of gold.

Nothing frustrates me like running out of gold and still having a large population. To keep them from rioting, I have to feed them more and work them less. I get less from my cities, and I still have to keep my workers on low-production farms, just to keep the cities from starving. Once I hit this stage, I know I'm in trouble.

So what could I have done? Well, for one, I could use the oceans. Oceans are great for giving both food and gold. This is critical because I want to keep wages high so that I can work my people to the bone, especially early on. Oceans have pretty low production though. Even in the future ages, shallow ocean tiles allow no undersea mines. For this reason, oceans alone make for a large, but poorly developed cities as city improvements take too long to build.

To make up for this, I look to combine oceans and mountains. The oceans pay the wages of one citizen and, with nets, feed the bellies of two. The other citizen gets to work in a mine on a mountain, which more than covers his wage and pumps lots of production straight into the city. A few good ocean and mountain cities with lots of nets and mines can fuel even the most aggressive war machine.

Stack, stack, and bombard
Once you've gotten going, you're probably in the mood to beat up a neighboring civilization. This is hard if you don't have the technology. Without cannons, a city wall is ferocious. Once you have cannons, a couple stacks of cannons mixed with musketeers can bombard most cities to their knees. Of course, if you must attack without softening the city with some good cannon fire, you can expect to take serious casualties.

Whatever works for you...
Of course, for most of you, you may have already discovered all of these tricks - or many others that are even more effective. I can't wait to hear that deity is just too darn easy. Until then, river, ocean, mountain, stack, bombard, and have a nice day.

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