Classic Game Strategy: Civ 3 Combat Engineer Blitz

Modern video games have amazing graphics, incredible sound, and all the advances modern technology can provide. Some older games are still classics and offer game play value so high they remain in use years after release. One such game is Sid Meier's Civilization 3 (Civ3). If you still own and play this game you should add a strategy to your bag of tricks: the combat engineer blitz.

Civ3 units can be stacked, meaning more than one can occupy a single map tile. When you do this with workers they can team up to complete a tile improvement faster. You can use this to incredible effect when waging war.

At any time after you have the capacity to build railroads you can use the combat engineer strategy to mount a blitzkrieg into enemy territory. With a large enough army you can conquer entire enemy civilizations in a single turn. Here's how it works.

When you have railroad technology it should be late enough in the game that other civilizations have it, too - or at least have their cities all connected by regular roads. That's one key condition. The second is that you need attacking units with at least a movement rating of 2 squares.

Build up a huge army of conquering units. Add a stack of workers - a big stack. It can be useful to have over 100 of them. The stack should be in one of the diagonal squares within two movement points' distance of an enemy city connected by roads to your target's empire.

Attack the nearby city with combat units till you conquer it. Wake a worker and move it to the nearest map tile in the formerly enemy territory that already has a regular road on it. Set that worked to build a railroad. Continue adding workers to that tile and using the "build railroad" command until the railroad has been completed. Repeat this process, all on the same turn, building an instantaneous railroad to the next enemy city.

This allows your combat units to move from the original stack to attack the second city in line without expending any movement points. After attacking and conquering the second city you can repeat the process, allowing you to attack city after city until you run out of combat units, workers, or enemies to destroy.

Have fun, and happy blitzing!