Tier List of Units in Civ 3's Modern Era (Single Player)
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- Опубликовано: 9 ноя 2024
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0:50 Transport
1:11 Submarine
1:23 Destroyer
1:38 Cruiser
2:25 AEGIS Cruiser
2:45 Nuclear Subs
2:55 Nuclear missiles
4:16 Battleship
5:30 Carrier
6:14 Bomber
6:30 F15
7:43 Fighter And Jet Fighter
8:15 Mobile Sam and Flak
9:17 Stealth Fighter
11:00 Stealth Bomber
12:17 Modern Armor and Panzer
12:43 Mech Infantry
12:50 Tank
13:32 Helicopter, Paratrooper, Modern Paratrooper
14:45 Bad joke
15:06 Marine
16:34 TOW Infantry
17:15 Artillery and Radar Artillery
Would love to hear your thoughts on how to balance them better for a nicer modern combat experience
The Modern multiplayer mod (there's a clip at the beginning) was designed primarily by me, so there is a playtested answer to your question hahah. But in summary...
-Boats have more HP, are slightly cheaper, and move faster.
-Transport boats and helis are faster/have bigger range, and hold more units.
-Cruise missiles are strong and deal splash damage (to introduce counterplay against stacks)
-Cheaper espionage
-More ways of delivering units to the enemy (chinooks, convoys, more draftable 2 move units)
-Stronger interceptors
-More variety of usable res! It shouldn't be the case that if you are missing oil, you can't build any interceptor. I mean, maybe from a realism perspective, but from a balance perspective it's really bad. So for example, in modern, Alu + oil is jet fighter, uranium gives regular fighter.
And a bunch more.
I did this in one of my own scenarios
@@suedeciviii7142 What the hell are Panzers? MBT's were actually developed on end of the WW2. I think it would make sense if they would use Mrc.IV as the lowest tier tank. If they need to...
From a naval history perspective its wild how BBs are slower than transports. This was only really true pre-WWI where BBs were still in a transitional stage from ironclads but from then to now the fastest BBs have always been as fast as the fastest ocean liners. Their average speeds have been pretty equal in terms of liners, most merchantmen are much slower than BBs. Old BBs were commonly used as convoy escorts because of the slow speed of the merchantmen they didn't need a frontline fast unit to guard them, just a big chunk of armor and guns.
Its even stranger because they correctly have CAs and CVs going the same speed because CAs were commonly the largest surface units fast enough to escort the carriers. So they had their escort roles down in one instance but not the other.
What are BB, CA and CV? BattleBots, cavalry archery, carrier vessel?
Just started Civ 3 a few weeks ago. Great channel!
Nice! What's been your favourite faction or map type so far?
Radar Artillery is above normal artillery for me. 99% of your radar artillery are going to be upgraded from accumulated artillery units over the course of the game, so the shield cost is mostly a non-factor. The bonus bombard is nice for greater consistency but the speed allows you to not only get into cities faster but comboed with railroads means you can play them super aggressively on your borders for defense in depth tactics on higher difficulties where the AI has seemingly infinite units so that you can whittle away their units until there is so few of them that you can run in and take their cities
The reason I prefer them to bombers is they turn enemy units into free promotions for your ground units
Thank you so much for this! Was scared you were going you abandon civ 3. This tier list was very helpful for my ongoing nightly campaign woth the Iroquois in my inter continental war with China and Sumeria in the modern era. I actually was building carriers! Thank you for setting me straight.
I'm just posting more in general! So there will be more Civ 3 videos AND more videos about other 4X games.
Yes, absolutely. get a toehold by any means necessary, and then use an airbase to get your planes in. If the enemy takes the city next to the airbase (by flip or conquest), your planes get teleported home. The AI won't prioritize killing your airbase if it's reasonably well guarded, so it's much safer to do things this way than to mess around with carriers (or to fly the planes directly into the captured city)
Ive never played modern era where I wasnt winning. thx for this
Awesome tier list. I’d love to see one for industrial units
Ive been trying to rebalance the game for my own single player games and im glad to see a lot of the changes ive made (nerfing bombers, buffing ships) fall in line with your balance complaints.
One thing im trying is increasing the interception chance to 90% but making all fighters have equal attack and defence. That way you have to send in your own fighters first to "dogfight" the AI's before you can use your bombers.
Great vid. Giving me more ideas for what to adjust!
The fighter-bomber from WWII in the Pacific does what you said to a certain extent. "Sweeping" to get rid of interceptors.
@@suedeciviii7142 oh, making a unit for it is cool.
I'm kind of worried because I changed the flat percentage and im worried the ai wont be able to grasp this concept and will be sending their bombers suicide style into me without a care in the world lol
@@MekSoLydian That's a valid concern hahah. Your way is completely valid, although it might make bombing too strong depending on how the rest of the scenario is balanced
Love the video,
Suede. this is a great and under discussed topic. my games never get this far most of the time but it still is very helpful knowledge!
Agreed. It happens so seldom that when it does, sometimes I get caught off guard!
Awesome tier list! Battleships and carriers being little better than floating bomber targets is just art imitating life sadly. The main reason I build battleships and carriers is to drive them around the coastal cities of weaker civs to stunt on them (in single player).
Someday we'll do that to the Celts my brother. Retribution for what they did to us 🔥
There's definitely a niche use case for cavalry in the modern era. Unless you're Germany, they're the only unit with 3 movement you can build until modern armour (4, if you put them in an army), and sometimes you've completely bombed down the defences of a city, but need that extra movement point to capture it on the same turn. Once you control the city and surrounding roads, stronger but slower defensive units can make it there the same turn.
Yeah, with 3 moves they are still valuable. But given how they come at the end of the medieval era I considered it too much of a reach to count them
@@suedeciviii7142 entirely fair, I just thought it worth mentioning, as it's a bit funny that this otherwise outdated and weak-at-the-time unit has its uses.
These videos are great man thnx
Battleships are great for bombarding terrain two tiles away so you don't get attacked next to land.
I prefer carriers as I can transport bombers to them immediately after being manufactured. Carriers are mobile bombardment platforms and a mainstay in my fleets. I usually stack them with destroyers and cruisers and park them off the coast of where I am attacking. This is especially great when you don't have to worry about airfield being overrun by enemy units which could wipe out stacks of parked bombers.
About ships: I'm in a continent-sized archipelago game fighting the Aztecs who own the largest continent (it's nearly circular). It's a war of attrition and the Aztecs are OP, so the strategy is:
1) eliminate their local strategic resources (this will prevent them building new bombers and ships)
2) blockade their coastal cities to stop resources coming in (if I can't get all other civs to embargo them)
3) destroy or capture their coastal cities to isolate them
The battleships, cruisers, etc. were crucial for continuous bombardment of the coastal cities and their roads to prevent reenforcement, to get my marines close enough to attack the city, and to keep their ships from breaking the blockade (while they still had resources to build ships) and attacking my aircraft carriers. [Meanwhile I had networks of subs keeping an eye on every possible sea route]. I ended up with floatillas for all 12 of their coastal cities, easily with over 100 cruisers/battleships/destroyers. My navy was powerful enough that when France declared war on me I could keep their ships at bay long enough to bring carriers within range of their continent and sue for peace.
Tl;dr: bombarding and blockading with ships is crucial for the middle stage of a war of attrition with the biggest Civ as their bombers and ships are eliminated.
Show me the save, I almost guarantee there's a better way to do it
With the C3X patch, paratroopers can be enabled to retain their movement when jumping, so you can use them for immediate commando operations. Makes the unit so much better!
Would be insane for multiplayer hahah
@@suedeciviii7142 It is compatible with MP ;D
@@MrAbgeBrandt But there's issues with having everyone install it
For the most part I agree with this list.
Suede!! Can you please do a follow up to this video and show what you would do to improve and balance the lower ranking units on this list?
See my comment about Modern. But I could do a whole video about the philosophy of the changes, with specific reference to single player and how the AI would need to treat things.
@@suedeciviii7142 yeah, I’ve looked at Modern mod in Discord server, and at this point it’s VERY different from the base game. I would be more interested in seeing changes to just units in Modern Era without them being influenced by different Governments, resources, units, etc.
@@adeather Government, buildings could be controlled for, but resources tie in heavily with unit balance.
Ohhhh... now i get it... ok the prhasing wasnt modern era units, it was modern units... safe to say i was confused about why Suede would make a singleplayer tierlist about a multiplayer mod.
On another note, do you think you could beat your own mod in an 8 player game on sid (tech trading possibly included)
I'm going to add (single player) to the video title lol to stop any confusion about that.
Curious if you've ever played vanilla / play the world and what you think of the balance between them and the changes made in conquests? Conquests (which is the only Civ expansion pack to this day not made by Firaxis themselves, I believe) was quite controversial balance-wise way back when, particularly for such stuff as the lethal land bombardment making bombers OP, statue of zeus being overpowered, etc. (Sulla's '10 reasons conquests went wrong' lists a lot of gripes from the time.)
I've read Sulla's pieces. I think I was 50-50 as to whether I agreed to the 10 points. Sulla's criticism of Medieval infantry, for example, is just short-sighted.
I played vanilla and PtW on release, but I was a child. So I don't have too much insight. I'll say, the original game was sparse and did really need to be filled out with extra units, buildings, and wonders.
@@suedeciviii7142 Medieval infantry I def. feel wasn't that bad, longbowmen could use tweaks in response perhaps but I'm not as totally opposed to swordsmen having an upgrade path either.
@@suedeciviii7142 As someone who only had PTW growing up and not conquests I can tell you mango motion is right about lethal bombard -- the whole point about why the cruise missile did exist was it was the only land unit that had lethal bombard. Artillery did not. Bombers were still a top tier unit due to range but battleships were about as useful since they had a relatively powerful bombard and bombers couldn't kill units via bombard anyhow. Marines and paratroopers were both industrial age units with 8/6 and 6/8 A/D respectively so paras while still useless made more sense compared to inf with 6/10 rather than 11D vs 18 with modern inf
I like using stealth bombers because they have precision strikes to damage city infrastructure and slow down production in a city, so that makes it way easier to go in and have to deal with less units being build which leads to an easier capture of a city
Yesss. Civil defense is brutal to get through. Also, 10x less interceptions is great. But flaks/mobile sam are still an issue for them
What about the most fun units to play with tierlist 🤔 I would love to hear your thoughts on it. Great video, fun to watch too
Hot take but Ansars are super fun to play with.
Funny how the AI will research air born units but decide not to use them.
Ships are good but only if the AI uses them, both attack and bombard get ramped up to 11 it seems, RNG out the window 😂
For some weird reason I can't get SAM's to work, FLAK is ok, but fighters are the only way to go. For a long time I thought I had to put the SAM in sentry mode rather than fortify it for it to work, still garbage.
Kinda like with fighters you have to tell them to protect the air space, if you fortify your fighters they just sit on the ground.
Good list.
As always, the biggest imbalance is with bombers. Conquests giving them lethal bombardment was a mistake.
Agree. First thing I mod out.
Just like in real life, artillery is the king of the battlefield.
I think nukes are pretty good... of course probably if you are in the situation to use them effectively you had already won anyways (especially via UN vote or conventional war), but still. Better/faster than the planes that are not bombers in my opinion! I find other AI players declaring war on me after I nuked the big guy not that threatening if I just nuke them as well. Still I haven't been in the situation where the AI nukes me as retaliation, so I might be wrong, I only tried it when I was a huge empire with tons of factories and massive production (which would win anyways if I made 200 bombers instead of 70 nukes).
I'd like to see you go for a nuke strategy someday even if I understand you can't really nuke anyone if you were a small pacifist guy for the rest of the game
Nukes are great because there's nothing that does the same thing. Whereas, F15s would be one of the better units around if bombers didn't do a similar job.
My criteria got a little jumbled. I was simultaneously ignoring your other options, but also assuming the enemy has the typical units of the era.
If there's a unit you might change your mind on and put on a tier higher I think it's the nukes :P I used them sometimes in my games and I was surprised they actually were usable and had a purpose (unlike most of the other things). Then again you play on SID so idk if there they are playable lol probably not because even the small guys have 300 soldiers.
I just felt like the ability to do massive damage on a small area counters well the AI's habit to send all its army in one tile after they have railroads
Did you ever did a video showing C3X and what it adds to the game? Searching doesn’t show anything and it would be a nice video
I probably should. Ok, it's on my list.
at least they made boats' usefulness historically accurate
Yes, but also no! Carriers were so important in WWII and it's a shame we can't replicate sick carrier vs carrier battles
Carriers should absolutely not be as bad as they are in Civ 3. And most of the good offensive modern-era boats should probably have significantly better offshore bombardment.
@@TheShinyFeraligatr Agreed. WWII had epic carrier battles with devastating implications for the course of the war, and these are basically irrelevant in Civ 3
@@suedeciviii7142 Not even just that, there's a reason modern American military policy involves carriers so heavily.
@@TheShinyFeraligatr at present, I'm of the opinion that carriers would do little in a war with a more-or-less equal opponent. Against a well-armed enemy (mid-range missiles like Iran has), they are kind of vulnerable.
I never upgrade artilleries to radar because after each bombard the artillery asks you to move it, because it has two moves. So you just cant simply spam "B".
Each round takes like 10x longer with radar artilleries if you have a stack of 20+ :D. They are better but it makes the game so much slower and exhausting :D
Lmao
Just press B and afterwards SPACE if you don't want to move or W if you want to move ;)
good list !
I’m pretty sure radar artillery can bombard when loaded in a transport, that’s a fun thing I do when I’m just playing around in the modern era
No unit can do that, unless it works only in single player and not MP
I did not know this!
@@thathandsomedevil0828 It's not true unless I'm very mistaken
What i want to see is the guerrilla being used in a scenario that makes sense for the unit
How weird is that my Civ3Conquests games never had cruisers?
Not the CD version back in the time, nor the present Steam version.
Bizarre. But I think maybe they were introduced in PTW?
you are underrating nukes and icbms. They are an easy a tier. Great for shock attacks and they will win my current demigod game for me
So.. how does the AI react to testing nuclear weapons on barbarians?
Guess I need to redo a javelin thrower barb farming game to preserve some camps and test it…?
Hah! Not something I actually know the answer to.
@@suedeciviii7142 I do know that they get upset if you detonate nuclear weapons near their borders - reminds me of France somehow in the 90’s 😅
I buffed naval units across the board in my single player mod, and now I'm wondering if my buffs are enough lol
I actually kinda like how the flashier naval units are so outclassed by aircraft, because that tracts IRL- anti ship missiles fired from other ships and aircraft are the reason battleships and cruisers aren't built anymore
Though carriers being useless isn't exactly realistic I suppose, lol
Yup! Just a lot of games suffer from this, where they make units with such a narrow time frame of being useful such that there's no point in building them.
15:15 Unless you're the Vikings!
Amazing the difference between future/modern MP and SP. 3 of the best units with an honorable mention for carrier in those scenarios in D and F 💀
I think you're cool and your content is cool. I want to see more cool stuff from you.
That's a nice thing to say. Thank you! I've been pushing myself to make more (and slightly better edited) videos and I've been finding it fun and rewarding.
@@suedeciviii7142 you got a good thing going. You rekindled my love for CIV3 after coming from an Alpha Centauri binge. Greetings from Luxembourg!
@@junker154 Good news then, my next video and stream will be on Alpha Centauri
Hello there Suede! I have a question that needs an answer.
We know that a city has 8 squares around it, then 20 after a cultural expansion.
What do I win if I increase the population more than 20 citizens? Should I mine some irrigated squares in order to get more shields?
Thank you! Love from 🇦🇷
You get specialists. Take your pick, whether specialists are better, or the extra shields from the tiles.
Typically, in low corruption cities, mining is better, in high corruption cities, specialists
not sure i agree with you about the uselessness of the nuclear sub though. for 40 shields more you get a faster sub with a bit more defense. Should be the same tier as the conventional sub
4 MOVEMENT! THE SUBMARINE HAS 4 MOVEMENT!?!?
My bad. Move submarine down a bit to the bottom of B tier. I thought there was no way it had less than 5.
That being said, I checked, nuke sub has the same defense. So I think it still belongs in C tier (being 140 shields, vs 100 for the regular sub)
It’s an ironclad with stealth attack
I think mech infantry should be S-tier. I can't even count how many times I've been landed by like 5 transports out of nowhere where drafting mech infantries saved me lol
battleships do come before most of the others..
the SAM unit (not mobile) has no stats seemingly, so I am confused as to how it compares to the mobile SAM. It requires aluminum, whereas the mobile SAM does not, so I guess its more powerful?
The SAM missile battery?
@@suedeciviii7142 yes
I agree that boats are understatted, but goddamn does it make for some fun island games on single player. The only effective way to counteract lethal bombardment is to have a fleet of ships so large that the AI can never actually take any of them out. On my current game I have an armada of 6 carriers, 8 battleships, 4 cruisers, 10 aegis cruisers, 30 destroyers, and 6 transports, plus the stored 8 marines, 4 bombers, 4 jet fighters, and 16 stealth bombers. Nothing short of a nuke is going to be able to touch it.
I think naval combat in civ 3 is thrilling precisely because the stats are a bit wonky and you'll occasionally have upset victories, whereas in 4, 5, and 6 it's more or less a forgone conclusion. I disagree with you about nuclear subs. Yes, they are laughably weak, but they are a vital tactical tool for taking out transports protected by a stack of naval vessels before they can land the troops they're carrying. Great video as always!
honestly it was a mistake, i could not believe that regular subs only have FOUR movement!
Also just wanted to point out, in Vanilla Civ3, Marines had only 8! attack- so, Firaxis felt like they needed a buff, but not Paratroopers?!
And then Paratroopers actually get a bit of use in the Pacific War scenario because all the units are rebalanced?!
I'm so confused
Yes. The marine buff is a little underwhelming if anything. They need to be cheaper.
They even took away lethal bombard from planes in WWII in the Pacific. It's like they understood how their base game was imbalanced when making that scen, but they chose to ignore it.
Is the fact that artillery doesn’t have lethal bombard inconsequential for your analysis?
It would help but at the same time lethal bombard is only going to matter once the units are low anyway so having a bombard unit relatively cheap, can run on railroads, and still pack enough punch to weaken defenses makes the very strong
Pretty trivial to kill with an army, or vet cav. See the end of my recent Babylon stream for an example.
Lethal bombard would make it much better though.
Cruise missle is God level. Range is better then artillary lol.
You play Dhalsim in Street Fighter 2 don't you?
@@suedeciviii7142 Hey that guys a really good fighter in the game lol! Long Range fighter to keep your foes at bay. I played as him from time to time :).
Have you realy ever used cruise missle? It should have gotten its own G tier, as in Garbage.
I have. It has a significant chance of doing 0 damage, which is hysterical.
@@suedeciviii7142 here is a challange for you: no offensive units, military victory, and no artilery units, only cruise missiles for bombardment. Will have to edit cruise missile placement for sure after that :D
Cruise missiles were better before bombers had lethal bombardment.
I use paratroopers just because I like the animation :)
can we play modern mod single player for testing - i tried but game can't load
Does it crash? Any scenario with custom player data has that issue. Pick random civ and it should work fine.
Anyone knows if there's a way to zoom in more than what the game normally allows to? Like a mod or something?
You can zoom out with Z. If you want a more Zoomed in game, maybe lower your computer resolution
What about guerilla?
Same issue as infantry. It theoretically fills a niche but strictly worse than TOW.
14:55 :)
I think carriers could be decent units if they had double or triple the capacity to carry bombers, an extra HP or two, and maybe 4 AA defense. The way they are in the unmodded game just makes me sad... they should have been such a cool unit! By the way, I've actually used cruise missiles in exactly one game (they sucked) and I've used radar artillery in exactly one game (they were really good). I've never used helicopters, though.
Edit: I'm referring to single player games
Agreed. I think the devs wanted to make boats feel like big ticket items (losing a carrier in real life was crippling to their war effort) so they increased the costs but didn't increase the power. They need to hold more planes, or provide some other sort of benefit.
@suedeciviii7142 nah even that wouldnt do it, simply put its not the cost of the carier thats the problem, its the cost of protecting them, and when the ai is always over focusing on navy, and also you can even counter subs cause jts a turn based game, the naval combat just ends up being inherently broken and something to be avoided
@@nodrugar5248 Agreed. Some other buff would be needed. Maybe when the carrier dies, half its planes teleport home.