Civ 3 emperor game getting tense...
Byzantines started to run away from the rest in my game and were poised to take over their entire super continent, which would probably have meant game over for me. The Hittites are a larger nation on the same continent, but for some reason not as advanced, and so unable to deal with Byzantine tanks and infantry. The Spanish also share the continent, but have been reduced almost to complete irrelevance by ongoing wars.
This is a typical lategame civ3 headache, but fortunately as it turned out, my possible saving grace was that I didn't have any oil on my continent (which I share with Russia and Japan). Normally this would be a severe kick in the nuts, being unable to build any mechanized units like bombers or tanks. But in this case I noticed a strategic piece of unclaimed marshland (1 solitary tile) close to the nexus point of Spain, Byzantine and the Hittite kingdom. A few tiles away from this marsh tile there was an oil deposit, technically part of Spain, but not close enough to their cities for them to hold on to it if a settlement expanded even once on the marsh tile.
So I loaded up two galleons with a settler, 3 workers, 2 artillery and 2 infantry units and crossed the ocean to the marsh. It took 2 turns to drain the marshland before I could settle, and I promptly secured the oil deposit.
Seeing as the Hittites, Spain and myself were at war with Byzantine at the time, this nexus point quickly turned into a massive war zone.
Luckily, even though Byzantine and myself were on equal footing technologically, their modern age research consisted only of ecology, whereas mine consisted of computers. They could build recycling centers, but I could build mechanized infantry, the best defensive unit in the game, with a very decent attack.
I thus had better units for the war, which nullified Byzantine's numerical advantage somewhat. The problem though was that I was on Byzantine turf, and ocean away from my factories. Using transports are too costly, too dangerous and too time consuming, so I reassigned most of my workers to build airports so that I could airlift tanks, artillery, mechanized infantry, workers and whatever else I needed en masse. Stuff that I could actually build with my new oil income.
The end result was several turns of intense airlifting, bombing and fighting, until I got enough of a foothold to destroy two Byzantine cities and capture one more, Leipzig (yeah, Germany was swallowed up by the Hittites and Byzantines).
This netted me a choke point between Byzantine and the Hittites. The former were very, very far from spent, but luckily they were prepared to declare peace, which gifted me the golden opportunity to seal off Byzantine from the Hittite part of the super continent with a wall of units.
Now I'm hoping that with Byzantine at least temporarily cut off, the Hittites can consolidate their position and reclaim a few cities. Especially now since I gave them tech to build tanks. In the meantime I'm going to reinforce that entire area as quickly as possible with fortresses and barricades along its border, for the inevitable war that will follow in 20-30 turns.
Matewis: When I played I also liked going for a mountain with a brook :) To get by the freezing problem I would try to build an underground aqueduct that used the brook to fill up an underground reservoir with a series of sluice gates. Though often I couldn't get it done it time I went with an underground well. I did some flailing around when everything was still frozen. I actually have ramps from the z level below across the width of the brook where I mined through the wall. Didn't help as everything was still frozen. 
