It was a shocker to me as well when I first played CIV III. However, I soon learned that either you can trade with the civ that has that particular resource or you must grab it either by finding, attacking a city near that resource or by using a settler to put a colony on that resource for you to exploit.

Anecdotally, I now have Civ IV, and it's surprising how stupid automated workers can be. No, the bananas do not need to be protected by a fort.

In Civ 4, building a fort on a tile containing a strategic resource gives you access to that resource. If the resource lies outside of your city radius there is no economic benefit to a plantation, whereas a fort allows you to better station defenders to protect the resource from being pillaged. It's usually not worth the longer build time in my opinion, but there is a valid logic to it.

A bigger complaint I have with automated workers is that their default setting will actually chop forests and replace your existing tile upgrades. Fortunately this can be toggled via options, but it's a pretty stupid default setting if you ask me.

Well, that's nice to learn with very little in game indicating or even logic itself designating, "Fort=resource have"

Civ3 is a pretty hard game, the AI can be relentless, don't know why they turned it into a pussy cat in civ4?

Strategic resources that can easily be absent is not a game idea i am fond of..... but i got the most enjoyment out of civ3 by building my own maps and making sure i got several of all the important resources. You do have to give some resources to the AI as well to prevent them floundering too much.

Every AI leader has different levels of aggression in Civ 4. Genghis Khan is much more likely to attack you without provocation Gandhi. You can always choose the option to increase the AI's aggression at the start of the game, too. I also prefer my AI enemies to be a little on the trigger happy side, so I usually turn that on.

Oh god no!

I don't want the AI to be so aggressive in the early game - but i would like it to be more aggressive once i am powerful... too bad i cannot put a timer on the aggression option - so it kicks in after a certain period of time.... that would be nice!

Edit: so yea, Civ3 the AI keeps coming at you hard even though you are powerful, that is the part about it i like, but not in the early stages of the game,,, that's why its such a hard game to play.

To be clear, I meant that the setting is turned on when you start the game, not that the AI's aggression is limited only to the early eras. Turn on that option and the AI will be aggressive throughout the entire game.

This is actually pretty annoying in Civ3 in the late game. Often AI will have no cities save for couple crappy cities super far from your domain, but they keep waging war on you refusing any peace offers. You actually have to go out of your way and wipe them out but good so that you can get some peace and focus on developing tech or an actual war with someone worthy.

It is a nuisance and does not make sense. Do this civilization have no self-preservation instincts? They really want me to wipe them out in the next 10 turns.

You use diplomacy in civ games??? Personally i have better things to do than be insulted by idiocy, so i don't use diplomacy and wherever i have to give a response i always reply with "kiss my arse"

I don't use diplomacy in any of the civ games.
I don't use diplomacy in Alpha centauri
I don't use diplomacy in civilisation call to power
I don't use diplomacy in Civilization beyond earth

Yes there are some advantages to be gained, but its not worth the trouble in my opinion. I much prefer simply destroying unreasonable AI - the more idiotic and unreasonable the AI is, the more satisfaction i gain from destroying them.

I do use diplomacy in Gallactic civilisations! - there is an awful lot of advantage to it in that game... so much so that ignoring diplomacy is akin to playing two levels harder!

I only use diplomacy to end war when it is dragging and I have already won, just don't have patience to mop it up. But yeah, otherwise I use diplomacy very early. From my experience diplomacy sucks in pretty much every strategy game I played.

Sucks - yes indeed.

It is because they don't want players to be able to exploit diplomacy.

But so long as they keep thinking that way, Diplomacy will continue being a pile of useless shxt - that's the reality of it.

I think if you are playing on mid level difficulty, diplomacy should be balanced, and if its too exploitable, fine, fxxx off and play on a harder difficulty level - problem solved!