CD Player's Site
Hints, Tips, Strategy and FAQs for playing Populous III online

A: There are two possibilities. You're either stupid or ignorant. ;-) If you're stupid, you might as well stop now, unless you enjoy losing (fortunately, I do, or at least I don't mind too much). But I'll bet it's just ignorance, and we can do something about that. You need to learn some tricks and techniques. That way you'll become less ignorant and start winning a few. Ignorance is much better than stupidity as a starting point! It seems to me that most people play anything up to 20 or 30 games before they start winning the occasional game, because the online game is *so* different from the standalone, so you'll need stamina. Remember that it's fun to win, but you only learn when you lose. Here are a few things I picked up early on:

Build early, build fast - Most victories go to the player with most fighters or most spell-power. Both require a large population, which requires a large settlement, so make sure that your braves are always building. That means you have to keep laying down houses, and maybe making new land, so keep landbridge charged. In the standalone game, you can take time to think about things, pause the game, have a coffee and carry on. Online, it's fast and furious, and slow = dead. (Incidentally, you can pause a game when online, but please don't do it.)

Learn what the sounds mean - They will give you early warning of attack. Each spell has its own associated word, and listen out also for the acknowledgement sounds, especially of preachers and spies. You really should be able to recognise them if you've played through the single-player levels, but you can hear the full set on several of the web sites listed below if you need to refresh your memory.

Watch out for early attacks - I now always lay down a training hut as my first building if I can (preacher if it's enabled, otherwise warrior) and train up 3-4 braves. It's a drain on resources, but gives some defence against an early rush by the enemy shaman with or without followers.

Watch for 'loaded' games - Experienced players (who should know better) sometimes host games and set the options and spells so narrowly that only one strategy can succeed. An example is to choose a world with a central totem which provides mana, and then to disable most of the spells, plus firewarriors, preachers and spies, plus guard towers, boats and balloons. This means that the first one to the totem starts getting loads of extra mana and can therefore rapidly power up to Angel of Death (AOD) which you have no defence against. If you find yourself in this position, and haven't explicitly agreed to it beforehand, I believe you are justified to quit the game - no one deserves points for that. As you get more experienced, you may get to spot these scenarios and can get a lot of pleasure in beating one of these guys in their own sandpit, but don't expect to get a point out of it - they are not usually good losers.

Choose your opponents carefully - As a newbie, if you play a shaman, you will lose! Stick to wildmen to have any chance of a win. You will also soon learn who is nearest to your level of skill, so go for new names, or names of people you *almost* beat before. If your memory is as bad as mine, keep a notebook by the machine and note down who you play and put an asterisk next to those you would like to play again. Bear in mind that the only way to learn new tactics (apart from this site :-) is to fight someone better than you, so the shamans are really acting as unpaid trainers when they offer to play newbies. I don't think we should begrudge them their points for that.