[Fyron]

Yes, modern tanks are vulnerable. In order for musketeers to have a 10% chance of defeating a modern armour unit while defending, you have to have the unit in a metropolis, on a montaintop, river square, and be fortified. This multiplies its defense by 2.5 times. In a situation like this, where a single combat Lasts for four months(three attacks per turn for the tanks), there are plenty of occasions for a musketman to kill the soldiers, or disable the tank. After all, the attackers don't spend their entire lives inside the tank. The terrain is also completely unsuited to the tank, and perfectly suited to the infantry. In open terrain, you have tank traps, mines, and everything else the game abstracts away.

What you are trying to do is rationalize the absurdities in the combat system. It doesn't work. These are not men with low grade rifles, they are men with arquebuses. One small round bullet, which you have to pack in with the gun powder to the gun. Such guns can not penetrate a tank's armor, period. Sure, it is theoretically possible, but highly unlikely. The tanks get defeated on open terrain too. These musketmen don't have mines and such.

I highly doubt that this is the case, unless you are trying to use low-tech units to bombard high-tech ones.

Nope, trying to bombard equal and lower tech units. It happened all the time when I tried bombarding, even with absurd numbers of units.

Then you have not actually attempted this strategy. It works, and is one of the standard methods to play. You can play an entire game where you perform no research, and simply buy tech advances.

Ok, so unless you spend all your trade on taxes and then buy everything, you fall behind. Sounds like fun to me.

I assume that you never play on a difficulty level less or greater than monarch then, so that the AI doesn't get production bonuses, and you don't either? Otherwise, what you are complaining about is that the AI makes the game too hard, which is easily remedied by choosng an easier difficulty level.

I am complaining that the AI cheats too much. Not a simple bonus to remain competitive, but cheating. I stopped playing the game long ago because it was no fun. So, of course the rampant cheating is insurmountable with my skill at civ 3. Had the game been fun, I could probably have played enough to learn how to cope with the cheating. But, it wasn't fun, so I stopped playing.

In my opinion, they are what make the game worth playing. It is unrealistic to assume that high-tech units will _always_ beat low tech ones.

It is unrealistic for large numbers of high tech units to be required to defeat low tech units. The problems happen with things like Pikemen too. Tell me how men armed with Pikes (and nothing else) can defeat tanks? They simply can't, unless you artificially create a lot of bizarre circumstances in their favor. In 99.99% of situations, the pikemen would be slaughtered without any danger at all to the tank. But in civ 3, they can defeat the tanks.