Adv2, Timmy

[timmy827]

Did what looked like obvious move 1SW for capital - I'm training myself to almost say 3rd ring doesn't exist as the culture grabs all 2nd ring first and buying many is very expensive.

Got worried by a barb scout seeing the capital on turn 4! But soon was neutralized due to the very sardine can setup with 3 AI's within 10 hexes; their starting bonus units wiped the camp before any trouble happened.

Went with God King at first civic choice for pantheon.

About turn 20 - head towards Astrology for religion (got a boost from a hut, not a natural wonder), and realized there is a 4th AI  (Scythia knows 'unmet player').  

Wow, you can't grab a hut that close to your cap with all your free units???  Unfortunately uesless (I had a builder out so would've gotten that boost in a couple turns anyways).  Working on a settler now



Crap.  That was probably the best spot available for 2nd city and lost it by a couple of turns.  Kudos to the AI for picking a good location - my intent was the exact same tile - but it doesn't feel like a super fair setup on cramped maps with Emperor AI's starting with Civ4-Deity-like starting units.  I saw the settler a few turns ago and was able to ask Harald not to settle close , but obviously that wasn't worth much.   

So best I could do was here

Ouch on the double warnings.  I am on Tomyris' capitals border, so yeah she has a legit complaint, but what was I to do?  There was really only one good spot that wasn't settling in the face of an AI and I just lost it to Norway.  (Northeast of capital is some flat grassland then tundra, Preslav CS blocks another site east on the river).  But geez, this is away from norways somewhat and he still complained.  I'm not sure if Sulla played this one out fully before posting the save, but worry that the negative reaction to any settlement means a small map might be near-guaranteed to devolve into warfare.  (I'm trying to be more critical of the Civ6 design than our sponsors! - Of course big maps where the AI's dont expand like my Rome in Adv1 are problems too; it may really hard to get a good balance for a scenario until the expansion AI is improved more).  My plan now was definitely to horseman rush the nearby AIs, however this placement was a gamble rather than west for 2nd horse resource right away.  (that horse city would be quite meh longterm, which is why I did this one first, I think, as well as grabbing land as close to Scythia as possible.  unfortunately the SW wheat got bought by them before I could pop borders to it).  

Speaking of which

I missed the picture, but it was 2fer with him signing up Scythia as well.  Interrupts the economic plans a bit...those had HS started at both cities and an Campus started at capital; using 2 2-mountain sites at cap.  But all on hold, 2nd settler more important, need another horse resource.  Went Stone Circles for Pantheon as we had decent number of stone/marble around.  


Ok, I think can handle this.  Fortunately Scythia didn't really send much or get another Envoy to Hong Kong to get them at war with me either.  Unfortunately Frederick has cramped me even more with a new city.  


Uhoh getting worse, the chariot is bad news and while Germany not at war, that also doesn't look promising.
I just got the archery boost and am gonna need it, also really need settler to get through to horses...also  I finish the Mil Tradition and adopt the Horse-building mil policy.  

Well, that's not gonna happen, Norway put their best unit in place to prevent that.  (Intelligence?  Blind luck from largely random movements?).  I can kill a wounded one of theirs instead and get the settler back to the cap but things deteriorated fast.


So archery would be good but Fred has (finally) DOW'd and I don't have enough frontline strengh; I can't attack with the slingers when they are doubled up in the city.  With warriors weakened (plus the BS of Fred being able to park units in my lands for several turns, and they don't get teleported out on DOW a la Civ4) my positioning gets overwhelmed and I lose 2 of the slingers, can only keep one in the city for upgrade.  Peace with Norway and a lux sale give me a glimmer of hope...maybe I can get that settler in place now...


But I spend that hope here, Scythia is finally doing something.  This was a mistake...

That honestly surprised me (see builder build in my under siege captial!) - I haven't seen any city combat yet.  Norway never tried attacking Cairo once, so I was assuming cities were stronger against warriors.  So, I'm not dead but clearly am screwed beyond reasonable hope of recovery, call it a conquest loss or resignation at 2000BC.  Ouch.

[timmy827]

So, it only took a couple days to play to that loss  (and now I wish I did the above writeup back then when I remembered it fully)
Since civ6 is still very new, I decided would still be fun to do a shadow game, with a reload about 10 turns back from defeat (after the Norway + Scythia DOWs but before much fighting, or Frederick joining).  
But didn't finish it.

Short summary of that replay:  
Took the rushes more seriously, put off finishing the settler for city #3 and the builder sillines, stayed in Agoge longer and spammed more warriors/slingers->archers for safety.  


In this timeline Barbarossa didn't declare war; not sure if more units from me deterred or just roll of the dice.  (He did keep a ton of units within my borders at capital....).   I killed some more of Harald's units and got a nice peace (33 g + 8 gpt).  Got a white peace with Scythia without much fighting there, could found Damascus west (the 'maybe 4' dot above) for 2nd horses and start cranking Horsemen out.  (I got the Foreign Trade civic for a swap around the time the 2nd horses was improved anyways, switching out of Agoge in the real-defeat was dumb, dumb move).  

Abotu T60 I could sign Fred to a joint war against Scythia (he even paid me for the 'privelege') so he threw his army that way; I didn't join in actively but instead hit Norway.  3-4 Horsemen could pretty easily take his two non-capital cities (no walls).
Before I got a battering ram in place for the capital, Fred DOW'd me finally; peaced Norway, wreck Fred's warriors and chariot and then was clearly over the hump militarily, captured 3 of his 4 cities.
(One issue I'm noticing with the combat system is it gets tempting to just conquer endlessly;  since most combats take off only 1/3rd or so of a units health it's much easier to never take losses once you have an army strong enough to conquer a couple cities, even if you have some tough fights you can rotate units out and avoid losing them, so becomes easy to just keep going after a few healing turns, little need to build reinforcements...I think this would be a considerable issue even if the tactical AI was much better, unlike civ4 where even with tech/promotions edge you will take some losses over a lot of 75-90% fights.  I suppose civ5 had this problem too, though aside from Holy Warriors I never really fought in my civ5 games since there was no motivation to conquer your way to a faster space win)
 
I think actually took 7 wars to conquer the 4 AI on the starting continent - made some other peace deals either to extort cash, reset war wearniess or just move on (leaving a crippled 1 city no-threat AI behind assuming could easily clean up later). .  About halfway through the wars I finished Stirrups with enough gold to eventually upgrade 4 chariots->Mamluks which were quite awesome (and of course AI was pretty bad; with the extra starting settler they can spam formidable early hordes but get totally outclassed later.  Despite them being ahead in tech, no AI swords or other strat-material units, no one built any spears; Scythia wastes their UU by using one at a time - also the game rules of 'no move after attack' means the historical advantage of horse archers disappears in civ6....).  Walls on most AI cities after first Norway conquest meant I had to wait for battering ram movement but that was only real speedbump.  It was also disappointing that AI expansion was really poor - not counting their free settlers, norway and Germany founded one more city each and that was it of the AI on home continent.  The big desert in the south limited the scythia/greece two's options somewhat but I found decent spots they ignored.

As of reporting day, the game is at 425AD; I own the whole continent, have 22 cities of varying size/qualities (10 captured, also a few captured settlers) (may do one more in the far south; tundra hills are still ok because hills >> all and some seafood).  My first belief (Jesuit Education) is finally getting used to buy Campus buildings as I've just about finished converting (inquistors are pretty awesome for this).  About to hit industrial in both tech (Mass Production, though a couple detours from beeline, including Cartography - scouts just starting to swim across the oceans) and civics.  Have just stabilized the gold situation about 100g before the army + all the captured district/building maintenance burned through what I could extort along the way (the +1 gold quarries at Banking were surpringly useful).  Got Colosseum (for 7 cities! location between my first 3 founded) to fix the amenity shortage - map seemed very weird, starting lux situation was nice with citurs/diamonds/marble near start but whole rest of the continent just has oodles more of those three plus whales - how many distinct "natural" luxuries spawn on the different map sizes?  I haven't seen other continent yet; doubt I would colonize much but could see a few cities to grab lux.

One other note from the replay - conquering cities seems a bit too strong, not just because the unit cost to do so can be low from poor AI.  They seem to fill up cities with districts well, so seems very profitable to capture their districts as opposed to building your districts which scale up in cost so much after the early game.  And you get soooo many more tiles at captured AI cities founded in the first 5 turns (IE capitals + whatever free settlers they get on higher diffs) - can immediately get all the tiles they claimed, then future culture expansion resets as if no borders had popped, so can expand those from say 16 to 22 tiles real fast as soon as peace is made and the occupation penalties go away.

There have been some comments on unfinished games so I'll throw in my own note.  I'm finding these hard to finish, I probably am more busy than in my RBciv4 heyday, but I also play very slowly when figuring stuff out, and this is very new to actually in context of RB events.  (I hadn't played very much Civ4 or MOO before started doing events there, but I got into RB after Beyond the Sword came out, so had devoured a lot of good guides and example games - uberfish, Sisutil, Sullla, T-hawk, Sirian etc - before doing any RB events).  I haven't really played any civ6 beyond the first two adventures so lots of stuff is new to me.  Some of the time is a little frustrating - looking up answers to how stuff works because the UI is not great and civilopedia lacking in some areas - but a lot of it is really fun figuring out stuff for the first time.  Wish I could finish events but doing so is  (Even typing up this short report took about 2 hours)
    

I'm torn between wanting to finish the shadow game anyways in unspoilered fashion  (knowing that whatever I post here will be too late to get most of the discussion) and just reading other peoples reports now.  Will be away from civ for a week starting soon over the holidays so we'll see, may depend on when the next event starts.  So, I'm still interested in this stuff even if I have trouble finished; avoiding reading for now but see a dozen other reports so hope there will be enough interest to sustatin a run of games.

[Sullla]

Wow, that was really rough. Triple war declarations from the AI in the first 50 turns?! I don't know if I would have used this savegame for Adventure Two if that had happened to me. I did actually play this one before sending out the save, and I expected the AI to get aggressive in at least some games. I did not expect *ALL* three neighbors to gang up against the player, and this does seem to be the one game where that happened. A roll of double zero on the roulette wheel, I suppose: everyone loses.

The one thing that I can think to recommend would be an earlier research of Archery tech. The archer units are just so much better than slingers; 10 extra strength and +1 range is hard to put into words. The attacks that enemy warriors shrug off from slingers do real damage from archers, and it's so much easier to attack in safety with that extra range. You had the right idea about Archery, and simply couldn't get there fast enough before time ran out. I guess this was mission accomplished in a sense for the Adventure Two scenario, seeing the AI manage to win another game, albeit with a cheese early game rush.

I did like the message on the losing screenshot: "rumor has it" that Germany has conquered Cairo.

Glad to hear that things went much better in the shadow game followup. Thanks for playing and reporting!

[timmy827]

Thanks, saw your post on new events summarizing how this one worked.
Nice to know (without spoilering on other reports, still might finish, though with new events coming soon who knows) that the overall difficulty level was pretty good and I just got way-unlucky in AI behavior (payback for Bakumatsu, where I got much fewer DOW's than most players!), along with a bit of arrogance on warrior swarms

One thought that occured to me
-I really like the change in Joint War (IE you can't start a spectator war, you have to join war in the target...of course you may be geographically isolated but it's better than Civ4/Civ5 where you could stay at peace )
-but the cost is way too low, both that AI's seem very willing and Fred paid me for a joint war in the replay.  Civ4 was better with its cost for DOW-deal, you needed to provide a pretty big tech/gold carrot and thus it basically wasn't possible until Middle Ages at least.