Civ 6 SG2 - Duty Free Egypt

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Save. Try not to get as frustrated as I did!

[Sareln]

Cool. Got it. Am travelling this weekend so I'll be sneaking this in on the laptop. Will post overview and pre-play thoughts tonight (+12 hrs) and then probably play the next day (+24 hrs).

[Sareln]

Overview thoughts. Prosecute the war against Spain until they're off the continent and will sign a deal which cedes those cities, the founding of that one city on the Greek continent doesn't seem to be worth pursuing. Sign peace with China whenever it's offered. Let Industrialization builds continue, use copious gold to buy builders and land tiles to prop up cities. Forgot to check, but if we are already on track to get a GM, maybe spend our culture advancing elsewhere and let the Eureka finish it.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Overview thoughts. Prosecute the war against Spain until they're off the continent and will sign a deal which cedes those cities, the founding of that one city on the Greek continent doesn't seem to be worth pursuing. Sign peace with China whenever it's offered. Let Industrialization builds continue, use copious gold to buy builders and land tiles to prop up cities. Forgot to check, but if we are already on track to get a GM, maybe spend our culture advancing elsewhere and let the Eureka finish it.

China I think will take white peace anyway. You might be able to get a small amount of gold out of them too.

GM is rather close about 6-8 turns away I think? I would personally buy buildings like the markets/banks over tiles because they get a quick return especially when you get the plus 100% com district buildings income card.


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[Sareln]

Overview thoughts.  Prosecute the war against Spain until they're off the continent and will sign a deal which cedes those cities, the founding of that one city on the Greek continent doesn't seem to be worth pursuing.  Sign peace with China whenever it's offered.  Let Industrialization builds continue, use copious gold to buy builders and land tiles to prop up cities.  Forgot to check, but if we are already on track to get a GM, maybe spend our culture advancing elsewhere and let the Eureka finish it.

China I think will take white peace anyway. You might be able to get a small amount of gold out of them too.

GM is rather close about 6-8 turns away I think? I would personally buy buildings like the markets/banks over tiles because they get a quick return especially when you get the plus 100% com district buildings income card.


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Delay another 12 hours due to lost time on the driving around, sorry.

If it's 6-8 turns my inclination is not to wait.  That +100% building income card is worth what? 7*3 + 7*(whatever banks are worth) per turn and it doesn't really compete against another card of similar power?

I did see Great Zimbabwe started, suggestion or an actual thing we're pushing for?

[Sareln]

Edited to add pictures.

Played.  I did take peace with Spain after taking Barcelona, got all the cedes.  The reason to take peace is that the cap one-shots capitals, does 50HP/shot to Knights, and 75HP/shot to crossbows and I didn't see a way to advance profitably into it.  I do believe that we captured niter around barcelona (Philip had it on his resource screen until Barcelona was captured).

I forgot to switch over into the 100% gold civic, but I did finish both enlightenment and mercantilism, the merchant just came in on the last turn.  I did pick up some military techs b/c I figure we want to be able to roll-over people a lot faster if it comes to that, and the next tech to steam-power is 11T with a Eureka for shipyards we can probably buy our way into (gold -> science).

The save is here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4995...0.Civ6Save




War weariness is not applied evenly, and it seems to be hammering two cities in particular.




The Spanish capital can one-shot catapults, which is why I started teching towards Bombards, b/c it means any city we fight from here on out, to overthrow it, we'll need non-fragile siege.




Scythia loves the missionary, we may need to kill them to prevent a religion loss depending on how well they do against Greece.




I noticed I could get an IND district in here from the city south of NAFTA (Capitalism?) and have it be in range of silk road.




Civic in and triangular trade adopted.




Spain is fielding Conquistadors, this one we can gun down with lots of crossbows.




There's another IND city state on the far continent, worth befriending for the extra IND district production?




Peace with China for resources and GPT.




Scythia is gunning for the Chinese island I think...




Peace with spain, all his gold, all his resources, and cessations on the cities we've taken.




Even crossbows take 75 HP damage versus the city center.




Our current Civic setup, need to take the next free transfer for the +100% gold policy, my bad there.




Spain made Seoul Neutral, so it needs to be regained at some point.

[Ruined Everything]

Great turns, REM and Sareln!

Popped open the save and had a look. 

First, we appear to be running up against our amenities cap - most of our cities have 0-1 amentities. I notice that we appear to be moving towards neighborhoods civicswise - why don't we stop off at zoos first? If we switch our research to Astronomy we can put two more turns into civil engineering, grab the colonialism boost, tech natural history and have our core cities build zoos after they finish 3-turning some workers.

Second, we appear to be running up against our housing cap. I think Pindicator had a point when he mentioned that we had basically no farms. There's plenty of good spots for farm triangles - I would suggest laying down 10-12 farms over the next turnset and getting our cities up to size 9-10. We aren't quite ready for Medina quarter sadly, but it should be an option by my turnset.

Governmentwise, can we shuffle in liberalism for town charters as a quick fix to the amenities crunch? With our massive army, swapping retainers for conscription (which is saving us <20 g/t) might be a wise idea to get some value out of our units. (Current government set up below, for the curious.)



I notice we have 5 excess resources waiting to be sold. Can we sell/trade them for gold/more amenities resources?

Finally, I'm still unconvinced that we should be building harbors. Foreign trade routes are pretty lucrative - Valencia is worth 20 g/t! - but if we had built campus-library-university + rationalism first/second we could have 200 beakers/turn right now. I don't know if the speed up from our massive gold surplus is going to overcome the fact that our research is 100 beakers/turn by T160 - not terrible, but from my (delayed, alas) Adventure 2 I'm sure that this isn't optimal (granted the land kinda sucks.)

[pindicator]

So I think we're not in that bad of a situation for a good space race completion time. I spent last night writing up my adventure 2 resort report and in that game a didn't break 100bpt until around t150, yet had things skyrocket from there.

I'm going to put us on a growth path as much as possible,which means zoos so our core can grow. Getting to the next district threshold and laying down campus districts will be a goal. Will try to play tonight if I can, but i have some holiday errands to run after work.

[Gaspar]

Looks good guys.

Loaded the save to have a poke around...

• Looks like we have GM ready so we can grab Seoul back right away. Toronto is one of the best late game city-states but we're already down 5 envoys to Greece so I'm less than enthusiastic that we could make that happen. Certainly difficult if we don't claim some sort of envoy boosting policy. Regardless, I'd definitely claim the GM, we're gaining GM GPP 2.5x as fast as the next competitor and I'd expect that to only increase as we build more buildings.
  
• On that note, we'll earn James Watt in the next turnset. He can flesh out the Industrial District of one of the newer burgs. There's enough options that I don't think its especially important where we choose to slam him.
  
• Great Zimbabwe is pretty nice but if we don't have a plan to make that happen faster, I don't think its worth plowing through another 4.5 turnsets to get it. Might just be smarter to finish that Campus.
  
• Growth and getting buildings in completed districts and getting Campuses down where possible should definitely be the next priority.
  
• We've grabbed all the interesting civics for a little bit. I think basically at this point we just get Zoos from Natural History and then push for the 3rd tier governments. Both Class Struggle and Suffrage have policies we'd want but I expect this to be a bit of a slog because we're unlikely to grab most of the boosts along the way. Obviously we get Neighborhoods which will be handy on the govt path.
  
• I think maybe Liberalism and Medina Quarter are policies we're going to need to employ, given the Amenity and Housing crunch. We wouldn't get a huge benefit from them just yet, though.
  
• I'm not sure how much wonder whoring we can realistically employ, but Potala, Oxford and Forbidden City are all pretty good ones right on our immediate tech path. We can get the Astronomy boost by finishing the Campus at Colombian Exchange and buying the buildings, but I'm not sure if that's actually worth more than just completing it outright. Since we're at peace, I'd probably just ignore the military techs once Gunpowder is in and sally forth through the sciencey part of the tree after grabbing Printing. I'd go Astronomy > SciTheory > Sanitation > Economics > Flight > Radio or something similar. Just make sure we're Suzerain of Seoul before teching Flight
  
• We really need to find a way to grow Silk Road. It can be a beast, but it really needs to be alot bigger. I think it might be worth cashing in those Rainforests and laying some farms down, even if it has a bit of short-term pain involved. I would also get an Entertainment Complex in there even if a Campus or Harbor is attractive because the central location means those Amenities help a lot of cities.
  
• We should probably get some espionage cooking. There are techs we could steal, as well as Great Works to help the cultural push.
  
• There are some somewhat unfavorable but doable deals we can make to get Silk from Norway and Marble, Truffles and Coffee from Greece. Even if it ends up costing alot of gpt, I think at a minimum Marble and Truffles are deals that should be done. Silk and Coffee are one ofs so will be pricier but given our Amenities crunch are still not beyond the realm of reality. I would definitely do these over just getting a few gpt for the extra resources. We can get all 3 of the Pericles amenities for all our spares and 50gpt. And we can get Silk for Oranges and 44 gpt. Those both sound pretty bad but we are making 244 gpt atm and that will only increase.
  
• I'm not sure precisely how it works, but I don't think the Spanish war weariness is going to erode anytime soon. Might be worth going back and killing them off later, but the warmonger penalties are always an issue. Warmongering in this game is so unbelievably stupid, all we did was respond to aggression and take a pair of cities and we have, for example, a -63 warmongering penalty with Greece. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
  
• We should be very aggressive with that gold, particularly if we don't make those trades with our Allies. Builders and Granaries for newer cities, production, gold and science buildings in more established ones are all better uses than just stockpiling. I suspect Sareln was stockpiling to upgrade Bombards but now that we've decide to peace Spain, I'd burn it on domestic concerns. I'd definitely buy Granaries in places like ACME, Cobden-Chevalier, Big N Large for example. A lot of those newer cities oculd also use builder labor.
  

Anyway, Sareln just sort of finished a phase, as our Cultural priorities and Military priorities just completed. Now we focus on growth and modernizing. We're in pretty good shape to win probably in 2.5 rolls through the turn-order.

[pindicator]

Well, Firaxis managed to kill my strategy for the rest of this game. Any ideas on how to proceed?