Civ6 PBEM: Sullla of Rome

[Athmos]

I always saw Great People teleporting to the nearest city on "capture" as well.

I agree that we should at least have an option to make them killable, I don't like that there is no real penalty for exposing your great generals. Isn't it enough that they can all instantly teleport between your cities ?

[Sullla]

Fahbs and gunnerxtr: Is that true? I also assumed that a Great General would be killed instantly if an enemy military unit captured it. Hopefully it's not something we'll have to explore in this game...

Athmos: Thanks again for that information; perhaps the zone of control rules for embarked units haven't changed and I simply had a case previously where a city I was sieging only had one water tile in its immediate ring. It ended up not mattering at Constantinople, and I have a galley in range to put Mediolanum under siege when it comes time to attack there. The small cities on TheArchduke's northern coast shouldn't require a siege unless something changes significantly in the next turn or two.

I downloaded the save early this morning, and was confronted with this situation:



Oh teh, why do you have to be good at this game? Now I know why the lurker thread has been buzzing so much for the past few days. I thought it was due to my attack on TheArchduke, and I'm sure that's part of it, but now I can see that teh was planning his own attack on me. I wonder if this was premeditated or a reaction to my capturing of TheArchduke's capital (thus demonstrating that the bulk of my army was off elsewhere)? My guess is that teh reacted to my own attack rather than having an invasion planned ahead of time; he correctly realizes that if he sits back and does nothing, I'm going to take all of northern Rome and effectively seal this game. I can't fault teh at all, even if it does make my life a lot more stressful here. A nice decision on his side.

Fortunately, I planned for this scenario. There's a reason why I went to the trouble of building those city walls in Aquileia, and it was for exactly this situation: an attack against my flank while my main army was off in northen Rome. Teh used his turn to fire with three archers, two against my northern warrior and one against my southern slinger. (I should have had the slinger in a more defensive position, although I wasn't expecting to be attacked.) The warrior would have died without the Oligarchy bonus so props there for my government choice. I also had the good news to finish Feudalism civic this turn, and that allowed me to make a policy swap:



Conscription was a mandatory choice in the Military slot, or else my income would go negative from all my units. Similarly, I wanted Serfdom here for the builder that's about to pop out of Ravenna. As much as I hated to give up Urban Planning, I think this was the right decision for at least the next few turns. In the Diplomatic slot, I picked up Diplomatic League to get the 2 for 1 envoy policy, and then I grabbed Bastion in the Wildcard policy. If you're looking to defend a city that has walls in place, this is the one-stop shop for protection. Let's see teh try to break through my city defenses with his archers after adding another +6 defensive strength and +5 ranged strength to Aquileia.

I would also have liked to slot in Agoge policy here for the +50% production bonus to Ancient/Classical ranged and melee units. Unfortunately, that policy was obsoleted by my discovery of Feudalism, replaced by Feudal Contract. That's a real pain, although I don't know that I could have afforded a slot for Agoge anyway right now. Too bad I'm not Germany with that extra Military card.



I'll deal with teh in a minute. First things first, let's move the units up in northern Rome. Cumae was very easily captured by the same legion that attacked the city last turn, with another attack dealing 150 damage and the legion taking all of 5 damage in return. Strength 48 against strength 5, yeouch. I actually had a bad dice roll last turn, if you go back and look at the expected damage versus the result. This was more in line with what was supposed to happen. One turn of healing will bring that legion back to full health again, and then it's time to head further east and continue the push.

Since the horseman wasn't needed at Cumae, it was able to push over to the east to the next city of Lugdunum. My other legions and the Great General followed accordingly:



Note that the iron resource over here has already been mined. That tends to confirm my suspicion that TheArchduke has finished Iron Working as a tech, although I also think he doesn't have the gold right now to upgrade a warrior to a legion. Perhaps he's building one in Mediolanum or Arpinum. Regardless of what he's doing, I need to move quickly and get these units back down to deal with Germany. I can only attack with two units against Lugdunum next turn because the Great General couldn't quite make it into the position I wanted, but I think attacks from the legion and the horseman will be enough when boosted by the Great General. That's assuming that Lugdunum remains at 10 strength, naturally. The legion should do roughly 125 damage on the first attack, and the horseman should be able to do the other 75 damage needed.

I made a tactical mistake with the southernmost legion. I moved it onto the stone tile, where it's in range of an archer that TheArchduke has on the bananas tile. Now I couldn't see the archer when I moved there, but my galley is sitting just outside Mediolanum's borders, and when I moved it up for scouting, the archer was revealed. I should have moved the galley first before the legions; doing things the other way around was silly. The saving grace is that a ranged attack at 25 strenth shouldn't do very much damage against a legion at 49 defensive strength. The power differential of 24 points should cut that down to about 10-15 points of damage. I also can't remember if archers can shoot over jungle tiles; if they can't shoot over jungles, then I'm fine here. (If the Archduke wants to move northeast of the bananas to shoot me, he's going to have a very very dead archer unit.) Actually... can you still move along enemy roads in Civ6? I seem to remember that you can do that in this game, which makes no sense at all, but I think that's the case. If it's true, then I can move up on the road and slaughter that archer even on its current tile. One way or another, we'll learn a bit more about the tactics of combat here next turn. So maybe this wasn't a tactical error, but rather a cunning bait for a trap. Yeah, we'll go with that.



At Aquileia, I pulled back my damaged units out of range of teh's archers. The healthy slinger moved into the city to be upgraded into an archer next turn. Too bad I was 3 gold short this turn, it would have been handy to have the archer ready for next turn. I also swapped Arretium and Aquileia onto archers, because all the districts in the world aren't going to help if I get run over by enemy units. Now here's the thing about teh's army composition. I've been tracking it thus far, and I'm pretty sure he has 1 warrior and about 5 or 6 archers. That's a strong defensive army, but it's not too good for actually attacking someone. In particular, without melee units to put a city under siege, it's really hard to capture anything because the city will just keep healing between turns. Archers also get a significant penalty when attacking cities; I went back and looked at a screenshot from my very first Civ6 game in Adventure One, where my crossbows were shooting the Roman capital (heh) with a -17 combat strength penalty. Archers get something similar; it's probably a penalty of -10 combat strength, something along those lines. So my city has a defensive strength of 38, and teh's archers can only attack it at a combat strength of roughly 10-15. They will do almost no damage, and without melee units to siege the city, that damage will quickly heal back. Meanwhile, I have my own walls to shoot back at the attackers, which will fire back at 30 strength (walls do damage equal to your best ranged unit = archer at strength 25, then I have the Bastion policy in place for +5 strength on top of that). Plus I'll also have an untouchable archer inside the city after upgrading the slinger next turn. Aquileia will be a very difficult fortress for teh to crack. I don't think he can do it with his current units; if he starts showing up with horsemen (which he can build), that will be the danger.

I made another tactical error here at Aquileia, and this one was more significant. You can see that I retreated my builder off to the west; my thinking was that if I moved the builder onto the forested hill tile, I could chop the forest on Turn 79, but then the builder would be captured by an archer on Turn 80. Well, that would normally be true... except that the builder has exactly one charge left, so it would disappear after chopping the forest. D'oh. What I realized during my morning commute is that I should have moved onto the forested hill, swapped Aquileia to a horseman, and then chopped the horseman to completion. A horseman here would be like a fox in a hen yard, able to strike teh's archers with its 36 strength rating (against 15 melee strength for archers) and then dart away again with its 4 movement points. Sigh. That's what I get for playing this turn at 5:50 AM just after waking up. Depending on how aggressively teh positions his archers, I may still be able to set up that forest chop. We'll see how serious he is about pushing against this city and taking return fire from the city defenses.

Offscreen, TheArchduke used an archer to shoot at the archer I have positioned at Arretium. I figured that he would do that, but I also think it was worthwhile to redline the warrior that I attacked there last turn. I retreated my northern archer into Arretium, where it will heal back to full in two turns. We'll see if that unit is needed more at Arretium or Aquileia.



No huge changes back in my core at the moment. That stupid Eagle Warrior is still poking around; at this point, I expect Yuris to attack me as well, because honestly at this point why not? It wouldn't be one of my games without getting ganged up on by everyone else at some point. I would still like to complete the Commercial district at the capital if possible; at the moment, this situation doesn't appear to be dire enough to force me to swap onto something else. Ravenna's builder can always chop something if things truly go badly. I also did finish my first Commercial district at Arretium this turn, although it was a bit overshadowed by other events taking place on the map.

In city state terms, I dropped an envoy into Hong Kong to pick up the double envoy bonus. Then after playing my turn and sending it off, I realized that I should have ignored Hong Kong and dropped both of my envoys into Cultural city state Vilnius. This would have made me the suzerain of that city state, and brought it into the war against teh. Argh! Really should not play such crucial turns so quickly. Well, I will get a free envoy when I finish the Mercenaries civic and that's only 6 turns away. I can drop two envoys into Vilnius at that point unless something changes. Overall, I think my defensive situation is OK at the moment, but it could be so much better with a forest chop lined up into a horseman and the city state down to the south brought into the war on my side. I really hope overlooking those small tactical moves don't end up costing me this game.



Teh will claim the first Great Scientist next turn; he must be a fractional amount short of recruiting Hypatia this turn. She's the best of the early game Great Scientists, and will be a major help to teh if this turns into a long game. Of course, by declaring war on me, teh also declared war on Stockholm, so he lost the +2 beakers he was getting over there. He deserves it. Teh is also beginning the slow climb towards the first Great Engineer, while offscreen I am in the early stages of pursuing the second Great General.

What a busy game. I need to push through TheArchduke's remaining cities quickly before any more shenanigans can take place in the east. We live in interesting times.

[Athmos]

(...)  Actually... can you still move along enemy roads in Civ6? I seem to remember that you can do that in this game, which makes no sense at all, but I think that's the case.(...)

Yes you can, you should and you probably will

in civ 6, roads are roads and everyone's a commando

[unaghy]

Excellent last several turns report. With all the action, finally some drama after all those quite turns with only numbers to read about

[antisocialmunky]

Honestly I would prefer good roads and not being able to commando them vs roads sucking until late game.  I really wish they had multiple qualities of road where every time you renew a trade route, it would upgrade the road to a more usable level kinda like a cottage but walky.

a ranged attack at 25 strentgh shouldn't do very much damage against a legion at 49 defensive strength

RAWR

[fahbs]

I too thought great people were killed when captured, since they just disappeared instantly. But when I do it right next to one of their cities, that person just teleports there.

Archers cannot shoot directly over jungle hexes. Your legion is safe from an archer on the banana tile.

Do units heal faster if they're inside a city, or do units all heal at the same rate anywhere within friendly borders?


and wait...horemen darting away after attacking? I thought attacking instantly depleted all movement points. Is this not the case?

(edit: I was going to correct that typo, but the idea of units called "horemen" rampaging across the map was too funny to delete)

[Athmos]

Without modifiers (medics, chaplains, great people boni...), units heal 5 HP/Turn in enemy territory, 10 HP/T in neutral territory, 15 HP/T in your territory and 20 HP/T in your cities. Naval units can't heal outside of your territory without a specific lvl3 promotion.

Sulla, your reports are always among the very best I've ever read, I'm commenting about various details but really they are always informative, detailed and engaging as well as entertaining, and this one is a very fine example of all these qualities, so THANK YOU and keep up the amazing work* ;-)


*specially as I now have a more concrete sense of the crazy amount of work involved after posting a few poorly documented text-only reports myself

[Sullla]

Fahbs: you are correct, horsemen can't move after attacking. The only unit that can do that in Civ6 is the Russian cossack unique unit, and it's supposed to be extremely powerful from what I've heard. I was thinking that a horseman would be able to move out and kill an archer, then retreat back to safety and start healing the next turn. Normal melee units can't do that because they only have 2 movement points, and archers can shoot 2 tiles away. This is why melee units are generally seen as weak in Civ6; they need a Great General to buff them up to 3 movement points to get on top of ranged units properly.

Athmos: thanks for posting the healing information along with so many other helpful tidbits. I did know the healing numbers ahead of time, but it's handy to have here in the thread as a reference. It's a pleasure to put these turn reports together as well, although I agree that they can be very time consuming. There's a reason why so many of the games we have here at Realms Beyond start out with a flurry of posts and then die out over time. Keeping up the time investment day after day, week after week, can be a chore. That said, this game has been a ton of fun to play, and I'm glad that myself and the other players have been able to share it with so many others. There's been more community interest in this game than anything else in the last few months, and I'm hoping it will help us keep drawing in some new faces for more Civ-related stuff. Maybe when this game is over, I can go back to working on my website and streaming - just no time right now with me doing so much writing every day.

Antisocialmunky: these pictures are great, much appreciated! Although as it turns out, I still haven't had a legion attacked by an archer yet in this game. I'm sure it's only a matter of time on that front though. Let's get to Turn 79:



I'll start with the northern front first. Capturing Cumae was enough to earn this legion a promotion, and I realized that I could save a turn of healing by moving southwest onto the wheat and then promoting. It's often a good idea to save the promotions in Civ6 because units heal back 50 HP upon promotion, which can be very powerful in combat. However, the tradeoff is that units can't gain more experience until they actually use their promotion, and promoting immediately ends their turn. I actually like this system, although the promotions themselves in Civ6 are mostly boring stuff. I took the promotion that grants +7 combat strength against melee and ranged units (Battlecry); the other option was +10 strength when defending against ranged attacks (Tortoise). The promotions finally have their own unique icons now in this patch version in another overdue interface addition. I'll skip posting the screenshot to save space.

Now if you look closely, you might notice something different about TheArchduke's cities. They're all sporting a huge increase in combat strength, from 10 points up to 30 points. Ugh - that means TheArchduke managed to produce a legion somewhere on the map. Sure enough, I was able to find the bugger:



There he is northeast of Mediolanum. I suspect this was a warrior upgrade; I knew that TheArchduke had two warriors prior to this conflict beginning, and the other one is the damaged unit sitting inside Mediolanum. Unfortunately this prevented me from being able to take Lugdunum this turn, as my legions went from doing roughly 125 damage per attack to something like 30 damage per attack. I should still be able to get the city next turn, but two attacks wasn't going to be enough to claim it on this turn, and without the ability to siege Lugdunum, it was better to wait and attack with everything next turn. It's unfortunate that I didn't get one more turn before TheArchduke was able to produce a legion, as I would have been able to roll over Lugdunum without much effort. On the other hand, if he had managed to turn up a legion sooner, it would have slowed me down enormously; Cumae fell to a single legion, and that never would have happened otherwise. All things told, this could have been a lot worse.

The legions had to use up their movement surrounding Lugdunum. The horseman though had extra movement points left over, and I saw an opportunity to make a significant action:



50 gold from pillaging that cattle pasture. Gimme gimme gimme. I should have researched the pillage information sooner, as I could have pillaged the horses back before taking the capital, and that would very much have been worth doing. Nonetheless, going from 35 gold to 85 gold was a very big deal indeed. It's too bad that plantations inexplicably pillage for faith (what?!) and not gold, or I'd cash in the furs plantation for another 50 gold next turn. For the curious, farms heal units when pillaged, pastures/camps provide 50 gold, mines provide 25 science, quarries provide 25 culture, and plantations provide 25 faith. The only thing I really want right now is gold, since I made that much science/culture in a single turn now anyway. But gold... that I definitely need.

The plan up here remains the same: capture Lugdunum (should be able to do next turn), then swing south and encircle Mediolanum. While the legion and defending archers will make it trickier, I should be able to continue taking the remaining Roman cities with my 4 legions + horseman + Great General combo. I even have the galley offshore to put Mediolanum under a proper siege. The key issue is time; I can definitely take over what's left of TheArchduke, it's just a matter of how fast I can do it with teh threatening me off in the east.



Speaking of teh, this was the situation that presented itself to me at the start of my turn at Aquileia. Teh fired on the city with three archers and moved up another archer and warrior behind his initial firing line. Based on my unit count, this is most of his army in this screenshot; there should be another archer or two somewhere else in the fog. Those three archer shots didn't exactly do a lot of damage to Aquileia's walls, but at the same time, if I'm not able to stop them they'll eventually be able to chip them down and then start assaulting the city itself. I needed to come up with a plan here.

First things first: upgrade the slinger inside the city to an archer at a cost of 30 gold. Next turn, the city walls + archer combination can hopefully do enough damage together to kill one of those archers, or at the very least redline it. Still, it would be great if I could get just a bit more firepower here...

You might have noticed that my initial trade route ended this turn, allowed me to reassign the trader to a new location. When I was looking at potential destinations for the trade route, suddenly a plan came together all at once:



The current quest for Vilnius was to send them a trade route. That's been their quest since I initially met them 65 turns ago, and I've been ignoring it all the while. But if I were to send them a trade route, that would fulfill their request and grant me a free envoy, and that plus the envoy I already had saved up in hand would take me to 3 envoys and make me the suzerain. Oh yeah, that's right, I'm bringing in ANOTHER city state as my ally here. Stockholm, Vilnius, and southern Rome are going to lay some smack down!

You know what else is so awesome about this move? The trade route to Vilnius is actually the most useful of the available options! It's worth 6 gold/turn (and another point of culture), and that additional gold income is perfect right now. Instead of 7.8 gold/turn, let's effectively double that to 13.8 gold/turn and prepare to upgrade the warrior in this area into a legion. I just need to hold out for 4 more turns, and I think that's doable.



I chose to have the city walls shoot at the southern-most German archer, which did about 60 damage as indicated in the screenshot. I moused over the result from attacking with the archer inside Aquileia against this damaged archer, and it definitely would have been enough to kill this unit, if I hadn't needed to spend this turn upgrading the slinger into the archer. Why target the southern-most German archer? I'm hoping that the Vilnius AI will be smart enough to attack and kill that unit with its own archer. Even the idiotic AI should be able to attack and finish off a wounded unit standing right next to it. I hope anyway. Don't let me down, Vilnius! If the city state can take out one of the archers, and I can cripple or kill another one on my upcoming turn, that should take a lot of the heat off of Aquileia. I have an archer in production inside the city, another archer healing over at Arretium that can start moving east next turn, a warrior that can be upgraded into a legion in 4 more turn's worth of my new income, and a city state helping to protect my flank with additional units. While I'm still worried about what could be lurking out there in the fog, I'm feeling better about my situation after pulling off that city state alliance. The trade route for an envoy move was pretty slick, if I do say so myself.



Finally, here's my core once again with some more military builds ordered up. I was holding off on going all-military because I wasn't sure how committed teh was to this attack. It seems like he's sending in everything he's got, so I may as well get ready for the long haul here. It also looks like my force in northern Rome is going to take a bit longer to keep chewing through those cities up there, now that TheArchduke has his own legion. As a result, I dialed up a horseman in Roma, which will take 4 turns to complete after the city grows on the interturn. Ravenna is going to get a jungle chop to help complete that archer, and elsewhere it's more archers. Agoge policy would certainly be useful here; too bad it's already been obsoleted.

Overall, I was very happy with how this turn played out. Unlike this morning, I think I was able to avoid any tactical mistakes and pull off some clever stuff with the pillaging and the trade route. Hopefully it will be enough to keep the momentum going in the north, and the line held in the east. (I'm really curious to see what the city state does - come on Vilnius, kill that wounded archer!)

[oledavy]

Nice move with the trade route, well done.

So, am I inferring correctly that your base city-strength is equal to the strongest melee unit you currently own? Do you have to have an example of the unit or just own the tech to produce it? Do anti-cavalry units count?

[rho21]

oledavy: you're clearly not reading this thread religiously enough.

This is a good opportunity to comment on how the defensive rating for cities work. You may have noticed that the defensive rating for Aquileia suddenly jumped up to 38 this turn, after sitting around 10 or 20 for the game up to this point. That's because city defensive rating is based on the strongest military unit that you've built to date in the game so far. Here's the official formula:

City Defenses

The strength of the city is the strongest unit you've ever built minus 10. Capital gives +3, districts give +2 each. Hills' bonus won't ever show up, but is active when attacking the city - it's the same as with units fighting.

Garrisoning a unit will increase the strength of the city to the strength of the unit, if higher. Thus garrisoning your strongest unit is +10.

Walls shoot with the strength of your strongest ranged units from both the archers and the artillery lines.

Up to this point, my strongest unit has been a warrior (melee strength 20). That means all my cities had the default strength of 10, and if I had a warrior stand inside the city, its defensive strength increased to 20. I have been keeping a warrior outside both of my frontline cities (Arretium and Aquileia) for exactly this reason, to increase the defensive strength if they would come under attack. A city with 20 strength is obviously a lot more sturdy than one with 10 strength. Now that I have a horseman (strength 35), the default city strength is 25. With the horseman standing in the city as in this screenshot, it goes up to 35, and the walls add another +3 defense for the 38 you see here. Once I upgrade a warrior to a legion, I'll have strength 30 everywhere, which is VERY strong for this early in the game. No one will crack my cities without horses and swords, and in pretty decent numbers.

Now you can see why it's so important to have visibility on at least one city of the other players. I can tell instantly what their best unit is even without power tracking in the Demographics. I'll know the instant that teh gets a legion, because his cities will leap up to 30 defensive strength. That's a major reason why I'm trying to move fast here. Even one legion will make a massive difference in attacking his cities. Ummm, don't pass on that knowledge if he doesn't know it yet, ok?