Civ6 PBEM: Sullla of Rome

[fahbs]

One word on all this conquering: it seems like repair costs are bugged with the latest patch. Game I'm in right now is telling me that repairing a library will cost 300(!!!) production.

Might want to keep that in mind before pillaging districts of cities you're planning to capture.


image of the crazy repair times: http://i.imgur.com/jhf4TBc.png. Even the -5 amenities shouldn't account for it.


Also....I had no idea you could harvest bonus resource. I had assumed that "harvest" meant you could just build the improvement on them to get access to them (plantation, pasture, etc). I had no idea you could "chop" them like forests.

It's confusing because the harvest action is up in the movement command row for some inexplicable reason. Why isn't it with all the other building actions like forest chop is?

[T-hawk]

I guess that if an archer is standing on a hill, it can shoot over another hill tile.

This is the rule in Civ 5, as long as the intervening hill doesn't have a forest or jungle. Most likely the same in Civ 6.

[Sullla]

Fahbs: district repair costs have been buggy ever since release. I had this repair time on a shrine in my Adventure One game:



I don't know if Firaxis has been unable to fix this bug, or if this is a new bug that introduced trying to fix the original one. But yeah, it takes FOREVER to repair districts and the buildings in them when they get pillaged. For that reason, I would never pillage districts when I'm intending to conquer a city. Tile improvement yes, because they're easily fixed, but definitely not districts. While I'm generally in favor of the idea here - don't let your stuff get pillaged or it will take a while to fix - the implementation right now is way over the top. An 80 production library should not cost 330 production to be fixed (and even worse, it's impossible to construct a university until it is fixed, sheesh!)

Thanks as well for the information on ranged mechanics, T-Hawk. I'm slowly learning through trial and error here, since I didn't play much Civ5 after the initial release period. Let's get to this morning's turn report:



Well, that discussion of pillaging mechanics was certainly timely. I'm not surprised here; I thought it was likely that TheArchduke would use his archer to pillage the district. That was worth 50 gold to him, and hopefully it won't be enough to upgrade that warrior into a legion inside Mediolanum. Perhaps in retrospect I should have kept the district 1 turn away from completion, and waited to finish it until this war was over. Then again, 4 turns ago I didn't have the trade route going to the Vilnius city state for that extra income, and I couldn't have known how things would play out around Aquileia. It's probably fine. I can always repair the district, and Arretium is a city that has plenty of production.

Tactically speaking, TheArchduke's forces were effectively trapped here in the pincer movement I mentioned last turn. They can't move further south into my territory without getting slashed at by archers, and they can't move further north without running into the anvil of my invasion force. The southern archer pillaged the Commercial district, the northern archer took a potshot at my legion northeast of the city, and TheArchduke's own legion moved back across the river. He misplayed the tactical maneuvering of that legion, although in TheArchduke's defense he has much less map vision than I do. It would have been much more dangerous to fortify that legion northeast or northwest of the city, and then I would have been forced to kill it in a highly defensive position in order to put Mediolanum under siege. Instead, the legion walked across the river, was shot by my archer, then walked back north again. Now it should be pretty easy pickings, as easy as a legion gets at least.



I'll diagram my movements this turn, since this was the most tactically interesting turn of the conflict thus far. First the injured legion moved a tile east onto the desert and then attacked the archer next to it. As I understand the zone of control rules, once you move into a zone of control you can't move again out of it, but the zone of control doesn't prevent you from attacking. Or something like that; I'm still learning all the ins and outs of this system. The archer itself doesn't have a zone of control, making this a bit simpler. This first attack had a strength differential of 30, which is right on the edge of getting a one-hit kill. I rolled slightly below damage and the archer survived with 8 HP remaining. Note that if my legion had been full health, the additional 3 strength would almost certainly have been enough to get the kill.

That said, leaving the archer just short of death worked out OK here. I was able to cross the river with the second legion indicated and get the kill. (Thanks ability to use enemy roads!) This put my nearly-full-strength legion next to TheArchduke's legion, and shielded the damaged legion from an attack next turn. The damaged legion will also be able to promote next turn, and will be back to full strength immediately thereafter.



Those first two attacks cleared the field of the archer. The next step was to assault Mediolanum itself, which I was able to place under a formal siege by moving my galley next to the settlement. I wanted to get in as much damage as possible this turn in case TheArchduke can upgrade the warrior inside the city to a legion next turn, which would increase the defensive rating of Mediolanum to 40-something. First I attacked with the healthy legion northwest of the city, at the river crossing penalty, which significantly lowered the damage inflicted. (Without the Oligarchy + Great General pairing, this would have been effectively an even battle.) Then I attacked with the damaged legion northeast of the city, then the galley. Why not? There will be plenty of time to heal up once the city falls, for now I needed damage. It's not like that galley is an important unit. Here was the net result after everything moved:



Mediolanum has a little over one third strength left, and with four units able to attack next turn, I should be able to finish off the capture. The Archduke's legion will probably attack my legion to the northeast, but the odds won't be great there, since I have the Great General bonus and support bonus from the nearby units of mine. Further south, I used two archers to shoot at TheArchduke's other archer, knocking it down to 10 HP and crippling it in the process. I should be able to kill it next turn with the archer currently southwest of Arretium, and then get two more ranged attacks against the legion with the other ranged units. There's even another horsemen that the capital finished this turn coming up from further to the southwest, and the warrior east of Arretium will be upgraded into a legion next turn. Long story short: I think I've got this under control.



Inside Arretium, the Feudalism farming triangle is now complete south of the city, and those floodplains tiles have some VERY nice tile yields. From 3/0 base they are now 5/1 tiles. Dutch polders, anyone? As soon as I finish the Bath district (4 turns), the housing cap is going to lift and this city will grow like a weed. I can work that triangle of farms along with the two plains hill mines and still reach 18 food, which will translate into +8.8 food/turn with the amenities bonus. Then I can steal the other copper resource from Mediolanum post-capture and reassign it here to Arretium like it was always intended. This is a very strong city, and it will virtually match my capital in production output.

Unfortunately, look at the damage to the Commercial district: 9 turns of repair needed. It's at something like 40/150 production right now, just a brutal amount of damage. It's weird how pillaging a tile improvement can be fixed like it's nothing, while pillaging a district results in this kind of crippling blow. I also found out that a pillaged district doesn't produce Great Person points; I'm no longer making progress towards a Great Merchant. Oh well. I'm not likely to repair this district any time soon, since I can still build another trader unit (1/2 routes currently used) and that's the main reason why I needed Commercial districts right now. I'm going to build the Bath districts, then crank out some traders since I need the boost for Medieval Faires civic. Then we'll see about repairing the Commercial district or working on the Industrial district after that.



The Aquileia front remains quiet, at least for me. I chopped that last grassland hill forest and used it to insta-complete a builder. This was a good time to get that builder out as I'm about to drop Serfdom policy next turn when I finish the current civics research. (I'll be back into it down the road, of course, when I time several cities to finish builders all at once.) The overflow from the builder when into completing the half-way one archer, and the overflow from that archer will go into the Bath district. I think it's better to finish the cheaper Bath district first, and then go back to the Commercial district after that. Tactically, I'll have two archers here next turn, and I'll upgrade the injured slinger into an archer as well at the paltry cost of 15 gold. With three archers, I should be able to repair the pillaged horses tile with that new builder, who is going to mine the grassland hill tile first.

There seems to be a fierce battle raging at Frankfurt just out of sight. Teh captured the city on his turn, and then it was retaken by Yuris immediately thereafter. This has knocked Frankfurt down to size 1, making it essentially useless to either party. Sounds good to me. This also means that teh's warrior in the area is dead, because cities can only be captured with a melee unit, and that means he had to have taken Frankfurt initially with his warrior, followed by the warrior getting wiped out when the city was reconquered. Strength 26 defensive rating means that there is likely an injured Eagle Warrior currently inside the city. I wonder if Yuris has been picking up some builders as slaves from this conflict?

For reference purposes, their military power ratings were almost identical this turn: 133 (teh) to 132 (Yuris). Those numbers are a turn out of date, but should be roughly accurate. My military rating this turn was 360.



Picture of my core cities with their Bath districts underway. The cost to build ended up being 81 production, not too bad at all. I'm glad I managed to get most of them down on the map before finishing another civic and driving up the cost further. In my test games, they were usually more like 65 production, but in this actual playthrough I delayed Engineering tech for Shipbuilding to make this attack viable, and ended up with more civics in hand as a result. Not a bad tradeoff.



Finally, here's a picture of the diplomacy screen with teh, just to give you an idea of the inability to speak with him. I still can't talk to TheArchduke either; next turn is 10 turns since the war began, so we'll see if that prompts a change. Not that I want to sign peace or anything, but it would be nice to see how much gold he has in his treasury again. Two items of note here. First, there's the notification that teh conquered a "lost city", confirming that he was briefly in possession of Frankfurt. Second, teh finished researching a civic this turn and swapped into Oligarchy government this turn. Yes, the red-headed stepchild Oligarchy government is now being used by all four of us at the moment. It's simply too good when you're in a major war to pass up. Those Military policy slots are also really nice to have when in combat; in Single Player they may feel almost useless at times, but that has not been the case in this game.

Hopefully we'll get in another turn later today. With luck, Mediolanum will fall and I can unify the territory of northern and southern Rome together, then start marching on the final remnants of TheArchduke's empire.

[unaghy]

"I'll diagram my movements this turn, since this was the most tactically interesting turn of the conflict thus far."

This what I´m actually looking forward in Civ6 MP games - epic battles. Well, this one is not that epic due to huge difference in the force, but still one of the first showcases of how to approach city siege against city defenders. 1UPT, ranged/melee strength differentiation, special movement & terrain defense rules and city siege are main difference to Civ4. So while there were epic clashes between stack of units and main tactics was about which unit will attack first and how stack is built, here it is more about unit positioning, strength difference and tactical maneuvering, which brings lot of new flavor.

[kjn]

Nice reporting as usual, Sullla   

A while ago I wrote an article about Battle for Wesnoth that looked at the concept of tactics, operations, and strategy within that game. I think it's general enough to fit onto Civ 6, and that the tactical model of Civ 6 is rich enough to fully support those three layers.

(In comparison, Civ 4 has barely a tactical level at all, and the push towards the Stack of Death means that operational level is pretty barren too.)

[Sullla]

Thanks unaghy and kjn! One thing I do want to point out is that Civ4 has a rich tactical layer of combat as well; it's not just a game of slamming large stacks into one another, as its detractors often claim. From my own personal experience, Speaker and I made some pretty nice moves in the Pitboss 2 game ages ago, and more recently, I think scooter and I were able to make some clever attacks in the Pitboss 33 Industrial game. There have been innumerable other sweet tactical plays in other Civ4 MP games as well, far too many to count here. So while I'm enjoying the maneuvers in this game, I want to point out that Civ6 doesn't represent some kind of huge leap forward over Civ4 in the tactics department. It's a different system, not necessarily a better one.

With that in mind, let's get to Turn 84:



This was the view when I opened up the save file. TheArchduke made a solid tactical move on his turn: he swapped the position of his legion and his warrior, then attacked the legion directly east of Mediolanum with his own legion from within the city. My unit got the better of that trade thanks to the Great General and the support bonus from the surrounding units, but TheArchduke did decent damage, and he simultaneously managed to buff the defenses of Mediolanum by putting the legion inside the city. Defensive strength went up from 33 to 38, not bad. TheArchduke also moved a second legion towards me from Arpinum; that's his best remaining production city by a country mile, and it must have been able to crank out the legion over the last few turns, likely with Agoge policy boosting the efforts. I think TheArchduke played this about as well as he could, given the poor hand he was dealt here.

But he did have a poor hand here, and this turn proved to be a strong tactical showing for the southern Roman forces. First things first: let's take that damaged city with the surrounding units.



Mediolanum itself was doomed, legion inside or no legion inside. The goal here was therefore to set up my units in such a way that they would be protected against that enemy legion incoming from the east, and be able to move on to the next remaining cities as quickly as possible. I started by attacking with the galley; the odds were terrible, but that unit will be able to rest up and heal afterwards, and faced no further danger. It knocked off about 10% of the city's health, and that was good enough. Then I attacked with the unit northeast of the city (the #2) specifically because I could see that I was going to come up short on the attack. The legion northeast of the city already had a promotion ready to go, which means that I could attack and then promote on the following turn to get right back to full health. Then I attacked last with the legion northwest of the city, since that legion had already burned its promotion previously. I would not be able to insta-heal that unit, so I wanted it to take as little damage as possible while attacking and also be inside the city itself, where units can heal back 20 HP per turn instead of 15 HP per turn. This worked out as planned, and I ended up capturing Mediolanum with the units ending up on the correct tiles that I intended.



Next up, it was the archers' turn to take a hand. I moved the archer inside the city to the northwest, and the archer behind Arretium into the city itself. That allowed the archer furthest back to shoot at TheArchduke's archer and finish it off. Take that for pillaging my Commercial district! Next, the other two archers combined to cripple the warrior standing to the southeast of Mediolanum:



Together they knocked it down to about 20% health, almost exactly the same result that my own warrior had when teh shot me a few turns back over at Aquileia. As in that previous case, this warrior likely would have died without the Oligarchy combat bonus to grant that extra +4 strength. At this point, I went to upgrade my full health warrior southeast of Arretium into a legion, and realized that I needed to swap civics in order to get the half cost upgrades. So let's do that before making any further moves:



I kept Conscription policy, which is currently saving me about 12 gold/turn. It's the best gold-producing option for me by a country mile, and I expect to keep running it for a very long time. This army is only going to get bigger, not smaller. I traded out Serfdom for Urban Planning, since my current builder production is done for the moment, and slotted Charismatic Leader back into place again. There probably won't be any more opportunities to get the 2 for 1 envoy deal again in this game. In the Wildcard slot, I dropped Bastion for Professional Army, and that's where those cheap upgrades will come into play. I have to salute the Bastions policy though, something that I've never used previously in Civ6. It was exactly what I needed to help hold off teh, and I'm glad that I was able to run it at the perfect time to help save Aquileia.

With the new policies in play, I could now do this:



Yep, that's a 40 production warrior being turned into a 110 production legion at a cost of 55 gold. Better than 1 gold for 1 production, craziness. If we create an in-house mod, this is something that almost certainly needs to be toned down. It's just way too effective to upgrade units right now, and that's doubly true with Professional Army policy. I also upgraded my last remaining slinger to an archer for 15 gold (heh), and I'll turn that last injured warrior into a legion as well next turn. Then I'll be able to swap into another policy at the next opportunity. If this game continues for another two or three dozen turns, I'll start saving up money for another mass legions -> muskets upgrade, using Professional Army to discount the whole thing. Ditto for the archers -> crossbows upgrade too. I'm very far ahead of everyone else in this game on the civics tree, and this is how you leverage Rome into a position of dominance: early cultural advantage into strong policies into military/economic superiority.

Up at the top of this screenshot, I diagrammed another little tactical shuffle. I swapped the position of the damaged legion with my horseman, and then used the horseman to finish off TheArchduke's warrior. I've highlighted the extremely one-sided combat result in the picture above. This easy fight even gave my horseman enough experience to earn its first promotion, nice. Then the two damaged legions standing next to TheArchduke's legion both promote-healed, leading to this image:



No soft targets for him to attack. I took the Battlecry promotion (+7 combat strength against melee and ranged units) because it seemed more likely to be useful. If any of these units gets a second promotion, I'll likely take Tortoise (+10 defense against ranged attacks) because that's also quite handy. Just not so much here, now that TheArchduke's archers are dead. I expect he'll retreat his legion back into Arpinum and wait for the final blows to fall. He's welcome to try attacking if he wants, although I doubt it would go well against my hill bonus + Great General + Oligarchy + support bonus + Battlecry (60 strength!) legion. Seriously, go ahead: take your best shot.

Next turn I'll move up against Durocortorum while promote-healing the legion northeast of Mediolanum and resting the legion inside Mediolanum itself. Durocortorum should fall on Turn 86, and then everything converges on Arpinum. I'd say roughly four or five more turns left for this war, barring something unexpected popping up. TheArchduke's military is virtually gone now, just that one legion remaining. If the last couple turns were set up, this was the turn where the jaws finally snapped shut and crushed his army.



OK, remaining miscellaneous issues from this turn. I used my new envoy with Hong Kong, resulting in 3 total and peace with the city state. It was moving a disturbing number of units up here in the far north, and picking up the 3 envoy boost for my (eventual) Industrial districts should be helpful down the road. The alternative was dropping the envoy in Stockholm to stop that war, but I think that would have been a waste. Stockholm is in the middle of the map, and all of the other players have met that city state. I don't want to get into an endless envoy-fight with teh for control of Stockholm. No, we're just going to take the city state for ourselves, claiming that Campus district it built and the very nice Galapagos Islands tiles north of the city. My military will even end the northern Roman campaign right at the gates of Stockholm, making another conquest pretty simple. In contrast, TheArchduke is the only one who has met Hong Kong aside from me, and that's the way it's going to stay. No one else is ever getting up here since I'm never signing Open Borders. The only way they meet this city state is post-oceangoing ships, and that's a very long time away.

New research is into Medieval Faires civic, and there's the requirement for the 4 trade routes boost that I've mentioned a few times previously. I have one in place already, a Commercial district done at Arretium for the second, and the capital along with Hispalis will get the other two Commercial districts finished. Then it's mostly a matter of building the traders; I think Arretium will do a pair of them and the capital one. I don't think that will all finish in the next 8 turns, but hopefully I can get it done in about 10-12 turns with minimal need to divert cultural into something else. Exploration civic and Merchant Republic government is available for research as soon as Medieval Faires is done. Perhaps 25 total turns to get there?



Aquileia finished its half-way done archer, and I opted to repair the walls with the remaining overflow production. It's unclear how much production this actually cost, since it just said "1 turn" and didn't state the exact amount needed. No need to take chances here though. The Bath and Commercial districts can wait while I make sure that I'm safe first.

Tactically, I moved my builder up onto the hill to mine the tile. It's safe there since teh's archers can't move onto the hill tile without moving next to it first. I'm not worried about a random horseman out of the fog; teh only has 1 horse resource at present, and he doesn't have an Encampment district. The new horseman that the capital produced is on its way over here, and once it arrives, I'll move up in force with it and the three archers to get the pasture repaired northeast of the city. If teh tried to contest this move, I'll do my best to kill his units. I don't intend to give him peace any time soon, if ever. When the conquest of northern Rome is complete, I'm going to have a whole lot of units available, and they may as well make themselves useful. If I can take cities, then I will.

It's now been exactly 10 turns since this war began, and I could finally speak to TheArchduke again:



I guess we can confirm that mechanic then: 10 turns after declaring war before it's even possible to sign peace. Be careful about attacking on a whim in this game. Here's the current trade screen, with all of the captured cities appearing on both lists. TheArchduke has no luxuries and one horse for a strategic resource, along with 73 gold in the bank. I don't think he'll last long enough for any further warrior -> legion upgrades, even if he still has a warrior alive somewhere.

Internationally, the biggest thing to take place was a huge jump in teh's science output, from 19 beakers/turn to 26 beakers/turn. It's clear what happened: he finally finished a Campus district and cashed in his Great Scientist for a major boost. Let's see how this worked. The Campus district was likely worth 1 beaker from adjacency bonuses, then Great Scientist Hypatia insta-rushed a library for 2 beakers, plus another beaker per her unique ability. Then he also received another 2 beakers from having 3 envoys with Stockholm (which goes to each Campus district), plus the base 2 beakers for the initial envoy. That's 6 beakers for finishing the Campus district, and a good demonstration of the power of going tall in this game. Yes, those districts are expensive to build but then can become extremely strong once buffed up with the right policies and buildings and city states.

This just lends further incentive to capture Stockholm as soon as possible. Without the Scientific city state bonuses, teh will lose 4 beakers/turn, and potentially more than that if he keeps building Campus districts. He has a slight beaker lead for the moment (you can see I make 23.4 beakers/turn right now), but I'm up four techs right now, and my science will explode the moment this war ends and the occupation penalty is removed from those captured cities. Enjoy your beaker edge while it lasts, teh...

[oledavy]

Excellent tactical moves, congrats on the successful campaign!

[fahbs]

How do you think wars will look when you can attack and gain major headway, but cannot quickly wipe out a player completely? Would you consider razing the cities and settling your own?

[kjn]

Now this is going very much off-topic, but yes, while Civ 4 does have a tactical level, it's pretty barren. Or perhaps it's better to say it's 2-dimensional, while Civ 6 seems to have a 3-dimensional tactical play. (You can probably compare Civ 6 to Wesnoth, I think, on the moving-units-on-tiles level.)

With Civ 4, tactical play is dominated by the unit stack. Yes, you can do worker stunts, fork cities, do flanking moves like the fast stack like you and Speaker did in the first war against the Greeks in PB2 (though that I'd argue falls more into operations than tactics). You also work with things like promotions and attack orders and scouting.

But one unit per tile and combats that do not last until death changes the map completely. How units are positioned relative each other starts to matter very much, and you have to think much more on where each unit will end up at the end of the turn. You have to decide on which units will be exposed, and from which directions, and how each unit can be supported in the strongest possible way.

I can dig up the article from the Wesnoth forum and post it in one of the general forums later today or tomorrow. Will likely edit it something as well, to better match the games played here.

[Old Harry]

I'll be interested to read that kjn.