Civ6 Succession Game 1: Commercial Free Programming

[Molach]

Turn 51:
I agree with much of Ruined's thoughts on new cities. He made us 3 settlers, so gonna settle westwards to piss of Gandhi. Or block the land off.
Took a shot of 'appeal' here -

two green tiles to make holiday resorts on. If we need to, down the line. I dunno, can we place districts to increase appeal to coastal tiles?

Tentative dot in the south - for our 4th settler.


IBT: Arabia founds Islam.

Turn 52:
Scout found Stockholm.

As you can see, we were first and get a nice +2 science in capital.

I decide to go against Ruined' here. I swap into new government - back to the old +faith +gold in capital one.

This will grant us a pantheon in 5 turns, which will give us the eureka for mysticism. My plan is here simply to use mysticism to swap back into builder civic and then push 'em out. So I set #2 city to watermill(1) and capital on trader. New builder heads up to the new city sites. Chocolate plantation. I like jungle - those 2/2 tiles are pretty strong for this time of game and our chocolate dot will make an effort to build Chichen Itza down the line.

Turn 53:
Varuning!


My mama always said, life's like a city of chocolates. You neved know what's you gonna get.

Wonka's Factory is founded. And named Fukuoka. Almost Cocoa, though. Forego +3 gold for a quicker monument.




Turn 54:
You settle too close!

-We will settle elsewhere in the future. I think we have settled as close to Brazil as we are going to in the next 30 turns.

New city:


Turn 55:
You settle too close!

-(Fingers in ears: Naaa naaa naa). To me, the second and third option here look about the same. Second is more confronting, but third is just as bad, just ignore the guy. I know my wife would rather have negative reply than ignoration.
No idea what the difference is here in-game. Tell me, game, with a pop-up, what these different choices mean! I learned from my first game that 30 turns seems to be the number you have to be a good boy before you satisfy option 1 here, but what about the others? Damn UI. Anyways, picked the third, ignore.

T 55 overview shot:

T 56:
New city.



Gandhi dot - sealing off the mountain chain for us. It was here or east, and I couldn't resist spiting Gandhi like this, and blocking the way for him.

Mysticism hits. Set policy (back) to +30% builderism. Select border-pop pantheon. Goddess of the Harvest was gone.

T 57:
Trader finishes. Choices:

Underwhelming. I decide to rebase to Fukuoka first.

Scout finds two huts.

First huts gives us boost to Astronomy and Masonry. Astronomy finishes Stockholm syndrome quest, we have two envoys there. I could send the mysticism envoy for suzerain status, but no point yet as we have no districts.


T58:
Trade route begun.

I could have gone to Rio here, but at this point, +1 food is better than +3 gold and +2 faith. Maybe. Anyway, the road to capital is vital, and after this route ends we'll have trading posts in two of our cities, which is good for future routes. This finishes Currency by way of boost.(I was researching horseback riding). We can now not build commercial districts. Sniff.

Warrior exploring further westwards, finds (Ricky) lake.

Warrior feels bad about leaving Fukuoka lightly defended, but checking out prices reveals that we can buy a replacement in a pinch. 160 gold for a warrior, 200 for archer. Plus this is indeed a nightmare to attack through. We should be safe. We also like Brazil.

Also note that I build a cocoa plantation and even worked it for +4 gold over +1 prod. Builder has one charge left.

T59:
We enter classical age. Scout hits a hut, boosts military tradition. Stockholm wants us to build a commercial district. Bah, talk about super-easy self-helping city state quests...ohhhh. Sniff.

Saladin calls.

Okay. Thanks for calling.

T60:
Archers gain some exp slaughtering barbarian warrior in the east.

They can advance and kill barb outpost...but we did get that eureka from a hut already so no big deal.

Tech is steady towards apprenticeship.

Find a natural wonder with exploring warrior, boosting astronomy.


So, a builder-light set. No chopping was done on any innocent forests on my set. We have a new builder coming out from capital, he should be willing to murder stuff.

I was kind of hoping to meet some more city-states and get the boost to new government, so we can switch cards and get even more settlers too, but seems that is...tricky. Just Stockholm yet.

I'm actually gonna stop here. I feel there are a lot of things happening, and we need to plan districts. I've been saving us for industrial ones, and theatre districts for our projected path. It is also too late to finish tonight. If there is a riot demanding I play my next 10 as well, I'll do so tomorrow, but very happy to end here and get some fresh eyes on this.

Here's the GP chart...

Religion is a tight race, and why would we go there again. Brazil has an encampment, India is getting merchant points, Arabia likes science and they all like holy shit.

-M

[Ruined Everything]

Great turnset!

I disagree with your seaside resort analysis. We should be able to put a seaside resort on every single coastal tile in that picture, if I'm not incorrect. Seaside resorts have huge potential, and I think they're worth exploring in this game.

Here's how appeal works (from the civ6 gameapedia)
+2: Each adjacent Natural Wonder.
+1: Each adjacent  Holy Site,  Theater Square,  Entertainment Complex or Wonder
+1: Each adjacent Mountain, Coast, Woods or Oasis.
+1: If the tile is on a River or Lake.
-1: Each adjacent  Industrial Zone,  Encampment,  Aerodrome or  Spaceport.
-1: Each adjacent Rainforests, Marsh or Floodplains.
-1: Each adjacent pillaged tile.

Let's take a look at Molach's picture again.

From here we can see that nearly every shore tile is sitting on a +2 from being next to 2 coastal tiles. There's a lot of rainforest, so a fair number of tiles are having their appeal dragged down, but it's clear that there's no marsh or floodplains in the area - if we clear felled all forest within 2 tiles of the shore, each one of those tiles would be +2, and some would even be +3 charming or +4-5 breath-taking.
 
Now enter the Eiffel tower. Eiffel increases every tile in our empire's appeal by 2. That sends every one of those shore tiles to breathtaking!

Seaside resorts produce double the tourism of the appeal of the tile they're on. That means that every one of the shore tiles you see in that picture could be producing 8 or more tourism for our civ. Cristo Redentor doubles that to 16! I count 17 shore tiles adjacent to two coastal tiles in that picture. 17*16 = 272 tourism! And that's just from this one picture.

I could be misunderstanding how seaside resorts work, but I do think that they are one of the more powerful tiles in the game, if used with Eiffel and Cristo, and I do think that we should consider exploring them as a means to an extremely fast tourism finish.

[Ranamar]

The other things to remember about seaside resorts are that they must be built on flatland (so, no hills), and I suspect they clear forest or jungle, so that means that, while they are passably workable tiles, they will be about as disappointing as the coast next to them. (Petra desert resorts are really funny, however, since they are highly productive and have no other needed improvements.) That means we'll be clearing a fair amount of that rainforest along the way, and it also means we can't actually put a resort on every one of those. Off the top of my head, we'd be losing about half of them.

In other news, I suspect that message from Saladin means that he's got the wonder-oriented hidden agendea. I don't remember what his personal one does.

[Ichabod]

Some comments, since I'll play the next turnset:

Our Capital is full of great tiles, but it's growing pretty slow, since it's hard to pass on 2/3 tiles to work 3/1 tiles. But if we are going to keep spamming settlers, it has to grow faster. It has the housing and amenities needed for now, so I suggest we buy a water mill there, to boost all the wheat tiles.



We can get the needed gold by trading one of our luxuries. We have a lot of copies of both mercury and cocoa, so we can trade our only one right now (no city needs the amenities, at the current game state). I think this option is better than buying a builder, since we get the 30% bonus on builders.



This is the trade I suggest we make. I could get up to 190 gold from Saladin, but I think it's best to start improving relations with Tomyris. She's far away and we can fulfill her agenda easily, by not going to war (which we don't plan to do, anyway). I'm not sure what is the trade screen exploit I hear people talking about and so I wonder if such a trade is legal/in the spirit of our variant. It's up to the team if we go with it or not, but I think it's  good plan.

I also suggest we give open borders to Tomyris. We should avoid giving it to other civs, to not allow them to settle on our backs.

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Some random map info:

1. The civ we haven't met yet completed Stonehenge, so only 2 religions remaining, I think. The unmet civ is likely to the west, since both Gandhi and Pedro have met it, but not Saladin or Tomyris.

2. Pedro will finish the Oracle soon:




3. We'll meet a second city state next turn:




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Next Cities:



What about settling our next city in the blue area? It gets coffee and tea as luxuries and we block of Saladin from all those river areas. I guess we need a bit more defenses if we decide to do that. Here's a better look at the area, without the lens view:



It's pretty close to Saladin, so I understand if the team prefers a safer location. But I think it's time to expand east.


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Districts:



In the Capital, I suggest we build an Industrial District on the red circle, since it gets a very nice +4 adjacency bonus. Furthermore, we can build Ruhr Valley on the dark red circle, making our Capital a very nice production center. The downside of this location is that it doesn't share much of the factory bonus with other cities. But considering it's the Capital, I think we should focus more on concentrated production, rather than spreading it in multiple cities.



Here's my other suggestion for an Industrial District. It gets +2 adjacency and gives bonus to the three cities, + the city to go on the blue area.

That's just to kickstart discussion.

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Finally, I think we are overbuilding monuments. I think we'd be better served with military units and builders. I think we should change the monument builds except maybe for Takamatsu, because that city will benefit more from extra culture, since the best yield tiles are still out of the borders (and I don't think we can afford buying that many tiles).

Finally, do we keep the jungle near Fukuoka for Chichen Itza? I think it's a great wonder, but I wonder how we'll build it without TRs. Perhaps it's just better to funnel all those jungles into chops. If we are going to save that city for Chichen Itza, it won't require builder labour for a long time, since all it can improve are the cocoa plantations. We can build some more archers there, in that case.

[Sullla]

Thanks Molach. Another nice turn report. I also wish that we could rename cities; those recent settlements are crying out to be named "Wonka" or "Chocolate Factory" or something similar. I don't understand how something as simple as renaming cities isn't included in this release build of Civ6. (It's simple text replacement! I could probably code that and I'm no programmer.)

I downloaded the savegame file and looked around a bit. At the capital, I'm wondering if we should try to complete a watermill in the near future. We're currently at 4/8 on the housing front, which would only go up higher from building a few more farms on those wheat tiles, and they would be 4 food / 1 production tiles with a watermill in place. Now that we've got five cities out and Gandhi pinned into a corner, we can probably grow upwards a bit before pushing out more settlers. I'm curious what the rest of the team thinks here. (EDIT: On the crosspost with Ichabod, I like the trade excess luxury and use the profits to purchase watermill plan. Seems fair to me, that's not an example of the trading screen exploit.)

Sendai needs a builder to mine the mercury tiles; it's going to be pretty weak on production until we can finish Apprenticeship tech and mine the pair of them to turn them into 1/3 tiles. We might want to save that last plains forest tile for a lumbermill (its riverside so it would become 1/4 immediately and that's not bad). The other cities are just getting started and I don't have a lot to say about them yet, other than the fact that we need builders in the worst way. That always seems to be the case when I'm playing.  

I think we all agree with research continuing towards Apprenticeship. By the way, we need to finish two more mines to get the boost there, which should happen naturally in the course of play, but worth keepig in mind anyway. On the civics tree, let's hope we can find two more city states in the north. Which government do we want when Political Philosophy finishes? I would think Classical Republic since we aren't doing much of anything with the Military policies right now. Feel free to suggest alternatives if you can see other options. I'll throw out Drama and Poetry as our next civics research to unlock our cheap Theatre Square districts. Probably won't get there until the next player set, but who knows, we might get Political Philosophy fast if we can find more city states. 



Here's a very tentative suggestion on districts at the capital and Chocolate Mountain, with the Industrial zones in yellow and the Theatre districts in purple. I don't have a good feel for Sendai because it's pretty much all flat ground. Shizuoka wants a Campus or Holy Site somewhere next to those mountains, and Fukuoka probably wants to save as many rainforests as possible for a future Chichen Itza build. That would seriously be an amazing city with the wonder, and all the bonus culture would synergize nicely with a cultural gameplan. (For that matter, the Oracle would be super nice if we were able to build it somehow. With Oracle plus suzerainty of Stockholm, we would be generating a disgusting amount of Great Person points. Not worth rushing immediately, but if it's still sitting there in a dozen turns, maybe...)

Molach, it's up to you if you want to run another 10 turns. If not, then we'll pass to Ichabod for 15 turns. Let us know what you prefer.

[Ranamar]

I spent a little time looking at that last picture, and I think I found a better spot for the Ruhr Valley wonder than was suggested above.  It does require another city, but we'll be doing that no matter what:


The red circles are potential city sites.  Under normal circumstances I might favor the hill one, but the coastal one would boost research for one of the sailing techs.  (Also, it gives us another hill to mine and additionally would give us at least one city from which we could build ships.)  The yellow dot would, of course, be the industrial zone.  It's exactly 6 tiles from Sendai.  Purple would be a theater square, and then adjacent to both would be the Ruhr Valley in the yellow-with-purple-ring spot.  If we build the city on the hill, those two could be swapped if we wanted.  Also, I'd suggest one of the open circles for Sendai's industrial zone.  The one E of the stone is just barely in range of my red circles and would get 3 mines and quarries around it, while the one SW of the stone is in a great position to get and give district adjacency bonuses.  (It's also in ring 2 instead of ring 3, making it a lot easier to get the land...)

In any event, none of the adjacency bonuses require that the city with the district be the same one as the city working the tiles, so stacking industrial zones on top of each other like that is actually pretty okay.

As a side note, remember the riverside forest we were talking about turning into a lumber mill?  One of the techs requires a lumber mill for its boost, so it behooves us to plan to build exactly one.  That seems like a solid place to put it, to me.

I haven't opened the file up, so I might have more ideas later.

[Molach]

Let the new blood take the next. (pass to Ichabod)

Monuments were for border pops to claim potentially disputed land. With that in mind, perhaps buy a tile SW of city 5...keep that life-line open before India claims it.

If you sell cocoa, builder up by chocolateria can build a new plantation turn 62 to replace. If we sell that too, more where that came from...

[Ichabod]

Watashi wa konban ge-mu o shimasu.

Got it, I'll play tonight.

[Ichabod]

Just to give a heads up that I'll finish the turnset and post it tonight. Couldn't get it done yesterday.

[Sullla]

Good luck Ichabod! In the meantime, I found a very good thread at CivFanatics detailing how the tourism calculations work that go into the Cultural victory condition. This appears to be the key number in the calculation; one tourist on the victory screen is determined by this formula:

round down(civ lifetime tourism / (# of civs in the game x 150))

For our game with 6 total civs, we'll get one tourist for every 900 points of tourism that we generate towards each other civ. Signing Open Borders also seems to play a huge role in acquiring tourism. The article is short enough that it's worth checking out in full at the link I put above.