Civ VI - Adventure 1 - China

[kjara]

At least we started near tea. 

China has a nice mix of early, mid and all game boosts

Early: Extra charge on workers and ability to rush Ancient and Classic age wonders with workers (15% per charge)

Mid: Medieval era Unique Unit

All around: 60% eureka's

???: unique improvement (great wall)



Since we started near enough desert, a pyrmaids rush seemed like an obvious thing to attempt:


Seemed like a great thing to go for.  We have stone in our initial city ring (meaning we can easily get the eureka for Masonry), and the free worker that we get from the pyramids almost pays for itself (since a 5 charger worker gives 5*15 = 75% of a wonder) meaning the extra worker charge is almost free (and will of course be useful for rushing out other early wonders).

Turn 1: found in place and start a scout.
Turn 2: we move our warrior nw and ...



That seems a bit early.....:


Turns out we started on a continent border (but oddly enough, because our settle didn't actually reveal any new tiles, we didn't get credit on turn 1).

Jumping forward a bit we are almost ready to start on the pyramids (after building two workers, one for improvements, one for rushing):


Of course, shortly after we start them, all the barbs show up (ended up having to rush out two extra warriors just to handle them).


With a bit of help from the citystate on the right we eventually push them back.


A few turns later, we finished grabbing a pantheon.  Looking back, I'm pretty sure this was a mistake (I handn't yet realized that you could rush a wonder while working on other things yet).  Fairly certain that with china you generally want to be building other things while you build early wonders (at least after you have the pyramids):

[kjara]

Our next big event is our neighbor to the north, egypt (who would be grumpy at us all game) grabbing the first religion (with stonehenge - considering she also has nice bonuses to early wonders that makes sense).  Sadly, she ended up grabbing some of the religious perks that we thought we wanted (Divine Inspiration:  All world wonders provide +4 faith).  Since by this point we had two wonders (pyramids and oracle) this would have been decent:



Two turns later we unlock the next tier of goverments.  Again, I think this was a bit of a mistake, but we went with autocracy (for the capital all yields and wonder boost).  However, we really didn't make great use of the red policy cards and probably would have been better off in Classical Republic.



All that wonder rushing slowed down our settling a bit, but we swapped into the +50% settler policy and churned out 3 quick settlers by turn 80.  


(You also might note that Cleo is already pretty unhappy with us here.  She followed this up shortly afterward with a early war.  Luckily Taiyuan was fairly well defended, with a nice river cutting off most of the possible attack routes. 

 

The AI still isn't all that great at war.  A few turns later I've killed another 3 warriors or so:



10 turns later, we grabbed our religion:


Of course, far more important than what I ended up picking (which is clearly why I forgot to take a picture of it at the time), here is our righteous indignation that Egypt took the belief that we wanted.


What we did end up taking (which ended actually working out really well), was the combo of cheaper apostles and supercharged relics (3x faith and tourism).  We combined this with the wonder that lets you get relics by losing apostles, but more on that later.

[kjara]

The AI defiently still has some issues.  For one, it seems really really bad at finding goodie huts.  Here we are at around turn 103, about 10 tiles from one of the other civs and a goodie hut is still there for the taking:





The next thing worth taking a picture of was when around turn 119 we unlocked our first tier 2 government:


Unlike the tier 1's the tier 2's don't all appear at the same point in the tree.  In fact, monarchy is a prereq for theocracy and even merchand republic is one level deeper in the tree.  Both of Monarchy's boosts ended up being quite useful as I found myself starved for housing around this point in the game (and getting up medevial walls wasn't that hard, esp as there's a +100% to defenses policy).  Again, I probably should have swapped from Monarchy to something else much sooner (as its 3 red cards again were overkill for what I was doing), but ah well.

The AI continues to offer very unexciting deals for my "spare" luxuries.  Considering that a second luxury starts being useful once you have a 5th city, I'm really not sure why the AI feels the need to spam you with these trade offers:



Our next big step research wise is to get industrization for factories.  These have the nice property of giving all cities within 6 tiles of the district +3.  Note that this stacks so if one city is within 4 factories, thats +12 production.  Considering how hard it is to get production in this game, it turns out to be fairly significant for buildings things like districts (that you can't rush with gold).



Shortly afterward we manage to suicide our first apostle into a group of missionaries, giving us our first relic. 




 Note that although these numbers seem huge (and they were a significant boost to our faith income at the time), the tourism from the relics actually faces a bunch of penalites.  First, if they are in a different religion from you, thats a straight 50% reduction (that other sources of tourism don't have to worry about).  Second, once they hit the enlightment civic, thats another 50% (for 25% total), although theres a wonder you can build to avoid this one at least.  Since I was busy killing off my religious units for the most the game, I never actually managed to convert any of the other civs to my religion, so except in a few cases where people didn't have a religion at all, I as only getting half amount.

[kjara]

From this point onward, things snowballed quickly, relics gave us faith to buy more apostles which gave us more relics:


The hardest part at times was actually finding AI faith units to kill ourselves on.  Ended up wandering at least a couple of apostles way over to the other side of the map just trying to die.


Around turn 223 we start moving nicely towards a victory condition:


By turn 240 we are almost there:

And despite the occasional backwards progress:



We win on turn 252 (1705) with a culture victory


(and a really bad score)


A few turns before the end we finally had unlocked what seems like its intended to be one of the main tourist improvements (seaside resorts), so there wasn't too much risk of falling behind kongo's internal tourism numbers (and was 13 turns away from finishing the cristo rendentor which gets rid of one of the faith based tourism penalties).

[kjara]

Here's what the empire looked like in the end:





Also:
Not sure how broken diplomacy is.  I swear I was getting an even mix of "Grr I hate what you do" and "Whee, I love how you make people happy" messages from the AI's but in the end everyone disliked me, hated me, or was at war (Though Egypt was the only one to declare - in total three time).

[Magil]

Nice write-up. On your final comment, it seems like "unfriendly" is almost the AI's default resting state now most of the time. And China certainly seems strong for getting those early Wonders out, other Civs have to sacrifice a fair amount to get those.