Adventure1: scooter's roads lead to Rome

[scooter]

I decided to join all the cool kids and report this as I go for this very unusual Adventure 1. In the spirit of this less formal adventure, I did click on 2-3 other threads, but I avoided the Rome threads. I then noticed one of them that wasn't Rome had the same starting position as me, so since then I've avoided other threads, and I think I'll continue that until I finish.

I also did play about 120T of a casual game as Rome to get a feel for the new mechanics before diving into this. I didn't play any Civ5 which this game resembles a bit, so I'm sure to make a lot of dumb mistakes.


Here are the general feelings I came away with on that test game.

1) The AI is horrendous. I'll easily out-expand it on Prince here, so I shouldn't worry too much about winning and just try to have fun while feeling things out.

2) As Rome, expanding heavily seems like the right choice. All of its bonuses are per-city bonuses, so the more cities the better. I've also noticed that this game doesn't seem to punish horizontal expansion THAT badly. REXing may be back on the menu?

3) I noticed that production, not food is at a premium here. Food > hammers early in Civ4, but that's only because there's a mechanic that converts food into hammers at a desirable rate. That doesn't exist here, and on top of that there are restraints in place to harm vertical growth. With that in mind, production will be my priority.

4) Stacking with that, it seems like leveraging policies very carefully is the best way to combat the production-starved feeling. Settlers are expensive, but combine mines with the 50% bonus policy, and suddenly it doesn't feel quite so bad.

5) Chopping early feels very strong. Forested hills are among the best "generic" tiles because you can chop it for a big boost, and then mine it to get it back to a 2/2 tile. Of courser, this is builder-intensive, but it feels worth it.

6) Scouting feels way more valuable than in Civ4. Being the first to meet a city-state and landing that free envoy gives you a lot of freebies. So building an early scout feels like a good move.

7) Ignore districts early as Rome. Better off building settlers, workers, and then military to capture a city or two. The free Monument culture helps the Civic tree, and you aren't penalized science for expanding wide.

8) Barbs are handle-able with warriors + the policy that helps you against them. Kiling scouts requires luck because they just run away.


So those are my starting assumptions diving in here. It'll be fun later to see if any of them look especially dumb. I've played about 50 turns, so I'll continue reporting as I go starting sometime soon.

[scooter]

Turn 1-35



I settled in place. 3 forest chops + stone in first ring seems really good, plus two hills to grow onto and mine in second ring. There's also tons of food here which is a nice bonus.

I went with Mining first because the stone seems like the best tile, and I also started with a builder because YOLO. Civ4 habits die hard. Besides, a barbarian death in my first game would be hysterical. Anyway, the plan here is to use some of the early builder charges on forest chops to jump-start my production.

I opened Builder-Scout-Builder-Warrior with my first builder chopping to complete the scout and then it seemed to have overflown into a second builder. I deforested the capital quickly with the goal of getting out a settler before too long.



Discipline is the obvious right choice, but I decided to ignore God King in favor of the extra production. I don't really understand how religion works here just yet, and I've already decided how I'm going to aim my early game, so I went with Urban Planning here instead. In retrospect now looking at the Pantheons, I think that was probably a poor choice. Maybe I'll slip in some time there to claim one soon.

I met the city-state of Kabul to my east. I was the first to meet them, so the free envoy meant I got a nice bonus towards units. This was a pretty nice boon:



10hpt at size 3 on T17 seems pretty great. The +2 is the Kabul bonus.



This was a nice break. I haven't been able to meet any civs, but I backed my way into this Eureka. This was one of those tribal villages where it was nearly impossible to find it under the jungle, but I did fine it eventually.



I concluded that rush buying felt like a very good use of gold even if you're paying a 4x multiple, so I used some on a warrior to make up for my farmer's gambit-y start. I think this turned out to be a tad excessive actually.

Barbarians early on weren't much of a problem, and I think I figured out why. When I scouted the south with a warrior, I came across a scout. I wounded the scout, but I was unable to kill it, and it successfully ran away. However, I realized I wounded it before he came within range of my borders, which meant he had no knowledge of where my city was. As a result, I didn't receive any barbs incoming from the south. Neat.



This was a little hairy given the barbs. If you'll notice, I have one slightly wounded warrior and one severely wounded warrior here, and that's it. The two of them had already killed off two waves of horsemen, so they were running on empty. One of these horsemen actually managed to get to Rome and pillage my stone. I was relieved to learn pillaging didn't destroy the mine, and my builder was able to repair it for free (not using a charge). That's nice.

I picked the location because the double horses + forested hill seemed good in the short run. That would let me chop out a builder, mine the hill, and hook a horse leaving the second builder to hook the other horse. Longer-term, I'll build a campus up against those triple peaks + jungle which seems really good. The lake provided fresh water, so all in all this location seemed great. It also led me towards my next city, but I'm getting ahead of myself.



I juggled my civic tech for a bit in order to land a free policy change on just the right turn - when I was ready to being production on my next settler. Really enjoying managing policies. I think there's tons of value to be found in this area.

More later.

[scooter]

Turn 36-50



My scout stumbled across an unfortunate sight. I managed to get him to survive the following turn with almost no hp. I wasn't able to run out of range from there, so I took the jungle promotion and hoped to survive the inter-turn. I did again (with a health bar that was basically gone) where I proceeded to run for a few turns while being chased. Eventually he got cornered and died. Oh well, he more than returned his value in Eurekas and city-state free envoys.



Met yet another city-state up here. To my great surprise, nobody had met this city state yet..? On turn 44? Just how isolated am I? My original plan was to rush someone, but there's literally nobody to attack. We'll do things differently, then.



So this was my plan. My original goal was to head to Iron Working to unlock Legions. I looked around, and I had no iron, but that's okay because UUs don't need their special resources.

That said, I realized the Eurekas leave an interesting dilemma. Because I do have a pair of horses, I have HBR discounted in half, while there's no way to unlock IW's Eureka (mine some iron). That's actually kind of an interesting balance for a UU. Resourceless, but expect to pay 2x as much science for it if you don't have the resource. I kinda like that.

Anyway, since I did get legions in my test game, and HBR was so cheap given my horse, I decided to take Horsemen for a spin instead. I have yet to build a mounted unit in this game, so why not now. The target will be Jakarta because it blocks off access to a wide open patch of quality land. Nobody has met them yet, so I want to see if I can kill them penalty-free if nobody has met them yet. That's clearly how it should work, but who knows if it actually will.



I was surprised by this tooltip here. Apparently you need two horses if you don't have an encampment? Good thing I was about to hook the second one.



And here's where I placed my third city on T49. Newsflash: Jungle rules in this game. Why? I have no clue. But this city is amazing. The only downside is it took the settler like 8-9 turns to trek up here, so maybe it wasn't worth it. Its only weakness is that is has only coastal water rather than freshwater, but I was seriously lacking for freshwater locations in this game. But seriously, it has two 4/1 tiles before any improvements. That's really great. I need to check and see if there's any buildings or wonders related to jungles. I know there's one for desert, and it's downright ridiculous.

Turn 50 Overview



I celebrated T50 by rush-buying a builder out of Antium. I'm not convinced using gold to buy tiles early on is good unless you don't have much choice. The culture does usually spread to the right tiles (although obviously if it was less black box-y it would be better), so I don't usually see a need. I will probably do it at my second city soon because it's got a killer campus location, but that's about it. Speaking of, we've got a great one here too between the peaks surrounded by jungle.



Here's my config at Rome currently while building my first Horseman. I'm at my amenity limit, so there's not much use in growing, so I've shifted into a hammer-centric setup. I can get 14hpt here from tiles, palace, policy, and Kabul. Actually, I think this is from before I did the policy switch because I should be getting a +100% here.

I'm not sure using a builder to farm that rice was actually worthwhile. It's only 1F better than the floodplains, and I'm not even working it now because my lack of luxuries means I can't really grow much more (yet), and there's no way to convert that excess food into something more useful. Something to think about.



Here's the policy config I shifted into on T50. I'm going to squeeze out a few horsemen, and then I'll do a switch back into economic mode.



This is my primary target. If I capture this, I'll get far easier access to the jungle heaven to the northwest. Of course I could send envoys here, but currently I've got 4 city states available to send envoys to, and only 1 of them has even met another civ. Envoys don't exactly churn out early, so I'd rather just capture this land and put it to work, and I'll cultivate some of the other city-states. I don't expect to see much other than warriors here. I'll send a warrior or two of my own along with a few horsemen just in case there's a Spear.



This encampment down here is my secondary target. Less of a priority for sure. I'm thinking of fog-busting this southern area. I think that still works? There's some decent cities down here with coastal water, but it's all backlines.



And here's my empire overview. This is the first serious barbarian invasion of the game from the south given my earlier comments on the scout. I might get one of my resources pillaged, but thankfully I've got a builder in the area waiting to clean it up. My warriors should be able to handle it just fine with the positional advantage, and if there's anything left in 3T the horseman will clean up just fine.

In the north some quick chops will get Antium off the a rocket start, and Ostia will probably aim to get a campus up along the peaks in the next 25T or so. After getting a couple horsemen out and swapping back into the settler policy, I'll aim to build a couple settlers. I've got one partial-built in Rome. The idea will be to capture Jakarta and follow that up with two quick city plants to the northwest to claim a ton of land, then backfill.



Comfortable score lead already.

So that's where I'm at right now. The policy and district placement stuff are probably my favorite things so far. The worst are 1UPT and the UI.

[scooter]

Turn 50-75

I played some more.



I jumped into Oligarchy and set up my policies this way. The 100% bonus here was part of the rationale for going with Horsemen. That got some Horsemen out in a hurry. After getting 4 of them out (1 too many) I slipped in a relatively quick settler after that to follow the horsemen up to the northwest. Operation landgrab is in full swing.



On T55 I finally met someone. How Cleopatra went 44 turns without meeting Nan Madol is completely beyond me. I did notice her rice there is pillaged. I guess the AI struggled with barbarians a bit?



This means war.



Candy from a baby.

A couple turns later I swapped out of the military building policy I no longer needed and took conscription. Military maintenance is more costly than I realized, so that helped a lot. I also swapped into the economic policy that gives you a wonder bonus. I had my eye on the Hanging Gardens which felt like a natural choice for my city spam.



SPEAKING OF CITY SPAM. This was my 5th city. The location may seem a bit further than ideal, but I've noticed that being on fresh water is ridiculously important, and this was one of the only spots on the entire map remaining with fresh water. I chopped a jungle with that builder to put me at size 2 immediately along with a nice production boost. I bought that jungle tile roughly 2E of the city because it's an absurd campus location - 3 peaks + 3 jungle! I'll try to get that online quickly.



Egypt hates me for declaring on a city state they haven't even met yet because OF COURSE THEY DO. I got a serious warmonger hit, but of course she's free to do the same to her neighboring city state. Really despising the diplomacy here. Egypt did immediately denounce me after declaring on Jakarta, but our relationship started to swing back up because she really likes that I have a powerful military. I'm not sure how long the denouncing lasts exactly?



Apprenticeship is my beeline of choice here. When I played my test game, I was shocked to see all my mines suddenly went up by 1hpt. It took me a few minutes to figure out this tech was the culprit because the only way to find this bonus is to hover over the tech. Really fantastic user experience there. Anyway, I'm counting on that to help me a lot as I get into the stage where everything is absurdly expensive.

Also featured in this picture: my brand new shiny Hanging Gardens! The wonder video was nice.



I mentioned earlier that nearly all the freshwater locations were gone - well this was the last one. So I went ahead and nabbed it. There's a bunch of hills here so this will be decent, but the lack of things to chop means it'll start a little slower.



And here's where I am at T75. 6 far-flung cities and another settler in production. I'm building two campuses because why not, although I've already blown by the AI in tech anyway so it barely matters. For the next phase I'm just going to see how much land I can lock down peacefully and go from there. There's a bunch of promising spots northwest of Jakarta that seem to be wide open, so why not. I've also got some nice backfill locations south of Rome. The Roman free roads thing is ridiculously strong as every new city improves your road network for free.

One thing I've failed to take advantage of is probably trade routes. I just built my first trade out of Antium, and it's going to head up to Hong Kong. That'll connect Antium to the western road network. I don't really know how to get more trade route capacity, but I know it's got to be possible. Given every city gets a free Trading Post for Rome, it does feel like I've missed an opportunity here.

I'm definitely having fun as evidenced by the late timestamps in the top-right corner of the screenshots. I do fear this fun will fizzle if some things aren't changed, though.

[scooter]

Turn 75-100



I finally met a second civ on T77. I would go on to meet a few more during this session. I guess the Rome start was just very isolated.



Breathtaking insight from Caelinus here.



Here's something that puzzled me. The horseman died on this peninsula here. The pre-attack meter actually showed me narrowly winning this battle and finishing off the Spear, and yet I died anyway. There's either a small RNG element to the results (fine by me) or a bug in the display (not so much). I guess it's probably RNG?

I got Apprenticeship at turn roll which was an early priority for me. I'd built a lot of mines, and it seemed like the additional production everywhere was really useful.



I found this in a goodie hut. That's sort of fun. It netted me something like 4 faith/turn and 8 tourists? I don't really understand great works just yet.



I settled Arretium here. Fresh water, jungle/forests to chop, luxury, and some hills seemed solid enough. It's pretty food poor, but that won't stop it from contributing. I can also plop down a campus to the west next to the other campus.



Here's a shot of my empire on T90. This is one of the last times I can fit the whole thing into one shot, so it seemed like a nice time to take a picture. Antium turned into a settler pump pretty quickly. I couldn't build a bath there, and there weren't many farmable tiles (without buying tiles), so I couldn't grow it much past 7. So I just built a bunch of settlers in a row out of it. Worked pretty nicely.

Rome is building an Industrial zone here, and Ostia is building I think a Library or something to go inside the campus. I think that's what that icon is anyway.



I picked up the policy that doubled campus adjacency bonuses, and it had a significant boost to my science output. It was worth 4bpt in this city alone, and a few more in Ostia.

And yeah, I'm lagging behind a bit in builder improvements here. I did remedy that eventually, but I haven't quite gotten the hang of optimizing builders. I was having a really difficult time actually because they were getting obscenely expensive, and they still had only 3 charges. Unlocking the policy that gave them 5 charges was a godsend for me when I finally got there.

Finally, on T92 I stumble across a Kongolese warrior/settler pair.



He agrees to swap capital locations on the initial meet. So I continue on my turn, and then I end turn.



Civ6 Broken Diplomacy to the rescue! This was followed up by Trajan (me) declaring war on me because of course it was. Of course, the silliness wasn't done when on T95 I met Teddy. He says hello and we swap capital locations.

I notice on the next turn his icon is the war indicator. Huh?



So as best as I can figure, he declared war on me 3T ago when Kongo did, but I hadn't met him yet, so I got Trajan instead. Then when I met him the game temporarily ignored the war status and followed the usual pattern of "hello let's see each other's capitals." And then because we were already at war, I never got the notification.

Was diplomacy tested in this game at all?



I dropped my 8th city here in what would have been Japanese land if they knew how to build settlers.

Finally, here's a T100 overview:



Nothing but builders and settlers. Why would I spend 15T slogging away at a Commercial Hub that's now several times its normal cost when I can keep grabbing land that the AI is ignoring?



The homeland is working on a workshop and industrial zone respectively. In this phase of the game the tech and civic trees are pretty disappointing. Everything is either not very useful or too expensive to be worth building. I also seem to be bumping up against Amenity caps, but nobody knows how those work, so I haven't really put much effort into solving that. All I really care about is seeing how much land I can claim.

I haven't put much thought into victory yet. Supposedly cultural is fairly easy, but I haven't figured out how to get international tourists yet. I'm guessing the answer is basically "get tons of culture"? Who knows. Seems like a good idea for the game to explain a victory mechanic.



Cleopatra is AFK. That's the only thing that makes sense.

[scooter]

Turn 100-150

Cleopatra decided to denounce me at some point because my military was weak. Funny though, she never worked up the nerve to prove it.



I decided to try to make up for my accidental neglecting of trade routes early on and take Merchant Republic for a spin. I actually didn't notice the 15% gold purchases bonus until literally just now. That's nice! I bought a lot of things with gold during this time, so hey, that worked out.



I kept settling cities because there was still land. This is insanely far away from my capital, but 118 turns into the game nobody has bothered, so why not! Those diamonds are an amazing tile, and overall this is a solid location with a nice mix of food and reasonable production. It certainly got off the ground a lot quicker than my next city. (I did shuffle a builder up here a turn or so later.)



One of my biggest disappointments with this game is that coastal cities suck so badly. This city took an absolute eternity to be useful. I rush-bought a builder a couple turns later (I've spent probably 80-90% of my gold this game on builder purchases), but even that wasn't really enough.

It feels a little wrong to have a Civ game where coastal cities are bad, but here we are. The reality is that coast tiles are awful tiles, the ocean bonuses are underwhelming, and they're rarely irrigated. I'm not sure what to suggest here. This feels like a fundamental consequence of fresh water + districts playing a huge role. It certainly feels like Civ6 has killed the fishing village.

I also learned here that barbarian scouts will not kill settlers. I actually had a warrior escort, but I sailed these two across the water rather than walk for ages to get here. I stumbled upon a barbarian boat, and he managed to kill my warrior en route. My settler survived, but I was trapped with no choice but to trust that the scout wouldn't attack. It didn't. So I settled the city safely.

At this point the AIs set off a string of wars. America and England apparently declared a joint-war on China, and then one of China's city-states joined on their behalf. A few turns later Japan declares on America, and all of this while Kongo is still technically at war with me.



Here's my core at T125. I've started building some districts.

One thing that puzzled me. Rome was never allowed to build a Bath. Does anyone know why? I understand that it needs to be on an adjacent riverside tile, but it didn't give me the option to do something like pave over one of those floodplains farms, which definitely would have been worth it. What did I do wrong? I got almost no value out of that unique district in this game because of not understanding the rules.



(Not Pictured: Setia)

And the western half of my empire on T125. I ended up with 12 cities by T125 with only one of them (Jakarta) captured via war. Honestly, Jakarta contributed very little economically because it's a pretty lousy spot. Coastal cities and all that. That said, geographically it made it SO much easier to claim all this land. AI borders: still nowhere to be seen! This Rome location is a bit lonely, especially with the allergic-to-settlers AI. I shudder to think of how long this land will be unclaimed for the players who start way out west.




Settled this spot 10T later. Mainly I was looking for an irrigated spot close to my eastern empire that wouldn't have to hike a million miles to settle, so this was it. The jungle/forest surroundings gave this a really nice jump-start. Settling a city and chopping down jungle to give a few free pop growths and a free granary (or whatever) is really nice!



I also built the Colosseum. I don't remember what it does anymore (this was several days ago), but I remember thinking it sounded good at the time.



144 turns in, and I finally settled a spot a half-dozen tiles from Rome. I mainly had no idea where to place cities down here, so I went with the spot that had a few easily accessible mines. No chops meant this city would suck for awhile, but I felt weird totally ignoring the south.

A couple turns later, Kongo and England declared war on Arabia. The AIs really seemed to hate each other! Kongo was still at war with me for who knows what reason.



Finally, that brings me to T150. I spent a lot of time here getting up the Industrial goodies in my core cities of Antium-Ostia-Rome-Aquileia. I placed the Industrial Zones for Ostia and Rome right between each other, and this managed to include Antium, Cumae, and Aquileia in the 6 tile range thing. (I don't completely understand how this works, and it was slightly accidental that it worked out that neatly.)



14 cities at T150 with 2 more settlers about to complete.



I don't even know.


Anyway, I wasn't really worrying about victory conditions at this point. At one stage I considered getting a bunch of Knights and trying for early Domination, but I wanted to use the sandbox here to play with some more goodies, so I pressed forward. For awhile I was simply experimenting with trade routes and districts. I also started building cultural buildings around this point trying to figure out how to generate Tourism for a cultural win, and then I quit putting effort into that because I came up with a better idea.

Basically, I've decided I wanted to try out some military options. That'll have to come in a future report though because I'm nearly caught up now. Spoilers: it involves levying military from a city-state possessing a massive, massive heap of ancient trash. SOUNDS FUN.

[scooter]

Turn 150-175

I thought about pursuing a cultural victory. It sure seemed like the easy way out. Instead, I decided to truly take 1UPT for a spin. Having not played Civ5, I wanted to see if it was as soul-sucking to war with 1UPT as I suspected. So let's go for a grind-it-out Domination victory. How much is this going to suck? We'll see.



I decided to try out this levy miltary feature. Hong Kong had an absolute ton of units for some reason. I guess it's just a high production city with nothing else to build.



And now I've got an outdated carpet of doom for 30T. One of the tricky things here is that Egypt does have ancient walls everywhere, and I don't have any siege. I want to see just how effective sheer overwhelming quantity is. I'm also gearing up at this stage to pump Cavs everywhere, so I'll probably use those to speed up the ending, but I wanted to assault Egypt's capital with this mess of crappy units and see what happens!



"Expanding." That's, er, one way of putting it. England decided not to burn it 1812-style.



So this was weird. I denounced Cleopatra, and on the turn that denouncing was ready to declare, I get this option? I have no idea what city-state I'm protecting here because I'm suzerain of like 4 of them, and I can't find a way to see AI relationships with city-states. I'm sure it's buried somewhere. Anyway, sure, I'll take it!



Finally settled this spot. It's solid purely due to the fresh water and hills.



This was a total grind, but it did work. Carpet of doom indeed. 3T of slamming into the city yields this:



Cavs finally caught up and were sent in:





I call this "why am I still playing this game." That's second place right there I'm hovering over.

Anyway, I soon got a great scientist, and he had a "light bulb" option netting 250b per adjacent peak. I had a spot with 4 and got myself a cool 1k beakers. Of course, this silly game punishes you for teching things, so I don't know why I bothered.



WHY. This is some okay land here, and 171 turns in Cleopatra had just totally ignored it. It's a little empty on hills, but still. Build settlers!



RIP Cleopatra. However, on her very last turn of existence she left me with a nasty surprise:



What? I see this message, and sure enough all those Hong Kong units I levied reverted back to their control. Yeesh, I sure am glad I sent Cavs to speed it up! If I hadn't done that, she would have survived quite a bit longer. Anyway, I didn't see the note until right after I killed her, and I click on Hong Kong, and I'm still listed as the Suzerain, and it's not close. So the only thing I can figure is that on her very last turn of existence, Cleo got an envoy, sent it to Hong Kong, and dethroned my Suzerain status returning all of Hong Kong's units. Then on the same turn I destroy her and immediately regain status, but the units are "gone." Yikes! I don't know if I love or hate that.



LET'S START ANOTHER ONE.



Cav spam. Currently paying 112gpt for units. Invasions are expensive! Eventually I started deleting my old units to give myself more of a buffer. Yes, Japan is running around with Spears, so this will be a romp. This is the easiest possible invasion. So... how tedious will it be?

[scooter]

Turn 175-End

Where were we? Oh right. Let's slog. The last 25 turns probably took me as long as the first 175, but we're in this now. Upon declaration against Japan, I was immediately denounced by the rest. That's fine. It saved me the hassle of denouncing them. Let's get on with the death march of Cavs.



First blood, much more to come. Running over the entire continent with Cavs is so very Vanilla Civ4 of me.



America was displaced earlier by England (more on that later), so this was Teddy's last remaining city. I went ahead and killed it because it was in my way.



Cairo fell next giving me my third AI capital of the game. It had the very cool Petra in it. Seeing that next to the Pyramids in a desert chunk is pretty cool. If nothing else, the visual aspect this game is really nice. Functionally terrible, but visually appealing.

Also notice the notification stack of doom on the right side of the screen. This style is so much worse than Civ4's event window. There's also a bug of some sort in it. You'll see the wonder notification at the bottom - the notification for the Pyramids never left the screen the entire game. I eventually just did my best to ignore the notifications because they were more annoying than helpful.

I was confused but pleased to discover I could declare a colonial war on Saladin (and everyone else from now on) giving me less warmonger penalties. That turned out to not actually matter. But weirdly the option didn't become available until after the denouncing period. I guess you have to denounce first regardless? Like everybody else, I still don't understand this system.

I also met Qin around this time for the first time all game.



Still settling cities mainly because I had some settlers on hand, although I quit bothering around this point because it was getting tedious. Completely embarassing that I'm settling cities this far from my capital 185 turns in.



"1UPT makes for better tactics than SoD" - people who were bad at Civ4.

The biggest pain with 1UPT here isn't 1UPT itself, it's the fact that you can't group units together and move in one click. Do you have any idea how long it takes to move this many units every turn? A LONG TIME.

What makes it a lot worse is actually the terrain movement costs. I understand why they made this decision, but wow, fighting terrain movement costs was way more exhausting than 1UPT.



Capital Number Four. This was his only remaining city, so he died. One hundred and eighty-five turns in. I guess the AI doesn't know that jungle is good?



Amidst my complaints, I do love that land units can just load up and sail on their own without the tediousness of boarding separate naval units. So I set sail for London and Xian next to finish off the last two AIs with their capital.



London has fallen.



The end. Um, right? I hit end turn, no dice. Did I misread the Civilopedia?



"If you are the last player in possession of your own original Capital, you win."

I am. I did not win. Good lord. I understand most of the bugs, but you'd think testing something as basic as victory conditions would be a high priority?



Basically, England captured Washington a long time ago. That makes me the sole owner of my original capital. However, what this page SHOULD say is that you must control all original capitals at once, which is a very different thing. So... Sigh, let's go capture Washington too.





SUCCESS.



Neville Chamberlain in a game where I was 3 eras ahead of the nearest AI, owned half the world, and captured every capital when the AI was still sporting Spears? Okay. Something tells me this screen was thrown together at the very end.



Total units killed graph was pretty fun. I never lost a single Cavalry the entire game. I would tell you how many of them I had by the end, but the game doesn't track in a findable way as far as I can tell, and I didn't have the patience to go count.


--------------

So I enjoyed 85% of this game, but these last 25T were some of the least fun I've ever had playing Civ. Playing a kill-fest game is basically off the table in Civ6, and that's really disappointing. The combination of 1UPT, obscure movement rules, and near-useless roads makes any sort of warring a logistical nightmare. I don't see a way to fix it either, unfortunately. I don't think that completely kills Civ6 as a SP game, but as a MP game on the scale that we've played Civ4 on it probably does.

I finished this game about 10 days ago, and I have yet to even touch Civ6 since then, FWIW. That's how badly it burned me out. Not a great sign!

That said, I'm hopeful that when the especially horrendous stuff gets fixed, the enjoyable parts of the game (empire building, city building, social policies, etc.) will shine through enough that I get some replayability out of it.

[The Black Sword]

So I enjoyed 85% of this game, but these last 25T were some of the least fun I've ever had playing Civ. Playing a kill-fest game is basically off the table in Civ6, and that's really disappointing. The combination of 1UPT, obscure movement rules, and near-useless roads makes any sort of warring a logistical nightmare. I don't see a way to fix it either, unfortunately. I don't think that completely kills Civ6 as a SP game, but as a MP game on the scale that we've played Civ4 on it probably does. 

I'm hoping that when you're only playing 1 turn at a time, against competent(human) opponents, war might be fun. Hard to test the theory with the current support for MP though ...

For SP I agree with you anyway, I started a Scythia Deity game last week to see what combat was like. I'm pretty sure I've won but I've no desire to finish the game.

[Ruined Everything]

Your adventure reads like a more competently played version of mine. We both went for rapid expansion into the dead land to the West of Egypt early on (I think our city placements were almost precisely the same - compare your T110 screen shot with my T120 one.)

We both then settled the western shore of the Eastern sea (I agree it was odd that Japan never settled the spot where you placed Velitrae and I placed Charleston - there was a lot of mining potential and a lot of food around that area.) T110ish - T150, invaded Cleopatra around T150, and blitzed Japan (followed by the rest of the AI) T175. 

Your army was a lot bigger than mine - probably because I was kinda playing sim city right up to the bitter end (I ended up with like 332 bpt) and murdered the world with a 12 man army.

Some thoughts:
- I noticed that you were pretty aggressive with your initial plants. This probably put you in a stronger position (the starting area was pretty shitty and there was some good stuff over by Japan and Egypt - and unlike civ4 I think there’s no distance cost.), Did you have problems with barb defense/supply chain logistics? 

- How many turns did it take to churn out a cav? Did you do anything other than i-zone + trade routes + policy?

- By the time walls go up, IDK how effective ancient era spam is (apart from archers, which the AI has trouble with.) I noticed that the only time people had military trouble in the adventure involved ramming warriors and chariots into walls. I used horsemen + crossbowmen for my conquest of Egypt, and that seemed to go faster? (Though I get that the levied carpet of doom was an experiment. )

- You obviously did a much more efficient job at blitzing through the AI then I did (we both started T 175ish, and you finished 20 turns ahead of me.) The one thing I did notice was that you weren’t using bombards. Any particular tactical reason for that, or were you just trying to spare yourself at that point? With free 6-move embarkment any unit can Blitzkrieg, and bombards can drop the walls in 1 shot (I found that bombard + 3-4 cavs was typically a 1 turn capital kill.)

Thanks for the report.