Adventure Two: Sullla's (Shadow) Report

[Sullla]

My report is linked here on my website. As I was the sponsor for this game and put the map together, my result is a shadow game. I'm looking forward to seeing how everyone else fared with this one - we'll be planning the upcoming Civ6 events based at least in part on how thing game turned out for the community. I hope everyone else had as much fun as I did with this one.

[BUFFBUNNY]

I'm a new player to Civ 6 (a few partial games under my belt) and I never played Civ 5.  I did, however, play Civ 4 a few times over a year or so period.  That being said.......I lost on turn 30.

Started with builder, slinger, settler and popped 2 scouts from goodie huts.  Was attacked by Harald with 6 units (warriors and archers) and died, (not so) gloriously, in battle.

Looking forward to trying again in the next event and to reading how everyone else did.

[Athmos]

After having read so many of your reports Sulla, It feel just great to be reading through this one having played the damn game !


edit/comment 1 : About that wave of horsemen you had appear during your war with Harald : I had the same thing happen while I was laying siege to Poprovka, and I know what it is : when a city has very low amenity (-4, -5), which can happen during a war, rebellions appear, in the form of a handful of barbarians, often quite dangerous as they are on the same tech level as the civ they "originate" from.
I had such a rebellion happen to me in one of my games, and in that case you get a message explaining what's happening. It's quite mysterious (and unpleasant) when it happen to the AI, generally while you are at war with them.


edit/comment 2 :

I love the fact that Civ6 allows for custom religions in addition to the real ones. There are a whole bunch of astrology-themed symbols to pick between, and the name of the religion can be anything that the player wants. I saw this symbol and had to instruct my people in how to walk the path of Lobsterism. It was particularly amusing every time that I would use a missionary and see "+200 The Way of the Lobster" pop up on the screen. This was more fun than it really should have been.

I agree wholeheartedly ! I founded A'Tuinism in much the same spirit, that turtle icon being irresistible to me. In A'Tuinism, a key symbolic moment during the mass is when the priest, laying on his back, is ritually turned over on his legs again by the believers (And why this is despite the great cosmic turtle being of course, of the swimming variety, is one of the great mysteries of the belief).
Do lobsterists crawl sideways or backward to enter their church ?


edit/comment 3 :

Hey, who are you calling a warmonger? She left me no choice, the Great Lobster made me do it!

Ha ! I almost declared war on Frederick for the same reason, to kill off his missionaries, but left it too late and only realized what would happen once I couldn't do anything about it anymore.

edit/comment 4 :

Yes, still using a single warrior unit to do the actual city capture. This game is so heavily biased in favor of ranged units, between the endless resource requirements for melee units and the needlessly-aggravating movement rules when crossing through rough terrain. With horses available near the starting position, I really should have built a couple of horsemen and had them on hand to help in these conquests. I didn't do so because I had no iron anywhere near the start, and therefore they wouldn't be able to upgrade into knights. (Of course, I was forgetting that Arabia has the mamluke as a knight replacement unique unit, and all of the unique units are resourceless in Civ6. I did not realize this until much later - whoops.)

I did a loooot of work with 4 archers and 2 warriors as my army in this game. Lots of conquest early in my game as well, if in a different order. I didn't build any horsemen either, I was tempted too but really archers were the guys doing the heavy lifting anyway.
Anyway, you would have been disappointed, horsemen don't upgrade to knights (they are light cavalry and only upgrade to cavalry, much later), heavy chariots do, and who build heavy chariots anyway ? Early heavy cavalry is really not that good (unless you have a unique one anyway), and the upgrade is very expensive, so usually I just wait for knights to get knights.

OK, I'm dropping the edit/comment after this. You get it.

Aachen proved to be a tough nut to crack. For starters, I was unable to put the city under a full siege and it kept healing back 20 HP per turn. I'm not sure why that happened, as I had a pair of muskets occupying all six tiles immediately surrounding the city center. I'm assuming it's because the Encampment district interfered with the siege in some way (?) I confess that the zone of control rules still confuse me in this game.

What's happening is that ZoC doesn't cross rivers (or, as you know, go into water). You can actually see the tiles that are controlled by each unit, they are highlighted in red when the unit is selected, even if that display is slightly confusing because it also highlight enemy ZoC. But in practice, depending on where the rivers are around a city, you might need 3 units or more to siege it (if a city has 2 of its surrounding tile on one side of the river and 4 on the other side, for example).
This siege feature is one of the reasons that make the promotion that grant archers a ZoC at level 3 actually surprisingly useful, specially as I think most of us tend to use only token melee forces until quite late in the game. I actually like this ZoC mechanism quite a bit, as usual it's a shame the AI can't use it.

There was no time to devote 8 turns to building a power plant. I needed Ruhr Valley immediately, and then it would have to be straight on to the Spaceport. This was probably the single biggest mistake in my game: underestimating how fast I would finish the ending techs, and getting caught with my capital not ready yet on the production side of things.

That was definitely my worst mistake as well (although I think I left it even much later than you). Actually, given that I had built Cairo industrial zone on that desert tile, I was loath to replace a mine with the Ruhr valley, and left it VERY late, I actually completed the useless Eiffel tower* before biting the bullet and replacing that mine... I now understand that fast spaceship needs much, MUCH earlier planning than what I did. Specially with how much of a bottleneck the first spaceport and 2 first space projects are.
Actually I made enough mistakes and wrong assumptions that I would be quite interested in getting back to this "first to space" format again at some later point.

*well not useless at all, but clearly much lower priority in this game

I'm not sure if the wider Civ6 community is aware of how amazing the planted forests and post-Steel lumbermill combination can be.

Yes, plant forest + lumbermill are quite awesome, but conservation comes very late - usually well after industrialization in my games.
And actually the contribution of tiles is not as crucial at that stage, the way your factory bonuses overlap (or, well, don't) is the most important factor. And forest and lumbermill still don't provide adjacency bonuses to industrial zone, which is the main reason I look for hills when I dotmap before anything else in the early game.

I think that the advancement of Great People to the next era is triggered by a certain number of the civs in the game hitting that period in time, and since the various AIs were so far behind in tech, I was forced to claim every Modern Great Person before being able to recruit any of the Atomic ones, and then all of the Atomic ones before being able to recruit any of the Information ones.

I just thought they simply always came in the same order, and that the era was actually mostly just flavor. I'll google a bit to see if I can find out. My game would have benefited immensely from better planning around great people. District project are actually a very good way to accelerate them, probably faster than patronage.
I think in the space victory context, when you get to the end and start building spaceport/space project, all your other cities should go into project mode to burn through the great scientist/engineer list (with possibly a few merchants if you have amenities issues). I was getting a GP every other turn or faster I think toward the end.

Great adventure and great report as always, thanks again !

[unaghy]

Thanks Sullla for this game I have enjoyed it. I have also posted my report, but I played it as causal game, not opting on earliest space win. Read trough your report and would like to comment, among other things, your planting tree/lumber-mill discovery.

I was aware of its benefits, however problem with this one is its prerequisite "Natural history", which causes that antiquity sites emerges and prevent tiles to be improved. Thus I tend to delay its research until I have improved most of the tiles in my cities. Not sure if all these sites are former "goody huttes", if it so, then I could just put map note on each to know where antiquity sites will emerge.

Later on I´m replacing river side plains farms by trees/lumber mills or replacing farms that dont get feudalism bonus. Only disadvantages are that they are not counted towards industry zone adjacency bonus, otherwise it would be awesome way how to fix ineffective industry zone placement (often there is no better choice at that time).

[pindicator]

Agree 100% about the power of Conservation as a civic. I discovered it a little too late in my game as well and was still planting trees as I was making spaceship parts, but it's a civic I'm going to target earlier in future games!

Great report as always,

[Sullla]

Sorry to hear that Buffbunny! You were not the only one to be rushed by the AI and eliminated on this map. If you don't mind, I'll include your game in the results along with the rest of the posters.

Athmos, I'm glad that you were finally able to join in on an active Epic/Adventure game. I always love getting to compare results with the other players who tried the same map; just reading about the games afterwards can never quite capture the same experience. And there's also a lot to be said for the early discovery period with a new game, when everyone is still trying to figure things out and experiment with different strategies before the optimal paths are worked out. Even when a game is going through growing pains like Civ6 is right now, it can be a tremendous amount of fun. (Civ3 was a great example of this. That game had *SO* many problems on release, and yet I look back on that first year as one of my favorite gaming periods ever.)

On your other comments: I learned during this game that two melee units is ideal for early game attacks to get the zone of control effect on enemy cities to stop them from healing. I did not know that initially while playing. (I did the first half of this game back in November when it was first announced.) Definitely agree that 4 archers + 2 warriors is a sweet spot for early game combat. Similarly, thanks for the knowledge about how zone of control doesn't cross rivers - that's new knowledge to me. I also did not know that horseman don't upgrade to knights, so, uh, good thing I didn't build any?

Lobsterites don't crawl, they scuttle.

About the Conversation discussion: the civic can be a little bit tricky to reach for a non-cultural victory. However, the benefits are substantial as well. I don't think that I agree about tile yields not being important in the lategame, as a handful of fairly useless flatground plains tiles can suddenly be turned into 1/5 forested lumbermills if they happen to be riverside. In Civ4, we talked about how powerful State Property workshops could be, with every grassland tile turned into 2/4 yield; Civ6 almost allows the player to replicate that with Steel lumbermills. And this game doesn't even have Slavery civic to speed things along! I need to get another game into the lategame period to experiment with this in more detail. I have a feeling that it's going to be very powerful though, especially when combined with the cheapness of builders in the lategame. This is also the answer to all those people on Reddit and CivFanatics complaining that everything takes forever to build in Civ6. If you have Industrial zones with factories/power plants and have build mines and lumbermills correctly, then it definitely does not take too long for everything to build. Definitely not.

Looking forward to reading the rest of the reports as they get posted.

[MJW (ya that one)]

This game is the ideal archer-rush I was talking about in my report...

[Kylearan]

Aaah, nice to be able to read one of your great reports again about a game I can actually relate to. Good game, and I learned quite a few things from you, like finishing builders only after swapping into the +2 action civic or about Conservation and planting forests. 

One noob question: How did you accelerate civic research? Did you build many cultural districts/buildings, or did this come from population mostly? You (and the others) got far more advanced in civics than I did; I had to stay in Merchant Republic all game since I failed to research a better government in time.   Somehow I always felt that campuses, industrial or commercial districts were more important (and even didn't build a monument in every city), but later suffered from my slow cultural research. I have yet to develop a good feeling about the ratio of different districts to build...

[Athmos]

I don't know about Sulla, but I tried to maximize culture by getting as much inspirations as possible (I think the first ones I missed was medieval faires (4 trade routes), although I was lucky to find an inspiration for foreign trade since our continent was actually really a single continent.
I built unneeded bombards, upgraded to field cannons, but didn't go so far as to build airstrips, military engineers and aqueducts.
Other than that, I first built monuments in all cities, and didn't build any theater district myself; I captured 2 from Germany, but that was quite late in my game. I used meritocracy (1 culture for every district) at one point, but not for very long. I had suzerainty over Vilnius for some time, but without theater it doesn't amount to much. I finished the civics tree and repeated the last civics quite a few time by the end. Admittedly, I also finished much later than you (turn 297).

I also had the civics (I think it's Raj) that let you earn 2 faith, culture and science for each city state vassal you have, which amounted to 10/turn I think, but that was toward the end of the tree and didn't play a large role I think.

So in the end for me monuments and inspirations were mostly enough. So, I think monuments are actually very important, I don't know how much population you need to generate 2 culture (or even if it's generated by population), but I do know that border expansion is much, much faster with a monument ant that is motivation enough for me. My guess is that without a monument, a small city generates less than one culture, so a monument more than triple that amount.

edit : Well I've just read that each citizen generates 0.3 culture. If that is true, a monument more than triple the output of a size 3 city, and still more than double the output of a size 6 city. I think monuments are useful :-)