I'm interested in hearing what everybody feels about normal units. Do they play a significant part of your games? Please stick to your evaluation of their current usefulness and how much you use them, rather than skipping straight to what should be done. Here is my take on each of them.

Spearmen
Completely useless for anything other than police and sacrifice. Never see the AI using them. It's easy enough to supply troops from other cites that the ability to build them anywhere really matters. The food upkeep makes them irrelevant as police troops fairly quickly.

Swordsmen
Marginally useful in a pinch when I've messed up, somewhat useful for rush tactics with lizardmen and trolls. Supposed to counter ranged, but too weak to really work in that role.

Bowmen
Not really that bad on paper, but I find myself never using them. Only potent when equipped with magical weapons and produced with barracks, and by that time you probably have stronger units available to you.

Cavalry
Barbarian Cavalry are great, but play little role because of dominant berserkers. Dark Elf Cavalry are nice, functioning somewhat like Horsebowmen but with First Strike. Other than that, I never use them.

Halberdiers
Amazing units, reasonably cheap and with an affordable structural requirement. I use these very often unless I have unique units that outclass them.

Shamans
Very useful for the Healing spell and cost efficiency, even better when boosted by racial traits (lizards, halflings).

Priests
Also very good, excellent durability. I find myself using them in combination with Horsebowmen when I play nomads because they negate Guardian Wind. A little boring that they're essentially identical to shamans now, with both having Healing.

Magicians
Great units worth the cost, use them very often in mid game and on.

Catapults
Cheap and seem powerful, but buffing them doesn't do much. Speed 1 makes them useless for anything but garrison duty. It's too bad we can't make them move 2 on the overland map and 1 in combat. I never bother with them.

As the starting production bonus seems to have too high impact on games, but cannot be regulated through starting positions well, two ideas that could be used to fix this problem.

1. Sawmill +8 production no longer benefits from production bonuses.
This is where most of your production comes from, so it reduces the impact of early production while not affecting late game that much, albeit it does make miner's guilds and mechanician guilds as well as inspiration worse.
It might be possible to only remove the effect of terrain instead of all production bonus though which solves that problem but isn't very intuitive.


2. Terrain production bonus capped at 3% / population like terrain/road gold bonus
Simple, effective and utilizes an existing game mechanic. It does make places with lots of mountains bad though as those won't have the population needed to utilize the production bonus.

Or we can

3. Leave everything unchanged, as many other factors have an equal or higher influence on games anyway. The higher food requirement and lower mountain production should reduce the impact of this problem somewhat, too.

Here we go, duel vs. Mr. Cairo

Me, Cornflakes: Persia
Mr. Cairo: Nubia

More thoughts on the civ picks later. For now, just a quick screenshot.

   

VERY lucky with city state envoys. In the first 10 turns I was first to meet all 4 city states. I'm trying to decide between early holy site and early campus at the mountains. Holy site synergizes  with the unique tile improvement, but Stockholm gave me an incredibly easy quest (Writing eureka) so I'm leaning towards Campus  and a quick Suzerain to go after Hypatia as the first GScientist.

The settler I'm currently building I'm planning to place to the north. The warrior will circle back now to escort the settler. I haven't seen any barbs yet. More thoughts later.

Had better starting positions, had worse. I do not want to risk moving forever, so I decided to settle on the Jade and go builder first to quickly catch up on culture with Rome.

   

A religious CS which is not that useful in a duel imo, but we will see.

   

OK, let's give this thing a shot.

First, the picks. Nubia. I'll be honest, I made my pick while quickly having a look at all the civs before work this morning, and I didn't realise the unique improvement for Nubia can only go on desert/floodplain. In any case, that's fine, it seemed a little OP to me anyway.

Cornflakes' pick is Persia. Their unique ability seems very powerful in SP, but in a duel I can just nullify it by declaring war on him as soon as I see him and never making peace. Their unque unit is a sword with a ranged attack. Well, my unique unit is an fast archer with a more powerful ranged attack and I build it with a 50% bonus.

Next, the start:

(Yes I know that my starting movement with the warrior was dumb, let's move on)
I was tempted to move towards the desert so I could have a Pyramid next to my city centre, but in the end I decided it was more important to snowball with my cap. It's districts will always be cheaper anyway as they'll come earlier. Besides, that plains hill jungle banana is 3 food 2 hammers. Seems good. 

My plan is based on my limited SP experience. There I always build a lot of units at the beginning (as in 2-3 slingers and a warrior) then build a settler, using my first chunk of cash to buy a builder. So that's what I'm going to try here. I'll be able to get even more slingers thanks to my ability, and I'll try and nip the barbs in the bud, so to speak, and prevent them from becoming a serious problem later on. Also, I am definitely planning on conquering some city-states early on as well, unless I luck out with a very useful one nearby.

Starting location pretty much has two possible ways to affect.

1. By limiting what the game considers acceptable when picking locations for the capitals. We have limited options here because the game freezes and fails the map generation if the map does not have enough good spots to fill all requirements at once for every wizard.
In particular, we can have the "max pop" and the "distance from other wizards" appear here and nothing else (the rest are obviously needed restrictions such as "must be on land").
With the newest - not yet released - update, the system changes so that the game drops the food and wizard distance requirements simultaneously if a higher requirement cannot be fulfilled in a certain amount of tries. (30000)
We need to discuss what the lowest acceptable amount for these two (enemy distance and food) is.
We also need to discuss how the correlation between the two should work - for example for each 2 lower food we drop distance by 1, or for each 1 food, or the other way around, we drop 1 food for 2 distance, etc.
And finally we need to discuss what the starting amounts should be, the amount where the game doesn't even try a higher because we don't expect it to happen or we don't care about it. For example we can say "We don't care to try for 18 food, and are fine with at least 12".
Based on a few experiments, a distance of 16+ is unlikely to happen and I usually get maps with the lowest distances being around 12 on normal and larger maps. On Tiny, even a distance of 6 is not unheard of.

Do note that if placing the cities fails for the lowest amount the game will now move lairs (which don't allow cities next to them for AI reasons) and tries again. So even if the map would end up a successful "6 wizard distance", if we set the minimal distance at 10 it might work, but would take longer to generate until lairs end up in a position where it works out. However, as Nodes and Towers are unmovable, it's also possible that repeated attempts fail as well and the game freezes. I don't know what the highest safe "minimal value" for each stat is. I think food should be safe up to ~10, but distance might not be. If we do want high minimal amounts, we'll need to do some extensive testing to see if it works or not. Also note that the minimal amount, maximal amount and the correlation aren't independent, if we decide on any two, the last one will have to be calculated from that.

2. As discussed in the starting mineral thread, it's in theory possible to make the game check tiles and add or remove minerals after the city was already placed. I believe it's also possible to change terrain itself, as at that time the tiles are still "raw" and not connected which means only the 10-15 basic tile types are used, not the 600+ various subtypes. So if we want any sort of restriction on production, minerals, etc, we need that to apply here. However, this a questionable, as it artificially changes the availability of good or bad starts and would take a huge amount of time for marginal gain. Honestly, as good as it sounds in theory, aside from early rush tactics, nothing else cares about the starting city to this level of detail. Sure, the starting city might not have adamantium, but the first hamlet next to it does, if you plan to strike on turn 90 it makes zero difference. Yes, the starting city matters a bit more, but still I rather start on a pop 4 swamp tundra that has pop 25 half a screen away with 3-4 ores than on something perfectly average. I also think it'll be close to impossible to agree on anything here as some people will ask for a maximal others for a minimal quality in the same or different resources, so I am tempted to just go with "I rather not open this can of worms". More importantly I now see the "[Starting Location] - Unable to improve this due to the order of steps in map generation." entry in the current tasks list which doesn't sound promising. I remember we had some sort of a discussion about it this spring which didn't go very well and concluded on "can't be done", but I don't remember the details. It might have been for some different goal but now I think it probably was the same. So I strongly believe we are better off staying away from trying to add this feature, game balance or not.

Anybody interested in another Duel Civ6 game? From the 2 games with TheArchduke we learned that the default starting locations are way too close, with the one right play being early aggression. I made a couple of edits to the starting location generator to increase the starting distance from 9 tiles to 20 tiles, locating the players approximately on opposite ends of the Duel-sized Pangaea. Also I made freshwater a mandatory requirement for starting positions. Coastal starts are still possible, but only if they are also lake-side or river-side. This should take care of the issues that cropped up in the previous duels.

Also my schedule has opened up and I can consistently play turns now. I have all the DLC so I'm open to either including or excluding them from the pick options. So, anybody interested?

Looks like we'll pick our civs back to back in the middle of the pack. Any civ you are particularly hoping for Mike? I'd love to show everyone the true strenght of the Kongo, but I'm not above picking one of the powercivs if they are still available.

I am not heart set on any civ combo in particular.

The one combo that i did think of was Egypt and Poland. Seems like the trade routes could become really strong.
Egypt focuses on economy / religion / science, while funding Poland's army. The trade route synergy of Poland sending all of its traders to Egypt was the idea of the strategy.

Again that was the combo i thought of when snake picking was announced, open to all ideas.

PLAYERS STAY OUT - Map making & Lurkers thread: