Hi everyone,
Things have been quiet since OSG-30 wrapped up and I want to get some more games running. I've been brainstorming ideas and themes, so here's is what I have come up with so far. I notice that the biggest challenge for our newer players just getting into Impossible difficulty is the election. There have been a large number of council losses in the last two Imperia, and I am trying to think how to address this. Ideas include playing as the Humans to improve relations or as the Sakkra to increase our ability to achieve a veto. I also thought we could play the Silicoids to get more planets but maybe not as a first outing. 
Can anyone else think of any diplomacy-specific variants that would help with mastering control of the council? I'd like to get another Imperium running shortly and if there is interest another SG would be fun too. Thoughts?

I updated the Google Docs spreadsheet to include the results of Epic Four. Thanks to all of you who took part - I'm planning on reading through your reports this weekend. It looked like some very exciting games from the skimming I did this week. I hope everyone had a good time.

Here are the Honorable Mention winners (also on the Google Docs spreadsheet):

First City Capture Mr. Cairo Turn 29
Most Cities Turn 200 Ranamar 31 cities
First Civ Eliminated Ranamar Turn 101
Highest XP Unit suboptimal 540 XP Field Cannon

This was the last game idea that I had for a Civ6 event. However, Cornflakes has floated a promising idea that I think will make for an excellent Adventure in its own right. Assuming that he's willing to find a good map, hopefully we can have another game ready to go in a week or two. The schedule is also open for other suggestions, so feel free to come up with your own scenario designs and we'll see what we can put in place. Thanks everyone.

My first RB Civ report was an AW game (Epic 14 of Civ4) and I got kindly lectured by a vet about report going too long.  This one probably is too, but it might be the last event so I went all in.  Thanks to the sponsor and all readers!

Quick scoring:
First city conquered:  T79 (if city states count) or T132 (if not).  I’d be shocked if the ruling matters
First civ kill:  T169 (I *better* not win this
Experience: 5 star field cannon in the west - 274 XP

36 cities on winning turn (187)


1W looks like obvious move at glance.  Also thought on the stone could be good too, the rice is a 4/0 marshrice; which first (with this then the tiles between the horses/cows is a good one)...I went with settling 1W.  

Idea was doing 3x pastures with the Open Sky pantheon (culture from pastures).   Also not sure why I can see that desert hill above the rice, but that looks like an ok spot already even if all desert to the north
That also allows going straight AH->Archery, no big need to do mining early.  
Was very tempted to gamble with builder first - I really bet Sullla playtested enough to make sure no AI’s real close, and that was true of the original AW civ3 and civ4 games - but warrior->builder was choice.  It doesn’t set back too much because all those pastures are 2nd ring, and can’t get the pantheon that early either.  Also deliberately did not build or use scouts, thought a few huts not worth possible extra trouble early.   I didn’t playtest a ton on what AW looks like but had thought that AI’s don’t scout great, so if I don’t wander out too far I won’t have to defend until later.  

Other early ideas - culture somewhat devalued, as envoys worthless
would it be easier to conquer nearby CS instead of building settlers?  One playtest indicated yes you definitely could with warriors/archers if fast enough.

Oh hey, there’s one.  A city would go where the warrior stood - with the pantheon those sheep hills are OK and has 5 grass hills in 2nd ring.  But eventually I decided against an early rush of Lisbon.  It’s not on freshwater and has a lot of desert/coast, so not a really strong site.  And the line of hills is an issue - would take 8 turns to move warriors or archers from the capital up there; that’s an uncomfortably long travel time and sounds like getting asked to have the AI show up in force while your army is away.  
(That animation was really neat - was able to move east, kill a lisbon warrior after it redlined a barb camp spear, and swipe the clearing gold + military tradition boost!).
With that gold, I was ok buying 2 of the pasture tiles, after normal culture got one plus the stone.  Pantheon not around yet so culture expansion pretty slow.

Mt. Kilamanjaro created a real interesting tradeoff here - the “c?” tile would be awesome with all the hills and bonus food, but really gimped on housing until Aqueducts available.  I would wind up doing it later, like my 5th city; curious what other players did with it.  

In my pregame I wasn’t necessarily planning to be doing a settler this early, but with no AI contact at all it seemed like this might be a very builderish always war game.  Also I have archery 1t from done (didn’t get slinger kill boost), want to prebuild some more slingers of course.  

Call me crazy but I’m building another settler (without Colonization!) as no AI’s around…
General approach was taking hold here.  I decided that I wanted to play a bit slower game:
-do not stomp an AI early with archer rush (none really close enough here anyways), or slightly less early with horseman attack.  That would play out a lot like my unwritten Adv 2 replay (didn’t finish a space win, but with better tactics early leveraged horsemen into wiping the continent around 400AD) or Adv 3.  
-wanted to play instead with siege and slower moving units, just for something different.  (But not glacial, thus getting GG seems key)
-and kind of wanted a longer game, wanted to develop my own civ more and defend for a while.  I had time to play this, and it looked like decent chance that the Epics would end after it; even if not I will be traveling a lot in Sept/Oct and probably can’t do the next game.  So wanted to invest some time in a longer game.
-also, unlike the last adventure, there were several good city sites around with rivers + multiple production tiles.


As far as districts - planned to do the CH+ Hansa combo basically everywhere, and probably a good number of encampments as well.  (their yields and buildings are kinda sucky, but GG are invaluable for the movement bonus).  Planning on totally ignoring other districts.
All that also explains why I didn’t settle Magdeburg 1W so it would get the horses - don’t really want too many of them, and can probably do encampments if needed (IE if I don’t get another city that grabs them).

Finally meet an AI, though the barb horses are a much more proximate issue, plus a camp to my NW also sending some units (thankfully no horses).  Also State Workforce isn’t urgent but was waiting on finishing Foreign Trade for when could ditch God King - did get the Open Sky pantheon, phew.  I guess backup choice would have been.  Really wish that you could see list of founded pantheons - maybe I’m wrong but think you see other civs pantheons when

1. They cross 25 faith after you’ve met them
   
2. They found a religion and
   

The Mrrshan are now in the game and there have been a lot of user interface improvements. Let me know what you think!

https://remnantsoftheprecursors.com/2017...available/

I played in this game because it will probably be the last RB event ever for Civ6.

The war-weariness isn’t that bad (spearmen and colosseum ftw!) and the AI is not very good taking out cities without a big edge (which is the only way it attacks you really). I’ve played games like this on IMM were the AI DoWed me and I won. A difficulty level isn’t worth losing luxes and access to city-states so this game is easy for me.  

AW in Civ3 allowed you to trade the turn you DoWed if you didn’t rip them off. That doesn’t matter here as the only non-per-turn per turn thing you can get are Great Works. Yay.

The “scoring” system awards things you should be doing anyway so I might have to let a unit die to get in a turn sooner and that’s it but I will be recording them for fun.

* First (among participating players, by turn number) to capture an enemy city. @turn 43
* Most cities controlled on Turn 200. 21. I crapped out a bunch of settlers in addition to conquest. Stopped playing after this.
* First to eliminate an enemy civilization (city states do not count). Brazil at Turn 104.
* Unit with the highest experience total at game's end. Didn’t grind which is needed to do well here; got bunch of units to level 3 (100 exp at least). If you cannot get exp when you reach level seven then everybody would easily be able to max this out if they are serious. (fake edit: there is indeed a hardcap...)

Don’t feel like having to gain the victory this time. France and Brazil are dead, Japan is useless and the other two civs are too far away. The other games had something to keep me going but not here: Adventure 1 was the first game so it didn’t count, my first spaceship win didn’t count because it was the first one, Scythia is never boring to play, the Rome game didn’t take much real-time to play due to isolation and Epic 2 I thought had a great strat because I didn’t see the true purpose of Nan Modal.

If I thought this game would look good against a “real” submission I would go on but it wouldn’t—I attacked Brazil when I should have attacked France first. This wasted time, exposed me to Japan and more city states and forced me to fight France’s UU.

I feel the biggest problem with these Epics is the AI is a one-trick pony (rushing) so you feel like you’re a pencil pusher for most of the game.  This requires clever gimmicks to overcome—that Scythia game that gives you an excuse to play the most (at that time) broken civ in the game and that Kongo game that brought empire management together.

Placeholder for now because I want to try putting together a narrative instead of just a turn log like I have in the past

Conquest victory T224
First conquered city: Turn 38
First civ kill: Turn 101
Cities at turn 200: 31, with a 32nd founded that turn
Highest promoted unit: Level 8 Field Cannon with 420xp

Fun footnote: As far as I can tell, I conquered every city on the map, due to the precise placement of my last target.

First of all, despite the CS issues with this game, I really enjoyed it, more than any other game of Civ6 I've yet played (not that I've played a lot).

I'll get the important stuff out of the way first:
I wasn't nearly as aggressive as I probably could have been, so I didn't win until turn 332, and then by science.
I probably spent I little too much time empire-building, if I had just gone for the conquest victory all-out, it would have been a lot easier, but then again, I wouldn't have got to play around in the modern era either so whatever.

Honourable Mentions:
Fist city capture: Turn 29 (Lisbon)
Cities controlled T200: 13 (I think, my closest screenshot is 205 and I had just captured my 13th city)
Fist Elimination: Some time between 250 and 260, during which I eliminated Sumeria and Spain (in that order)
Highest promoted unit: A Level 8 Machine Gun at 536/540 XP. Probably all of that XX came when it was an Archer/Xbow, as Machine Guns are pretty much useless.

The general way my game went:
-First conquests were against CS: Lisbon, then Geneva (but Geneva had just been conquered by Brazil)
-My first proper invasion was against Japan, and I was trounced, so I left them and Brazil alone for most of the game, and until right near the end they were ahead of me in tech.
-I continued to defend and expand normally to the west until I ran out of CS's to capture, and began to eat the Sumerians and Spain, who had been fighting eachother as well. 
-Then it was France, the most useless of the AI this game, and then into Brazil. Brazil was my equal in tech, if not military power, so it promised to be a real slog, but then I saw that Japan had started on a space victory. So I sent my army up to there to try and stop him, while also going for space myself.
-In the end I did quite quickly defeat Japan, by this time I had Mobile Artillery, which made things a lot easier, and I quickly took their capital and their space city. I didn't really need to though as my own capital was more than capable of winning a spacerace with Japan despite their headstart, as I had both the GPs who add +100% to Space Projects (or whatever they're called in Civ6), and after I built the spaceport, it only took around 3-4 turns for each of the projects.
-At that point it became a race against myself, to see if I would win by science before I could capture Brazil's capital. In the end I got to Mars just a few turns before I would have won by conquest.

I ended the game with 37 cities, I think.

Suboptimal's Epic (4) Fail

Summary Results

Victory: Nope, Turn 381 Loss, Japan launched the spaceship (hey, Emperor has me out of my element  )

Honorable Mentions

First Enemy City Taken: Lisbon, Turn 33
First Civ Eliminated: France, Turn 121
City Count, Turn 200: 12
Best Promoted Unit: Field Cannon, Level 9, 540/540 XP, not promotable.  Found the hard ceiling on XP gain for a unit.

A question for the readers: A lot of people (here and elsewhere) seem to use an archer rush to take cities early on.  However, at least on my installation of the game archers are at -17 strength against city fortifications even when no walls are present (I can get a screenshot out of an SP game as an example).  Has this penalty always been the case against cities without walls and I never noticed it or do I have a bug on my hands?  

The Details

Started out settling in place and I crank out a bunch of slingers while going Animal Husbandry → Archery on techs and Code of Laws → Craftmanship on civics.  Despite completing Archery on Turn 17 I went after Lisbon to the north with three promoted slingers and a warrior or two.  It fell on Turn 33:



This was a tactical error as I then had to take the units, upgrade & heal them, bring them back through the capital and then go south into French territory.  I founded my first settled city just north of Paris and La Rochelle, intending on using it as a jump point for invading France.  At Turn 50 the situation in Germany and France:





I took out La Rochelle on Turn 53 and was going to try to attack Paris without battering rams, but got stagnated by French troops.  Instead I went around Paris and took out Tolouse on Turn 76.  I get a ram down there and take Paris on Turn 91 with two more French cities yet to fall.  Marseilles is captured on Turn 105 and capture the last French city on Turn 121.  



Unfortunately for me, while this was going on in the south, Japan showed up around Frankfurt in the north with three knights and a swordsman against...an archer and no walls.  On Turn 108 Frankfurt falls:




At this point in time there are a couple of things that are evident:

- I'm way behind in techs and civics, as expected on this difficulty
- The AI is very disorganized in its unit movements, Frankfurt excepted.

I get a pantheon on Turn 132 and take God of Craftsman.  Frankfurt is returned to the German Empire on Turn 150 after an assault with knights, a siege tower and Joan D'Arc.  Feeling giddy I make an attempt on Sao Paulo with the same units and get my ass handed to me.  Their city strength was too high because they have field cannon out and about.

Around this time I realize that the only way that I'll be able to make any further progress is to figure out which civ is the weakest and target that one as best I can while attempting to build campuses, hansas and commercial hubs to keep my production, tech rate and economy afloat.  This only sort of works.  I make an attempt of Valladolid on Turn 182 with 7 knights and a battering ram.  Four turns later:



So close but yet so far!  Back to teching and trying to catch up.  

The revolts start on Turn 194:



I make another attempt at Spain on Turn 215 but find out that rams are useless because Spain has finished Steel.  I finally capture the city on Turn 222 and move south for Preslav, which was previously conquered by Spain.  That falls on Turn 230.  The game continues up through the 200's and into the 300's.  My economy is in reasonable shape but I'm only pulling in about 125 science per turn as I started running amenity-giving policies in the wildcard slots to reduce the revolts.  Despite this being a pangea Lisbon had not much to do so I built the Venetian Arsenal, which actually came in handy as I was able to build a few pairs of Battleships in the city which I then formed into fleets and used to capture Larak from the Sumerians and Madrid from Spain (on Turn 377).  



Four turns later:



Generally speaking, I lasted a lot longer than I expected given that this is only my second game (more than 60-70 turns) on Emperor and I've also never done an Always War variant.  The AI did use aerodromes and air units (Aachen was being attacked by jet fighters on occasion).  However, after about Turn 120 or so the AI was sending units in drips and drabs rather than as any sort of “force”.  The AI also didn't really make any effort to attack cities or pillage significantly, which leads me to this unit:



It started life as an archer and got a few promotions.  After upgrading to crossbowman this unit spent a good 200 turns parked in Nuremburg on my western front.  Here it is after 5 promotions, with my second most promoted unit to the east in Heidelberg.



Spain and Sumeria were both sending units through this corridor and with walls up there were no attacks on the city.  
As a result the crossbowman would take a pot shot at any unit in range, do maybe 5-10 damage and gain 5 or so XP.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  On Turn 223 this unit was at 315 XP and had taken the Expert Marksman promotion and was pulling down 10 XP per turn just by potshotting units it had no business attacking.  On Turn 259 is was a strength 82 field cannon when firing out of a city center or district.  Around Turn 330 the trickle of forces from the west dried up so I relocated the unit to Aachen, where the Brazilians seemed intent on roaming through with helicopters, tanks and eventually mobile artillery.  The unit got up to 540 XP where it earned its Level 9 promotion.  With no promotions available, though, the unit could gain no more experience.  Therefore, it looks like 540 XP is the “hard cap”.

Just a placeholder for now, sorry...

I played, enjoyed and won this game, I'll have to check my screenshots to write a proper report.

I can only state for sure, that I won a conquest victory (of course) in T165.

I noticed that the AI seemed to have got a little bit better at war (not really at combat, but it felt like they were building a lot more unit than before the patch, at least while at war).


EDIT : I can benefit from some free hosting by my ISP. Account validation can take a few days, but I will add the screenshots in due time.