This was my second civ6 game, I have played virtually no civ5 apart for a couple of weeks when it was released, so I am coming from civ4 which I played for years in multiplayer.  

In both my previous and this civ6 game I realized two things, I really like what they've done with Civ6 and Prince level is easy    

In this game as Kongo I ended up winning a cultural (tourism?) victory in 1605 AD (turn 232). I did not start aiming for a cultural victory, in fact I don't think I have ever won a cultural victory in a game of civilization! 

However the way things unfolded it became evident that it would be the easiest path to victory. 

I learned a lot in this game, especially around the way tourism works and how to optimize for a cultural victory and I will try to share all this.


The first 50 turns

Turn 1
I settled in place, saw no reason to move and the start is really good as it has hammers, food and luxury. 

Teched Mining first as there were 2 mining resources to improve and went scout-builder. In this level (prince) I don't see any reason to go for anything else than builder after your scout. Scout out first seems essential to explore, find goodies but also very important to be the first to discover city states to get the first envoy with them. This first free envoy helps massively your start but also the game overall as we will see further on.

   

Turn 13
My scouting warrior finds an injured barb camp (from city state warriors) and clears it for a nice Inspiration boost and some cash! I am meanwhile researching animal husbandry for no reason whatsoever!

   

Turn 40

My first settler is in place to settle my second city. My build order was scout-builder-warrior-warrior-settler. I had some barb issues to the south that is why I had to do a second warrior before settler just to be safe.

I chose the river/coast location in the east to settle as I want the luxury.

Meanwhile I have 581 gold in the bank and I start to think of the best way to use them. I decide in buying a water mill in my capital which will give me 3 food and 1 production.

   

Turn 47

It is time to found my pantheon. I choose the one that give culture for every luxury as there are a lot of luxuries on the map. I am not thinking cultural victory yet, just a nice way to expand my borders.

   

Hey, anyone want a casual 4-man PBEM on a map like 68?

Roster:
Matthew Perry
Pukemaker
Rough Hello
_________________

Mapmaker: The Grill

Turn Order: (all addresses gmail)
Greenline: greenlinecivfour
Ruff_Hi: ruff.hi
Ipecac: ipecacrb
Commodore: commodore.rb

Settings as requested are:

Speed: Normal
Difficulty: Monarch
Map: Standard (44x28, 646 land tiles, 48% water)
Barbs: On
Units at start: scout and settler
No: Statue of Zeus, war elephants, blockades, active espionage, nukes, Great Lighthouse, Apostolic Palace diplo victory, tribal villages, events, tech trading
Diplo: AI diplo
Map description: Geography derived from a tropical full-of-resources Totestra with low sea levels, with a few bridges/choke points added in. Starting areas have been heavily edited to give everyone equal access to opportunities. Stone and marble are not present.

Tracker

Figured this was worth pursuing in case others haven't seen.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/wa...rk.600669/

Basically Isau in that thread proposes that the modifiers we see are +/- per turn acting on the overall relationship value and not just allowed to be additive to reach the current relationship status.

So if you have -4 it will reduce relationship by 4 per turn. I believe several other games work this way though they tend to make it clearer.

If people want a base to theorize or try to suss out the scaling equations / effects of scaling and when it comes into play I have a set of saves from one game with decent spacings, purely by accident.

T109
T155
T225
T252
T281
T297

I'll preface this by saying that I had forgotten I had signed up to do this and have played about 14 hours of Civ 6 at this point.

Story of my game, let's have a space race before we can build oceangoing ships, while a gaggle of Great Writers look on in despair!

I decided to play around with the half-price Holy Sites and Theater Squares for a Culture victory, founded a religion to enable purchases of Theater Square buildings with Faith (Jesuit Education), and very quickly realized that the scaling cost of districts would be the hard cap on how much tourism I could generate. Each city could only store 1 piece of Writing and either 3 pieces of Art or 3 Artifacts (the game ended before I reached Radio for Music slots), but I was getting every available Great Writer and Artist from the Theater Square spam, so I ended up with half a dozen unused Great People milling around Kyoto (maybe they were busking for the tourists, waiting anxiously for new museums and amphitheaters to open up ). I didn't build a single military unit past the three Archers that staved off the early Barbarians, and the AI never gave me any trouble beyond Cleopatra denouncing me every so often. I ended up finishing the relevant branch of the culture tree by t214, even without any Inspiration boosts. I won a Culture Victory on t236.

Screenshots:

This is my first serious game of Civ VI, after a bit of durdling around as Catherine de Medici to get a feel for things.  (and when I say durdling, I mean I'm pretty sure I took far too long building a settler.)  The Civilopedia has better search but does not seem as well organized as the Civ IV one, which is the last one I really played.

On top of all this, I can't hold a candle to some of the players here, so expect a comedy of errors, bad plans, changed minds, and so on.

Right, so... I'm Arabia.
Arabia gets some big bonuses once they have a religion.  First off, Saladin is guaranteed to get a great prophet.  If he hasn't gotten one by the time the last one is left, it's just granted to him straight up.
Additionally, the worship building for the Arabians' religion costs 1/10 as much *and* gives a 10% bonus to science and a few other things.

Since I'm guaranteed a prophet, I don't necessarily need to work particularly hard to get one, but that's no reason to wait.  Some of the religious bonuses are massively better than other ones, which I'll get to when founding a religion.  On top of that, we want to be somewhat religious-focused, I think, as we have the Madrassa, which is a fancy university that doesn't come at the usual university tech.  (Instead, it's at Theology in the civics tree.)

I decided to settle in place, because it turns out that settling on floodplains destroys the food bonus.  I also wasn't punished terribly hard for going worker-first in my trial game, so I'm building a worker to get a couple of improved tiles off the ground.  For one thing, building a quarry gets us a boost to something down the line, and then a pasture has some nice bonuses, too.


Unfortunately, we're going to need irrigation sometime soon, too, but there isn't a good resource to farm for the boost.  That rice will probably have to do, and it's a little far off.  Maybe I'll spend some gold buying its tile and the cow one.  In any event, we're starting with mining for the quarry and going from there.

Turn 2, we find horses (Nice!  Our UU is mounted) and apparently sight another continent for a foreign trade boost.  It looks like I live on the boundary between Zealandia and Gondwanna, but they're one landmass.


Turn 5, a barbarian scout shows up.  Time to stop exploring and see if we can intercept it somehow.  Of course, it's faster than my warrior, so that's sorta awkward.


I chase it over a land bridge, but there's another scout nearby that I'm probably not going to be able to catch either.  Well, nothing for it but waiting for the FFH-style barbarians, I guess.


T12, I change my mind a bit.  Since my borders autoexpanded onto tea, which requires irrigation, we're going to rush for that.  I need to irrigate something, and I also need Pottery.  So, 3 turns into AH, I'm switching to Pottery, while I investigate irrigating this rice I have.  With the limited charges on a builder, I feel like I'm not missing much by running in circles, and the granary housing could be handy.

T15, Code of Laws comes in.  I take +5 vs. Barbarians and +1 faith and gold in capital.  +5 vs. barbs seems handy, but the +1 faith per turn in the capital is critical: it's the single easiest source of faith I have identified in the early game.  (The alternative, from what I can tell, is to build a holy site district.)  I set Foreign Trade because, while the Craftsmanship boost will come soon, I don't plan to use those policies quite yet.
I also arrive at the rice, buy the spot, and farm it.  It's not irrigated or anything, but it boosts my irrigation research, which I need to build a tea plantation.  I set that as the next tech after pottery, even though pottery hasn't come in yet.  I also now have a 4F tile to work on, and I grow in one turn.

T16, the scout I've been working on completes.  I start on a warrior, while bringing my starting one home.  When this finishes, I'm tempted to start on a settler.  I've got horses to the north of me, on a lake, and I want to claim all that.

T19: Barbarian horses have arrived from the South; a scout had gotten away.  I need a plan to fight this, as, currently, I have one warrior, with a second in build.  Maybe the horsemen will try to cross the river; that'd be nice.
[I appear to have misplaced the screenshot I thought I took here.]
Second warrior arrives in 2 turns.  Maybe my scout can help out for a bit.

T20: now we have a second horse arriving, along with a Saka Horse Archer.  One more turn, and then I'm chopping a forest to boost building yet another warrior.


T21: second warrior completes; set slinger and chop tree to complete it in 2 more turns.  I also dispatch the far side horseman with my scout.  Perhaps I panicked overmuch, but it does look like I'll lose one warrior.

T22: The Saka fails its morale check and runs, instead of finishing off my wounded warrior.  My other warrior kills the other horseman, and I move the wounded warrior into the city for faster healing.  In the process of taking down that horseman, we spot a barbarian camp.  Looks like it's time to move in and take it out, once this slinger completes.


T23: The Saka came back???  Well, my new slinger dispatches it, although I did need to move my less-wounded warrior out of the way for that.  Why use the slinger?  Well, it gives me a boost on Archery, which I suspect I'll want sometime.
Since the slinger completed, it's time to build a second builder.  I've got tea to put a plantation on in 2 turns, and I'm going to try to get a pasture running after that.  (Then, horses here we come!)  Settlers to come next, I think; it's high time we expand.

T25: My slinger was in range of the spearman defending the camp.  This appears to have been sufficient to bait it out, which is nice for breaking the fortification bonus.  I'm not quite ready to fight it yet, though, so I'm taking it back across water and seeing if the spearman attacks my other unit in range.  If not, oh well... I suppose I can bait it out again once things have healed up.  My scout is healed from his horsey adventure, though, so he's on the move again.
Foreign Trade comes in, as does Irrigation.  I set Animal Husbandry and Craftsmanship.  It's 5 turns to the builder, so we should get the full boost on Craftsmanship.

T26: The spearman smells blood, apparently, and keeps chasing the wounded slinger.  I swap it with the nearly-healed warrior in my capital.  My other warrior is nearly healed, so he's going to stay fortified another turn.

T27: Spearman crosses the river.  I'm really not sure what he's doing.  Having healed up and observed the camp to be empty, I move one warrior to backdoor it while the guard is away.


T28: Barb spear attacks my fortify-to-heal warrior; gets rekt.  Warrior has a promotion available now.  Unfortunately, promoting now eats your entire turn, and I want this spear dead now, not later.  There's a horseman on the horizon I chasing my scout to worry about next.  Fortunately, I can roll onto the hill and kill the spear this turn.  The camp succumbs as well.  The scout runs like hell with a hill to slow the horse down... and discovers there's a barbarian camp in that direction.  Whoops!  Well, that scout is probably turbofucked.  I run him into the ZOC of the spearman to reveal some more territory; there's no way he's making it out alive unless the horseman forgets about him.

T29: Being trapped, I decide to have the scout go out in a blaze of glory.  Also, AH came in; next tech BW for spears and iron, then Masonry for Pyramids, which I'll build on my little bit of desert that I have no idea what I'm going to do with.  Worker next turn.

T30: Worker builds and moves to Tea tile; next build Granary for housing.  Shuffled some units around to get ready for the next target.

T31: Building tea plantation for a third improved tile brings craftsmanship down to arriving in 4 turns.

T32: I find the barb horseman again and beat up on him a bit, but don't quite kill him.  Also, I realize after the plantation I have 7 housing for 4 pop, where I thought it was a little tighter.  I switch my build to a settler, because let's get this show on the road.  11T to settler.  We'll be able to see iron by then, so I'll have a little idea of whether I should reevaluate from going after the horses (and jade, although that one is within 3 tiles of my capital) in the north.

T33: The horseman decides to go out in a blaze of glory.  This time, I remember to try the promotion.  It turns out that promotions take the whole turn but also fully heal.  I'm going to need to remember that.
Let's talk a bit about promotions for melee units here, though...
The two options for the first-stage promotion are:
* +7 combat strength vs. melee and ranged
* +10 combat strength defending against ranged
In almost every case, the first sounds vastly better than the second!  If I'm reading it right, you get 70% of the second one's bonus in any case where that one would apply, and you also get that +7 when you're bashing heads normally, which is ... I dunno, almost all the time, right?  Especially at this stage in the game, when there aren't aircraft.  Needless to say, I took the +7.

T36: There are more scouts (and often nearly-dead ones) nosing around, while my expeditionary force is away.  I build a scout, partly to delay construction of my settler: I want to hit 6 pop for a turn to get a boost before dropping back down to 5 when I build my settler.  Also, I have a sudden brainstorm: I forgot I can buy cultural expansion, so I move my worker to the nearby Jade... when it gets there, I'm buying the tile and getting a second amenity, putting my capital back into happy state.  It beats the unimproved forests which my last citizen has been working, anyway.  (perhaps I should have been building farms...)
Unrelatedly, Bronze Working comes in.  As mentioned, I'm going for Masonry next and plan to build the Pyramids for better workers.  (then maybe I'll start using them for just about all tiles everywhere...)

T37: Barbarian camp #2 cleared.  Still chasing scouts around.

T38: Jade mined.  (All my worked tiles are now improved, with an average improvement value of 1 pip of *something*.  One of these scouts walks right up to my capital, and I'm running after it with a slinger.  Scout finishes build in 1 turn, then back to settler.  I'm looking around a bit with my warriors up near the encampment.

T40: This turn, I hit 25 faith, from my 1 faith per turn in my capital from my government economic policy.  This lets us pick a pantheon.

We've got some choices here, which tend to come in themes:

+Faith:

• Dance of the Aurora: Holy Site districts get +1 faith from adjacent Tundra tiles (missing from my list)
  
• Desert Folklore: Holy Site districts get +1 faith from Desert tiles
  
• Sacred Path: Holy Site districts +1 faith from adjacent rainforest (missing from my list)
  
• Stone Circles: +2 faith from each quarry (missing from my list)
  
• Religious Idols: +1 Faith from mines over luxury and bonus resources
  
• Initiation Rites: +50 faith for each barbarian outpost cleared
  
• God of War: Bonus faith equal to 50% of the strength of each enemy unit killed within 8 tiles of a holy site district you own
  

• Lady of the Reeds and Marshes: +1 production from Marsh, Oasis, and Floodplains
  
• God of the Sea: +1 production from Fishing Boats
  
• God of Craftsmen: +1 production from mines over strategic resources
  

• Goddess of the Hunt: +1 food from camps
  
• Goddess of Festivals: +1 food from wine, incense, cocoa, tobacco, coffee, and tea plantations
  

• God of the Open Sky: +1 culture from pastures
  
• Oral Tradition: +1 culture from Banana, Citrus, Cotton, Dyes, Silk, Spices, and Sugar Plantations
  

• River Goddess: +1 Amenity to cities if they have a Holy Site district adjacent to a River
  
• Fertility Rites: City growth rate is 10% higher
  
• God of Healing: Increases healing by 30% in your holy site district and adjacent tiles.
  
• Religious settlements: Border expansion rate is 15% higher.
  
• Divine Spark: +1 Great Person point from various districts (missing from my list)
  
• Monument to the Gods: +15% production for early wonders (missing from my list)
  

• Lady of reeds is +1 prod each in 3 tiles I don't currently use.
  
• God of the Sea is also underwhelming... I haven't researched fishing, but I currently have 5 seafood revealed, but 1 is in the arctic.
  
• God of Craftsmen works on my 2 horses I'll get online soon... and nothing else so far; it turns out there's no iron nearby.
  
• Goddess of the hunt? hah!  There's one huntable resource to the south.
  
• Goddess of festivals?  I have two tea tiles nearby, one of them being worked.
  

• Open sky will eventually net me 3 culture from 2 horses and a cow; there's a second cow to the south.
  
• Oral Tradition will eveeentually get us some stuff with the spices up north.
  
• Desert folklore will get me a small amount in my capital and that's it.
  
• Idols currently only works with my two jade deposits; there's a copper deposit in the arctic, but it hardly seems worth getting ever.
  
• I don't really like how the combat or harvest ones work.
  

• River Goddess will get us +1 amenity in maaaybe 3 cities if I push it, based on the single river I've found so far.  (I could have done more scouting, though...
  
• +15% culture spread will save us some money somewhere.
  
• +10% city growth is a nice basic boost.
  

Starting out as Kongo.  I figure I'll go for a culture victory as they seem pretty well suited with bonuses from great works of art and double great artist points.  Mbanza should allow for some good growth if some nice forest areas, maybe even go for their achievement (30 pop capital).  And a nice unique unit just when I'll be fighting barbs a lot.

This is going to be my first full game.  I played about 120 turns as America prior to this and haven't followed the game in too much depth.




So here's the starting area.  Nice forests which is great.  Rice is nice.  Diamonds fairly close.  A river, mountains, stone, hills, what more could a guy want?  I don't know because I don't know how to play yet and haven't actually played a game of civ in a good while now since I mostly skipped V.




And just like that Mbanza Kongo is founded.  Moved down a little bit for more forests and boy are there a lot!  Founding also revealed dyes so bonus!.

So tech wise going to go mining which opens up masonry and bronze working.  Probably go bronze working first because may be able to get it boosted first.  That gets me close to Iron Working for my UU in case I need it earlier.  Otherwise I can get things like pottery and writing and the like.  For culture will go Foreign Trade first and possibly Mysticism (since I'll be going great person and works the Oracle may be nice).  Problem is I can't generate faith really so unlikely to found a pantheon to boost it.  So chances are will be going early empire and then drama.




Began exploring to my south and look who I should find.  So that gives me a boost to writing.  




They were fighting a barb, let them get it down so I could get the kill and camp.  Gives me some nice gold and a boost to military traditions.  Next found the White Cliffs of dover to the north west with scout, so there's another boost.  Would be nice to get a city up there for the culture maybe.





Met the amercians to the south.  Sent a delgation.  Going to try for peaceful there.  Less likely will stay happy with Cleopatra.  Amercians have the Big Stick Policy which means they should like me being peaceful and being on their continent.

New government time.  Enacted Discpline to handle early barbs and God King to see if I can found my pantheon.  Work begins on foreign trade next.

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.