[SPOILERS] scooter tries Civ6

[Kaiser]

Religion founded. Ichabod won't have such an easy time now that he's fighting units with +10 strength.

Defender of the Faith: Even at +5 strength this is still awesome for a MP game. Denies it to other players and makes it very tough for anyone to attack you. We have never seen anyone running Defender of the Faith get conquered in one of our MP games, ever. Worth taking along with Choral Music as the other initial belief.

Minor correction here, I focussed to early on a religion in PBEM 3 (and settled to aggressive jumping a better city site, ignored to much Adrieniers advice) and was rushed by Ichabod early enough to make it not matter in the end (that was even with +10 bonus) 

I think we were actually conquered within 10 turns after founding the religion but the reporting at the end of the game has been poor

[scooter]

Chevalier and Alhazard - good to know on era points. I’m hopeful we can get some exploration going here shortly. We need it badly.

Turn 21




We’ve settled the city of Longxi, in accordance with our very creative city naming theme of “cities that are in China.” I’m mildly tempted to name cities after things that might upset China, but we’ll keep this thread more lighthearted instead.

The spear is still wounded as I expected, and I should be able to finish this thing off before exiting Discipline. My only concern is just the warrior proximity upon finishing off the spear - I need to make sure I’m not redlined and adjacent to that warrior. After two attacks I should be able to promote on the following turn if it comes to that, so I’ll just have to keep an eye on the warrior’s location and play based on that. Longxi is working the 2/2 stone tile over the 3/1 sugar tile, and I’m not sure if that’s the right call. I mainly just based it off the fact that our current first ring tiles are pretty underwhelming compared to the capital, so growth felt less crucial.





The main decision I need to make here is whether to camp the deer before heading north, where regardless I’ll camp the horse (which we pickup next turn I think) on the way. Camping the deer delays the workers arrival in the north by 5 turns, and prevents us from quarrying the stone with this builder. I’ll break down the timings a bit more precisely soon, but I’m leaning towards camping the deer, because if it speeds the builder purchase by a turn or so, the delay will be worth it.


I also checked the scoreboard this turn, and based on Empire score, everyone except TheArchduke settled a city on this exact same turn. So we do seem to have very similar capitals after all, despite the fact that everyone else moved, and I stayed put. Alhambram and Cornflakes picked up a second tech, and nobody has picked up a second civic yet. Those pictures spoiled in case you care.

[scooter]

Quick mechanics question: Will the building of our first worker cause the price for a purchased worker to rise? It's 200g now, but will that go up if our first worker is completed prior to the purchase?

[Sullla]

Hmmm, I think you'd do better to use a builder charge on farming the rice tile at the capital over putting a camp on the deer. That gets you a 5 food tile for very fast growth, plus the boost for Irrigation tech, plus another point of housing when combined together with a pasture on the cattle tile. It also doesn't force you to walk a bunch of turns in the opposite direction to get over to the deer tile. Food and production are just more important than gold in the early game turns.

I'd also suggest running the sugar tile over the stone tile at the second city, at least until you finish researching Astrology tech. The main rationale is that you don't really care about building a monument faster, so why not run high growth tiles until unlocking the stuff that you do want to build? For that matter, growing to size 2 in five turns versus eight turns probably pays back the lost production anyway.

You should get about 30 gold for clearing the barbarian camp. On the down side, finishing the builder in the capital is going to increase the cost of rushing the builder in the second city, since each builder costs 4 production more than the previous one. On the plus side, you can probably finish researching State Workforce civic by the time that you're ready to drop builder chargers into Stonehenge, and that would get you +15% on each builder charge (total would be 0.15 * 1.15 = 17.25% per charge). That's not a ton but probably still worth running the policy for a little bit when you drop 4-5 charges into the wonder.

By the way, both State Workforce and Early Empire grant a governor promotion, so you can almost certainly have Liang in place by the time that you're ready to cash-rush out a builder. Worth thinking about how to set that up, maybe by immediately building a Holy Site at the second city to pick up the State Workforce boost for Liang + Corvee policy.

[scooter]

Sullla, your post actually came in just after I finished the current turn, which had some noteworthy developments. Sorry about the timing!

Turn 22

Caught a massive break on the inter-turn.





It took me several seconds to figure out what in the world happened here. What happened was the absolute best case scenario: the wounded spear attacked me, did horribly as you would expect, and the enemy warrior moved away. So you better believe I slammed into that spear.







Didn’t realize I could score an extra era point thanks to proximity to our city. If you can believe it, the news gets better.





We got a sweet 50 gold out of this, which I take it is definitely an above-average result. That puts our warrior at 15/15xp, so he will promo-heal next turn. Our warrior in Longxi is healing right now as well, and we can finally get some scouting done here now. Combined with the fact that the barb scout in the south is still stuck on our borders thanks to the city-state, and things are looking very nice. I went ahead and put together a proposed plan for finishing Stonehenge with the current state of our gold in mind.





178g means if we delay the capital builder by a few turns, we can purchase one on T26, and Stonehenge would complete on T32 as long as we sink 18h into it from Longxi itself during this time. I also looked at a plan that just allows the builder to complete and builds an improvement on the way. We could absolutely do this, but it delays the purchase enough that the builder ends up idling for a few turns, so I think we might as well get into Agoge and squeeze out most of if not all of a unit in that idle time. Plus this gets us Stonehenge a good bit faster.


Does this plan seem reasonable? It loses out on some of the efficiencies Sullla mentioned in his previous post, but with the extra gold we now have in the bank, I’m guessing this route is probably still worth it?

TheArchduke had a huge score spike on this turn. He settled his second city just 1T behind the rest of us, and picked up an extra couple empire points more than I would have expected. Also seems to have picked up more era points. He seems very likely to get a golden age next.

[scooter]

Note: this route does mean no tile improvements for another 12-14T or so. So it's not without its drawbacks. It's that or delay Stonehenge a few turns, which I'm very open to as well if it seems worth it.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Hm, an 8-point empire score increase is hard to explain. A city would be 6 points, and a pop growth is 1 point, but where does the extra point come from? There's no way he can grow the new city on the turn it's planted...I suppose a resource harvest could give him a pop boost, but doing a food harvest so early in the game seems insane - you not only lose out on the yield of the food for future growth but you also are harvesting so early you hardly get any returns on it at all. He could have built/purchased a monument, I believe city center buildings give empire score?

As for how early to finish Stonehenge, that depends on how early you want to found the religion. Neither belief gives immediate benefit, so the main thing is just making sure we finish it before someone snags a Great Prophet so we get first pick. Hungary and India I'm not worried about - India likes religion but is in no rush and has no early bonus to get it, Hungary doesn't seem like a faith-oriented civ. The only person who could conceivably get that GP early is the Archduke, with his half-cost Holy Sites (and his suspected early Astrology tech). But even that's unlikely to beat us.

The only time China has lost the religion race that I know of is in PBEM7, which was entirely due to Mike's cheating. Russia had built Lavras, which are half-cost and get double Great Prophet points, but that still would not have been enough, Emperor K also ran several Projects to generate points via production. Normally doing that is crazy, since early game production is so precious, so why did Emperor do it? Because Mike had built a Khmer holy site, used his ill-gotten gold to purchase a shrine (which made his prophet points equal to Emperor's) and was ALSO running projects.

Now, Archduke COULD built a cheap holy site and start running projects of his own, but he'll only have the 1 point per turn default unless he pauses to build/purchase a shrine first. We should be able to see that coming from miles away - be sure to start checking the Great Person screen each turn to monitor if he starts generating Prophet points. That will give us many turns' notice before he lands his prophet.

So, on the whole, I'm inclined for the path of efficiency over speed. We shouldn't give up too much to get Defender of the Faith and Choral Music a few turns earlier - they'll be of no use to us until a)someone is in position to attack us and b)we have Holy Sites generating faith/culture for us. So our goal just needs to be "before anyone else could conceivably snag them," not "as soon as we possibly could."

How long until you're committed to the quick way or the efficient way? Could we wait and see how Japan plays it?

[Sullla]

I agree with Chevalier, definitely do not bend over backwards to get a super early Stonehenge. Odds are that you will easily out-race anyone else to founding the first religion, and even if you don't, it's not that big of a deal. You could still take Monument to the Gods or Jesuit Education and get an excellent Founder belief even if you're second to the punch. Leaving a builder 2 turns away from finishing for 10 turns or whatever seems crazy to me. The only real disaster would be someone else building Stonehenge first and that feels like it would be insane even to attempt for someone else with China in the game. I can't see it happening.

Keep an eye on the Great Person screen to be sure and watch for when the first Great Prophet points appear, but I wouldn't get too paranoid either.

[scooter]

You guys are totally right. I was working backwards from my assumption of purchasing builder at 200g. I’m not really worried about Japan and religion at this point. He still has no prophet points. So I took some time and looked at two more scenarios. The first is still early-Stonehenge, but less wasteful. It doesn’t wait for Liang, basically.





Compared to last post, this moves Stonehenge back 2 turns and spends 16g more on the builder in exchange for picking up rice and stone improvements. The other 6 charges would all go into Stonehenge. Let’s look at the longer play.





This is what it looks like if we wait for Longxi to build a Holy Site. The Holy Site completes EoT35. We’d line up our culture into State Workforce so that the inspiration would automatically complete it, allowing us to hire Liang on T36. From that point, we have to wait I think like 5 turns until her bonus is active. So on T41 (nearly 300g banked by then), we could purchase a 5 charge builder out of Longxi. 5 charges with Corvee gets us 155.25/180 into Stonehenge. We would either need to sink in 24.75 the old-fashioned way (15% boost would apply), or sometime prior to this we pop 1 charge in from another builder. That gets us 103% of the cost, in which case each turn we’d sink a charge in, then swap to whatever else we’re building so we don’t spend any turn except the last actually building Stonehenge.


Either way, that would give us Stonehenge on T46 if my assumptions are all correct. How do we feel about that? I think at that point Japan could theoretically beat us to first religion, at least. Stonehenge I gotta think is very safe still, though. The upside of delaying Henge by 12 turns compared to the other plan is our starting builder can sink all of his charges into actual tile improvements, improving our first two cities faster and picking up a Eureka or two along the way.


Fake-edit: realized in proofing this post, the holy site can be sped up by a turn with a stone quarry from our first builder. That moves every estimate forward 1T, which means T45 Stonehenge.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

The only real disaster would be someone else building Stonehenge first and that feels like it would be insane even to attempt for someone else with China in the game. I can't see it happening.

Yeah, a nice side benefit of China, which I recall noting in PBEM7 but can't be bothered to dig through the 88 pages (jesus) of Woden and I's thread to find, is that not only can China rush wonders but that very ability serves as excellent deterrent value to keep others from even attempting wonders. If someone is bound and determined to sneak the Temple of Artemis or Petra or something past us, eventually someone will succeed via resource harvests and our attention being elsewhere - but to do so is so massively risky for them that often people just write off the Pyramids or Stonehenge or whatever just because China is present in the game. Our very ability to rush wonders can often make it so that we don't have to.

As for the revised micro plans, personally, I favor the turn 34 one. 12 turns is a long time to delay, and I don't think the extra benefits are worth the added risk of someone doing something insane and harvesting all their deer and stone into Stonehenge purely out of spite. We'll have more than enough builder charges down the line between the Pyramids, Liang, and the Ancestral Hall.