Posts: 3,926
Threads: 18
Joined: Aug 2017
I think you're giving your planning too little credit. The Heptagon is the result not of planning out your next city or even your next three cities - generally as far as I go, because that's most of the detail I can hold in my head at a time - but of planning out seven from the ancient era. What elevates it from pipe dream to masterful is the careful synchronization of build queues, builder moves, and tech boosts to line everything up in the optimal order. I'm curious - if you played your simulation a few more times, or just took an old save now that the game is done, and refined the approach to the Heptagon, could you get everything laid out and productive even faster? That kind of fine detailed thinking is all down to micro, and while other players can have a good sense of what they should be doing at any particular time (and I feel that I yield nothing to you when it comes to squeezing useful/relevant information out of the save), putting it all together into one package is what has made you the sub-100 turn victor in two games in a row, in wildly different circumstances in each game.
That said, though, I think the main difference in this game was that only two players, thrawn and Archduke, really chose civs and came to the table with plans to take advantage of the unique, builder-oriented setup of the game. Thrawn correctly knew that military was all-but useless before the Renaissance, and also that Germany's slow burn - traditionally its Achilles heel, as the two cases of Singaboy demonstrated - would be no liability at all. Then it was the 'spreadsheet' that let you optimize and race past Archduke, whose seowon spam was a perfectly viable strategy - because your attention to detail let you blast through the slow early parts of the German game, totally optimize around small cities (fresh water was absent from your settling, because each city only needed 4 pop to get fully 3 districts, a great benefit to Germany I never appreciated, even with your bonkers capital settle!) and get out lots of cheap Hansas boosted to a massive degree. So, yes, you are right that having the correct strategy (and, just as important, being able to read your opponents, which is true of any game!) is the biggest part of why you succeed - but don't discount your own specific Civ VI skills either in truly letting you run laps around the competition.
I rolled my eyes at your username when you first started posting but you actually do a good job of living up to Mitth'raw'nurodo, while I can at best manage a Traest Kre'fey.
