Civ6 Succession Game 1: Commercial Free Programming

[Jkaen]

when you are planning your districts I think you need to decide how early / if you are going to take on Ghandi, as you probably want them grouped towards the centre of your empire, so you need to know is that east or west of you

[Ichabod]

Gandhi's agenda implies he doesn't declare war very often. A quick google search tells me he only declares war to regain lost territory (which is the only kind of war that doesn't give warmonger penalties), so we are safe even if we settle in his face, it seems. That is, if we choose to trust information around the web about Civ 6 (info about civ 5 on the web was often unreliable).

Anyway, I don't think getting declared by Gandhi is a huge worry for us. It's not an argument against going Stonehenge/holy sites, I think.

How many religions there are to be founded? Just 3 (going by RE's post)? The number of Great Prophets are likely based on size of map or number of Civs, it's not based on eras.

My point about religion was that, if we want to get any benefit from it, we need to invest in faith generation. Otherwise, we won't get much benefit (most bonuses are per city or per citizen) and our religion will soon be overwhelmed by the AI. Now that I think of it, there's not much of a downside in getting SH first and building the Holy Sites later. Perhaps not the most efficient, but it'll work. Is it worth it, though? What are the benefits we want from a religion?

One tactic that worked for me on a SP game was using my Apostles with the good promos (especially the one that reduces other religions when spreading yours) to convert the AI cities with Holy Sites (especially the Capital/Holy City of the opponent's religion). By doing this, the AI keeps spamming missionaries and apostles, but they'll be from our religion, rather than their religion (the missionary/apostle religion depends on the city's religion, from what I can tell). Perhaps a bit exploitative, but by doing this, the AI will do the work of spreading religion for us (Saladin and Gandhi seems like very dedicated religious AIs, with their faith bonuses).

And the point about winning the game. I'm perfectly happy if we want to just play at our own pace and decide later how do we want to win. Like, just expand and tech for now, after some turns, we decide how to go from there. But I wonder how fast we could win by just spamming theater squares, for the Artist/Writer/Musician GPPs... Getting the Oracle would be nice, if we go that route.

The race for chocolate mountain

First of all, we want to grab Sullla's city by chocolate mountain. In doing so, we lock down those two chocolate tiles from the murder-Gandhi next door. With a plantation, those two tiles can support 8 (!) tier 1 cities. The chocolate economy is real! There may even be more in the fog - I've noticed that in civ 6 resources tend to be clustered. This probably requires Kyoto to go settler next after it churns out 2 workers by T39, and we'll probably have it T45-6 or so.

Is that really how amenities work? I don't think 2 copies of an amenity gives the bonus to more cities, you just get the 4 amenities spread across 4 cities and that's it. Further copies are just for trade. And size 1 cities don't require amenities. I think they need their first amenity at size 3. If we stagnate cities at size 2 (2 plains hills mines are the perfect setup), we don't need to worry about amenities.

[Ruined Everything]

Gandhi's agenda implies he doesn't declare war very often. A quick google search tells me he only declares war to regain lost territory (which is the only kind of war that doesn't give warmonger penalties), so we are safe even if we settle in his face, it seems. That is, if we choose to trust information around the web about Civ 6 (info about civ 5 on the web was often unreliable).

If true that's awesome! I've been sneak attacked by the AI routinely T60-75 or so, so I'm a little paranoid.   

How many religions there are to be founded? Just 3 (going by RE's post)? The number of Great Prophets are likely based on size of map or number of Civs, it's not based on eras.

I was running off the basis that there's only one GP per age (only 1 classical GP, etc), just like all the great scientists and that there are no industrial+ prophets. If there are multiple classical/medieval great prophets that changes the calculation quite a bit. (In civ 5, if I recall, there were 4 religions on a small map. IDK if that's true here.)

My point about religion was that, if we want to get any benefit from it, we need to invest in faith generation. Otherwise, we won't get much benefit (most bonuses are per city or per citizen) and our religion will soon be overwhelmed by the AI. Now that I think of it, there's not much of a downside in getting SH first and building the Holy Sites later. Perhaps not the most efficient, but it'll work. Is it worth it, though? What are the benefits we want from a religion?

There is *some* drawback to getting the 'henge - we could have 2 holy sites and 2 shrines for 180 hammers rather than 1 henge. My calculations were based on the fact that it was going to be hard to get a religion any other way. If we think we have a good chance of getting a religion 'naturally', we should do that.

And the point about winning the game. I'm perfectly happy if we want to just play at our own pace and decide later how do we want to win. Like, just expand and tech for now, after some turns, we decide how to go from there. But I wonder how fast we could win by just spamming theater squares, for the Artist/Writer/Musician GPPs... Getting the Oracle would be nice, if we go that route.

This could be very fun. (ICS Hansa spam but with theatre districts?) How many districts can a city build at size 2? If we can build an i-zone and a culture square in every city, and somehow pay for it all, I'd imagine we'd win quite quickly. I also wouldn't mind seeing if Eiffel + Cristo redactor seaside resorts (+16 tourism on every tile bounded by two coastal tiles) actually works.

Is that really how amenties work? I don't think 2 copies of an amenity gives the bonus to more cities, you just get the 4 amenities spread across 4 cities and that's it. Further copies are just for trade. And size 1 cities don't require amenities. I think they need their first amenity at size 3. If we stagnate cities at size 2 (2 plains hills mines are the perfect setup), we don't need to worry about amenities.

I wasn't talking about amenities. I was talking about those chocolate squares gold! Admittedly, with a healthy supply of truffles there's actually a reasonable about of g/t on the map, but 10 g/t is nothing to sniff at.

[Ranamar]

I think Ichabod covered a lot of the important stuff already, particularly that Gandhi only fights completely "just" wars: he never does anything that will give warmongering penalties. That said, this is still the ancient era, so maybe he'll declare war during that time anyway due to a lack of warmongering penalties during the ancient era?

I also agree that we'll need holy sites for the faith generation eventually anyway. At least a couple, unless we want to sink religious bonuses into getting faith... and that seems counterproductive: the whole point of getting the religion was to get gold bonuses from it. However, I don't think we need more than one for the initial prophet run; we just need to keep an eye on the GPP bars. There's a decent double-mountain site to the south for the future which we can put a holy site at.

Relatedly, have we decided what pantheon we want? (I'm not sure if this has been discussed and I missed it.)

Also, what kind of production can we get out of each of our cities? There are two pairs of forests outside of Sendai's borders, but only one pair outside of Kyoto's borders. It sounds like we can normal-build a holy site 1E or 1NE of Kyoto, but the only adjacency bonuses it would get are the forests that would be used if we were chop-rushing. 1W of Sendai looks like it could work, too, and seems more rush oriented, because we can chop more different forests. We can't build 1NW of Sendai, though, because there's a resource we can see, there.

Oh, and you were asking about district spam... you get your second non-unique district at 4 pop. However, there are a few policies that give out free amenities, so we can probably keep it not unhappy at 4 as long as we use one of them. (or, we can take the +amenity for 2 districts religious belief to do that.)

[Molach]

Ill cast my vote for dropping out of the religious Gandhi/Saladin fervor and instead become the most tourist-friendly nation on earth.

My last/first game war about war. Domination is a slog, and if we wanted to go there we'd ideally have a couple of units harassing Gandhi already...

Missing religion now means no religious chance forever, so dropping out now really narrows it down, better if we all agree. Btw I seem to remember reading that number of GPs is (standard_number_of_civs/2) +1. So 4 for us.

Those trees for 'henge also represent an opportunity for other wonders for our cultural win...and saving money by not having to buy tiles is nice.

About religion, am I right in thinking that we can still b faith-buy units in theocracy even with no religion, too? If so, that is a way to spend leftover faith - a brief stint into theo to conjure up an up-to-date army to defend our culture push?

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About settling and such, I agree to settle aggressivly west and stake out our fair share of land from Gandhi. Capital wants to be central so he cant have our land.

And for cash, clearing camps should keep our troops experienced and in supply. The -maintenance military card will be good down the line.

tl;dr - Im fine without religion and prefer cultural of the VC then remaining.

[Ruined Everything]

The only reason I brought up religion in the planning thread was as a potential source of gold. Specifically:

Tithe: +1 Gold for every 4 followers of this Religion, Church Property: Gold +2 for each city following this Religion. (IDK how good these are - but that is a 'free' c-zone bonus at each city.)

means that each size 12 city generates 5 gold, which pays for most its i-zone and a culture district.

Is this necessary? Are there better ways of generating gold?

I agree that religion represents a huge opportunity cost, and is probably best avoided if at all possible.

[Ranamar]

Actually, as I covered in my Adventure 1 thread, we can only get either +2 gold for religion OR +1 gold per 4 converts. The other extra belief needs to be something related to either religious spread or military bonuses for religion. Given that, often, you only have a little over half your population in a city of your religion, +2 flat is definitely better in the early game, especially with packed cities like these, although the other one may scale better into the late game. TBH, I think the biggest value we'd get out of religion is if we can squeeze an extra amenity in basically all cities out of it, since we're planning to have a lot of cities, and most of them will at least have two districts.

Ignoring eventual costs to convert our empire, which feels like it is its own self-contained currency, what could we get right now for the 90-100 hammers that a holy site and shrine would cost us? I think that's about one or maybe one and a half settlers?

[Molach]

One holy site and shrine is no big deal. Think it is enough though?

[Ruined Everything]

Actually, as I covered in my Adventure 1 thread, we can only get either +2 gold for religion OR +1 gold per 4 converts.   The other extra belief needs to be something related to either religious spread or military bonuses for religion.  Given that, often, you only have a little over half your population in a city of your religion, +2 flat is definitely better in the early game, especially with packed cities like these, although the other one may scale better into the late game. TBH, I think the biggest value we'd get out of religion is if we can squeeze an extra amenity in basically all cities out of it, since we're planning to have a lot of cities, and most of them will at least have two districts.

Ignoring eventual costs to convert our empire, which feels like it is its own self-contained currency, what could we get right now for the 90-100 hammers that a holy site and shrine would cost us?  I think that's about one or maybe one and a half settlers?

I didn't realize that you couldn't get both of those beliefs at once! Learning a lot this game. I clearly have much to learn about the art of civ 6. 

I'd need to look at the unit micro, but I bet I could get out at least 2 settlers for those hammers, because we'll have Early Empire's 50% hammer amplification shortly after worker spam ends. Chops into early empire are a pretty efficient way to generate hammers.

I wonder if it's possible to overflow boosted chops? Setting it up so that you overflow a 50% boosted settler chop into a worker or a 100% boosted horseman chop into a wonder would be a neat micro trick if it worked. Shame that chops produce units immediately - it would be fun to get a horseman to 78/80 hammers with the 100% boost to cavalry civics, and then chop like 4 forests and 1 turn the oracle the next turn.   

It does look like there's a consensus towards rapid expansion to the west in lieu of a religion. (If Gandhi really won't declare war on us, I'm totally using him as a barb shield.) I'll give it another couple hours in case I overstated consensus and then I'll play my turns. Thanks for all the thoughts, guys!

EDIT: Didn't see Molach's post.

Molach: I'm not sure that 2 GPP/turn on its own is enough to lock down one of the 3 GP we can get. We'd prolly have to build a second shrine or spend a score of turns in the + 2GPP/turn policy (especially because we're probably not gonna get the 60 GPP GP, unless Gandhi doesn't build anything.) That being said, I've never chased religion high difficulty (I tend to play domination) so I don't know when we can expect the GP to fall.

[Ichabod]

I made some tests with those city projects you can build after you have a district. It seems the project gives you 40 great person points of the type of the district, while Theater district project gives 20 GPP for each of writer, musician and artist. The cost of the project is based on tech, apparently 25 base + 7 hammers per tech you know (or civic, I think it uses the one you have the most as the multiplyer). It doesn't seem to increase the cost based on number of times you did the project. FInally, after you start the project, the cost remains the same until you finish it (I didn't test with selecting the project and replacing it instantly, just tested after spending one turn of production into it).

The industrial district project says it will reward you with some amount of gold, along with the GPP (holy sites give faith, harbor gives gold, commercial gives "big amount of gold", theater gives cuture and so on). But I tested it and I didn't seem to receive any gold whatsoever... Not sure what's up with that...

This leads me to two main points:

1. We can use the Holy Site Prayers project to get a quick Great Prophet, if we want. It gives 2/3 of the first prophet cost, and I don't see it costing more than half of Stonehenge.

2. I wonder how fast we can generate great artists/writers/musicians by spamming the Theater project... 60 GPP per project is pretty interesting. In a game where we won't be able to spam units/buildings freely, due to lack of gold, spending production of such projects may end up being useful. Obviously, that's only if we want to go with the Culture Victory path.