[SPOILER] Let's try a Civ6 duel

[scooter]

Turn 32-33



Well, I finally found where the other two city-states were hiding. Amazingly, I beat Brick to both of these. Anyway, Brussels' bonus seems kind of weak, but Hatussa was a nice bump.



I've apparently beaten Brick to city #3, which I placed on this turn. I'm not sure if that's knowable in-game (surely it's somewhere in the diplo screen?), but he told me, so that made things easier. I brought along a Builder that had a single charge left so that I could hook the Copper immediately. I also took a swing at that barbarian warrior, and it unfortunately barely survived. Gorgo apparently gets culture for killing a unit, so I was hoping to score some culture by sniping that kill, but it looks like it's not meant to be.

Finally, I completed a Heavy Chariot in the capital at end of turn and started to shuffle him west. I started on a Hoplite too. I have no idea if it's any good... It sounds like it's kind of weak until you have a few of them? Anyway, I noticed Brick's power jumped upward a great deal higher than mine, so I suspect he may try to take aim at my newly settled city or at least harass my western border, so I'm going to try to reinforce it a bit. In the meantime, I'll probably settle east next because I've got a much bigger buffer from Brick over there.

[Tacitus]

I started on a Hoplite too. I have no idea if it's any good... It sounds like it's kind of weak until you have a few of them?

PBEM 2 discovered a bug where apparently hoplites were getting the strength bonus from being adjacent to another hoplite even if they weren't. Don't know if that has been patched. In my opinion, the main problem with the unit is the lack of a production multiplier policy for it.

[scooter]

Interesting... There's a lot of things that seem to still be unpatched, so it wouldn't shock me. SPEAKING OF WHICH.

Turn 34-39



So this was odd. Barbarians can apparently capture builders, which I guess makes sense. It's a little odd that there's seemingly nothing for them to do other than wander around the map, and more importantly, attack strength is seriously bugged here. They both have a listed strength of 5247. Apparently I could have attacked (I didn't), but it would have done nothing? I have no idea. Anyone know what's going on here? Maybe I should hunt this builder down and see what happens when I attack him?




I discovered Galapagos, and I also discovered why Brick hasn't met these city-states yet. Due to the layout of the map I'd been assuming the map wrapped around. This was obviously never going to be the case since this is Pangaea not Civ4 Lakes, but I hadn't put much thought into it until just now. So it seems like my third city was inadvertantly well-placed because it's cutting Brick off from a lot of land that I've now got to myself. Kind of an unfortunate map roll for him.

Brick to his credit seems to have realized this sooner, and has sailed a galley down below my capital in an apparent attempt to go establish contact with the city-states over here in hopes of competing against me for their benefits. We'll see if that works, but for now I'm still the only one to meet the eastern two city-states.



I'm applying some light pressure here to Brick with the Chariot/Warrior combo. His militaristic city-state ally is helping him out though, so I doubt I can do any real damage. At the very least I can make it difficult for him to settle in my direction, and that's good enough for now. He did offer me straight peace, but there's no real benefit to that for me. I countered asking for one of his excess luxuries for peace, which he of course declined. I have no luxuries yet (bought some tiles up at Argos to lock that down), which I'm now realizing is a real problem. So that's hurt me a little bit. I'm generally struggling to "reclassify" resource types in my head. I honestly thought Copper was a strategic resource up until last night, for example.



Here's where we stand on the last turn I played. Fairly even overall, and his primary score advantage is his cities must be a few notches larger than mine due to the amenity situation. He still has just two cities to my three, and his power is below me as well. I'm finishing up Early Empire shortly, at which point I'll swap civics and get out another settler or two with the 50% bonus. That's the tentative plan anyway. Toying with Stonehenge too if just to see if a religion is worthwhile. I honestly have no idea.

[Cornflakes]

The strength numbers look weird for attacking a builder but I have seen that before in my games. If you attack a builder you automatically win and capture the builder. It will maintain the same number of charges that it had remaining when captured.

[rho21]

Combine that with the fact that most builder actions aren't as impactful as they were in Civ4, and builders early are kind of underwhelming.

That isn't quite the full story as there's a eureka to pick up very early for improving three tiles. The hammer cost of an early builder seems much less bad when you can get a big one-off science (or is it culture?) boost. Another reason why that chop wasn't optimal.

[scooter]

Our turn pace has been fairly slow lately, so I don't have a substantial update right now. I did have a snafu or two where I got caught inside the triangle of Brick, his city-state, and some barbarians, so that was a bit of a setback, but I think I can manage.

That said, I'm going to compile some things that I've been learning where I've made obvious mistakes. This is mainly just to organize my thoughts and figure things out, and maybe it'll be useful to someone else just now diving into Civ6. In no particular order...

* Already discussed, but the chop-mine with the early-ish builder was pretty bad. The builder itself may have been a poor choice. The main reason here is I'm using 2/3 of a charge to get a hammer return much less than the builder investment. In addition, one of the benefits of an early-ish builder is improving 3 tiles to unlock the Craftmanship eureka. I missed that one, so I cost myself a fair bit of science as a result.

* I still haven't placed any districts, and I think that's probably a mistake. I'm about to complete State Property despite not getting the district eureka. I'm not sure if hitting that eureka is "standard" play or not, but it sure feels like I could have used some of my wasted production on a district of some sort. Brick did this, and it seems to have helped him a lot.

* Stonehenge (and by extension a religion) seems fairly weak if you don't have some sort of leader/civ synergy to go with it. I'm about to complete it, but I think this will end up being a poor decision. In fairness here, I literally decided to build it for fun just to see what it's like in a game setting, and then the next day I googled "how does religion work in civ6." Buyers remorse set in fairly quickly.

* Copper: no longer a strategic resource! I treated it like one. Oops.

* My early tech/culture trees have been fairly unfocused, especially on the civic side. I forgot that getting Political Philosophy ASAP is pretty advantageous because it unlocks all the early governments. I detoured slightly in this area, and I think it hurt me. Is beelining Political Philosophy fairly common?

* I apparently don't fully understand all the ways in which you get envoys. Brick became Suzerain of his neighbor militaristic city-state blindingly fast, and I've still only accumulated one non-free envoy the entire game. Clearly I'm missing something here, and I'm going to have to figure this out.

* I didn't prioritize luxuries properly, and I've had serious happiness issues as a result.


This game doesn't interest me much in single-player which is why I'm making my rookie mistakes publicly rather than in SP, but I can see why Civ6 is picking up in MP popularity.

[shallow_thought]

For what it's worth, I'm finding this thread really valuable. I picked up Civ VI when it was on sale last week or so, and am just getting used to it. I don't think my current laptop will actually let me get into the later game without melting or me eventually having to take an hour off at each interturn, but it's fun trying different openings, making the basic mistakes and finding out what's actually important amongst all the shiny things. Watching someone else go through the process, and rather more slowly and carefully at that, is really useful.

[scooter]

For what it's worth, I'm finding this thread really valuable. I picked up Civ VI when it was on sale last week or so, and am just getting used to it. I don't think my current laptop will actually let me get into the later game without melting or me eventually having to take an hour off at each interturn, but it's fun trying different openings, making the basic mistakes and finding out what's actually important amongst all the shiny things. Watching someone else go through the process, and rather more slowly and carefully at that, is really useful.

Nice, glad it's useful for someone else too!

Turn 40-48



This was the point where things started to get hairy for me. I did ask Brick recently, and I guess he completed a city-state quest which got him a second envoy, and the third one came because he got to a proper government very quickly to speed up the generation. Makes sense. He also got his religion a turn before me (I'll get to that), and cheaper holy sites is apparently a Japanese bonus.

Anyway, he apparently has iron, and the combo of sword, spear, and city-state warriors pushed me back pretty quickly. I was hoping to scout out his land a little bit, but it wasn't meant to be.



That resulted in this little nightmare where I got trapped between his units and the barbarians. Amazingly, the chariot and warrior survived, but the cost was the Hoplite down at the bottom that I pulled in to try to rescue them. He apparently died to archer fire on the inter-turn, which I didn't think was possible at the time.

To make things worse, up in the north he managed to get onto and pillage that gypsum after I had gone to extreme cost to hook it up. My lack of amenities has been pretty painful so far, while Brick has a few of them.

Another thing I was painfully reminded of: apparently you need two horse to build horsemen? I went through all the hassle of teching Horseback Riding only to find out I need two horse resources for that. Yikes. That sounds vaguely familiar.



On a brighter note, I did at least track down this builder, so someday if/when I can escort it home safely I'll get a whopping one builder charge out of him.



I did manage to finish Stonehenge and found a religion. I had no idea what beliefs to select. Divine Inspiration seemed decent because I figure in a 2 player game I'll have less wonder competition, so maybe that'll be more useful. Stupa I picked mainly because I'm crunched for luxuries, and I expect that to be an issue for awhile.



Here's the state of the west on this last turn. His warrior is apparently promoted to be anti-Hoplite, so that Hoplite is practically useless and was withdrawn. I also managed to lose my Slinger at one point too. I'm pretty sure I switched to an actual unit at Sparta after placing the encampment, but I don't remember what exactly. The following turn I had planned to start a Horseman, but as mentioned above, I found out the hard way that wasn't possible.

As for next plans, I've got a settler coming out of Athens in about 4T (may go up a tad if I change civics), so over the next half dozen turns I'm just trying to stabilize the military situation as best as I can. I badly need to settle west of Sparta for the luxuries, but it's not safe to do so yet. If I have to, I'll settle east towards the city-states, but I'd like to claim these resources here. We'll see.

[Mardoc]

Another thing I was painfully reminded of: apparently you need two horse to build horsemen? I went through all the hassle of teching Horseback Riding only to find out I need two horse resources for that. Yikes. That sounds vaguely familiar.

My understanding from lurking is that you need two strategic resources to build any unit that requires it, unless you have an Encampment, in which case you only need one.  You can also perform upgrades with only one resource.

Not coincidentally, Encampments went from mostly-useless in SP meta to super-important in MP meta.

[shallow_thought]

Another thing I was painfully reminded of: apparently you need two horse to build horsemen? I went through all the hassle of teching Horseback Riding only to find out I need two horse resources for that. Yikes. That sounds vaguely familiar.

Yeah, you need either two of a resource or one plus an encampment. I imagine that in a duel game with limited resources on the map an early encampment could be important - is that one I see in Brick's lands in the screenshot? I think that they also have other effects, similar to a city centre (can shoot at units, add bonuses to a unit fortified on the encampment). Despite the costs, I'd consider finishing yours as part of the "stabilise the situation" phase...