[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[ljubljana]

@TAD i am awake and should be free for the next 4-5 hrs if you wanna test more

also, crossing my fingers for a mogadishu spawn in the actual PBEM....

[TheArchduke]

Playing with a friend today.

[ljubljana]

kk sounds good!

[ljubljana]

guys look at this start i found while i was rolling test maps

[TheArchduke]

Holy Lady of the Reeds, Batman!

[ljubljana]

do i even /want/ an early religion

[williams482]

Huh, if Thrawn/Krill won't get the +5 combat strength out of the gate, what were they testing? Pillage rewards?

Although shared pillage rewards are scary (okay, understated. Freaking terrifying), the requirement that Sumeria keep a unit within five tiles of a pillage to get the benefits is not trivial. Sumeria cannot cross oceans the way the vikings can, and their galleys will be both less numerous and less powerful. We should be alert to situations where we cannot stop Thrawn from pillaging, but we can stop Krill from mooching additional rewards by killing nearby units.

Like you two, I'm pretty confident that Chevalier will recognize the danger and act accordingly here, which hopefully includes persuading his teammate to be aggressive too. Woden probably will as well, and might not matter as much because he's the obvious target. We should probably plan to send 1g/1g offers upon meeting any of the non-Thrawn/Krill teams (maybe even envoys, a more explicit "I am willing to give you an asset for nothing, will you respond in turn?" offer) and avoid doing stuff that would normally piss off neighbors like settling "pink dot" cities (not that I expect many opportunities for that). It's definitely risky to treat opponents we can't talk to as allies, but unless Thrawn severely flubs his opening or finds that the map doesn't suit his plans, working together is how any of the three of us can win.

Of course we've yet to see a PBEM where people managed to maintain real alliances without diplo. PBEM18 had some of that, but it was by and large still an unpredictable mess of shifting expectations with multiple civs (Canada, England) that were only barely or not at all trying to gang up on the presumed leaders.

Side note, as for frigates vs caravels, I'm pretty sure frigates have been seen as the key ships not because they beat caravels mano-a-mano (they don't), but because they can actually break through cities after the seas are won. Smashing caravels against walled cities does not work very well at all.

[ljubljana]

5 tiles is a reeeally long distance, though. that's far enough away that krill could keep units on the other side of some ocean tiles and out of sight of our units and still be reaping the pillage rewards without us even knowing it. i'm also a bit nervous because i'm not sure if krill gets the extra pillage rewards just once for having any number of units within 5 tiles, or if each unit within 5 tiles gets its own copy of the pillage rewards. obviously the latter is horrifying. at least the language on the civilopedia suggest that, if the +5 CS requires a formal alliance to be signed first, maybe the pillage sharing does as well...? but i'm also not convinced that the +5 CS actually is inactive from the game start, maybe it just wasn't showing up in the interface due to one of Civ6's many UI "quirks"...

yeahhhh unspoken alliances...do not have a good track record in PBEMs. i'd say the closest we've seen is Chevalier and TAD vs thrawn in PBEM19, which was pretty unshakeable and only "failed" to stop thrawn because Ioan stabbed TAD in the side and i was sitting in the corner being useless. and, well, we ARE Chevalier and TAD vs thrawn, so maybe that will help

re caravels one thing we HAVEN'T seen, that i expect we will see in this game, is people diligently stacking combat bonuses on melee ships from the very start of the game. and there are just MORE of those than there are for ranged ships - embolon, reinforced hull, oligarchic legacy, twilight valor, hell even convoy if you can keep individual ships alive for that long, compared to really just LoB for ranged ships, and from a hammer + niter perspective caravels have always been easier to spam. to be sure i still think naval battles will be determined by who can crack the other side's mass of frigates first, but i think we should expect the melee ship screens to have a little more staying power this game than in PBEM20.

[ljubljana]

what do you guys think about an early religion as japan? listing some pros and cons

pros:
- crusade makes us much less appealing as a target - even if thrawn takes my cities they will become death traps as soon as he does so. it also could prod the other teams into investing into religion themselves to be less weak to it
- holy sites can be non-coastal unlike harbors, reducing the amt of surface area to defend vs thrawn
- building a faith economy lets us snowball with monumentality in classical + faith-buy a GA or GMC troops later on
- easier to boost campus yields with Meiji Restoration via holy sites than harbors, which require coastal campuses
- half-price holy site + 70 hammer feed the world shrine is MUCH faster at bootstrapping cities onto hammer tiles than full-price harbor + 120 hammer lighthouse, and gives the option of a temple later for even more growth acceleration. most cities will likely be able to do HS + shrine + temple for about the same price as harbor + lighthouse, and the former gives 6 food + 4 housing vs 2ish food + 3 housing for the latter. plus the food snowball comes online in two chunks w the HS instead of all at the end with the harbor
- with an FtW shrine you do NOT have to work food tiles, unlike a lighthouse. so working, eg, 6 1/4 plains lumbermills without a food deficit requires size 8 and two fish tiles worked w the lighthouse, but for FtW you just need size 6 + shrine + temple

cons:
- 1 faith is a much weaker yield to add to TAD's trade routes than a harbor's 3 gold or a campus's 1 beaker - indeed it's by far the worst TR yield of any district
- delays campi to size 4, a recipe for a major science crash in conjunction w skipping Pingala
- delays harbors to size 7, trading some early faith for a LOT of early gold from missing trade routes and really pushing back the first great admiral
- will be harder to find strong holy site + campus tiles at every city without paving over hammer tiles
- we don't strictly NEED monasticism to build a strong medieval science base, could just do harbors + free inquiry instead of holy sites, although that does turn off the possibility of Twilight Valor
- how many useful tiles will the average city have to work, anyways? in PBEM20 the answer was just 5 or so in most of my cities. in PBEM22 we will likely have more than that as 1/1/5 Feitorias are workable tiles, but not sure how MUCH more than that we'll manage...

my guess is the balance of food vs hammer tiles at the start will quite likely determine the answer...

[ljubljana]

oh wtf, civ6:



this comes ONE game after spawning 3 tiles from China btw