[Spoilers] Whosit & Pindicator Team Thread

[Whosit]

Kind of shocked that there was no critique of my defense in the lurker thread. Just more talk about my PBEM23 game. :P

With the benefits of some hindsight, both Writing and Currency were useless techs for us. Perhaps what we should have done when we realized that we were between a rock and a hard place would have been to settle for a second source of horses and then try to horseman rush.... Persia, I guess? At turn 19 we knew that TAD had been able to turn a barb camp into a super-fast 2nd city, and I'd still rather fight Persia than a Rome that had such a huge head start on us.

The location I picked for Equal Rites was definitely a mistake. Trying to remember off the top of my head, but I think the only other source of horses I can remember was that location north of Hong Kong where Woden did end up settling a city. It would have still been a big stretch with how far it was from the capital.

I dunno. JC is damn strong when he gets a lot of barbarian camps to eat.

[Krill]

What defence?

[Whosit]

No need to be an asshole about it. Couldn't even spare a winky face to soften the blow?

[RefSteel]

I think by the time the actual attack came, there wasn't much you could have done. (Admittedly, I don't know Civ6 very well, but ... it looked pretty hopeless even before the attack came.) It's possible that was true throughout the game though. Your team reacted immediately with full emergency measures when you realized there was potential for a Persian Immortal attack much earlier on, and I assume you did more or less the same thing when you realized Caesar would be coming for you as soon as your DoF expired, but unless you could have gotten better military tech and additional powerful units out by that time, anticipating the need for it in advance and developing the production and gold economy to actually produce the necessary defenses, I doubt if there was any way even to meaningfully slow down the assault.

Or in other words: I think the lurker thread did have all the critique of your defense that was relevant in this situation:

Drat the RNG that gave Archduke Caesar.

[pindicator]

Thanks for playing it out Whosit.

I just don't know what we could have done. Give up on any semblance of growth and attack TAD early? What were our options for growth and development if not going for currency? That's not rhetorical: I feel like theres less options, or better put that I don't know all my options.
I'm still unimpressed by Civ6 balance, with my current understanding, but I'll probably give it another try when I finish my trip.

[Krill]

No need to be an asshole about it. Couldn't even spare a winky face to soften the blow?

Do you understand that in any post event analysis or debrief one of the first steps is to go through and document what actually happened (fact first, analysis later)? This was a very quick collapse, last weekend you were at peace with Rome, this weekend you're gone. There's one screenshot of Mort surrounded by legions and then a post saying you lose the last city in 2 turns. So it's a legitimate question: what defence?

[Whosit]

When Rome hit, I had 4 Archers and 2-3 Horsemen to meet about 7 Legions, plus a couple Archers and Horsemen each, and a great general. No walls because we hadn't teched Masonry yet. (I had also left a warrior and archer on our west because I suspected Woden would take the opportunity to hit us, which didn't end up happening though I'm not sure if it was a lack of desire.) It took all those units combining fire to take down one Legion, then they all died. I legitimately have no idea how many horsemen it takes to fight off half a dozen Legions +support that are boosted by Oligarchy and a Great General (49 base strength before promotions). Once our army was trashed, there wasn't much I could do besides using what I had left to plink a few hp off TADs units here and there. I did get walls + Victor + Bastions card to defend our final city with, but TAD still took the walls down in a turn, and the archer-level ranged attack from the walls didn't do much damage. So with our current tech level, I think Walls in our cities would have only slowed TAD, not stopped him with the forces he had. We'd have needed crossbows to defend this, I think.

One big factor here is that I simply assumed that, with all that space after conquering greenline, TAD would spam settlers behind an impenetrable wall of Legions rather than march them all west. TAD made the smarter/faster play, and it didn't help that our scout was on the wrong side of Rome to see it coming any earlier. If we hadn't trained that last settler, and finished researching HBR earlier, could probably have had 3-4 more horsemen in time, though I think they would have still gotten stomped.

Pindicator and I did realize we were between a rock and a hard place earlier in the game, but we decided to play for the long game and cross our fingers. I was personally worried that if we overbuilt military early, TAD could freely build off his city advantage and just wipe us out later anyway. I was also worried that committing against Rome or Persia would allow the other one to attack us, because I assumed that whoever we weren't at war with would not renew a Friendship agreement while we were in a hot war. I saw someone in the lurker thread say that an anti-Rome coalition could have been formed, and I did want to do that, but I had no idea how to effectively communicate that without direct diplo.

Also, FWIW, I don't think Woden trading 1 unit's worth of iron to TAD earlier really affected the outcome at all.

@Ref: There's no equivalent to slavery in Civ6, so the only way to rush units is to either buy them with gold (we were pretty gold poor this game), or chop them out. I was able to chop out one horseman, but I just didn't have enough builders on hand at the time to chop more.

@Pindicator: Civ6 isn't really balanced for MP as far as I can tell. I think most leaders/civs are meant to give you different SP experiences. Personally, I am fine with that, but that's why the BBG mod and others exist to make a more even MP experience.