Civ6 PBEM: Sullla of Rome

[Brian Shanahan]

I must say I do find it funny that the Roman UB is a replacement for the aqueduct. Especially considering how many they built in real life.

[T-hawk]

Reaching size 3 a turn sooner means you eventually reach sizes 4 and 5 and everything down the road a turn sooner too, generally speaking. The 5 turns of production eventually gets made up by the additional tile at each of those sizes coming a turn sooner. And you get the fractional beakers and culture along the way.

[oledavy]

Reaching size 3 a turn sooner means you eventually reach sizes 4 and 5 and everything down the road a turn sooner too, generally speaking.  The 5 turns of production eventually gets made up by the additional tile at each of those sizes coming a turn sooner.  And you get the fractional beakers and culture along the way.

If you ever feel like sitting down and crunching numbers, I would love to see your speculation on the approximate values of Civ 6's currencies. 

I do generally agree with Sullla, that production > food in most cases. I don't know how you quantify something like Faith though, which is highly situational (extremely valuable when going for a pantheon, if you don't have a religion, meh?).

[antisocialmunky]

Reaching size 3 a turn sooner means you eventually reach sizes 4 and 5 and everything down the road a turn sooner too, generally speaking.  The 5 turns of production eventually gets made up by the additional tile at each of those sizes coming a turn sooner.  And you get the fractional beakers and culture along the way.

I'd like to see your math too because my intuition is that it is a wash when you start bumping into the housing and amenity caps and you reach your size cap.   Sure you get the extra tile yields from growing faster but the 5 turns of production get your infrastructure marginally faster as well.  You also of course can't forget about the eurekas and other bonuses.  You may be able to get eurekas and new civic cards marginally faster because you produced a thing to fulfill some condition as opposed to just growing slightly faster. This would only be useful in exceptional circumstances however so like I said I think the paths are pretty equal.

I would play towards production > growth though because production is more flexible than growth.

[unaghy]

Finally finished my work backlog and having more time to make some comments. I read all posts till today in one go, so I will just make comments to all what interested me most so far in one reply.

Discussion about cost/sea tiles
Sea tiles are weak, so moving out of cost at least 1 tile is mandatory, ideally 2 tiles (while keeping possibility to place harbor) in my opinion. If its worth of one lost turn for moving with settler its another question

Discussion about grassland flatland
Just leave them unimproved. IMHO, wasting builder charges for farms you dont need, while will be most likely replaced by district is not wort of builder costs. In case they have forrest chop is situational - it depends on if on river, if enough production tiles around, if build needs to be hurried.

Sulla, your thorough tactical preparation for this MP is incredible as well as all those information you can gather from invisible (at least for average player) clues! You are giving big lesson out here.

If I ever participate in MP and you are there, only way to counter this will be playing not predictable, making no posts on site at all, forcing quick turns to minimize time you can gather information and possibly dog pilling on you (just kidding)

<edit> Oh, I almost forget - and random map! 

[Ituralde]

Nice to see a Civ VI Multiplayer game on this site taking off. I enjoy Civ 6 far more than 5 and was hoping it would get some traction on this site.

Already a lot of great insights from your reports Sullla and I look forward to following along.

[Sullla]

Lively thread discussion, excellent! I didn't get a new turn yesterday which makes this a good time to respond to some of the comments here.

Brian: I tend to think of the Roman Bath less of a unique building replacement, and more of a case where the Romans are so good at putting up aqueducts that they can build one at half cost that provides extra housing and amenities.

T-Hawk and others on the growth vs production discussion: yes, I was simplifying in my post yesterday. You'll have to forgive me on that since I was at the tail end of a 3000 word post. But it seems there's an interest in this discussion so let's try to examine this in more detail. We all started the game at size 1 on Turn 1; my capital worked the 4/0 rice tile at size 1 and grew to size 2 on Turn 5, then worked the 2/2 horses tile and grew to size 3 on Turn 10. Yuris did the same thing for the first four turns, then starting on Turn 5 worked another 4/0 citris tile and grew to size 3 on Turn 9. After the end of Turn 10, the comparison looks like this, assuming Yuris grabbed the horses tile at size 3:

Sullla: 40 total food, 44 total production
Yuris: 52 total food, 34 total production

We're looking at a trade of food against production in a near 1:1 ratio here so far. T-Hawk is absolutely correct in pointing out that this comparison can't be limited to the first 10 turns, however, since Yuris will reach size 4 quite a bit faster and will be able to work an additional tile long before my city will be able to do so. That has to be balanced against the fact that my city will also get out the first builder faster; my builder will complete at the end of Turn 11 (when I hit 51/50 production) where Yuris won't have it ready until the end of Turn 13. I will make back some of that lost food by farming the rice two turns earlier, and I will get further ahead in production by pasturing the horses sooner and mining the hill tile sooner.

There are also other competing factors, as antisocialmunky points out. The sooner that I can get a builder out, the sooner that I'll be able to complete the boost for Craftsmanship civic from improving three tiles. That's a very important civic to hand in hand since it unlocks two highly useful policies (Agoge for the +50% unit production and Ilkum for +30% builder production). Since I'm playing as Rome with an early Cultural city state envoy, I also need to get that boost quickly or I'll end up wasting culture as I push towards Political Philosophy and the first governments. Admittedly, this is not something that comes up as a problem very often, heh. And accelerating the first builder also accelerates my next build to completion, allowing me to get the first settler done more quickly as well. This is something else that we have to factor in: if getting the first builder done 2 turns faster also lets me get my second city up and running 2 turns faster, playing as Rome where that second city will include a free monument to snowball my culture further ahead towards the first government, that's a pretty big deal.

Looks, more population is always a good thing to have in Civilization. The fact that each pop point is worth science and culture in Civ6 inherently makes them useful. The point that I'm trying to make is that high food tends to be always the right play in Civ4 because it's so easy to turn food into other in-game currencies via Slavery civic, specialists, etc. High food is much more dubious in Civ6 because the game (for better or worse) lacks those easy conversions. Cities that lack native production capacity mostly grow to the housing cap and then sit there not doing a whole lot until they can run trade routes or find some other method to get production. This particular case might be closer than I originally thought, but I do think that trading food for production is the better play. It's largely irrelevant for me though, since I lack the 4/0 citris tile as an option. I had the choice of working the 2/2 horses or the 2/1 grassland hill tile, and that was an easy call.

Unaghy and Ituralde: Thanks for the kind words. I do think that Civ6 has the basis to be a good MP game, and that most of the issues it has right now are due to the AI's inability to understand the game, not the gameplay itself. I'll do my best to discuss various gameplay mechanics as we go along. I've been waiting to meet someone else to do a big post on how all the Demographics work in this game for C&D purposes, and I expect that will happen any turn now. Hopefully I can have success in at least one PBEM game before I give away all my knowledge and have it used against me by the rest of the community.

[antisocialmunky]

I agree with your point about Food in Civ4, Sullla. Civ4 isn't a great point of reference for the power of growth via pop based strategies vs infrastructure building vs teching. Civ4's slavery while flashy, fun, and cool really isn't representative of most 4x. You have to usually balance infrastructure and growth in those games so you don't outstrip your infrastructure and become inefficient with your pop. This is even the case in Civ4 where growing out of improved tiles is really inefficient but slavery provides an easy way to convert growth to infrastructure so running max growth loses most of its disadvantages.

[Sullla]

Busy times today in the Civ6 PBEM game! We managed to get through two turns in the last 24 hours, and that's in addition to a new patch dropping. Fortunately the patch did not break anything in terms of savegame compatibility, and we're still running as usual. Quick thoughts on the new patch as it relates to this game: I don't think it's going to change anything too dramatically. We were early enough in the gameplay that none of the balance changes should have affected anything in progress. The nerf to the Commercial/Habor district pairing likely means that there will be few Harbor districts constructed, again not much impact since this map has little water on it. The changes to the tech tree will make it harder for anyone to rush a neighbor with horses or knights, which is fine with me since I wasn't planning on doing either. It does also mean that players must research Archery tech (and therefore obsolete slingers) before researching Apprenticeship tech, slowing down one of the most popular beelines a little bit. Since I do want an early Apprenticeship tech, I'll have to get out some slingers early on before I'm forced to research Archery tech and obsolete them.

Back to the gameplay. Here's the exploration news from Turn 11:



There's Mount Everest off to the east in the dead center of the continent. I picked up the boost for Astrology tech in the process, although that's something that I have no intention of researching anytime soon. I'll let my neighboring city state build the Holy District and then conquer it away from them later. Note as well the oasis in the east and the river off to the west. These are the two sources of freshwater in the contested part of the map, and I plan on sending settlers to both areas very early on. I've been able to reach 4 cities by Turn 45 in test games against the AI, and while I expect I will have to slow down a bit to build some actual military against other players, I do want to rush out to those places sooner rather than later.



Here's the score breakdown and this turn is a good time to discuss what these numbers mean. Although Civ6 has no formal Demograpics screen, the combination of this Score Victory screen and the Overall screen reveal a great deal of information to the player. It's more than Civ5 provides if still a long ways short of Civ4. Looking at the score breakdown first, here's where the numbers come from:

Empire score consists of:
5 points/city
3 points/district
1 point/population

Other:
2 points/tech researched
2 points/civic researched
3 points/great person recruited
5 points/wonder owned
4 points for founded pantheon
8 points for founded religion

It's unfortunate that the empire score isn't broken down on the in-game screen, but in a PBEM game like this with only 4 players it's relatively easy to track what's happening. Number of cities can be checked by looking at the other player's information on the diplomatic trade screen. You can tell if 3 points is a district or 3 population growths by checking the Great Person screen; if the other player is suddenly getting more Great Person points, it means that they finished a district. Similarly, this makes it easy to see when the other players are finishing techs, civics, wonders, etc.

At the moment, everyone in this game has a size 3 capital (empire score = 8 for a single city and three pop). Everyone has finished one tech, and Teh and TheArchduke have each finished a civic as well thanks to their boosted cultural output. Together with the overall ranking screen that I'll breakdown in the next post, I can tell what the other players are doing with very high accuracy.

One more example from my first-ever game of Civ6 where I have a screenshot of this breakdown:



Empire score comes from two cities (10 points) and 5 total population points. I've researched 5 techs and 3 civics thus far; note how much slower the cultural output was in this non-Rome, non-Cultural city state game. Kongo had one city at size 5 with a district completed along with 4 techs and 2 civics. See? Easy to make sense of the numbers, at least in the early game.

Another turn rolled around this morning, which I'll split off into the next post...

[Sullla]

I moved my warrior on Turn 12 and... contact!



It's my sibling Roman civ played by TheArchduke. He must be located on the northwest corner of the continent, which is the player who will have the closest contact with my territory. Assuming that Yuris has the northeastern starting position with the citris resource, that would place teh in the southeast, and the other player who will border me. Hmmm. There are some positives and negatives from that arrangement. On the positive side, I won't have to worry about an Eagle Warrior rush from Yuris' Aztecs since they are the furthest distance from me. On the negative side, Yuris would have arguably been the easiest player to attack after the early game was over. Geographically speaking, the position to the north/south of your start is easier to attack than the player to the east/west, which could be a problem here because I'd rather not attack Rome if possible. Anyway, it's still much too early to decide anything. I'll wait and see whether teh or TheArchduke looks like an easier proposition and go from there.

I also made contact with Scientific city state Stockholm, fulfilling the boost for Political Philosophy. I am going to reach the first governments *VERY* early in this game, with Rome + Cultural city state and the boosts already completed for most of the civics along the way. (I will not get the boost for State Workforce because I have no plan on building an early district but I should get all the rest without any trouble.) I did not get the free envoy for contacting Stockholm first, which was instead picked up by TheArchduke. It looks like he made contact on this turn, which means that I lost out on the 2 beakers/turn reward by virtue of turn order. Argh! So close. That would have been an insane boost to my early game if I could have landed the free envoy with THREE city states, including a Cultural/Scientific pair. Well I can't complain about that, I've been quite lucky in what I did manage to get. Still it would have been nice.

The quest from Stockholm is a bit unfortunate: they want me to construct a Campus district, which is again something that I have no intention of doing. I'll pick up an envoy soon enough though; Mysticism civic awards a free envoy and is boosted by founding a pantheon, which I will have in a few turns. I'll look at making a quick pitstop there after reaching the governments at Political Philosophy, and then dropping the envoy into Stockholm. I have more culture than I expected via that city state, and getting 2 beakers from the Scientific city state is almost certainly worth doing. The suzerain bonus for Stockholm is also really nice: +1 Great Person point for all districts. I'll try to keep Stockholm alive and maintain suzerain status for that bonus alone, plus the bonus for Campus districts is obviously nice as well. (The other two city states I plan to annex for myself. I don't need a boost to Holy Site or Theatre districts in this game.)



Back at home, the builder completed and I started on a settler. Yep, going builder -> settler for this game. I'm going to work off the assumption that my neighbors aren't gearing up for an early rush and try to get an unbeatable economic lead. Rome is of course a perfect civ for this gameplan, as all new cities immediately get the monument for another +2 culture/turn plus a completed road back to the capital. We could very easily be looking at a situation where I'm getting 8 culture/turn while poor Yuris is still stuck on 2.5 culture/turn. This is also a relatively small map, and once the good freshwater spots are gone, they'll be gone. I'd rather be defending that territory with archers in hand and warriors ready to be upgraded into legions than try to take it away from someone else who has it in their hands. My warrior will be back from scouting in time to escort this settler, and we'll see what happens from there.

Economic side note: we'll get to test whether production overflow works as expected in Civ6. The builder finished at 52/50 production in the capital this turn, which means that we should see the settler pop up as 9/80 next turn, not 7/80. I know that overflow can be a little wonky in this game but it is supposed to exist thankfully. (And one last note on going for a settler here: it makes little sense to construct a military unit right now without the Agoge policy in place for +50% production. I want to go settler -> slinger for the unit cost discount once the policy is in place, not slinger -> settler.)



Now that I've met TheArchduke, let's look at the Overall score ranking screen in a little more detail. There is a great deal of useful information here, however it only becomes visible on mousing over each civ icon. Why the screen works like this, I have no idea. I thought this screen was pretty useless until I started doing Cultural games and mousing over the other civs to watch their cultural output. All four of the victory conditions here have helpful information. At the top, the Science victory mouseover tells you the number of total techs researched and beaker/turn output of the other players. (You must have met them to reveal this information.) TheArchduke has exactly the numbers expected: 1 tech researched and 6.1 beakers/turn, same as me plus 2 beakers from the Scientific city state. The Cultural victory mouseover tells you the culture/turn output and tourism/turn output of each other player met. This does not reveal the number of civics researched, but of course that can be easily calculated by looking at the Score breakdown on the next tab over. TheArchduke has 3.9 culture/turn, same as me minus the extra 2 culture from the city state down in the south.

The Domination tab will reveal the military strength of each other player. I don't have an exact formula for this, but from my testing it appears to be:

Military Score Formula:
Unit power = military score, ranged units use ranged strength
12 gold = 1 military score point

Pretty weird, I know, but that seems to be how it works. Gold absolutely does factor into the military score rating, and I believe it did in Civ5 as well. TheArchduke currently has a military score of 30, and it's easy to calculate where that came from. First check his gold on the trade screen, and it turns out that he has 8 gold in the bank. Looks like he made a recent tile purchase himself; I wonder what tile he wanted? (None of us have enough gold yet to cash-rush anything out of the capital.) Since his military score from gold is zero, the 30 points must be coming from units. Sure enough, there's an easy combination that makes that work: warrior = 20 points along with a scout = 10 points. So I can reasonably conclude that TheArchduke went scout-first out of his capital. That's good news for me: 30 production into a scout is 30 production not put into a builder to accelerate the growth curve. Scouts don't upgrade into anything useful until rangers, and aside from having 3 moves to snipe unprotected settlers/builders, they are virtually useless in combat. Going slinger-first would have been much more dangerous, as that slinger could easily turn into an archer later on. Of course the scout will reveal more of the map and help to make contacts for TheArchduke, which means it's not completely useless or anything. But overall, yes, I'm happy to see my closest neighbor starting with a relatively inefficient unit build instead of something that will accelerate the growth curve.



The Religious tab normally isn't that useful, however it had some helpful information for me this turn. It displays number of converted cities to your self-founded religion along with faith/turn. Mousing over TheArchduke revealed that he is producing 1 faith/turn, and since he is listed as being in second place, that means that none of the other players are getting more than 1 faith/turn. This is key information: no one else has met a Religious city state, and with Stockholm now contacted in the north-central part of the map, all city states in the game should already have been found. This means that I am now safe to change out of God King policy in favor of Urban Planning, as I will score the first pantheon even with only 2 faith/turn. I'm not racing anyone and there's no need for the extra point of faith. Convenient timing with Foreign Trade civic completing next turn!

Overall then, busy turns and lot of information to consider. I do have a C&D spreadsheet set up online via GoogleDocs if anyone wants to follow along. Link will be posted below. I hope you're enjoying reading about this game as much a I'm enjoying playing it so far.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...Ow/pubhtml