[Spoilers] The games they are a changin' - Ichabod Civ 6 PBEM 3 as England

[Woden]

Actually, come to think about it, I don't know if it checks to see if you have Civ on the steam account. It might be possible to create a bogus steam account and share it. Pretty much what you suggested but using steam.

[Ichabod]

Just found a bug. Royal Navy Dockyard counts as 2 different districts, at least for the purpose of the mathemathics eureka (got it with only a RND and a campus). Probably for other things too, but needs confirmation.

[Ichabod]

I played some starts to practice for this game and I want to discuss strategy, with anyone that is interested.

I'm mostly talking about early game here, I don't know if things change later in the game, because I never reach late game.

The first thing I think about Civ 6 is that food sucks. It's not worth investing in it early (meaning builder charges here, mostly). This is connected to the fact that early science is not very useful (and the culture gain by pop is very low) and mostly because of housing. Investing in food means your investment will be hindered when you reach the housing caps (and it's very easy to reach the amenity cap too, which further hurts your investment), so it's not like in Civ 5 where constant growth is the desired approach.

Food sucks is also connected with the power of production (and the lack of food to hammer conversions). A big part of this is the civic cards, which give bonus to hammers, but not to anything else, mostly. And you heavily need production for everything -> units, districts, settlers, builders.

Translating this into the game, I think is very, very important to get a strong production city as your second city. Settling a high food spot can make you get to size 4 quickly, but then what? You don't need that science, and the city will be forever stuck on a few builds, without contributing to expansion and development. It's natural to want to settle a fresh water spot as a second city, but I wonder if a coastal city with 2 natural 1/3 tiles isn't better. It can stay at size 2 for a long time, as long as it's working high hammers. This is also connected with resource conservation, meaning builder charges and gold -> prioritize forest/hill zones to get the same yields without builder improvements, settle near this tiles so you don't need to waste gold. Finally, another advantage of low pop cities is enjoying the free amenity cap.

Going to a new subject, early culture is way better than early science. That's because early culture leads to guaranteed benefits in the form of (the ability to use) civic cards and governments. Meanwhile, early science doesn't lead too much. I love apprenticeship and the extra yield on mines, but if you are expanding as I think you should, you won't have many mines up if you beeline it. Besides, the Eureka usually mean you want to wait out on some techs to get the free beakers. It's usually a pretty straightforward decision, because the tech doesn't give you anything you want right now, so why not wait? Even considering the military side of things, upgrading seems to be way better than building the units, so you only need to reach the tech in time, you don't need time to pre-build things (perharps Horseback Riding is an exception, due to horsemen being the first unit on that upgrade path, but you want HR anyway because the Eureka is easy and it's on the way to apprenticeship).

Meanwhile, early culture leads to a lot of benefits. Things is, there's no way to improve early culture, other than through lucky City States. Early monument is terrible, because the payoff of early culture ends after Political Philosophy, so the investment is wasted after that (meanwhile, you severily hindered your expansion by doing it). Another make or break factor with early culture is the inspirations. The build a district one can help a non-culture CS player catch up a bit to a CS player (because I don't think you have time to build a district in a straight beelne to PP with a cultural CS), but that's an investment in itself. In one of my games I got a cultural CS and all the inspirations to PP (the district one from a hut), which mean a really, really fast PP, and the snowball afterthat.

That's all for now. Most of this is pretty obvious, but it helps organizing my thoughts. I think I have a better grasp now regarding what to do in the game to come. I can't wait to start.

[srgtb]

Harbors can be built on any lake tile controlled by the city. But the extra adjacency bonus from the recent patch is only for harbors next to a city.

[Ichabod]

So, we are about to start.

I expect to have the save avaiable once I get home from work (4 hours from now, more or less). If that's the case, I'll upload a screenshot of the start so you can chime in, Pindicator. I'll likely play the turn in a couple of hours, though, because I don't want to leave the other players expectations hanging.

[pindicator]

Awesome! I'm excited to see this get underway

[Ichabod]

Coastal start bias, right?

Only spots with water are next to the river. Others are no water at all.

My initial thought is to settle on the silks. Free one culture from the get go, I think we get the luxury even without the tech (or was that fixed). We settle away from the hills, but there's no other place for the city to pick tiles, other than hills (and we'd have the extra culture).

The silk spot also has a rather decent Campus site nearby, with 3 science from mountains.

It's a low food start, so I guess we settler spam at small size. 


What do you think, Pindicator?

[Ichabod]

Another thing to notice is that a plantation tile is pretty bad, we'd hardly ever work it over a mine (and we'd have to waste a builder charge). Settling on the resource gives us the culture all the time.

[pindicator]

Well ... Yuck

I think moving the warrior is easy enough to do first. Either due west or north both look like the best options. Too bad, the tiles I really want to know are the ones north east of the settler, but the hills block visibility there. I don't think there's anything we'll uncover that would change the settler question though.

Have you checked the other filters yet? Maybe we got luckier with continents than with shoreline. Also, settler filter could potentially clue us in to where a city state is.

As for the settler ... again, Yuck.

The best tiles around are the 2/2 sheep, the 3f rice, the 2/2 marble, and the 1/3 forest hill in the south. There's obviously tundra south so I would really not want to move in that direction. I do agree that a 3 mountain campus would be nice, but I think that it would be all right to have that in the 3rd ring --- we'd just have to spend ~110g to get the tile.

I don't like moving onto the silk because you're moving away from any food and making some good tiles go from 2nd ring to 3rd ring. If we could somehow get that rice into 2nd ring that'd be best IMO. Actually, what would the capital tile be if we settled on the sheep? Giving up a 2/3 tile would really need to be worthwhile so I don't know if I'd like that either, but it would open up quite a few tiles to 2nd ring expansion: the marble and the rice. Plus you'd have a number of grass hills to grow on before any border expansions.

Actually, I'm starting to warm on the silk a little. You do get that marble 2nd ring, so you'd be able to work two 2f/3h tiles early, and likely that 1f/3h tile at size 3. You'd have a lot of early production ... but it would be hard to grow the city in the mid game.

[Ichabod]

The warrior is already moved. It started on the sheep. No new continents, no unavaiable settling spots indicating a CS nearby.

The idea with settling on the silk is to have a fast start. No matter what we do, the Capital is slow growing. The only way to get the rice closer is settling on the sheep, and that loses food too. All the other spots have no water whatsoever.

On the sheep is likely the only other option avaiable, really. It gets an extra city center hammer, which is very good. It gets the rice quickly (and we'll be working the silk tile from the get go too, making the early policy and the culture expansion to the rice faster), and it has a lot of good tiles nearby. Finally, it has a perfect spot for the Pyramids.

The other option is SIP and trying to luck out on extra resources on the fog (fog reading, which I'm not sure is a thing on Civ 6, gives me only plains there, so at most we'd get wheat, which isn't that great of a food bonus). But the warrior placement was unfortunate, and there wasn't anything to do to see what was there.

I think it's between the sheep and the silk. And it's not an easy decision... I think the rice might be the defining factor. Even if I was trash talking food, we need a way to grow the Capital back from losing pop to settlers, and growing on 2 food tiles will be hard. This is were lack of experience hurts, I'm not sure we could make the silk Capital work as a sort of settler pump. My guess it'd be though. Well, we can probably gain access to the rice tile when we are building the settlers too, through buying tiles.

Even farm triangles are lacking here, the only one I see is near the rice, which would require another city there to work. Pretty hard, really.