Singaboy and Sullla's team thread

[Singaboy]

There is no such thing as blockading tiles in civ 6. You have to pillage them but they can still be worked.

As for resources, you can trade even your only source. The 'best' part is that even you lose the resource, the deal will remain for 30 turns no matter what. This opens up some weird possibilities.

[BRickAstley]

Glad to see you guys doing really well even with all of that cheating nonsense.

Still no baby here so I am still tied up, without a solid ETA for a return. I'll let you guys know when I have one.

[Sullla]

That's disappointing to see about the district cost. I think it's one of two things:

1) The discounting mechanism needed another turn to kick in, as you mentioned.
2) The discounting mechanism is counting *BOTH* of our civs when tallying up the techs and completed districts.

If it's the first case, we should get a case to test it later. I'm leaning towards the second case though because our scores seem to get added together on the global rankings screen, and it would make sense if the district discounting mechanics applied as well. I would ask Cornflakes if he had any insight into this situation but he's on one of the other teams now. Let's see if I can get some districts constructed and see if the formula applies to the total of both our civs. (I would love to know if the other teams have run into this as well - would that be asking the lurkers for too much information? Probably.)

I'm not that concerned about our military score because we still haven't met anyone and it's clear that our homeland is a long distance away from anyone else's homeland. Building military that you don't need is wasteful, and I think we still have plenty of time before anyone's in a position to threaten us. We'll be able to upgrade your slingers into archers and my warriors into legions as needed with our strong income. That said, a horseman or two purely for scouting purposes would be nice, and I do hope to get out some galleys with the +100% naval production card if I can take this city state. We'll have a better sense of where we stand when we actually meet a unit from another team. If I can take the city state, I'll send you some archers to help take Antananarivo, which I agree should be our next strategic objective once Buenos Aires falls.

That's tough luck. I wanted to suggest earlier on to block the city completely. That way when a new unit is produced and has nowhere to go it can either be deleted or no attack is possible. Let's hope the AI is foolish enough but my experience is that it has improved quite a bit in such situations.
By the way your warrior could still attack the city if the city has zero health and not die. I assume the archer will shoot at the same archer again though.

Blocking all the tiles around the city would have been nice but I don't see any way that could have been accomplished. I've only been at war with the city state for three turns, and I had to kill the three warriors that it had on hand. The last warrior died on the previous turn and then the archer popped up this turn. Here's one thing I can do though: move the archer on the horses a tile east onto the cows. That way any new unit in Buenos Aires will be forced to move onto the marsh tile where it will immediately lose its turn and be unable to attack. Then I can always move back onto the horses when the warrior is ready to attack the city. I'm still keeping my fingers crossed here that the AI archer will do something stupid. Anything other than shooting at my warrior leaves me a good chance to capture the city state.

[Modo]

Thank you for clarifying that, Singaboy, I could have sworn I've seen enemy occupied tiles as red in the city citizen assignment screen but it seems that doesn't mean you don't get the yield from the tile.
If the district discount cost would take both civs into account wouldn't that have prevented the discount for the districts China built already?
Maybe a test with something similar to permanent alliances or any other ingame mechanism but the way this game is set up I'm assuming it still considers you as two distinct civs.
I suspect the game starts to track discounts harder or even failing the more you get into the game and more techs/civics/districts become available; plenty of different possibilities to test, T-Hawk would have a field day with that :D
Obviously it's all speculation at this point.

[Sullla]

I have off work on Fridays and that let me play the turn as soon as it came back to me. For an 8 player game we've had really fast turnarounds on the saves. When the game was opening up, I was focused on the bottom right hand corner of the screen to see the notification on which one of my units was attacked by the city state archer. Surprisingly, there was no such notification there, only a single indicator that one of my units could take a promotion. Huh? Then I scrolled the screen down to the south and saw...



Oh my god, the city state archer moved to the marsh tile!!! The tactical AI in this game is a freaking idiot. If you want the explanation for why we've mostly moved to Multiplayer as a community for Civ6, this is the reason in a single screenshot. Yes, the AI is really that dumb when it comes to combat. The odds of taking this city suddenly shot right back up to 90% again. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I immediately moved to take advantage of the situation:



The archer on the horses with Volley promotion shot the city state archer and dealt 53 damage. That gave an advantage of +17 strength to the archer on the jungle hill (damage range 47-71, expected damage 59) who avoided rolling the minimum possible result and slew the enemy unit. Just like that the threat to my units was gone, and the other two archers were able to fire on the city state with no defending unit to increase its strength rating. Together they did about 40 damage, leaving me with this result:



The 16 damage came from the injured archer in the northeast. At this point I'm not wasting a turn to promote the injured archers, I'm having them continue shooting to try and take down the city as quickly as possible before it can build more units. Buenos Aires should have 9 base production if I've done the calculation correctly, which means that I should hopefully have one more free turn here before another unit finishes. I think I might be able to take this city next turn with all four archers shooting and then the warrior attacking. The city will be at 157 health and they will likely average about 20-25 damage per shot... hmmm, probably a little short then. Well, I'll do as much damage as I can and try to block the cattle tile to prevent a city state unit moving onto it. Whether in one turn or two, the city state is all but certain to fall now.

I may also have to expend an archer shot on killing that barbarian scout next turn. We'll see where it ends up going but that's a very annoying unit. Ostia will finish its settler next turn and I'm setting up a civics swap by finishing off Military Tradition research. I'll drop Colonization and Ilkum temporarily since I won't be training any settlers or builders, and pick up Urban Planning and Land Surveyors to discount the tile purchase of the iron upcoming at my capital. Then about five turns in those policies and back into Urban Planning/Ilkum for more builders.



The capital finished a builder, and after thinking about which tiles to improve, I've decided to use the three charges on the plantation, a forest chop on the hill tile southwest of the sheep, and mining the iron tile in the third ring. That gets the capital up to five good tiles (wheat, bananas, sheep, iron, and the remaining 1/3 forested plains hill) which is enough to last it for a little bit until another builder pops out. The warrior is intended for Agoge overflow into a chopped Campus district. 11.5 base production this turn then 13.6 base production next turn results in 38/40 for the warrior, which a forest chop at Agoge bonus production should take out a good chunk of the Campus. I'll repeat the same process at Ostia, which is also going warrior with Agoge forest chop into Campus next. So total producion queue at Roma is likely warrior -> Campus -> builder, then we'll see what looks good after that.



Here's Firenze coming along nicely. My builder moved onto the cattle tile and will improve it next turn, letting the city work a 3/1/1 culture tile at size 2. That takes the city up to +5.5 food/turn surplus, and it means the city will take four turns to size 2 and then another four turns to size 3. The horses tile is next to be grabbed by the tile picker and will be improved in time to be grabbed at size 3, opening up an amazing 2 food / 3 production / 1 culture tile. The iron tile will be picked next, and I'm crossing my fingers that the 2/1/2/2 grassland hill tile south of the city will be the next one chosen after that. I'm hoping I can avoid spending money to buy the tile since this city has insane cultural output. That's the last one I intend to improve with my builder, and hopefully I can wait around until it's chosen by the tile picker. There's no rush since the city won't grow to size 4 for a little bit.



Then at the end of my turn I spotted this barbarian quadrireme. There must be a barb camp up here somewhere, argh. That's going to be a pain to deal with. Still exploring the far north.

No score changes of note this turn from the other teams (no new cities or districts). With Singaboy about to found his third city this turn, we're both going to have three cities while Chevalier Mal Fet is the only other one in the game with a third city. We pair that with three wonders completed thus far, by far the best culture output in the game, and currently the second-best science output behind the Khmer/Kongo team. If the price for that was having a middling military power rating at this point in the game, with no one met and no close rivals, I'll certainly take it.

One last thought: the logic behind building the Campus in Hangzhou right now was the fact that it would be a cheap discounted district, and to set up a discounted Theatre. But if we're not getting the discount there, do we actually need to build it right now? It is only worth 1 science/turn at the moment and that's kind of a poor return for a 9 turn build. Would it be better to finish the shrine first and open up missionary purchases, or do neither and take advantage of China's switch into Urban Planning/Ilkum to get out a builder from the capital as well? We could use forest chop overflow via an Agoge warrior for the district/shrine and that might be a better idea. Just throwing ideas out there - what do you think?

[suboptimal]

The next thing is a huge disappointment. I thought I had seen something in my own test but brushed it off as careless play. Where on earth is the discount for the campus?  
It costs 117 hammers, there is nothing of a discount. Do I need to wait a turn? I the discount mechnanism doesn't work the way we think it should then there is no point holding off those other technologies just to cater for discounts. In fact, i would go right for Theology so I can build Mahabodi for the Apostles.

I just posted in the Expanded Civilopedia thread in response to Cornflakes' original post on the discounts. The values of C and A in the equations are not updated until you complete a tech or civic.  The value of P updates immediately when the district is placed.  This is per the original CivFanatics post and I don't see this mentioned in Cornflakes' post.

[Sullla]

Thank you very much for posting about that suboptimal! Ah, it's a shame that Singaboy locked in the Campus last turn, especially with Mysticism finishing between turns. But now we know about how the mechanic works, and that means we can put it to good use. What do you think Singaboy? Should we finish building that Campus in order to get the discount on the Theatre as we originally planned, or would it take too long at the 9 turn (now 8 turn) cost?

[Singaboy]

Turn 48:

Well, it is good to have that info. This means I locked the campus one turn too early  
We can always finish the campus later on in my mind before dropping the theatre. I am not too sure whether we really save much hammers with all the waiting and delaying and shifting civics etc. However, I thought I had come up with some clever play  

Let's see. First thing, I change the civics. I am planning to finish the shrine before anything in the capital, run a builder in the new city and get the settler in Quanzhou out. Hence, I reckon Urban Planning for now is a good idea. Initially the new city won't make a lot of hammers (max 3) and the gain with Ilkum would be rather limited. On top of that, if I run high hammer tiles the city will not grow for a long time, no good.

I found Shangdu starting to produce a builder.

Next thing, I chop the forest at Quanzhou to speed up the settler. Unfortunately, the forest only gives 43 hammers before Colonization. This is where the city ends up. 77/140 hammers are in with 63 hammers remaining. Thanks to Urban Planning the city now makes 9 hammers (around 13 with Colonization). I am not quite sure why the display says, the settler takes another 6 turns. In my mind, it should be 5. Next turn with the mined hill, the city will make 10/15 hammers and surely, the settler has to be done by T53.

Now, the new city would take ages to grow using either an unimproved wheat tile or the forest hills. I will get the builder from Quanzhou over for a last charge of a wheat later, but surely, this is not what I want. I get a 'clever' idea. Why not borrow the sugar tile from Hangzhou for 3 turns to let the city grow to size 2. I do that. This has the effect that Hangzhou will grow only in 6 turns. However, since there is no rush to drop the theatre (maybe only after the shrine and campus have been built), the one turn delay in growth do not matter much. In fact, thanks to Urban Planning the shrine will be done in exactly 5 turns. Given that citrus amenity comes in next turn, this should actually improve a little.

With this setup, Shangdu will now grow in a mere 3 turns to pop 2

Research remains on currency, though the question now again is to delay this to lock the theatre at a discount. There are only so many technologies I can research until 1 turn completion, but I could try. One must remember though, that the Mahabodi also requires a temple. Hangzhou needs to build a shrine, campus and temple. I in fact, would prefer the sequence to be shrine -> temple -> Mahabodi while building the campus. Shangdu can produce the builder for Mahabodi in the meantime, even though the cost is already at 70 hammers.

Drama and Poetry will be done next turn followed by heading for Theology to unlock the temple and Mahabodi. In other news, in the north, we beat the slinger and it should be defeated next turn. The slinger continues to round that small lake. Thanks to the third city, my score has shot up yet again. In fact it stands at 86 now. The score is blown up by three wonders, no doubt. However, the number of civics and technologies is pretty decent too.

[Sullla]

Nice decision to swap the sugar tile to Shangdu to get it to grow quickly. That's actually one of the reasons why I thought we should settle that spot in the north, the ability to swap tiles back and forth between Hangzhou and Shangdu. The 1/3 forested plains hill along the river can also be traded, and there's a further 2/2 forested hill tile west of the sugar that's third ring for the capital but only second ring for Shangdu that we may want to purchase for both cities to trade back and forth. We'll have to think carefully about how to manage these cities. For now, I like how they're both configured. Shangdu should be able to work a wheat tile at size 2 for more fast growth, and then at size 3 it can start picking up the forested hills to get some real production going. With the amenities bonus and Hanging Gardens global bonus, that's +25% food for +6.25 food/turn surplus off of the sugar tile alone. Three turns to size 2 and then four turns to size 3 - very fast indeed.

Quangzhou looks fine on its settler build. You knocked out about half of the settler's cost (62 production out of the 140 cost) and the resulting 6 turn build time is pretty fair. Quangzhou is another city that's going to keep growing at a fantastic rate - there's still tons of useful tiles to improve there. Never enough builders!

Research remains on currency, though the question now again is to delay this to lock the theatre at a discount. There are only so many technologies I can research until 1 turn completion, but I could try. One must remember though, that the Mahabodi also requires a temple. Hangzhou needs to build a shrine, campus and temple. I in fact, would prefer the sequence to be shrine -> temple -> Mahabodi while building the campus. Shangdu can produce the builder for Mahabodi in the meantime, even though the cost is already at 70 hammers.

I wasn't entirely clear on what you meant here. You're thinking of completing the shrine and temple next in the capital, and then working on the Campus while putting builder charges into the Mahabodi, is that correct? We might need to slip another builder into the production queue somewhere in there because there's a lot of tiles to improve in this region and forests that can be chopped into the Holy Site district buildings. Also, with Drama and Poetry finishing between turns, I'm not sure that we'll be in a good position to get a discounted district as we were planning. We would need to finish the Campus district and then simultaneously not unlock any more district techs/civics in order to get a discount on the Theatre. I think that may still be worth doing, but we probably need to speed up the Campus district before the temple at the capital if it's something we want to pursue. Or is the whole thing just too much trouble at this point - what do you think?

With regards to score: this is a decent moment to sit back and take an overall game snapshot while Cornflakes is traveling and unable to play the turn. Let's look briefly at the major scoring categories to see how the teams are doing. As always, I could be wrong here since I'm working off of the world rankings screen.

Expansion
China/Rome: 3/3 cities, 11/8 pop
Kongo/Khmer: 2/2 cities, 7/6 pop
Russia/Germany: 2/2 cities, 8/9 pop
England/Nubia: 3/2 cities, 8/6 pop

We have a clear lead in this category over everyone else. The Russia/Germany team is the only one that has a comparable amount of population; we're almost 50% ahead in total pop of the other two teams (19 total against 14 and 13 total). Chevalier Mal Fet is the only other player who has a third city on board. If Rome is able to capture the Industrial city state in the next two turns, we're going to zoom really far ahead here.

Districts
China/Rome: 2/0 districts (both Holy Sites)
Kongo/Khmer: 1/1 districts (one Campus, one Holy Site)
Russia/Germany: 2/1 districts (two Lavras, one Campus)
England/Nubia: 0/1 districts (one Encampment)

I'd say we're doing pretty well here with two Holy Sites completed. The only team ahead of us is Russia/Germany due to their cheap discounted Lavras. I'm not sure what the England/Nubia team is doing; shouldn't Nubia have a bigger edge here with their civ ability? Their opening play has been baffling to me.

Technology
China/Rome: 8/7 techs researched
Kongo/Khmer: 8/9 techs researched
Russia/Germany: 8/7 techs researched
England/Nubia: 6/8 techs researched

Most of the teams are pretty comparable here, with the Khmer/Kongo team having a lead over the pack. Early game technologies can be difficult to gauge though, since they have very different costs and it's not uncommon to be holding some techs 1 turn away from completion. I'm hoping that our population edge will start to boost us in this category.

Civics
China/Rome: 7/7 civics researched
Kongo/Khmer: 5/7 civics researched
Russia/Germany: 5/4 civics researched
England/Nubia: 4/4 civics researched

This is where we have our biggest edge, with Khmer keeping pace but everyone else far behind. I suspect that the Khmer team met a Scientific and Cultural city state at some point to explain how they could have so many techs/civics despite such mediocre population numbers. (That or perhaps an early landing of a culture-producing pantheon.) The fact that we reached critical civics unlocking the first governments, Colonization, Agoge, and so on a good dozen turns before the Russia/Germany team is the source of our biggest advantage.

Now the tradeoff is that we appear to be only mediocre in military power (although still not in last place) and our exploration hasn't been as good as we would like. I said before that I would accept that trade for our position right now and I stand by that. We do need to push out more units and get a better sense of the rest of the map, but investing in a strong early growth curve was not a waste. We also have a likely edge in financial power as well which doesn't show up in the numbers at all. I have further thoughts on religion that I'm going to post later today. I think there's a good case to be made for certain religious beliefs that we should take with the Mahabodi that might be slightly unexpected.

[Sullla]

OK, some thoughts on religion. First I wanted to start with this short statement from Japper. It's in his PBEM5 thread but there's nothing spoilered about it at all and it pertains to our situation in this game:

I maintain that Tithe is stronger than Church Property. It matches the gold yield in a city with 8 pop already.

That's probably the only reason why we were able to claim Church Property in this game, the fact that Japper beliefs Tithe is the stronger of the two. Thank goodness for that, or else the cheating religion that Mikeforall landed would also have gotten them the game's best Founder belief. Japper is simply wrong about the comparison between the two, by the way. Here's what they both do:

Church Property: +2 gold for each city following this religion
Tithe: +1 gold for each FOLLOWER of this religion

The crucial factor is the fact that city population does not equal followers. If I go back to that picture with the Religious lens from a few turns ago, this is easy to see:



Hangzhou is pop 5 but has only 4 followers of our religion. Generally speaking, it takes a lot longer to acquire followers in a city than it does to grow population. Hangzhou is now pop 6 going on pop 7 and I bet it still only has those initial 4 followers. And even if you can get 8 followers in a city, that still only breaks even with the Church Property benefit when converting a city at size 1! For Tithe to be better, you'd have to have a bunch of population 12-15 cities with 10 or more followers in each one. Therefore, while it's possible for Tithe to exceed Church Property eventually, it takes so long that the payback horizon is never going to be reached in practice. And of course having a higher income in the early stages of the game is much better than having a higher income in the later stages of the game, with the way that Civ works as a snowball mechanic. Anyway, this is somewhat off topic but from what I've seen, Church Property is much stronger than Tithe and on the short list for the best religious beliefs in Civ6.

As far as upcoming beliefs to pick, I think the Worship building is a pretty clear choice for the Wat if we have it available. The +2 science from the Wat is the best benefit on the Worship buildings from an economic perspective, since it's easier to get the +2 production on the Meeting House via tile improvements or trade routes than it is to get +2 science. The other options are mostly good for a religious game only, unless playing some kind of extreme low-food situation where Gurdwaras would be needed. So Wats are a clear choice for one of our upcoming Mahabodi beliefs.

The last belief comes in the Enhancer category, which is probably the weakest of the four after Defender of the Faith gets taken. Most of them involve ways to spread religion better in some fashion. Here's a quick run through the list, starting with the least useful and proceeding to the most useful for us.

Monastic Isolation: Your religion's pressure never drops due to losses in Theological combat. This is really weak and I can't see anyone ever picking it.
Missionary Zeal: Religious units ignore movement cost of terrain and features. Only useful if you're trying to win a religious victory, not for us.
Itinerant Preachers: Religion spreads to cities 30% further away. This means that the passive spread from religion affects cities 13 tiles away instead of 10 tiles away. Not worth it.
Scripture: Religious spread from adjacent city pressure is 25% stronger, 50% stronger after discovering Printing Press. This would cause our Holy City to exert 5 points of pressure instead of 4 points of pressure. Probably worse than Itinerant Preachers.
Burial Grounds: Culture Bomb adjacent tiles when completing a Holy Site. Not terrible but there are better options.
Religious Colonization: Cities start with this religion in place if founded by a player who has this as their majority religion. Also something decent but I think we won't have much trouble converting our new cities once the religion has been spread throughout the home continent.

There are two beliefs that I think would be worth debating between. One is the safer option, the other is the more daring option.

Holy Order: Missionaries and apostles are 30% cheaper to purchase. This one is useful for any game since you're always going to need to purchase at least a few missionaries. Why not get them cheaper, especially considering the weakness of most of the other Enhancer options. This would also be nice for denying to other teams, forcing Russia and Khmer to invest more faith if they want to get their apostles and missionaries out onto the field. So this is the safe option and something we could choose and do well with.

Crusade: Combat units gain +10 strength near foreign cities following your religion. This is the more risky option, harder to use but with a potentially giant payoff if used effectively. Crusade is the reverse of Defender of the Faith. If your state religion is the majority religion in an enemy city, your units get +10 strength inside that city's borders. The problem here is naturally the fact that it's hard to get your state religion as the majority faith in an enemy city. Players aren't likely to let you walk missionaries up and convert their city without a fight. However, it would be easy to convert cities states and make it easy to capture them, and that alone could make this a worthwhile policy to take. Antananarivo would crumble almost instantly if we took Crusade and spread our religion there. And Crusade can be used against other players too; the way to do this is bring missionaries along with the army, escorting them to the city walls and then slamming three or four missionary charges into the enemy city right before attacking. An apostle with the Proselytizer promotion becomes a deadly, deadly weapon if we could somehow get our hands on one.

I'm kind of leaning towards the Crusade option both because I think it's something we could leverage to good effect... and also because I think it would be more fun to play. Seriously though, no one has really tried to use this yet in a PBEM game. Singaboy is going to have a *TON* of faith on hand - I think he's easily going to have about 200 faith/turn by the midgame - and we need something to spend that faith on. We'll buy some Wats and we'll buy some units via Theocracy, but that still leaves us with a lot of faith. Why not put that faith into missionaries and use them to complement our armies when they go on the march? Every city converted yields +2 gold/turn, and anything that we can convert before attacking gives us a double Great General bonus. I think it's worth the investment to see if we can pull it off, versus getting 30% cheaper missionaries and having more faith than we can really spend.

There you go, thoughts from a lazy Saturday while waiting for the next turn. If we can line up Church Property, Wats, and Crusade I think our religion will prove to be a pretty tough customer even without Jesuit Education.