Singaboy and Sullla's team thread

[hzhp800]

Can scouts pillage? I seem to recall learning from the other PBEMs that scouts cannot capture traders, settlers and builders. Can they pillage tiles? (Edit: I should also be clear that the rules for player scouts are different than barb scouts.)

[Sullla]

Scouts are treated just like other military units in Civ6; this isn't Civ4 where they had special rules about not being able to attack. As far as I know, they can attack, pillage tiles, capture enemy units, and so on. I've captured an AI city before with a scout so I don't think there's any reason why they wouldn't be able to do whatever another unit can do.

[Singaboy]

T57
The situation at the beginning of the turn. England's scout didn't move as much as I feared. This is very important. I will lay out the plan how to deal with this situation in the next image.

The wheel drops down to 1 turn due to Rome finishing its research last turn. I will follow suit with IW for Jebel Barkal next turn I guess. The Inspiration will come from Rome soon. With the new builder, cost of the next builder has gone up by 4 hammers, yet Shangdu's finishing time has not increased and my planning can be sped up by a turn as the new builder will arrive a turn early. Ideally this would mean Mahabodi done by T70.

Interestingly, I still don't have any contact with England.



I move the builder next to the sugar but in such a fashion to stay out of sight of England's scout. My warrior moves south to be able to protect the builder. Let's discuss the situation.

Let's assume England's scout moves next to the river on T58, my three units will move as indicated. The builder will move onto the sugar, the missionary close to Roma and my warrior across the river onto the forest hill.
The following turn, theoretically, England's scout can cross the river. The problem is not that the builder is in danger (the warrior can always cover the builder from here on). However, the scout could attempt to pillage the Holy Site. All other pillaged tiles would easily get repaired. In order to avoid this potentially disastrous pillage, I suggest the Roman archer to move as indicated. If England's scout really moves next to the river, the Roman archer could block the Holy Site (not sure whether the archer can one shoot kill the scout) or stay behind to kill the unit in case England declares war.

I feel this side tracking of one archer here is warranted to prevent a bad pillage. My warrior alone cant cover the builder and the Holy Site. It is also too wounded to kill the scout in one turn.

In the west, Beijing gets founded and as planned beforehand, a builder started. The city works the rice tile first for fast city growth in 4 turns. We will need some gold for some tile purchases on top of three slinger upgrades. Good thing, my income went up to 21gpt this turn due to Antananarivo joining our religion.

The city has a builder with most likely one charge left (one mine and crabs connected). There are also three warriors to deal with though I don't fore see this a huge issue when we have plenty of archers and a horseman there.

There is a big issue though in the south. Someone has removed the barbarian camp (!!!) which my slinger was struggling with for the longest time. We will have new visitors there soon. Good thing, Quanzhou is producing horsemen now. Next turn, Quanzhou will grow to pop 5 and make 10 hammers a turn. Not much for now, but better than nothing. 80/15 hammers means 5-6 turns per horseman. We really could use Petra there.

[Sullla]

Singaboy, for your reference I'm not planning on finishing Iron Working for a while. I want to take the tech to 1 turn away from completion and leave it there so that I can build a few more warriors for upgrading into legions later on. Just wanted to give you a head's up about the boost for Iron Working not getting passed along for a little bit.

I'm happy to pull the Roman archer over to Hangzhou as you suggested next turn. The English scout can't make it to that tile next to the citris next turn, but we'll make sure that no pillaging takes place if Chevalier Mal Fet declares war. The builders that are in progress at Hangzhou and Shangdu are looking good, coming along nicely there and then can start chopping forest/jungle tiles and improving resources.

Wow, the barb camp disappearing is surprising. I wonder if that could be the last team, Germany and Russia, to complete the full set. If your injured slinger stays on the current tile, you'll be able to see anything coming north without them having a chance to attack, with that forest tile blocking maneuverability. I don't know if that was your thinking, just something I observed.

Did you have any further thoughts on a potential Declaration of Friendship with Kongo before the turn gets back around to me again?

[Singaboy]

Yes, please send them a DoF. Time is on our side here. In fact, if we can keep Germany and Russia as well as Kongo/Khmer on our side, we might have a first target in England/Nubia.

My slinger is in a nice position the way it is. It has enough time to run back home but the vision to see any incoming unit. I am planning to send a horseman south there to explore and the slinger north for upgrading.

By the way, the micromanagement to get Mahabodi is all laid out a few pages back. I should be able to follow exactly that plan even if England's scout is trying to be funny. Maybe I should mention that the salt tile in the north will be added to the city in 4 turns just nicely in time to get connected in 5 turns

As for Shangdu, once the builder is done I might finally start something that gets no bonus anyway such as a monument or trader before the Holy Site. In fact a trader would be good to get the Chinese cities connected.

[suboptimal]

Scouts are treated just like other military units in Civ6; this isn't Civ4 where they had special rules about not being able to attack. As far as I know, they can attack, pillage tiles, capture enemy units, and so on. I've captured an AI city before with a scout so I don't think there's any reason why they wouldn't be able to do whatever another unit can do.

I think it's somewhere in between:

PBEM 6 spoiler

Alhambram in his Turn 85 report for PBEM 6 stated that he attempted to pillage my trader and had no option to do so, even though we are at war.  He said he looked up online that scouts cannot pillage or capture civilian units.  This doesn't seem right to me but he's got the screenshot to prove at least the no pillaging part of the equation.

[Singaboy]

That's interesting. I know from PBEM2 that scouts can attack cities and I did attack units plenty times with them.

Unless it is 100% confirmed that scouts can't pillage tiles I rather not test it here with the Holy Site. Better be safe than sorry.

[suboptimal]

That's what's odd -- they most certainly can pillage tiles.

Alhambram's scout pillaged a Campus and a pasture of mine in PBEM 6. That's why he was surprised that he couldn't pillage the trader (but could pillage the road it was on).

Also just realized I don't need to spoiler tag this. The two opponents who don't know this happened are opponents in this game and I can't spoiler the person that actually did it....

[Modo]

If they can pillage one type of district then most likely then can pillage any type. Districts / roads / cities are static features while traders may be coded somewhere between a feature and a unit (trade route with an actual unit moving along that route) so this may mess up the scouts when it comes to the traders only?
That raises an interesting question though, if you pillage the road created by a trader and the trader continues to move on that trade route will the road eventually get created again?

[Sullla]

The detail about scouts not being able to pillage traders... I dunno, I'm still not sure about that. This was the picture in question:




Are we absolutely sure that pillaging was unavailable? It looks as though there might be more commands under the arrow on the left side of the interface. Maybe Alhambram was correct and it's just not possible for scouts to pillage trade routes, Civ6 certainly has enogh weird little quirks that it wouldn't surprise me. Perhaps we'll have a chance to test this further in this game at some point. Anyway, new turn:



This was a pretty quiet turn for my civ. Cornflakes moved the Kongo warrior back two tiles in a defensive manner off in the southeast. I kept exploring with my own units, although I decided to have the archer stand in place to heal in case the Kongo unit moves aggressively forward. There's some pretty good land in the area, albeit not as good as what we've settled elsewhere. Venezia finished its first galley this turn and I'll move it southeast for the time being. I'd like to find out if that area with the truffles and chocolate resources is an island or part of the mainland. The second galley out of Venezia will head southwest instead of southeast to investigate the other peninsula in that direction.



A few words about upcoming city planning and economic development. Milano grabbed the truffles tile this turn for a nice 3 gold/turn boost in income. Growth and hopefully the city's conversion to our religion should come in 3 turns. I need to get more food in there to help the city grow faster; a trade route to Roma would be really nice when the current trade route ends. The next tile gets picked up at Milano in 9 turns, and we'll have 2/3 odds to get either the rice or the wheat to farm for the Feudalism boost. Crossing my fingers for the rice tile, which would go to 4 food yield and that would be really nice for this spot. Cattle + rice tiles would get this city up to a nice food surplus.

The builder continued moving towards Ostia this turn. It's going to farm the western wheat, then the southern wheat, and then move to Milano to farm whatever resource tile gets picked there next. The second builder out of Roma is going to chop/mine a plains hill tile and then move down to Ostia's rice tile to produce the sixth and final farm. Ostia expands borders in 13 turns, but I think a turn or two will get shaved off that as the city grows. Currently I need 10 more turns of civics research to finish Feudalism (with the boost) so that's lining up rather nicely. I'll probably have to dump a turn or two into Military Training civic, but that's fine. Venezia will finish its second galley in 3 turns with city growth, but I may try to delay it to 4 turns to keep food surplus high and get more production overflow. Most of these cities are on high-food diets at the moment, growing upwards and training builders that won't finish until Serfdom civic is ready.



Roma is producing that second builder right now. It's running ahead of the pace I expected, even while working mostly high food tiles, so I'll have it get another builder halfway done and then swap to city walls when Defensive Tactics + Limes finishes in 4 turns. Build the city walls quickly with the 100% production boost and then overflow chop into the Commercial district. After that, I'll probably look to get out another settler here. I'm planning to go back into Colonization policy and crank out 2-3 settlers after the round of city walls with Limes policy get produced.

Oh, and the Campus district here did not change its science output, still just 1 beaker instead of 2 beakers. Does anyone know why that is? Do get get +1 beaker from two adjacent districts, and +1 beaker from two adjacent jungles, but one jungle and one district don't count together? That's probably the answer even if it makes no sense.



I did offer a Declaration of Friendship to Cornflakes and the Kongo civ. Let's see if he accepts; I would guess that he will, since they have a weak situation and probably should be worrying about the England/Nubia team. One way or the other, we'll have some more information about their intentions.



With this being a slow turn, I thought I'd show the Great Person screen. There are still no Great Person point invested in the Great Admiral, Great Engineer, Great Merchant, or Great Prophet categories right now. In the Great General category, Woden has two Encampments build and he's 18 turns away from the first Great General assuming no changes. Russia is slowly stacking up points towards the Great Writer/Artist/Musician categories with no one else having any points. The only place where there's any kind of race is the Great Scientist field: TheArchduke and Kongo are making 1 point/turn and Rome is making 2 points/turn. While I'm a good distance behind, there's a third Campus finishing in 5 turns at Firenze and I have a decent chance of catching TheArchduke. It would be nice to take this first Great Scientist to grab some of the harder Classical/Medieval boosts (and use the unit as an explorer right now), but it's not a huge deal. I'll probably get the second Great Scientist if I don't get the first.

The big news is in score tracking this turn. EmperorK has gone from 30 points of empire score just three turns ago to 57 points of empire score this turn. I have him down as going from two cities up to five cities and building another Lavra district, which could be wrong but it's hard to tell. It would certainly be helpful if we met their team and could see how many cities Russia had. The fact that a Lavra district = 6 points and a new city also equals 6 points makes it difficult with nothing but score tracking. If Russia really did go up to five cities, I wonder if Germany built a city and gifted it over to Russia. That could help explain what I'm seeing since Germany still has three cities and only gained the most recent one by capturing a city state. Maybe we'll meet their team and have more information.

Regardless, the main lesson here is that the Russia/Germany team is hot on our heels and we don't have as much of a lead as I had hoped. That's what happens when an individual civ doubles their empire score in three turns. Whatever they're doing, it's working for them.