[SPOILER] - Suboptimal finds trees, still seeks forest

[suboptimal]

All those redlined units are encouraging, though dead units would be better. What would you get for pillaging the government plaza? Not like you get to keep it anyways.

The only units I'll have issues with are the swordsmen and any archers that remain in the cities.  Any of the named crossbows within 2 hexes of Sun Tzu can one shot a fully healed archer, even if it's in a forest/jungle hill tile.  The other issue that may crop up is Res Publica's Encampment.  I'd like to be able to park a unit on the tile to stop construction but that exposes it to fire from the city.

[suboptimal]

Turn 105

Pleasantly surprised that the time between Archduke’s turn and the turn getting passed to me was less than 24 hours. Now if Archduke brought his time to play his turn down from 50-something hours we’d be all set…

The horseman died as expected, per the notifications. I’ve got another diplomatic offer from Cornflakes. The swordsman in the woods at the front can be promoted. However, I’ve got a new problem:




Look out! It’s coming right for us!

Celestial Navigation has completed. However, I don’t want to put the Harbors down just quite yet….I need to complete the Commercial Hubs at Mashed & Dauphinoise and the Campuses at Hasselback and Disco Fries first. That will give me nine districts completed and nine districts unlocked, making my first Harbor to go down come at a discount.

Up north Disco Fries has completed its monument. I start building the Campus and the wines get swapped back to Gnocchi. Magnus will establish and the first chop will come next turn. I move the builder to the first ring forest of Disco Fries as I’ll chop that first. That’ll speed things up by a turn. The chariot moves west, uncovers some more grassland hill forests, one with a deer. I’ll screenshot that area next turn. I pause now for diplomatic communications:




Sigh. No. What this does tell me is that Cornflakes continues to lack Shipbuilding.

Down at Dauphinoise the builder is out. I start the Commercial Hub (at +40% bonus), move the builder down to the PFH and chop the forest. Commercial Hub is now at 105/122 and will complete next turn (base yield on the chop was 65 but there was quite a bit of builder overflow). I’ll complete the granary next and then move on to the market there. Hasselback’s builder moves to the city center en route to the Dauph Coast. Speaking of the Dauph Coast, the settler moves and…




The city works the bananas, the builder moves to the bananas for a plantation next turn. The builder coming down from Hasselback will put a pasture on the cattle while this builder puts down the plantation, fishing boats on the southern crabs and chops the jungle NW of the city center. The northern crabs will likely get fishing boats as well, provided that tile gets picked by the chooser first. I won’t mind if the jungle hill to the southwest gets picked first, though. It does mean I have four turns of production to put somewhere since I won’t be placing a Harbor for another 4 turns. I was originally thinking monument but I don’t really need that. I was also thinking granary but I won’t finish that before the lighthouse or Aqueduct. I start walls because those, at some point, will get built anyway.

Swordsman complete, Fondant starts a siege tower as the backup plan to the battering ram. Crossbow and swordsman advance, Yukon Gold moves towards the Encampment and Red Pontiac moves into the Encampment for upgrade next turn (1 short this turn). Down at Khmer everyone’s cleared out. The Encampment graphics have shown no change over the past several turns and there’s at least one more graphical step between the current condition and “complete”. What to do? I shift the wounded crossbow west and park it northeast of the proto-Encampment. The fully healed one moves west to Sun Tzu’s location and the sword and Maris Piper swap places. The sword moves up to the jungle hill, ending its movement. Rear guard sword and crossbow both stay in place. I just realized that I could have moved Maris Piper to the Government Plaza before moving it into the woods tile. I’ll do that next turn to sniff out what is lurking in the fog to the south of the city axis.

I then check out Res Publica with Russet and have an interesting situation:




I can take out the archer now, at the risk of a city-attack and an attack by the swordsman. The city attack wouldn’t kill the archer but the swordsman, combined with the city attack, could do so. However, if the archer dies from the swordsman I could advance the crossbow to the proto-Encampment and kill it without issue. I take the shot, killing the archer...and then realize that if I had moved east to the wheat first I wouldn’t need to advance the crossbow to shoot the swordsman if it leaves the city. /5. Two sloppy moves in one turn.

I’ll promote-heal with Tortoise next turn and move the ram up to that sword’s position. On the following turn I’ll advance the sword and ram under cover of crossbows up to Conquest of Paradise and start the attack on the walls. Maris Piper will move back in behind the sword to take a couple of shots while the undamaged crossbow takes Maris Piper’s position.

With Celestial Navigation complete I start Stirrups. That’ll take six turns, which is enough for Hasselback to complete its Campus and library. Then I’ll debate whether or not I save the iron for a swordsman in Fondant or a 10-turn knight build in Hasselback.

[Rowain]

How do you feel about conceding the game to TBS?

[suboptimal]

How do you feel about conceding the game to TBS?

On the one hand, I have no visibility into what is going on in "the other place" (to borrow from UK Parliament) other than the fact that based on the numbers he's not catchable.  OTOH of course this comes just as I made some progress in my 60-turn, 4 month slog of a war against Pindicator, which I'd like to continue just to see how far I get.  On the third hand, turn pace has been disastrous of late despite T105's pleasant surprise of a 2-day turnaround.

As a non-factor in the game I defer to Archduke, Cornflakes, Kaiser and CMF as they're the ones that might (or might not) feel that they can do something about it.

[suboptimal]

I just went back through my screenshots....we met TBS/Cree on Turn 97...all of 8 turns ago. At that point in time TBS was running the following numbers:

348 score, 431 milpower, 107, 55

Just 8 turns later he was at 420 score, 746 milpower, 200, 51. How'd he get to 200? Well, here are the numbers:

T98: 113
T99: 128
T100: 130
T101: 164
T102: 181
T103: 194
T104: 200
T105: 200

I'm very curious to see how he did that. He was ramping up just before his Golden Age hit and then he gained another 70 points. Wonder if he took Free Inquiry and then brought a pile of Commercial Hubs online? Actually, that's it -- he's got 10 cities in the deal screen and 8 of them have Harbors, which are easier to get higher adjacencies with than Commercial Hubs. If he's running Naval Architecture (+100% Harbor Adjacencies) and brought them all online in the last turns that's more than enough. Archduke only has two Commercial Hubs, Cornflakes has four Harbors and two Commercial Hubs. Speaking of which, he also doubled his science output. On Turn 101 Cornflakes was only at 56 and when Turn 102 came around he was at 96 and then added another 10 since then.


Rowain: forget my earlier post. I concede because that's just ridiculous.

It's also amazing to see how builderish people get when they're not under threat.

[suboptimal]

OK...jailbroke the save and took a look around from Archduke's/Russia's perspective. The other land mass was a ring, just like ours, clockwise from 12:00 it was Kaiser, Cornflakes, TBS and Archduke. My earlier suppositions about TBS doubling his science using Harbors was incorrect. He's only got 5 completed Harbors generating 18, plus 7 from Commercial Hubs. He's got 86 from Campus, libraries and specialists and another 22 from envoys in Fez and Hattusa. Another 39.5 from population, toss in a bit more from wherever he had Pingala positioned and that's about 172 of 200 without Pingala, who could probably account for a good chunk of that. Very interesting district placement, taking advantage of traders grabbing third ring tiles - he had a couple of district clusters in third rings and a couple of cases where a city's third ring district was placed in another city's second ring. The question, though, is how did he double his science in 7 turns? The old-fashioned way. He completed construction on four Campus districts, two libraries and put a third envoy in Hattusa. That's 46 right there, plus 25 from the Free Inquiry dedication. He's also got two settlers en route and had some population growth.

I also learned that my chariot up north would have discovered Tsingy next turn - it was located 3 tiles east of the planned city that was northeast near the fog.

Down at the Khmer theater Pindicator never played his Turn 105. However, two things of note. First, he had a settler heading off east of Conquest of Paradise. Second, the area west of Res Publica was much larger than I suspected:




I had only made it as far as the barbarian camp in the center of the picture. The biggest obstacle (provided I conquered Res Publica and Conquest of Paradise) was getting to Art of War would have been the barbarians.

If we started at 14 city-states then three city-states were eaten - haven't gotten into other game threads yet to see which ones (or where) they were.

Dunno if I'll do a post-mortem on this one -- my issues were pretty obvious so no need to beat a dead horse there.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

One city-state was Russia's Radio - I had grievances against Russia from it when I took over for Alhambram. I don't know about the other 2. I think calling the game was premature, but I haven't looked around the jailbroken save, maybe Cornflakes and Archduke really had no chance. I'd like the save, to be honest, to try and play out Australia's position from a SP point of view - it's kind of a "save my disaster restaurant" type of game, which was of course my naming theme.

I think our Khmer war was we just didn't bring enough force to account for unforeseen difficulties like the rough terrain around his capital. I think swapping to econ builds before Pin's capital fell was the key mistake - we should have stayed focused on archer production, and if we have too many at the end, well, the hell with it, at least we can go after Australia. Alhambram was hilariously vulnerable, with 2 warriors, 3 archers, and a heavy chariot for defense. A crossbow push in the north would have been hard for him to stop.

[suboptimal]

The three city-states were Cardiff (taken by Archduke), Mohenjo-Daro (taken by TBS with horses in the T70-T80 windor) and Jerusalem (ditto). DoFs on the other landmass proliferated between the 40's and 50's (IIRC) and that let everyone expand peacefully for 30 turns. TBS basically got his first two cities up, put out two settlers in the late 40's, built the Gov Plaza, chopped the Ancestral Hall and then took two city-states and built four more settlers. His science ramp was due to high adjacency placements and completing them as his science ramped. Part of his ability to do so appears to be good use of Mekewaps.

He also made interesting use of the traders' acquisition of tiles. For example, his initial trader's route between his first two cities was three tiles from the coast. He bought the two tiles out to the coast (they were all 3rd ring for the capital, the tile with the road was 2nd ring for City #2), placed a coastal Campus in his capital for a double reef adjacency and then severed the link to the capital by giving the tile with the road back to City #2 and putting a Campus there. The tile between the Campuses was where he put his capital's Government Plaza.

I didn't look in depth at what Kaiser, Archduke and Cornflakes did (I jailbroke the saves I had from turns ending in 0) but Kaiser & Cornflakes had lower population and cultural expansion than TBS. Archduke prioritized Lavras over Campus districts from the looks of it. I'm not sure but it looks like Kaiser was pushed up against Tundra in the north while TBS had a very large peninsula to his south to settle into that he effectively sealed off from Cornflakes and Archduke with the late Ancient settlers.

Archduke was under siege in a "two and a half" front war. Kaiser was raiding him from the east, TBS had engaged via land from the south and via the sea (3-4 frigates, 2 caravels) from the southwest (direction of Fez).

I don't know how much visibility the other players had on TBS's back lines. They all probably felt they had a shot until he did his science ramp. Like you say Alhambram was defenseless all of TBS's troops were in his north. Cornflakes was geographically positioned to act BUT I don't know what his visibility was. There was also the fact that Archduke seemed to be "the leader" for quite a while and there may have been a concern that attacking TBS (who was attacking Archduke) might have let Archduke run away. Granted, I haven't gone into anyone's threads yet, just looked at a sequence of turn saves, so this is part speculation and part Monday-monrning QBing.

Regarding playing out the game as Australia, the main difficulty there is that when you jailbreak a save you can only look at things and play from the perspective of the first person in the turn order (in this case, Russia). It appears that Alhambram was attempting to play tall - I'm surprised at the lack of the number of cities given that he could have been spamming settlers while Pin and I were dragged down in war.

[Kaiser]

I actually conquered Akkad as well, not sure if this fits into your counting of city states.

We would have been sea neighbors but were both behind the curve on the less interesting (no 2 scientific city states) sea. I doubt we would have gotten in competition especially I was expecting Russia to run over me soon.

Good luck next game

[The Black Sword]

I haven't had a chance to read your early game yet, but I wonder if you could do it again would you still go for the early war with Pindicator? Maybe it was just execution and it should have worked, but early war against a good defender seems tough to me in Civ6. This map also seemed to have a lot of spare land lying around so you don't necessarily need to take someone else's.

Regarding my science ramp up, I think it was just the first time in the game I really started valuing science. Techs don't feel that impactful to me in the early game, so I focused on snowballing other things. I just took the really efficient stuff like Pingala and the 4 adjacency campus. So I generally prioritised settlers and trade routes first and then when I did push science I had a lot of hammers to put into the buildings quite quickly. It was also getting to the stage of the game where I felt science was important to hit the key military techs.