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

[pindicator]

A couple pantheon ideas that come to mind for me during the slow work day:

• God of the Open Sky - Only the one sheep tile so far, but we'll be working it early and often. Still, underwhelming.
  
• Divine Spark - If we are interested in an early campus then this could help us get an early Great Scientist in addition. Speaking of which, what are the initial great people? Can you post a screenshot?
  
• God of the Sea - If we see a good coastal spot, but that is starting to feel like a really big if.
  
• Fertility Rites - Mitigate the poor food in our start.
  
• Religious Settlements - Or attack the problem from the other angle, and try to get our cultural borders expanding faster so we can get the rice or wheat going
  

...or we could go for an early religion

[Ichabod]

Is God of the Forge still bugged, meaning it gives the bonus to everyone, not just you? If it's not, it's also an interesting option, stacking those early game buffs.

If the CS is the one that allows you to buy buildings with faith, we could go for a faith pantheon (the +2 from quarries one? Not very exciting...). But that's a very long shot and likely not worth it.

I like the pasture/culture from the ones you listed, because it helps getting to PP faster (I hope we'll find some more pastures around). Divine Inspiration is also interesting (unfortunately, the GSci avaiable is the one that gives 3 Eurekas, IIRC). I actually toyed with the idea of going with a fast Theater Square/Amphitheater combo to get a quick Great Writer. That would be a huge boon in culture generation (I wonder if Amphitheaters get theming bonuses?). Problem is, even with the pantheon, the GW wouldn't be anywhere near a "quick" thing, and Theater Squares don't get easy adjacency bonuses, meaning they are pretty depressing to build (a billion hammers for some GPP gains, yuck).

Religious Settlements is also a possibility, as you pointed out. I wonder how it compares with raw culture production, like against God of the Open Sky.

I think any decision about religion has to wait until we see which CS we have. Some of them are way more powerful then the others and would make religion a more tempting path to follow.

My initial research choice was mining, because I had to quickly decide between it and AH. AH is probably a bit better, but I think those are the two techs we go for first, anyway.

I loved the idea of harvesting that copper (no need to improve it, we can probably get the Eureka somewhere else). That's a 3 mountains adjacency tile, which is pretty good for district purposes. A pity that our Capital will be so foodless, when we have so many great district tiles.

[pindicator]

Is God of the Forge still bugged, meaning it gives the bonus to everyone, not just you? If it's not, it's also an interesting option, stacking those early game buffs.

Unfortunately none of the patch notes mention this. But they all state "additional bug fixes"; does anyone know for sure?

If the CS is the one that allows you to buy buildings with faith, we could go for a faith pantheon (the +2 from quarries one? Not very exciting...). But that's a very long shot and likely not worth it.

...

I think any decision about religion has to wait until we see which CS we have. Some of them are way more powerful then the others and would make religion a more tempting path to follow.

If that's a CS that we want to keep, then I would strongly consider changing our strategy to go for an early Holy Site and then picking one of the pro-religious pantheons.

I'm hoping it isn't though, because I would much prefer that we conquer it after getting the 25 faith for a pantheon.

My initial research choice was mining, because I had to quickly decide between it and AH. AH is probably a bit better, but I think those are the two techs we go for first, anyway.

I loved the idea of harvesting that copper (no need to improve it, we can probably get the Eureka somewhere else). That's a 3 mountains adjacency tile, which is pretty good for district purposes. A pity that our Capital will be so foodless, when we have so many great district tiles.

That all sounds good. I'm wondering how our first builder s going to go - we obviously want to improve 3 tiles for the eureka. Sheep and marble are both easy choices - do we hope to be able to buy a grain as our 3rd?

I'll probably wait until after we see what that city state is before trying to calculate what our timing is for getting the first settler out.

[Ichabod]

The City State is Yerevan, the one that allows the player to choose the Apostle promotion. In my limited SP experience, I found this ability to be very good, since Apostles promoted to the +20 religious strength completely own the ones without. But in MP, it seems like a huge investment to go for Apostles.

Against going strong for a religion is the fact that our opposition is likely to do it. We have Japan (half cost Holy Sites), India (gains bonuses based on other religions, has a faith based unique improvement) and Arabia (insta nabs the last prophet). I think it's a big risk to a not that great reward.

Speaking for religion, notice that the Quest for Yerevan is the Inspiration for Mysticism (founding a pantheon). So, basically, we are starting with 2 envoys there.



The tile picker is behaving as it should, at least for now. Notice how the extra culture makes a difference, it seems it'll get the tile way faster than usual. I forgot to name the city again!



The GP screen. The GEng is very interesting (it has 2 charges of 215 prod). It could net us the Colosseum, for example, which is a great wonder. Petra is anotehr possibility, considering we have desert to our west. Perhaps we can find a good sot for it there. But getting that GEng won't be quick.

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The big decision for the next turn is where to move our warrior. East or West?



Notice that Yerevan is on coast, so we have ocean to our north. Considering the tundra to our south... Are we in some sort of peninsula? I'm not sure, I feel the map is a bit confusing. Anyway, if we go east, we'll reveal a fresh water spot for a city, the tile 1NE of the forest (it's far enough away from Yerevan). That's good info and all, and the warriors is already better positioned to go East from Yerevan.



West has desert and no water in sight, as of now. The big advanatge of going west is that our scout is already going east, so we'll reveal things in both directions. As Pindicator said, our scout has very little incentive to go south, while going east, so we'll probably reach that part of te map with the scout, in due time. I think this alone makes going west with the warrior a better option, even if the first moves are just slogging through some hills.

I spent a good amount of time looking at the settler map and it didn't show any info pointing to another CS nearby, so it's basically a guess where to go from here, I'd say.

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Finally, the useless piece of info from the turn.



Why does that coast tile get 3 gold, if there's no resource in it? Am I missing something here?

[Ichabod]

I'm wondering how our first builder s going to go - we obviously want to improve 3 tiles for the eureka. Sheep and marble are both easy choices - do we hope to be able to buy a grain as our 3rd?

I'll probably wait until after we see what that city state is before trying to calculate what our timing is for getting the first settler out.

I'm in doubt about that as well. Unfortunately, we have no easy tiles. Getting to a grain is a huge gold investment, depending on what the tile picker does (if we need to buy 2 tiles, for example). The other option I see is a grass hill mine (plains hill mine won't be worked for a long time, considering we can just buy/get the 1/3 forested tile), since mines are good and needed.

Depending on the timings, we could also save the 3rd charge for the second city (we could build the settler reasonably quickly with two 2/3 tiles, one 1/3, plus the +1 prod card, that's 13 per turn, without any amenity bonuses). I don't think we'll be using the 30% builder bonus very soon, the big hit in delaying Crafstmanship is the +50% on ranged and melee, which almost always loses hammers.

I think for now we just bounce some ideas. We can reassess it later when we have more info.

[oledavy]

Finally, the useless piece of info from the turn.



Why does that coast tile get 3 gold, if there's no resource in it? Am I missing something here?

Bugged display. For whatever reason, resources sometime don't show up properly when in fog of war. See in my PBEM2 thread when I was trying to figure out why Buenos Aires had 2 gold on a tile without copper...

There are crabs or pearls there.

[pindicator]

Well I'm convinced we should capture Yerevan after seeing it on the coast. I hadn't even thought about the competition for religious strats, but I'd much rather have another city that can build a Royal Port -- especially if it's already coastal and can get that extra gold bonus.

Agree with sending the warrior west. We might be in a mid-continent isthmus, but more likely is that we're on an edge and need to figure out which direction our neighbors are. But I don't think we should send it too far afield. I think we might want it to be able to help escort our settler should we need that.

Speaking of which, time to crunch some numbers and figure out when that settler is coming. Oledavy, you don't happen to know exact numbers for food and culture growth, do you? I ask because I know you did some spreadsheet work in your pbem2 game. Maybe even the algorithm for how the next culture tile us picked as an early Christmas present?

[oledavy]

Oledavy, you don't happen to know exact numbers for food and culture growth, do you? I ask because I know you did some spreadsheet work in your pbem2 game. Maybe even the algorithm for how the next culture tile us picked as an early Christmas present?  

I'm sorry to say I have no idea, I'm flattered that my play in Civ6 has conveyed there were spreadsheets behind it though (there weren't) 

sgtrb has been posting a lot of useful numbers and game info like that in my PBEM2 thread and in the general forum. He might have an idea.

[Singaboy]

Are you talking about population growth? There is a clear formula for it.

=15+8*x+x^1.5 with x being the current population - 1. Hence, to grow from 1 to 2, you need 15 food, the next is 24 etc etc. There is a great formula thread at civfanatics with all sorts of numbers. The most difficult ones for me are district dynamics and harvest yields as both change with techs. Settlers get +20 production for each new one, for builders is +4.

[pindicator]

Awesome! Much obliged.

I also found the culture formula on reddit for when tiles are added is 10 + (6 * n) ^ 1.3