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

[Ichabod]

Thanks for the info, Dave and Singaboy.

Here's the quick turn update.



My warrior watches his future victims. Yerevan is covered in jungle, but I won't complain, since it's on a river and Coastal. Hopefully these punks build a district for me... It'd be fun to nab a religion through a conquered Holy Site district.

It appears that Kaiser found a cultural CS and Bacchus a scientific one. Not entirely sure, though, could be other stuff. I won't be doing any C&D stuff, so I'm hoping I find the opponents soon, so all info appears clearly.

[pindicator]

Are there any wonders we want in the early game? The pantheon for +15% wonder production might be worth considering too

[pindicator]

So in lieu of a save, I wanted to look at what the first 30-40 turns are going to be.  Especially vis-a-vis our food situation, or more specifically, our lack of food and how we can mitigate that.

Here's a probable path for the first 20 turns:

t7 - Culture nabs the stone
t8 - Scout done; start slinger
t9 - Grow to 2
t11 - Mining & Code of Laws finishes.  Nab Urban Planning
t13 - slinger done; start builder
t14 - culture nabs another tile, I'm guessing the bronze
t15 - pantheon comes in.  Not sure what goes here, more on that later
t18 - Animal Husbandry done
t19 - builder done, moves to sheep
t20 - grow to 3.  Pasture sheep

And here we run into the problem of not having any more 2 food tiles to work.  Assuming the culture grabs the tiles of marble -> bronze -> forested plains hill -> grass hill, then you're not going to see another 2-food tile until turn 44. (Can cut that down to turn 37 if we go with the God of the Open Sky pantheon).  So what to do about it?

You could just say that we're going to take the loss in food and either spam units or more settlers.  For instance, after turn 20, you could go:

t23 - builder pastures sheep quarries stone
t25 - Foreign Trade or Craftsmanship finishes (without Eureka - this happens on t18 if we find a 2nd continent by then).  Another way to look at this is this is the latest you can push back delaying either civic without getting a eureka before you start committing to one.
t26 - settler done, start something (slinger?)
*Note here:  you could use the builder to mine the bronze just for the Eurekas for Craftsmanship & Wheel, since it doesn't take up a builder charge to remove an improvement.  But since we're also going back down to size 2 with the start of the settler it's probably worth it just to accept that you're working a plains forest for turns 20-26 and use the builder on an improvement at the 2nd city spot around turn 30 when you plant the city)
t34 - grow to size 3 again; during this time you'll get roughly 87 cogs of production to mess around with.

Anyway, not sure what the plan would be after getting the first settler out.  Do you want to spam military units, knowing that you'll eventually need those units to take Yerevan and because we're a little light for defending against barbarians?  Or do you want to get really ballsy and just go settler -> settler (2nd settler will finish t35).  At size 2 you'll be pumping out 10 production/turn, so you may even be able to go for something like an early monument or granary.  Or hell, an early trader even.  I'm not sure what the best solution is tbh.  If it was me, I'd probably go for military just because I'd want to feel like I could scout while having enough for defending any barbarians, and I also would want to eventually hit Yerevan so might as well put those hammers into military early on.

And if you did want to build units then just going straight for Craftsmanship after Code of Laws, getting that on t25 and swapping civics for +50% production for units makes a lot of sense.  


EDIT:  A quick note on gold

We aren't going to work any tiles that produce gold (unless you want to improve that tundra broze and work a 1 food - 2 cog - 2 gold tile), so our gold rate is pretty easy to measure early on.  Thresholds for the purchase points will be:

t29 - 140g buys a slinger
t33 - 160g buys a warrior or trader

Past that it will depend on what the 2nd city has

[Ichabod]

Thanks, Pindicator, that's a great guide. I'm taking a better look at it tonight and I'll update with some thoughts.

I already played another turn, but it was past midnight yesterday, so I didn't report it. I'll wait for the next one and bundle them up, because it's mostly just the warrior walking without finding anything interesting.

Edit: the only thing worth noticing is that the tile picker decided to be stupid and favour the copper over the stone (the 2/2 tile is stone, marble is the tiles with 1/2/culture to the north). Fortunately, it seems it won't be a problem, considering your plans above, we'll get both before the builder is ready.

[pindicator]

That's interesting - it was showing the marble as being the next tile in an earlier screenshot. I wonder if it is just counting up the total yields no matter the type and then selecting between the two randomly. Probably also a bias towards bonus resources if the forested plains hill is never being shown as a possibility.

Pity though, it would have been nice to get that 1/3 tile before growing to 3

[Ichabod]

I'm turning the warrior back around to return to the Capital, while the CS warrior is being annoying. I tried some voodoo with the focus buttons in the city screen to make the governor change its mind to get the stone, but apparently to no avail. We'll see what happens next turn.

My initial plan would be scout -> builder -> slinger (or perhaps slinger before builder) -> settler, as you've mentioned, Pindicator. But I think any further decisions have to wait until some more exploration. Right now, we have no decent second city spot yet. In such a situation, perhaps rushing Yerevan could be the best move, who knows.

If I understand siege rules correctly, we need 3 melee units to successfully besiege Yerevan. If that's indeed the case, perhaps just flooding the city with archers is best. Do you think 3 archers and a warrior could take that city (after we clear the wandering units)? I admit I have very little experience with Civ 6 combat. If we go in a similar route, perhaps god of the forge is the best pantheon, since 25% bonus is really big (we'd be getting 75% on units, so we could do some cool overflow tricks with chops and all that).

Probably best to wait until Yerevan builds some infra, while we expand naturally. We'll see.

Regarding the Capital micro, there's the option to mine a grass hill with the last builder charge, giving a 2/2 tile. I'm not entirely sure I like this, because growing from size 3 to 4 with three 2 food tiles will probably be too long to be worth it (rather just get the extra hammer from the 1/3 tile).

[pindicator]

Heh, I like how I named all the resources wrong but you still figured out what I meant!

Going builder next is certainly doable.  You're right that we need to pull the warrior back if you do that.  Let's see, builder comes out on t15, same turn that we get to pick a pantheon.  So the warrior still has a few turns left to scout, enough to at least move southwest a few turns and see what is immediately to the west of London.  (Btw, still not renamed )  Builder would hook up the sheep on t16 and the stone on t19.

This almost gets the settler out a turn quicker.  If my math is right, we'd be sitting at 79.7 cogs on turn 25.  Which would could then get by say mining that plains hill by the capital.  Actually if you're really feeling the snowball love, then after quarrying the stone you move the builder to the copper and just harvest that tile straight away.  If I'm reading the harvest formula correctly that would get us 29 hammers, which would get us the settler out on turn 23.  So it would save roughly 3 turns on the settler for that last worker charge, if you wanted to use it that way.

EDIT:  I read the formula correctly, but I double checked in game and harvesting bronze gets you gold, not hammers.  So scratch that idea, unless 59g sounds like a needed boost.  You could chop a forest for 23 hammers, but you're only saving 2 turns now, and that just doesn't seem like a big enough boost to matter.

[Ichabod]

Harvesting the copper for gold... Maybe this could open a strategy where we buy the settler for the third city with gold. We'd be giving up on the Craftsmanship Eureka (since we wouldn't have gold to buy a second builder, nor time to finish it, I think), but rushing a third city might be an interesting option. 59 gold is like 11 turns of our GPT, so it could be nice. I have to double check the values for buying the second settler.

Depending on the time of things, we could also do it in the future too.

[Cornflakes]

Regarding siege rules, zone of control for melee units cover the tiles under and adjacent to the unit, so in theory 2 melee units on opposite sides of a city are sufficient to besiege the city ... however rivers and coast complicate things. Zone of control does not cross rivers and does not extend from land onto coast or vice versa. Also ranged units only exert ZoC on their own tile, not to adjacent tiles. Embarked units also only exert zone of control on their own water tile, not to adjacent water tiles. (Note that besieging units do not need to be directly touching a city, since melee units exert ZoC over adjacent tiles a melee can participate in a siege from a tile from a tile way). Also I believe a friendly unit adjacent to the city breaks the siege.

So for Yerevan you would need either a ship or an embarked unit on the coast tile, one on the tile east of the river, and at least two units west of the river arranged such that all four tiles west of the river are under/adjacent to a melee unit or under a ranged unit.

Hope that makes sense 

[pindicator]

Gold converts to hammers at a 4:1 ratio. So harvesting that copper for rush gold isn't really worth it imo. It would be the equivalent of 15 cogs of production. I'd rather improve the tile for the eurekas for Wheel and Craftsmanship for 40 beakers and 20 culture respectively. We'd also get to work the 1/2/2 copper tiles a few turns while we're at size 3,at least until a better tile opens up. And then I think might as well just mine a plains hill for a 1/3 tile. And then I think might as well just wait for culture to nab the 1/3 forested hill and use the charge on the 2nd city.

I guess it comes down to what you think is better: getting the inspiration for Craftsmanship and spending a worker charge to guarantee the eureka for Wheel - or saving the worker charge for a 2nd city. I'm leaning towards the eureka bonus because heavy chariots can be an important unit, but I'm honestly thinking myself in circles on this one.

As for Yerevan, thanks for finding those seige mechanics Cornflakes!
It sounds like we aren't likely to able to seige the city in an early rush. (It also makes me think coastal front line cities could possibly be a thing.) As for how much will be needed... Going off of a certain pbem2 thread (not naming names but still, potential minor spoilers below):

3 warriors, 2 archers around t45 were used to take a city state in pbem2. At least I think that's the correct total. Their image hosting service is displaying an error message in place of pictures around that date.

With the terrain, are we going to even be able to use archers against the city? It looks like flatland jungle in front of Yerevan and then two hills behind. Do you know if archers can attack over the jungle from a hill tile? If they can then 3 warriors and 2 archers seems right. I think we can get a force like that after the settler if we go Craftsmanship civic next and then swap to Agoge for the unit production bonus. More would be better off course. We'd also need to take care to get the archery eureka.