Singaboy and Sullla's team thread

[Singaboy]

I just opened the save and Woden has requested for a DoF. I am holding the game until I get a reply from you, Sulla. What do you think? Shall we accept that? I am not too sure about it

Ok, I went ahead and did NOT accept the proposal. We can always counter that offer on Sulla's turn without them playing any turn, hence no damage is done either way. I feel that this DoF proposal shows a few things.

- England and Nubia want to quickly swallow all of Khmer and Kongo (This turn they didn't conquer anything, the strengths on both sides have not changed yet in the display).
- England/Nubia do not feel confident to take us on.
- Accepting the DoF would signal to Kongo and Khmer, that they are a lost cause and would maybe not defend solely against Nubia and England now. Our chances to quickly get the remaining Kongo cities are much higher if they continue to send their units to defend against Nubia and England.
- We should try and seize the opportunity when it comes to attack them. We are getting ahead in technology and culture slowly and if we can take out Nan Madol. we will seriously hamper their progress.
- We do have roughly 30 more turns of peace in the west and can concentrate on the east and make fast progress there.

[Modo]

In fact, I'm going to slip in a legion and repair the road that I pillaged on the tile where the settler is currently standing. Yeah, legions can do that since they have the build fortification ability. Or at least they could do it back in PBEM1 days, so unless it's been removed in a patch I think they can still fix pillaged tiles.

The hidden power of Rome in Civ6, we no longer get combat engineers but Rome gets engineered combatants. You could even keep a couple of legions for this purpose alone.
If you don't forget about this it would be good to know if they fixed it or not. No problem if you forget either, I'll nag...we got to be good at something too.

[Singaboy]

Turn 103:

What an eventful turn indeed. I open the save and get a host of news. First, with Reformed Church, I enter the Renaissance Era. This means new envoy tasks. Unfortunately, I have those 'recruit a knight' tasks to be done which means I won't get additional tasks from Lisbon and Valletta in this era. Nothing I can do about it. I get some Inspirations and Eurekas too.

And of course, I get that DoF request from Woden (see post above). I do not have a request from Woden for citrus though. Though I didn't take a screenshot, I sent Rome citrus as a gift. I am keeping my only copy of salt for now. This makes 6/7 ecstatic again and drives up all outputs a little.
This screenshot also shows the situation near Kinchassa. No movement of England's troops here.




A change of government is in order. Theocracy will be the government I will be in for the rest of the game I assume. With it, I am changing civics quite a bit. The following is the set that I am choosing for one turn. Conscription is almost like a permanent feature in most of my games to keep military maintenance bearable. Professional army is enabled for one turn just like Diplomatic League for 2 for 1 envoys. Simultaneum is enabled too for enhanced faith output. Two or three out of those policies will be retired next turn again for other policies. This means, I have only this and the beginning of next turn for unit upgrades.

This round, I upgrade a mere chariot as I want to keep my unit maintenance as low as possible. With no war on the western front, there is no need to upgrade all those chariots there. I can do that at a later stage. This upgrade has big consequences though as I get 1 envoy in Lisbon and two envoys in Valletta for that.

With the addition of two envoys into Lisbon, the final tally can be seen below. I currently have 13 envoys is 6 city states. With medieval fairies done next turn, I can enable Merchant Confederations and enjoy 13gpt, quite a nice sum of income. The current tasks at hand are a little trickier. Seoul wants a great Scientist, Bandar Brunei a religious conversion, Nan Madol a trade route and Geneva the Inspiration for Exploration. With theocracy enabled, the nice bonus for envoys has shrunk from 8.4 to 5 per turn.

The result of the government and policy changes as well as the additional envoys can be seen in the next image. Faith has increased from 90 to 111 a turn. Income is increased to 86.7 too. Hangzhou is making additional 2 hammers a turn for units. In fact, I could disable Colonization next turn and still get that settler done in 3 turns. keeping Colonization would result in additional 26.4 hammers. However, I would be stuck with that policy for another 4 turns until the next civic kicks in. If I enable Urban Planning for example, I would enjoy 8 hammers a turn (9 with Pisa being traded to me). That's at least 32 hammers for 4 turns, which is clearly superior to Colonization. There are other nice policies available but their impact is not yet significant for my districts.

Currently I have 3 Holy Sites, 2 Commercial Hubs (soon 3), 1 Campus and 1 Entertainment District.

I also included the costs for faith drafts of units. The formula is simple. Hammer cost *2 * 0.85 due to theocracy 15% discount.

An overview of China shows that I am currently building three districts the 'hard' way without chops. Beijing's CH will be done in 4 turns thanks to increased hammer output. The builder there, will move west and improve sheep and salt, mine a hill and then help out at Pagan too.
I am planning to produce another round of builders that will chop forests with walls for districts. Once Beijing's commercial hub is done, I hope to produce a theatre and encampment for a discount. I would need a total of 16 districts to enjoy additional discounts for most districts.
Shangdu has its temple production reduced by a turn thanks to mining of a grass hill. Shangdu will soon be pretty hammer rich as the city will enjoy two river lumber mills adding 4 hammers. As it has niter too, it will get even better in due time. I will 'discover' niter in two turns, with machinery and military engineering done.
Quanzhou will grow to 7 in tow turns. With plenty of cows being improved, I am hoping to boost the city to size 10. It would be an awesome city then.

One can also see that my faith has decreased by 300 as I purchased 3 archers as discussed previously. They can be seen at Beijing, Hangzhou and Shangdu. I will upgrade them next turn to crossbows and walk them over to the eastern coast. As stated before, I think we should take an aggressive stance towards Nubia and England and hurt them before they get those powerful naval units.



The last action is to turn down Woden's request. As stated above, they won't know what I am doing until after Sulla's turn.



Just a a reference, my military now consists of:
1 warrior, 1 slinger, 6 archers, 5 chariots, 2 horsemen
1 knight
2 galleys, 1 quadrireme

In the next few rounds, I will purchase swordsmen and 2 catapults. I would prefer to recruit a lot of units in the east though, hence it might be better to wait for Pisa to come online and then recruit a unit a turn.

[Sullla]

Sinagboy, thanks for sending the citrus resource gift over to Rome. That's the one thing that I forgot to do yesterday, and it will offset China taking over suzerainship of Lisbon. Your envoy situations is looking stellar; with Merchant Confederation in place it looks like you'll be close to the 100 gold/turn mark.

The big topic to discuss is the prospect of a Declaration of Friendship with England and Nubia. I completely agree with how you handled this, rejecting their current offer for the time being to keep our options open. Like you, I don't think we should sign on to another 30 turns of peace while the situation with Kongo/Khmer is unsettled. Unlike what you wrote in your report, I'm not convinced that we should be looking to start a war against England and Nubia, however. They're at the peak of their power right now while we still have a lot of room for growth. Since we are outresearching their team (slightly), I think it's more to our advantage to pick a fight when we have an advantage in unit quality, even if that only takes place during a narrow window of time. Right now, it's knights/crossbows versus knights/crossbows, and I'm not eager to jump into that when they still have more power than we do. I would prefer to wait for right now, let them bang their heads against Kongo/Khmer for the time being and hopefully lose some units, while we keep teching along and prepare for our upcoming backstab of poor Japper. Since we're going to be fighting Kongo/Khmer again, we shouldn't be looking to fight England/Nubia as well, not right this minute anyway. I'm not saying sign a Declaration of Friendship, let's just sign nothing for now and keep our options open.

Let me outline what I think our ideal scenario would be, and we can try to work towards it. In a perfect world, England/Nubia will keep slogging along for the next ten turns, making slow progress against Kongo/Khmer while suffering some losses in the process. Turn 112 hits and we bull-rush Japper from behind, taking his new jungle city and Max Havellar immediately at the start of the war, then push on to take Heart of Darkness (and hopefully Kinchassa). Your chariots that were upgraded to knights over by Savoia can help out in this by swinging around to the south of Max Havellar, where I think we can hit the city with five or six knights out of the fog on Turn 112. Anyway, so we let England/Nubia bleed themselves against the core of the Kongo/Khmer forces and then sweep in and take a big chunk of the spoils for ourselves. Meanwhile, Pisa has been traded over to China and we're faith-rushing a unit out of there every turn or two in preparation for potential conflict with England/Nubia. Firenze finishes Venetian Arsenal right around Turn 123, and Rome has it set up so that five quadriremes all complete on the next turn, instantly becoming ten quadriremes and then getting upgraded to frigates. With the quadriremes and galleys built earlier, we could legitimately have 6 caravels and 12 frigates as soon as Turn 125. There's just no way that England or Nubia could match that, and with total control of the seas we could raze Nan Madol, Valletta, and any other coastal city that they have. *THAT* would be the time to strike them, with a land army comparable to theirs (maybe with field guns available by that point?) and with an unmatched naval force to complement it.

Now I don't expect things to go that smoothly, but at the very least we can aim for that direction. Picking a fight around Turn 125-130 is more likely to work to our advantage than picking a fight around Turn 105. Other short issues:

* That faith output + Theocracy government is just awesome. China may not need to "build" a unit ever again. Archers for 100 faith is a ridiculous steal, as are horses for 135 faith. We can practically 1-turn horses right now, and while we don't actually want the outdated horses, down the road we can get a dozen of them and then mass upgrade to cavalry. That might be an even better setup for a future attack: beeline cavalry once we line up the tricky Siege Tactics boost and then let China cut loose with a bunch of faith-purchased, gold-upgraded cavalry. Woden's crossbows are nice and all but they only have 30 melee strength and cavs have 62 melee strength... plus 5 movement points to race over terrain and get on top of them. Hmmm, I need to keep thinking more on this. Roman caravels/frigates from the sea and the current military in the southeast, plus Chinese mass cavalry for the core of the striking force with a targeted attack date in the Turn 125-130 range? That sounds like it would be extremely difficult for anyone to stop. It's a long way in the future but it could be a game-winning move. (Would need a *TON* of gold for upgrades, like 3000 or so in all, but with China we have a lot of income to play around with.)

* I agree that it's likely worthwhile to drop Colonization if only one city is benefitting and nearly finished with a settler. Is there anything more useful than Urban Planning? Just curious since we have a lot of civics unlocked at this point. Maybe not though.

* By the way, do you need to upgrade three archers to crossbows next turn? You could upgrade one so that Chinese cities have the strength of a crossbow shot, but it's probably better to hold off on the rest to save money. I'm sure that there will be future opportunities to pop into Professional Army for a big upgrade push.

* One small note: we will need a niter source connected to upgrade the planned two catapults into bombards. Obviously no immediate rush on this since Siege Tactics is still a ways off and China can't even see niter yet.

* And finally, I agree with waiting to purchase units in Pisa rather than walk them all the way over from the Chinese core. Instead of purchasing swords though, what do you think about horsemen instead for a planned future upgrade to cavalry? Having a few swords would be a great idea since they can be upgraded to muskets, but probably horses are the more useful unit because of the cavalry upgrade path. What do you think?

[Singaboy]

Good ideas there. I was not thinking of attacking Nubia and England now. However, I didn't want us to watch in horror how they can rip Khmer and Kongo apart. For example, if they would manage to take the Congolese capital, it might be good to fight them and take the city and defend it with all our might.
Of course, your plan with a mighty navy and cavalry sounds splendid. I was planning to faith purchase horsemen soon too. Maybe I get 2 swordsmen so we can get muskets. Then faith purchase horsemen. You are also right about waiting to upgrade those archers to save gpt as much as possible. Now that I have knights, I don't think crossbowmen make city defenses any better. So, maybe simply walk those archers over to the east coast.

I am planning to get a civic down to 1 turn completion to be able to get Professional Army the moment it is needed.

As for niter, could it be that a source of it could be hidden under one of my cities which you can't see at the moment? Anyway, I will get to see it in 2 turns. Since Shangdu is expanding its borders in 3 turns, I am pretty certain, it will select the niter tile. With the builder nearby, I can easily connect that source.

[Athmos]

with 1UPT, Sullas's units could probably hinder troop movement around Heart of Darkness or other Congolese cities without even being at war with Kongo again (yet). It might be quite possible to delay them long enough (A few turns could make the difference to enable you to take it for yourself).
Anyway, It is probably worth it to encircle the cities from the fog to be better positioned to siege and have devastating alpha strikes as soon as you re-declare.

[Modo]

Don't think anyone would be taken by surprise at that point
Also, spreading your forces discoordinates them and from what I'm seeing in this game it's better to keep them concentrated for support bonuses and such.

[Sullla]

One quick note on city defenses: upgrading an archer to a crossbow won't increase the city defensive value at all, correct. However, city walls (and Encampments) fire at the strength of your best ranged units, whatever that might be. We still don't necessarily need to upgrade an archer into a crossbow since we're not at war right now, and no Chinese city with walls is currently threatened. However, I do think that we'll want to get at least one of the Chinese unique units (the Crouching Tigers) since that way every city would shoot at 50 ranged strength. Maybe we can purchase one in Pisa after trading it over to China; city walls with 50 strength and another unit with 50 strength (albeit at 1 range) would make a pretty strong deterrant if anyone tried to attack the city.

Anyway, on to my turn:



I had a flurry of notification messages at the start of my turn, including three trade offers from other players. Running down the list quickly, there were two boost messages for Cartography (finished the second Harbor) and Reformed Church (coming over from Singaboy). The Harbor district unlocked a new trade route for Rome, and Singaboy became the suzerain of Lisbon as we planned. There was also the expiration of the Declaration of Friendship with TheArchduke, and that was the subject of the first trade offer:



TheArchduke wanted another Declaration of Friendship. This is pretty meaningless because we just signed a DoF with EmperorK three turns ago, so I went ahead and accepted. Now our Declaration of Friendship with their team runs until Turn 135 instead of through Turn 132. Singaboy, this was minor enough that I didn't think we needed to sit down and discuss it. I think we both agree that the current peace with Russia/Germany serves our goals while we concentrate on finishing off Kongo/Khmer and then potentially taking action against England/Nubia. Their team also seems happy with the current situation on our shared border.

I had the same offer from Woden as you did:



They requested a Declaration of Friendship with both of our civs. I rejected it for the same reason that you did last turn, the need to keep our options open during the Kongo/Khmer conflict. We're not attacking them right now, but we're not signing this effective Non-Aggression Pact either. I doubt they're looking to start any trouble, and I suspect they would have preferred that we sign on for the 30 turns of peace. Their attack against Kongo/Khmer doesn't appear to be making a ton of headway from what I can see.

The third deal was Singaboy's offer of the extra citrus resource - thanks a bunch.



My scouting knight picked up the view of a Khmer city for the first time. I'm hoping to get closer and see some more of the details, including ideally the city center tile. This does not appear to be the Khmer capital, which I think is directly east of Heart of Darkness. Still no sign of the Nubian units attacking Cornflakes, although they can't be too far away now. I have a few more turns of scouting time with this knight before I have to return back to the rest of the army for safety's sake.

Note that Japper has finally finished walls in Kinchassa, and the English units grouped up by Nan Madol don't appear to be making much progress. Japper's army has also completely vacated his western border to defend against England, leaving himself seemingly wide open to a followup attack from our team. Eight more turns until we can attack (and we both play after Japper so he won't even have a chance to react on Turn 112). Poor guy. We've really been mean to Japper in this game.



This galley did not find a welcome reception. Two barbarian quadriremes were not a pleasant sight. The galley should survive their two attacks and then will need to limp home to heal up as a bit, perhaps coming back as a caravel to deal with them. I also confirmed that there is no coastal tile route through the Arctic. Ships (and embarked units) must follow the coast along the northern shore of Kongo or else have Cartography researched to unlock ocean travel. So far, no one appears to have that tech.



I sent a trade route from Firenze to Roma last turn. The second trader in Firenze didn't have Roma available as a trade route option, which I should have known would be the case. No chance to get a second 2 food / 3 production route unlocked. However, I took this chance to run the second trade route to Ravenna, which was still able to provide 2 production, the thing I most cared about. I valued the Ravenna route because it will build a road along the highlighted path, greatly facilitating movement along this corridor that has long bedeviled my units. The road building was worth losing out on the potential for 1 extra food/turn, especially since Firenze already has plenty of food to work with. This took my civ up to 5 trade routes in operation, and I came up with a spur-of-the-moment plan to unlock the sixth trade route enabled by the Harbor district that finished last turn:



At Ravenna, there was enough overflow from the Harbor district finishing to 1-turn a trader unit, and that seemed like a great use for the extra production. There are no production boosts associated with traders and they can be difficult to build sometimes. Now I'll have a sixth trade route to play around with next turn, which I think I'll send to Savoia to provide it with some extra food and production. That can be a good city once it gets a little food going. I'm looking forward to having more Economic policy slots available and using one for Triangular Trade once it unlocks at Mercantilism: 4 gold and 1 faith per trade route. With six trade routes active and two more trade routes available at Merchant Republic government, that's a lot of extra gold coming online in 15 or so turns.

Elsewhere, my three builders completed as expected and started heading off to improve tiles. I did figure out where all of the charges will be used and can optimize movement accordingly. Roma started on an expensive Armory and I have no immediate tricks to speed that up. I need to get an armory, a settler, and a university finished out of the capital which is probably going to take a little while. Ostia and Milano will finish their legions shortly before the armory completes and unlocks Gunpowder. Venezia is building ships for the moment; I'm loathe to take it off ships but I do need two universities for the Printing boost and that might be the place to get the second one. Either there or Milano, still not sure which one yet. Siena finishes its Campus district next turn and then can complete a galley that's almost done, one of the galleys I'm racing to finish before Cartography obsoletes them. That one and galleys out of Genova and Ravenna get me to six total, which I think will be enough. I don't really need that many caravels, it's frigates that I want in massive numbers.



Here's the southeast. Savoia is almost done its monument while Pisa is nearly finished city walls. Japper moved his settler in a way I didn't anticipate to the southeast, so I guess he doesn't want the white dot tile. I'm making room for him to move a tile to the southwest, across the river and onto the swampy natural wonder. Perhaps he wants the tile southwest of the citrus? We'll see.



Here's a picture I went back and took after playing my turn to highlight an idea. Singaboy, we should be able to hit Max Havellar from all sides on the first turn of the war (Turn 112) using our knights. I'm allocating 4 of them to this area, and your extra 2 would be a big help. If you can move your two knights down to the east of Seoul and prepare to attack Max Havellar from the southwest, I can swing my knights around and attack from the southeast, where everything is still in fog right now. We stay out of sight until Turn 111, then move up to the border and attack on Turn 112. With the movement speed of knights and the lack of walls in Max Havellar, this should be an easy capture. Then we meet up with the Roman units pushing east into the jungle and attack Heart of Darkness from the soft, unprotected underbelly.



We also should start coordinating our research with the goal of beelining for Military Science and cavalry, as we were discussing yesterday. To pull this off, we need the following techs:

* Castles (already boosted for both of us)
* Printing (Rome will supply the boost)
* Siege Tactics (China will supply the boost)
* Military Science (just offscreen to the right, Rome already has the boost)

Lining this up will be a bit tricky though. Rome has to finish researching Printing to hand the boost over to China, while China will have to land the boost for Siege Tactics, which requires researching all the way up to Metal Casting to unlock bombards as a unit. We're going to need China to focus research on the techs on this beeline (and Gunpowder/Metal Casting to unlock bombards) so that we can have this unlocked in the next 25 or so turns. There's no time to waste elsewhere, China is going to have to ignore the top part of the tree for a while. After all, it's not enough for just one of our civs to reach Military Science, we need both of our civs to make it there. Still, I think it's all doable with careful planning and making use of that magnificent 60% boost unique ability on China. Any thoughts on this, Singaboy?

[Modo]

Note that Japper has finally finished walls in Kinchassa, and the English units grouped up by Nan Madol don't appear to be making much progress. Japper's army has also completely vacated his western border to defend against England, leaving himself seemingly wide open to a followup attack from our team. Eight more turns until we can attack (and we both play after Japper so he won't even have a chance to react on Turn 112). Poor guy. We've really been mean to Japper in this game.

You allowing his settler to move unimpeded away from the current theatre of war might have helped create the impression you're at least providing some help in his time of need.
Pretty ruthless stuff...I like it.

[Singaboy]

Turn 104:

It was a quick turn around today and I got to play my turn before heading to sleep. It was a far less busy turn than T103 as well, but with some changes nevertheless. Machinery and Medieval Fairies done meant a quick change of policy cards. That was done after I upgraded the second chariot in the east. I decided to use Limes for more walls pre-builds as Quanzhou and Pagan do not have them yet. The coastal cities will be busy for a while before going to produce more naval units anyway. Merchant Confederation will boost the income and Urban Planning the production just a little bit.



The main change in the west is the fact that Germany retreated the archer that was blocking the canal spot, which I quickly occupied with my slinger. I am surprised that he is giving up that position. Maybe TheArchduke feels that this city would be too threatened. I could now found the next city on that spot instead of the peninsula. What do you think Sulla, should I found the next city where the slinger is standing? Boosted by defense, this city could provice excellent cover for Pagan and Kashgar.

There were other notable issue with Archduke's Germany. They in fact have reached the Renaissance Era for technologies and I am wondering whether he is shooting for the Arsenal too. With powerful production from Hansas, this might be a problem. Unfortunately I can't scout the coast without caravels. Another thought is, that Germany is pulling its units west to support a Russian strike on Nubia and England. With the renewed DoF, they do not have to worry about us and might want to strike their foe in the west while they are bust with Khmer and Kongo. Yet another reason for us NOT to sign a DoF with Nubia and England.

Pagan grew to size 3 and really needs the granary to get bigger. The other interesting item for me is whether Shangdu will add the niter tile in two turns. This brings up the technology discussion from Sulla. I am going to finish Military Engineering this turn, heading for gunpowder and Siege Tactics next. Gunpowder requires 196 science, roughly 4 turns for me. Siege Tactics and Metal Casting both require 264 beakers, which equates to 5+ turns each. The plan is to research 3 turns of gunpowder next followed by 5 turns of Siege Tactics. Then, I switch back to gunpowder, finishing it on T114, followed by Metal Casting finishing on T119 (assuming I get the Eurekas on time). Siege Tactics will be finally done on T120. We can then head towards Military Science (hopefully I will have unlocked the Eureka myself with a knight victory). This will take until maybe T126 (338 beakers). I am aiming to add more science buildings (Hangzhou adding a library next, Quanzhou, Beijing and Tianjin going for campuses too) to boost beaker output. 



An image of the front after Nubia and England have played their turns. My knights will move south of Max Havelaar, potentially looking for an opportunistic victory against a barbarian unit. Could you let me know the exact position where you think my knights should be on T111, so that I can plan accordingly. The order of attack suggests that China might be the one taking the city in the end.



I am going to start purchasing militray units with Pisa in my hands next turn (?), starting with a crouching tiger as suggested. It's gonna cost 270 faith, pretty steep here.