Civ6 PBEM: Sullla of Rome

[Sullla]

Turn 31 brought the first tactical unit puzzle that I've encountered thus far:



This was the scene that greeted me when I opened up the save file. TheArchduke moved his northern warrior up a tile to shadow my warrior, and he moved his southern warrior down from the copper tile and next to my warrior as well. This looked like a pincer movement - is he trying to squeeze my warrior between his two units and kill it? I had to sit here for a little while and think about how I wanted to respond to this.

My only goal here is to make sure that TheArchduke can't get a city in this region before I can. My settler finished this turn and is on its way up here, with a settling ETA of Turn 37. That means I need 6 more turns before I can feel safe about winning the settling race, assuming I'm in one at all. My best guess is that TheArchduke is still about 2-3 turns away from finishing his own settler since he completed a warrior about five turns ago, and he doesn't have my pantheon or Urban Planning or Colonization to boost his settler production. But I could be wrong, and if a settler would pop out of his capital next turn somehow, he could beat me to the spot I want by the narrowest of margins. That means I need to have at least the possibility of buying time by occupying the current tile where the warrior is standing, even if the possibility that I'll need it is unlikely. I would feel an enormous fool if I moved my warrior away and then a settler plopped down on that spot right before my own settler arrived.

So I wanted to stay on the current tile with my warrior if possible. What would happen if I did that and TheArchduke attacked with both of his units? I could use the Fortify command with my warrior, which adds +2 combat strength each turn of fortification (max of +6 strength after three turns), and that definitely would help. TheArchduke's southern warrior in particular would have a hard time making progress there, as it would be 20 strength against my 27 strength with the river penalty, almost as bad as the combat I hovered over yesterday when TheArchduke had a warrior with two turns of fortification bonus. The northern warrior would get much better odds at 20 strength against 22 strength, and my warrior would lose some combat strength as it took damage of course. My best estimate is that I would lose about 40-50 health if both of them attacked, and then I would heal back 10 HP between turns and could stack up another turn's worth of fortification bonus, plus still have the option to retreat across the river to the south if things looked bad.

That didn't sound so bad, and therefore I decided to stay in place while moving up the slinger:



Go ahead, TheArchduke: make my day. Of course I don't really want him to attack, and this is all an effort to buy myself a few more turns while my settler moves north. The slinger in particular is a bluff, as it has to expose itself to attack from the warrior in order to cross the river, and I don't want the 5 strength slinger defending against that 20 strength warrior, no sirree! Still, if my understanding of the Civ6 combat system is correct, I think I'll be OK even if he does want to get aggressive. It's difficult to attack across a river into a fortified unit unless you have some kind of a technological edge. And the fortification system is actually quite well done in this game, with the stacking +2 bonus for each turn of fortification. +6 strength is no joke and turns an even fight into a rout. If TheArchduke does want to fight here, he's got to do it right away, because the fortification bonus on my warrior only gets stronger each turn.

The most likely scenario is that TheArchduke backs off or fortifies his own units in place. I would be very happy with either outcome. Just need to buy a couple more turns here and I'll be golden.



Back at the capital, the settler did finish on time this turn. I was pleased to see that I can regrow back to size 4 in only two turns, minimizing the turns where I'm not working all of my improved tiles. From swapping tiles around I was able to determine that I need 9 food for growth, and so I'll run +6 food this turn by dropping the plains hill, then pick it back up again next turn for +4 food and enough to hit size 4. That warrior build should take 3 turns to complete (and therefore will not play a role in this little shindig), then we'll see if I'm greedy enough to go back onto yet another settler after that.

Elsewhere, Ravenna will grow to size 3 next turn and trigger the amenities penalty for unhappiness. I'll discuss it more next turn; it's something I want to avoid if possible, but not really that big of a deal here. Bronze Working will also complete next turn and reveal iron on the map; I think everyone gets the resource near the capital on this map script since it's a balanced one. I actually don't have enough culture to drop the Encampment district immediately, which is a bit of a shame. You can see the tile where it's going and it will still take 5 more turns. Ah well, not a huge deal really although it will make the district slightly more expensive. Now I can finally backtrack and pick up Pottery and Irrigation to connect those spices; each should take 4 turns and I'll have them in hand by the time Ravenna produces its builder, just as expected.

TheArchduke researched another tech this turn, his sixth of the game. I've only researched two techs! That sounds intimidating and all that, but his beaker output is only slightly ahead of mine even with the Scientific city state; he gets 6.8 beakers/turn and I was getting 6.2 beakers/turn before popping out the settler. With Roma and Ravenna both growing in the next two turns, I'll have almost as much science per turn, and considerably more when I get my own envoy into that city state in a dozen or so turns. So what exactly has my northern neighbor been researching? He's been finishing techs as regular as clockwork, first every 5 turns and then every 4 turns after meeting the city state. Because the techs are coming in at such regular intervals, all of his techs must have cost the same amount in beakers, and that tells me what he's been pursuing with a high degree of accuracy. I'm sure he has the initial three techs (25 beakers each) and the boosted Irrigation and Writing (also 25 beakers). The last tech must be either Sailing or Astrology, which also cost 25 beakers with their respective boosts. He only has Sailing if he put his capital on the coast, which I hope is true because it would mean his start is essentially crippled. More likely, the other tech is Astrology, which is also kind of a bad choice since it only leads to Holy Districts and then Celestial Navigation tech (Harbors). It might be close to 100 turns before I go for either of those options, no matter how cheap they might be to research. There's not much there I want.

Since we're at the start of a new forum page, I'll link my C&D spreadsheet again for the curious to give all of you a better peak at where these numbers are coming from.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...Ow/pubhtml

[SadGit]

Wait, so roads dont boost movement at all? Are they just there to show an active traderoute?

[Bacchus]

In Ancient Era, road remove the terrain movement penalties except river crossing, Classical removes river crossing costs, starting with Medieval, roads give a discount on movement, starts with an irrelevant 0.75 discount.

[Sullla]

Bacchus explained this pretty well; I'll add that in the Modern era roads cut movement to 0.5 points. If I were creating a mod for Civ6, cleaning up the interface issues and fixing the movement issues would be my main targets. There is no reason for movement to be so painfully slow in this game, and roads don't provide nearly enough benefit until very late on the tech tree. It's ridiculous that you can be in the Industrial era and moving along roads is still no faster than moving across grassland tiles in the Ancient age. This game does so many things so well... and then it facepalms in a couple of key areas.

Coming into this turn, I was slightly concerned about my decision to fortify the warrior in place. The worst-case scenario was TheArchduke bringing his scout over from wherever it's located on the map right now and using all three of his units to pin my warrior in place. If a scout and warrior blocked my ability to retreat south across the river, it would be pretty easy for him to kill my warrior, and that would set back my settling plans dramatically, since I would not be able to put a city in this region with just a slinger against 2 warriors and a scout. This was an unlikely scenario to be sure but not out of the question entirely. Fortunately things were much rosier when I downloaded the save file and took a look:



TheArchduke did not declare war on me between turns. He moved his northern warrior over to the coast and his southern warrior back to the copper tile. This was about as friendly as he could be with his unit moves, in particular retreating the southern warrior to the copper tile. Now I could move my slinger across the river without fear of being attacked if needed. TheArchduke also had a deal proposal waiting for me:



He offered a "horses for horses" exchange, which according to past community tradition is a way of signaling friendly intentions. No "sheep for sheep" deal like we used to see in Civ4, but I'm pretty sure this is the same thing. Between moving his units in thoroughly unaggressive fashion and offering this trade, TheArchduke clearly wants to be on good terms, and that's excellent news for me. I went ahead and re-offered the same horses for horses deal (which is where this screenshot comes from) and resent the same deal back to him. This is one small thing that Civ6 gets right over Civ4: you can actually look at the map before clicking on an incoming offer from another player and deciding whether to accept or decline. As much as I love Civ4, the fact that diplomatic offers had to be acted on before doing anything else was a bit of an interface hitch.

I could have left my warrior in place and kept increasing the fortify bonus, however I decided to move him south of the river. The main reason for this was strategic: TheArchduke's next turn will be Turn 33, and even if a settler appears out of his capital next turn, it's no longer possible for him to beat my own settler to this central rivers region. For that matter, it doesn't even look like I was ever in a race here at all. Since I don't need to block that one-tile chokepoint against an incoming settler, I might as well signal friendly intentions back to TheArchduke and retreat south. A nice, quiet border over here for the next 50 or so turns is exactly what I want, and perhaps TheArchduke is thinking the same thing. I might as well do what I can to respond to his friendly gesture with one of my own.

The biggest news of the turn came when I was preparing to exit the diplomatic screen:



TheArchduke has founded his pantheon, and it's the God of the Sea belief! That one adds +1 production to all fishing boats on seafood resources, and it's one of the best pantheons for archipelago maps. This... is not an archipelago map. Going back to an earlier discussion topic in this thread, water tiles in Civ6 are terrible and your cities should avoid working them as much as possible. Seafood resources are the only decent tiles, and even they aren't too hot. A fish tile has 2/0/1 yield before improvement, and goes to 3/0/1 yield after adding a fishing boat. With this pantheon, that becomes a 3/1/1 tile, which is not bad but nothing to write home about. The problem is that the non-resource water tiles are simply horrible at 1/0/1 yield, and any city on the coast is going to collect a bunch of these lousy tiles. It's almost always better to found one tile off the coast, as my capital did, and then build a Harbor district in the second or third ring for water access.

The real question is why TheArchduke picked this particular pantheon, which has limited usefulness on this pangaea map. It begs the obvious question: did he found his capital on the coastal starting tile?! I still think that would be suicidal in this game, and I didn't really expect anyone else to do that. But why else would TheArchduke take this pantheon unless he had a city on the coast expecting to be working seafood resource tiles? And he has no other cities beyond his capital, which rules out any other locations where this would be useful. Perhaps this explains why TheArchduke's development has been so much slower than the other players in this game. And it would also explain why he researched either Astrology or Sailing tech, because of course he researched Sailing tech if he settled his capital on the coast. There's an easy way to test this: if TheArchduke's gold/turn income goes up in the near future, it will be a sign that he's working coastal tiles like the fish and the crabs that have additional gold yield. We'll figure this out yet from the Demographics information.



To give you a sense for why the coastal spot would be such a bad choice, take a look at my capital again. Imagine that my capital is located on tile further northwest, located at the mouth of that little river. This spot would severely lack for production since it doesn't include any hill tiles. While this capital would have grabbed the fish and the crab tiles, it wouldn't have any of the three hill tiles at the bottom of the screen because they would all be in the third ring. Also note the iron tile that's been revealed from my completion of Bronze Working tech - that would be in the fourth ring and won't be workable by a costal capital at all, or be purchaseable with gold. Anyway, the costal spot is bad enough at size 4, but cripplingly weak at size 8 when it's losing out on three or four hill tiles that the inland capital picks up. If TheArchduke really did settle the coastal spot, he's in extremely serious trouble here. I guess you guys can find out for sure by popping over to his spoiler thread while I'm still stuck here speculating.

My capital ended up with 16 production into the warrior when the overflow from the settler was accounted for. That feels about right; I was getting 12 total production last turn (8 base with the +50% Agoge bonus) and I must have had 4 overflow from the settler. (Checking again... I was at 87/100 on the settler and had 16.5 production/turn with Colonization policy in place. Yep, checks out.) This turn I could swap back onto the plains hill tile and tick up to 10 production base / 15 production total while still growing back to size 4. Two more turns for the warrior and then hopefully another settler after that.

Note as well that I can build Encampment districts now, but I still need my culture to expand onto the tile I want. It looks like the district will cost about 120 production, and unfortunately there's no production bonuses available there. I'll wait a bit longer and let my capital grow larger before trying to take on that project.



Finally, here's Ravenna after growing to size 3 and hitting the amenities penalty. I'm losing -5% to my production, culture, and beakers at the moment, which is small enough that it doesn't hurt too much while still being a penalty that I want to remove ASAP. Even a small penalty like that adds up over time. The good news is that the builder will complete significantly faster than the current ETA states, as I'll be able to work the stone tile shortly when borders expand, plus this city will pick up the Urban Planning bonus once I hit the first governments, plus I'll also be able to grab Ilkum for +30% production on builders. That should take the city from its current 3 production to 5 * 1.3 = 6.5 production. I figure about 8 more turns total until the builder is done, which is right when my current tech path of Pottery -> Irrigation will complete. Once the spices are connected with a plantation, the amenities penalty will disappear and Ravenna will be good to size 5. Connecting the jade at the capital takes it up another two sizes, to size 7, and building a Bath district adds another amenity (and four more points of housing!) which should be plenty for most of this game.

Overall then, this was a great turn for me. Early game conflict avoided, guaranteed access to the settling spot that I want, and the possibility that my closest neighbor has made a serious strategic error from the start of the game. Good stuff.

[Old Harry]

Thanks for such a thorough thread Sullla, I feel like I'll be an expert by the time you've finished.

On city names my first thought is Roman quotes used in Asterix.

[antisocialmunky]

I hope they figure out ways of making the ocean more useful. That's probably the most disappointing thing after the crappy movement rules. I'm not sure how you do it though, production is too important and historically you can't get production on water tiles in Civ so even if you buff water tiles, you'll still reach the cap where production is bottlenecking everything. I guess you could make water give you magical gold to fuel rush buying but I'm not a huge fan of that either.

[Tyrmith]

Long term what exactly do you do with the city states? They seem very helpful in the early game, are they still helpful later in the game, or do you just mow over them and make them another city of yours?

[Sullla]

Lots of good questions, thanks for asking everyone! Old Harry: I'd probably better do well in this game since I'll have given away all my knowledge by the end of it.

Antisocialmunky: I think that they could improve water tiles to the point of being usable without much trouble. The main thing I would do is change the lighthouse from adding +1 food to a city (which is pretty sad) to adding +1 food to all water tiles, the same way that a lighthouse does in Civ4. Then work boats on water resources could add +1 production on seafood, which would be a lot more useful. Then God of the Sea pantheon could be stacked for a further +1 production to make those resources legitimately good; imagine that fish resource as a 3/2/1 tile and now we're talking. At any rate, it's important to let water tiles reach 2 food yield to avoid being a net negative on growth. Seeing as how lighthouses still require the construction of a Harbor district, I don't think this change would make them particularly overpowered - if anything, Harbors could use some buffing. None of that seems likely to happen at this point, but we can at least dream for the future.

Tyrmith: city states can be extremely helpful to keep around in the long term depending on their type and their unique benefit. All city states are one of 6 different types: Cultural, Scientific, Commercial, Religious, Militaristic, or Industrious. Each city state also has a unique benefit that applies to the suzerain of that city state, which I'll discuss more later when we reach that point. But sticking to the 6 different types for right now, each city state provides benefits depending on how many envoys you have present with them. With 1 envoy, each city state provides a flat bonus in the capital city, and only in the capital city. A Cultural city state provides +2 culture in the capital, a Scientific city state provides +2 science in the capital, and so on. It's almost always worthwhile to get 1 envoy with each city state regardless of type to grab this flat bonus.

The city states then provide further per-city bonuses with more envoys. At 3 envoys, a Scientific city state provides +2 beakers at every Campus district across your empire. Then at 6 envoys, it provides ANOTHER +2 beakers at every Campus district. Obviously on a big map with a lot of cities, this bonus can be extremely powerful, as compared to the 1 envoy bonus which is a flat amount that never increases. However, you need to build the Campus districts or you don't get any benefit, and if you're investing in a different type of district, then it might not be worthwhile to send envoys at all. The specific bonus depends on the type of city state, with Commercial city states providing benefits to Commercial districts, and Religious city states adding to Holy Site districts, and so on. So some city states might be cannon fodder to be taken over later, while others have large enough benefits that you might want to keep them around. (Note as well here the key difference between city states in Civ5 and Civ6. In Civ5, city states give free food and free military units. In Civ6, city states give you a small flat benefit initially, and then everything else requires an investment in districts. Not to mention, the envoy generation mechanic is infinitely better than the "dump 500 gold for 100 influence" payouts. Civ6 has an active system, not a passive system, and that makes all the difference.)

In the context of this game, I plan to bulldoze the Religious city state to my south and the Cultural city state in the middle of the map. I won't be building Holy Site districts or Theatre districts, and therefore I don't need either of them long term. The Scientific city state is a keeper though; not only will I build lots of Campus districts later, this particular city state (Stockholm) also has a really nice suzerain bonus, adding +1 Great Person point / turn for each district that the suzerain controls. That's like getting a better version of the Holy Spark pantheon. I intend to become suzerain of Stockholm early on and never relinquish control over them if I can help it. The other city states are likely toast down the road.

[Sullla]

We also have another turn this evening, Turn 33:



A little bit more posturing over here in the north. TheArchduke moved his warrior east from the copper tile and his other warrior south a tile to the 1-tile chokepoint. I have my slinger on the hill for vision and my warrior just chilling at the southern end of the river up there. This is all idle unit shuffling to little real point; my settler is now in Ravenna, and shouldn't have any trouble moving up to the desired city spot in the next few turns. My warrior can fortify on the tile where the city is going, and the slinger can hold the southern 1-tile chokepoint for the one turn I need to move the settler through it. Most likely, the Archduke will hang out on the north side of that river and won't even see my settler until the city is already planted.

And... that's pretty much it for what happened this turn. My capital did regrow back to size 4, and I was the first player in the game to reach 7 population points. At 6.8 beakers/turn, I have now equaled TheArchduke's science output, and that's with him getting 2 beakers/turn from the Scientific city state. My culture is almost double anyone else's; teh has the second-most at 5 culture/turn. I'm looking to be in very good shape here.

With that in mind, I'll post a few screenshots of other parts of the Civ6 interface that I haven't shown yet. Here's the Reports screen that can be pulled down from the top bar:



This is useful for showing where all of the various city inputs are coming from, although this being the Civ6 interface, of course it's missing information. The production list doesn't include modifiers from policies like Agoge or Colonization, the Science and Culture tallies don't include beakers and culture that come from population, there's no mention here of the culture coming from my city state envoy, and so on. Also I have no idea what's going on with that "Amenities" row there; my capital is not getting 0.9 production from amenities, and you can see that the numbers don't even add up with that row. What's going on here?! So this screen has some definite flaws but can be useful to see some of what's going on at a glance.



This is my current tech tree; I thought I should display it since a lot of readers of this thread probably are not that familiar with Civ6. All of the techs in vertical columns have the same cost in beakers, with the first group costing 25 beakers, then the second group costing 50 beakers, and the third group costing 80 beakers. The initial trio of techs can't be boosted, but most of the ones in the second column have easy to achieve boosts, which drops them down to a very cheap 25 beakers. These are the techs that everyone else has been grabbing. I went for the much more expensive and unboostable Bronze Working and now I'm backtracking for some of the cheaper stuff. My upcoming tech path is Pottery into Irrigation so that I can build a plantation on the spices at Ravenna. Then I will likely go for Writing into Currency (offscreen beyond Writing tech), timed to come in after I finish my first trader unit for the boost. Currency costs 120 beakers but is very easy to boost by creating a trade route, making it less expensive than it might seem.

I may have to go for Archery tech at some point if I'm expecting an attack, although I want to delay that for as long as possible. Once I finish Archery tech, I can't build slingers anymore. Ideally, I'll get out 3 or 4 slingers and have them ready to be upgraded into archers - but not actually upgraded into archers - since that way I don't have to pay maintenance on them. Slingers are free while archers cost 1 gold/turn. Of course, the tradeoff is that slingers are almost useless in combat while archers are excellent units until horses and swords appear. It's a bit of an interesting dynamic.



Similarly, here's the civics tree that operates on culture instead of science. I already have the three initial civics (Code of Laws, Craftsmanship, Foreign Trade) and most of the second-tier civics in Early Empire and State Workforce. Unlike the science tree, all of the civics do not have the same cost in each vertical column here. Craftsmanship and Foreign trade both cost 40 culture (and are both easy to boost), Early Empire and State Workforce cost 70 culture, but Military Tradition and Mysticism only cost 50 culture despite being in the same column. With the boost in place for Mysticism, it's a very cheap civic indeed, although the policies located there are not very useful. I plan on going there next after grabbing the governments at Political Philosophy because Mysticism also grants a free envoy on discovery. I'll drop that into the Scientific city state for the +2 free beakers, and that should easily catapult me into the science lead for a long time to come. Then on to Military Tradition, and we'll see where we go from there.

Political Philosophy costs 110 culture, which can be very expensive indeed if you can't manage to boost it by finding 3 city states. The fact that I'm going to reach the civic on Turn 36 is legitimately insane; you are not supposed to have this much culture so early in the game. Poor Yuris is not Rome and doesn't have an envoy with a Cultural city state, which means that even his size 6 capital is only producing 2.8 culture/turn. I get more than triple that now, and when I plant my third city shortly, another free monument and pop point will take me up over 11 culture/turn. I'll have my government in place with 4 policy cards long before anyone else. As I've said before, it's good to be Rome.

[Rowain]

AFAIK if your city is happy you get a Bonus on produktion . That are the values in the amenities line.