Singaboy and Sullla's team thread

[Singaboy]

Besides this epic sea battle, for China, there is only the role of a sidelined spectator currently.

Oh, I lost that southern knight after all...costs me 1 war weariness point unfortunately. Rome provided tobacco though to make up for this. I decided to upgrade anotehr quarireme at Xinagqi. I will end up with two battle ships here in time to come. As I said, they might provide the help that Rome might need here. Genova might be cut off and no canal connection for the time being. Hangzhou finished its project and continued a knight (unlike the industrial district that is shown). I think, we need a game breaker here and it will come in the form of battleships and tanks combined with the ability to build fleets and armies etc. Hence, I won't build any more cavalry now and save the gold for battleship and tank upgrades given the fact that oil is almost guaranteed to be in our hands when combustion arrives.

Nationalism is back in place and will complete for a double swap using public work to push out three builders. Wars of Religion will be swapped in for Professional Army, though I doubt the stalemate between our front lines on land will be broken at the moment. I will switch to national history before moving on to urbanization. It will most likely take 5 turns (maybe I am lucky and 4 turns would do) to get there. This means on T152, I should get Hangzhou to pop 15. Currently, the city is 128 food short of pop 14. Next turn, a marsh harvest would push the city to pop 14, but I will wait for the additional boosts from two civics for the harvest on T148 then moving towards the rice and being able to harvest that on T150, well in time for the need of the Inspiration for Urbanization. It is then for Rome to provide the long leg to mobilization where we do not enjoy any boost (it costs 1400 culture and will take Rome maybe 13 long turns). I guess our tank and battleship armies have to fight without army support for a while.



A look at the stalemate in the east. I did not upgrade the remaining two horsemen. I rather use the gold for more tanks later. There are currently only 3 knights, but at a cost of 295 faith, I will be able to draft one every three turns. This means, I should be getting maybe 3 more knights til combustion.

Good luck Sulla with the naval battle. Hit England even harder this round to hit their morale. They might take Geneva but that comes at the cost of losing most of the fleet.

[Sullla]

Wow, that went *MUCH* better than I thought. Now it might seem weird to be posting that at a time when one of my cities looks like it's going to fall, but I mean it. This was a fantastic turn for our team, between the 10 English ships sunk and the strange response by Woden on his half of the turn. Here's a quick tally of what I lost:

* Double promoted ironclad in the east
* Helpless isolated frigate in the east
* Two frigates in the west

And that's it! I only lost four total ships, and that's shocking given the amount of firepower that Woden had available. I was expecting much worse. My fleet is almost entirely intact. What's more, nearly all of these ships can reach the remaining English fleet in the west. I should be able to sink everything over there except for the frigate and caravel fleets sieging up Genova. These actions just don't make sense to me. Why did Woden waste a caravel attack on pillaging the Harbor at Firenze rather than using another attack? I can easily repair that district in a turn or two. It's annoying because there was a frigate 1 turn from completion that now won't complete until after it gets autoupgraded to a battleship in queue, but that's pretty minor overall. Similarly, by directing so many attacks against the ironclad + frigate pair off in the east, Woden has done the one thing that he needed to avoid: splitting up his fleet. The ships in the east are completely separated from the ships in the west. I'm going to crush the western fleet and then turn and destroy the eastern ones after upgrading to battleships, and then all of Chevalier's cities on this ocean are ours for the taking.

As far as Genova goes, losing it will be annoying but not fatally so. I can swap the capital over to a settler and pop out another city for this spot in 9 turns, less than that if I can get a forest chop into it. (There's a forest tile in the third ring that may be worth purchasing to speed along a settler build. Maybe.) Genova has a Campus and Commercial district, worth roughly 10 beakers and 4 culture and 25 gold/turn (with the trade route). Losing the city will suck. But it's replaceable, and if losing the city lets me destroy the English navy, I'm happy to make that trade. I don't even need a canal city immediately because most of my fleet will be needed in the eastern ocean for the time being. I just need to be able to get them back in time to face TheArchduke by Turn 161, and there's plenty of time for that.

This decision to sell out in the hopes of taking Genova makes no sense to me. What is the thinking behind this decision? If Woden razes the city then he's trapped up against the coast with nowhere to retreat and all of those ships die. If he captures the city, he can move through it and keep going, but what then? He's not going to capture Siena on the other side, which will be getting 200 HP walls on Turn 148. Woden would need to spend Turn 147 finishing up with the conquest of Genova, and then the extra strength walls are there at the start of Turn 148. Furthermore, I have two caravels and a frigate over near Venezia, and they can reach Siena by Turn 148, while upgrading into ironclads / battleship along the way. Siena is never falling, not to this force. I just don't get it. Woden could never possibly take and hold Genova, and if he burns it down, he traps his whole western navy for destruction. One city (and not one of my better cities honestly) is not worth sacrificing most of the English fleet.

I'm reminded of something that oledavy wrote in the closing stages of the PBEM2 game. He said something to the effect that his cities didn't matter anymore; the Japanese empire essentially was equivalent to the Japanese fleet. We're in extreme lategame here just as oledavy was in that game, and I think the same lesson applies. The goal right now in the eastern ocean is not to capture territory, it's to destroy the enemy fleet. Once the fleet is gone, every city on the water is helpless and can be taken at leisure. Woden should have been trying to sink my ships over any other possible goal. I won the first turn 10-4 in ships killed, and since combat is a snowball game, I'm set to win the second round even more decisively. I started the turn with 19 ships on the eastern ocean, and by my count England started with 25. England has double Great Admirals, two fleets, and an armada. I should not be winning these trades - with better tactics, I think England could have wiped the floor with me. So yes, this qualifies as a very, very good turn for our team regardless of what happens at Genova.

My one concern is holding onto Nan Madol from the English frigates in the eastern fog; I might try to plug that one-tile gap south of the island with an ironclad to stall for time. Battleships are online in just two more turns though, and then it's really time to kick some ass.

[Kerberos]

very good turn for our team regardless of what happens at Genova.

Battleships are online in just two more turns though, and then it's really time to kick some ass.

But, will you have the Oil resource on hand to perform the updates to Battleships if Genova falls ? I didnt see any other land based Oil (besides the one near Genova) in Roman territory from your screen captures.

[Singaboy]

You don't require oil for battleships. They run on coal.

Anyway for tanks, we will need oil and there are two sources near Shangdu and Quanzhou. I am going to finish research on steel in tow turns and can then see those resources. I am getting builders in those cities as well on T148. Just nice

[Modo]

So my best guess is that Woden / CMF have considered themselves in a much better position and planned to bait you with Nan Madol and trap you there so that they could overrun your units and start taking cities while their reinforcements dealt with your fleet.

I see this all the time with players getting into auto pilot mode and stick with a plan (bad or good but still inflexible) even if the conditions change so I think Woden still sees the current trade as positive for them...and that's good news
Normally you'd dread battleships coming online in two more turns instead of one but if they continue to think they have the initiative and bring more ships closer to your coast then they're basically doing half of your work for you, let's hope by the time they wake up there won't be much hope to wake up to.

[Sullla]

This was another tactically excellent but strategically frustrating turn.



The notifications at the beginning of the turn had some bad news: my isolated frigate was not just killed but captured by an English Sea Dog. See, that's what can happen when a unit is out of position. There must have been more Sea Dogs off in the fog that I didn't know about. According to the notifications, my ironclad was also attacked by a Sea Dog but wasn't captured, fortunately. There's at least two Sea Dogs off to the east therefore. That unit is also really stupid from a design standpoint, a naval unit with a percentage chance to capture an enemy unit and bring it over to your side. Fine for Single Player but way too gamey and luck-based for a more serious Multiplayer endeavor. The sacrifice of those two units did successfully buy me a turn's worth of time, however, and it kept my other ships north of the little island from being attacked. Ultimately I think it was worth it.

As usual, the first thing to do was to scout out the enemy ships:



At least five English frigates over here, plus the captured frigate, plus the two Sea Dogs. That's at least eight ships in the east and there's a lot of fog that I couldn't see. Plus there are builders at Lepanto and Midway about to chop forests, and each forest will mean two more frigates. This really sucks you guys. More on that later though. At least this gave me some vision on where these ships were located, and where I should position my own ships to try and stay out of range.



Here's what I was up against in the west. These were the same seven ships that I spotted last turn, along with the group of three fleet/armada ships attacking Genova. I spent a long time sitting and planning out my attacks to make sure that every ship could once again get into the fighting. There was one frigate who was too far back but everything else looked able to contribute. Let's finish taking apart this half of the English navy.



My top goal here from a tactical perspective was to take out the frigate protecting the Great Admiral. It was positioned pretty well in the back to boost every ship except this poor caravel out in front. If I could eliminate the Great Admiral, killing off the rest of the ships would be a much easier task. When I plotted out the moves, I saw that I needed to remove this caravel first to get rid of its zone of control. That would allow me to move onto the fish resource east of Genova and fire on the frigate guarding the Admiral. This unfortunate English caravel was just in range of one of my backline frigates and therefore took the first shot to open up the combat.



Ravenna's brand new frigate finished this turn was only able to reach the caravel, and therefore had the honor of eliminating it. By the way, the Valetta city state has a galley down there that we'll need to kill off at some point, heh. No attacks available this turn to deal with it.



This was the attack that I mentioned before, hitting the frigate covering the Great Admiral to set up a future attack. Damage was a little bit low on the attack roll at only 46, which goes to show how having the Great Admiral's +5 strength makes such a difference. Attacking at +17 strength deals significantly more damage than attacking at +12 strength.



I wanted to finish off the Great Admiral frigate next, only to realize that I had to get rid of this frigate as well or else its zone of control would block movement around to the north to get at the Great Admiral. I needed to avoid a poor dice roll here and I did, getting a slightly above average result.



Which was then enough for a second frigate to finish the enemy ship off. Whew. This was the most luck-dependent pair of attacks in the sequence. I only needed average luck to get the kill, but as we all know, you don't always get average dice rolls. This opened the path forward to target the Great Admiral:



I attacked at +17 strength and... argh, came up short! Two below-average dice rolls in a row, the first one for 46 damage and then this one for 50 damage on a possible range of 47-71. 4 out of 100 HP remaining on the enemy ship, almost like the Great Admiral was providing a dice roll bonus. See, things don't always go perfectly for me either. I had enough grace room on the previous turn to two-shot everything because I was averaging about 55 damage per attack, and even a low roll would be overcome with the second shot that did additional damage due to low health.



Fortunately, I was able to shift plans and use this ironclad to get the kill. In retrospect, I would have needed to move a unit onto this tile regardless, but I was hoping to move a frigate here and still be able to get a shot off. Instead, I had to "waste" an attack to remove the ship and the underlying Great Admiral, plus my ironclad took another 10 damage in the process. Well, nothing to be done about it. I needed that Admiral and its combat bonus gone from the battlefield.



And there it went, teleporting over to Lepanto's Harbor. The Great Admiral is now out of the fighting in the west, but it will come back to annoy us again in the east. Fortunately it can only move three tiles per turn until England discovers Steam Power tech and that limits its effectiveness.



Back to the main action. With the Great Admiral gone, I could begin carving up the rest of the enemy fleet essentially at my leisure. I pasted in the damage printout to demonstrate how the removal of the Great Admiral significantly increased the damage of each shot. These +17 strength attacks deal an average of 59 damage so this was actually a slightly below average roll, believe it or not.



Mopping up.



Now the caravel was actually a tougher target because of its 50 melee strength, as opposed to the 45 melee strength of the frigates. This is why I waited to take on the caravels until after the Great Admiral was gone, as otherwise I'd only be attacking at +7 strength and averaging 40 damage, not enough for a two-shot kill without getting lucky. One shot from my frigate to soften up this unit...



Followed by the ironclad cleaning up for the kill. At +21 strength differential this was a guaranted kill of the English caravel, but look at that damage taken. 15 damage from the caravel when it was fighting at -21 strength? That was a max damage roll from the enemy ship there, argh. A bit annoying.



I had my non-promoted frigate shoot at the injured English caravel. While I knew that it wouldn't deal as much damage, I also wouldn't need to inflict a full 100 HP worth of damage to get the kill. I rolled below average and did 35 damage to this guy, but that was still enough to take him to half health since the unit was already injured.



And then this was an almost guaranteed kill, although if I had rolled the absolute minimum of 48 damage I may have come up short. Fortunately an average damage roll here was plenty to get the job done.



My injured frigate from last turn got into the action as well! I needed some kind of damage on this last remaining English frigate because my ironclad couldn't one-shot it. The amount of damage didn't matter very much, anything around 30 damage would do. I got a max damage roll here at a time when I didn't particularly need it and ended up with 42 damage, heh.



The last ironclad easily finished things off. Now I moved my injured frigate up next to the enemy ship to provide an additional support bonus for the ironclad when I attacked, but that wasn't really needed here. I probably should have placed the injured frigate east of the fish tile so that it was out of range of the remaining English fleets/armadas. As it is, this unit is now vulnerable to being attacked by one of those ships and killed on England's turn. So that's a tactical misplay on my part, although any movement by those fleets/armada ships out of the narrow Genova fjord will ensure their immediate destruction on my next turn.

The net result was another fantastic turn for our navy from a tactical perspective. Seven more English ships sunk and my own ships placed far enough to the west that they should mostly be out of range of the English ships in the east. While I wasn't able to go after the three ships attacking Genova, I was able to hit everything else and destroy it. The kill count now stands at 17-4 in my favor, although I will probably lose another ship or two on the upcoming English turn. I placed an ironclad to block the 1-tile path leading to Nan Madol; only two ships can attack it from the east and everything else has to go up and around the island to the north, where they will put themselves in range of my ships again. The one frigate that couldn't get into the fighting this turn is two tiles back from the ironclad in what will hopefully be a safe spot, ready to promote into a battleship and keep fighting. With Steel coming online next turn, I should feel charged and excited about our prospects in this war. But I don't, I mostly feel depressed and with little interest in continuing. Let me take a quick break and I'll explain what I mean in a second post.

[Modo]

Roman two shot tactic: hit with the first ship then get the kill with the second.
English two shot tactic: get killed then capture the injured killer.

Is there a difference in the chance to capture of Sea Dogs based on the difference in ship quality? That is to say, a Sea Dog has the same chance to capture against a frigate and a battleship?

[Sullla]

Modo: yes, Sea Dogs (and Aztec Eagle Warriors) have much higher odds to capture against units weaker than them. It's not an even chance against all units. Anyway, back to the turn report. Why pillaging my Harbor district at Firenze wasn't worth it:



It's a one-turn repair to fix it. Now this actually did end up hurting me because the city didn't finish a frigate, and now I'll have to build the remaining 150 production manually to get a battleship instead of upgrading the completed frigate for a modest 125 gold cost. But Woden couldn't have known that, it just ended up working out that way. Unlike in the original pre-patch versions of Civ6 where a pillaged district took ages to fix, now they're not too hard to repair. And if Woden had attacked with that caravel instead of pillaging with it, he likely could have killed the frigate of mine that survived with half health... which would have left me short of enough attacks finish off all seven of the enemy ships. Again, naval combat is a snowball game.



Siena had a trade route to assign this turn which naturally went to Lisbon for more income. By the way, that is a very unfortunate location for Singaboy's apostle, heh. If Woden captures Genova with the intention of moving ships through it, he can probably kill the apostle. Note that I have a frigate incoming near Siena that can be upgraded to a battleship next turn. We should also be prepared for a musket to spawn at Genova when it gets captured due to the English "free units for taking cities on other continents" ability. I'm still not entirely sure what Woden was planning with the attack at Genova. I can only guess that he didn't expect his navy to get chewed to pieces like it did over the last two turns.



Northern overview. I've swapped the capital to a settler in anticipation of needing to replace the Genova spot. If by some miracle Woden would capture it instead of razing the city, I should be able to take it back pretty easily with my ships. Siena should not be in serious danger, not with 200 HP walls appearing next turn and more ships on the way as reinforcements. With the last round of frigates completed, my naval cities have now switched over to privateers as the next best option to build.



Not as much going on in the south. The frigate finished at Palermo will upgrade to a battleship next turn and prepare to defend the city from attack. I don't see much chance for England's raiding force to take the city with Steel-enforced walls in place (that fire with the ranged strength of a battleship) and another battleship inside the city itself. Together they can two-shot an enemy frigate with ease. If a truly large English group of ships starts moving through the southern tundra, that would be cause for concern though. I'm sending my scout back down there to try and spot more ships on their way through the ice.



I reassigned all of Genova's tiles that I could to other cities in expectation of it being captured. Farewell poor city, you served the empire well.

So what's the larger problem that I was referring to in the previous post. Aren't we winning the war handily at sea? Tactically yes, but I'm not sure that continues to hold true at the strategic level. I've already killed 17 ships worth about 900 combined power rating. That should be enough to deliver a massive, crushing victory to our side. However, the ridiculousness of Venetian Arsenal combined with lategame harvesting of resources means that I'm only breaking even in these trades. I have to kill enemy ships at a 2:1 ratio at least, and probably better than that in order to prevail. I checked the power ratings for this turn, and England's power has barely decreased at all, only 200 power down from last turn. I'm actually losing more power in the war right now than England because Venetian Arsenal-powered chops/harvests are continuing to turn out ships at a fantastic rate. Let me post this picture from earlier in the turn again:



Lepanto has a forest left, Midway has two forests and a stone remaining. That's probably enough to produce 8 additional ships for England when they're all harvested. Combined with the other ships that England has in the eastern half of the ocean, I'm probably still outnumbered despite the incredible bloodletting thus far. And while that's almost all of the tile features remaining to be harvested, Chevalier could potentially chop two silk forests in cities over here, and he could buy some of the forest tiles in the third ring of Midway to harvest them. That's what, another 8 ships potentially there to be claimed? Settling a pair of junk cities has produced close to a dozen ships for him already, and he still has more yet to go.

It's not just England though. Woden's Nubia is doing the same thing:



Look at Kurgus. It's a complete junk city, thrown down in the middle of the jungle for the express purpose of chopping the jungle tiles. Woden has Goddess of the Harvest pantheon, so he's clearing jungle and getting 150 faith with each chop, which he then uses to faith-purchase units in Theocracy government. He tossed down Shaat this turn to keep doing the same thing. It's not even on the coast and there's no intention of ever building anything here, just harvesting the terrain. On our team, Singaboy spent the whole game building wonders and Holy Sites for faith to be able to purchase units in Theocracy. On EmperorK's team, Russia spent the whole game carefully building Lavras and settling the tundra to collect faith.

Woden throws down junk cities and harvests stuff with his pantheon.

And I don't blame Woden and Chevalier. They're only playing the game as it exists, not as the way it should be. Furthermore, all of the rest of us have been doing the same thing, if not quite so blatantly. I founded Lucca for the sole purpose of harvesting resources. Look at what TheArchduke is doing now:



His island city has harvested the terrain for a Harbor district to unlock another trade route, same as I did at my own island city of Ferrara. There's another settler heading off into the tundra to do the same thing.



Plus this settler is headed off to another island for more harvesting of resources. It's the smart play at this stage of the game. But it's so, so disappointing from a mechanics standpoint. Our actual cities that we've built throughout the game up to this point are being eclipsed by junk cities that exist only to harvest forests and resources. It's just like what pindicator and Ichabod were posting about at the tail end of the PBEM5 game. Let me reproduce their posts here again:

The hammer cost scaling is not only about districts/settlers/builders (the costs that scale during the game). Those actually work fine, since it's more organic (well, there's the problem that, without chops, new cities will never ever build a district). The problem is the scaling of fixed cost production, like units, buildings and wonders. After a certain point, they cost way too much for the benefit given (buildings/wonders) or have different ways of acquisition that are way better (faith purchasing and upgrades, in the case of units).

Housing is a problem, because cities are just too weak right now. The dependence on hill tiles is also very bad, even worse (well, I guess there's the option of planting forests and lumbermills for flat tiles, but that's way more costly - perhaps not even worth -, and depends on rivers as well). Cities after a point (and that point is not that far from midgame, I'd say) are just chop fodder, you either have things to chop, or the city will likely never come close to repay its costs. I think the problems you point out are way more serious than they appear on a first glance, Pindi.

By the way, with the earlier discussion, I agree with Ichabod 100% here. It's not so much the scaling production costs, it's a combination of base costs of buildings and units being so high in the late game, and that combined with districts being tweaked just a little too high. Maybe not. My 2nd wave cities (the ones I took from Japper and the ones I planted after) can make a district in about 20 turns right now, which is probably a good number for them being underdeveloped at this stage in the game. But it means a new city has really hard time to get up and running, to the point where it doesn't seem worth building settlers.

But worse are the unit costs. Units cost as much as districts right now - actually moreso. Early in the game the balance is definitely that units cost less. And the high unit costs also mean that if a player were to have his army wiped then that is likely game-ending for him in multiplayer. If I can corner and wipe out those Arabian cavalry then Alhambram will likely never be able to replace them in any realistic timeframe. And with the 3 cities i have building Rough Riders - they aren't slouches on production, but they are going to take 14-18 turns each to complete. I could research up to tanks in that timeframe - so there's definitely some imbalance between not just production but also how production relates to research in the lategame.

These are very serious problems. Unfortunately the whole economy of Civ6 completely falls apart after the midgame. We couldn't see this for a while because all our Multiplayer games were ending at fairly early dates, and a lot of the chopping math is counterintuitive at first. But now that it's been a year of competitive play and we're starting to have longer games, it's all falling apart. The whole gameplay after a certain point revolves around upgrading old units (because new units are too expensive to build) and chopping/harvesting resources because they yield incredible amounts of free production. None of this makes any sense, and it renders the cities that you build up laboriously over the course of the game to be almost worthless in the late stages of the game. I can spend 8 turns building a frigate in a mature city... or I can toss down a size 1 crap city and harvest a stone resource for the same effect, with the ship appearing instantly. It's ridiculous. The game shouldn't work this way. (Obviously Magnus only makes things ten times worse in the expansion which is why I refuse to touch it until he's fixed.)

Venetian Arsenal takes a bad problem and makes it much, much worse. If it were just the case that England's manually-built ships were doubled, I could probably live with that. Difficult and annoying to counter them, but we have a tech lead and that would likely be enough. But no, every one of those blasted resource harvests gets doubled too. It's almost impossible to defeat someone who can convert every forest into two frigates. That's totally absurd and represents a blind spot on the part of the developers. They obviously didn't forsee the results of the system that they created, and we didn't realize just how bad it was until recently when everyone began to start making heavy use of resource harvests. The Venetian Arsenal basically says "whoever builds this becomes invincible in naval combat, forever" and no world wonder should ever be that powerful. It's virtually an auto-win button. Like, does everyone realize how horribly Woden has botched the combat so far from a tactical perspective? If he had played things better, he could have destroyed my whole navy by now or close to it. It's a miracle that I have a modest edge right now; my whole force started out with 20 ships and I've already killed 17 ships, while needing to face down another 15-20 ships before all is said and done. Oh, and my opponent has the movement speed edge, double Great Admirals, two fleets, and an armada!!! But he has the Venetian Arsenal and forest chops in crappy size 1 cities so I guess tactical brilliance doesn't really matter.

I still think that I can eventually win the struggle on the eastern ocean with the technological edge by upgrading to battleships. I think. But it's not fun to play this game, and it's clear that we aren't strong enough to make any serious headway against England or Nubia. England has 2300 power and Nubia has 2000 power this turn, just slightly weaker than us. We couldn't put together a force to conquer Russia/Germany, and we haven't been able to put together a force to conquer England/Nubia. As a result, here's my proposal: I think we should offer a three-way draw to this game. All three teams have played magnificent games thus far. We are all too strong for anyone to conquer anyone else. We're also entering into the most broken portion of Civ6 gameplay, and seeing who can abuse forest chops the most doesn't particularly appeal to me. On a personal note, I need to stop playing the turns soon. They just take too much time and effort, and I really want to get back to playing some other games. I know from Chevalier's PBEM8 thread that he finds these turns to be grueling as well, and I suspect that there's a similar fatigue from the Russia/Germany team. It's been great and fun, but I think we're pretty much at a stopping point.

Singaboy, what are your thoughts in this regard? I wouldn't want to say anything without consulting with you first. I really will need someone else to substitute for me sometime soon if we all keep going, it's just too time-intensive for me to keep investing 2-3 hours per day. As for the lurkers, sorry about this. I know it's been fun to read, but I have to live in the real world too.

[Modo]

Don't worry about that, since all of you guys got to this point the problem could be exposed so clearly and there's no point in burning out in a slug without much gameplay value.
Since it's likely this won't get fixed or fixed very late how would you envision MP being regulated to avoid this problem in the future? A total ban on harvests / chops for units is too harsh I think, maybe a limit on the amount of them and / or based on the cost of the unit as opposed to the final amount produced by chops / harvests, etc?

[Singaboy]

Sulla, great that you can put all this into words, that I fail to pin down. I am really annoyed that my carefully developed cities can't produce anything meaningful unless there is something to chop. If not for the faith drafting, I would have had a pretty hard time to get those field cannons and cavalry. This will only get worse.

I agree with you that the game is pretty much a stalemate. I do not mind you bringing this up in the general thread proposing a three way draw. I am pretty certain that most players must be pretty worn out.

This also means, that Civ6 needs pretty much an overhaul of its mechanics which work fine in the early to mid game but (as you rightly pointed out) fall apart from then.