Civ6 Succession Game 1: Commercial Free Programming

[Ruined Everything]

Trade route..? From Chocolate hill to cap for the road, the minuscule yield and trading posts? To India? Brazil?

Also, Chicken Pizza (forgot how the original is spelled)

I was actually thinking from cap or Sendai to Rio (or somewhere nearby.) We're not gonna get good internal yields without districts, and we haven't found any city states so we can't send them there. 

However: 1. Brazil has probably built districts at their cap, and 2. a road nearby the chocolate river will allow us to send troops up there quickly, and since our other neighbor is Gandhi, the chocolate river is the only place we'll have to defend until we finally build over to Saladin.

[Ichabod]

Don't forget to get the last bit of faith for the pantheon. More later. On the phone.

[Sullla]

Great turnset! I was not expecting there to be so many chocolate resources up there in the northwest, definitely looks like they are heavily clumped on this map. Inland Sea in general seems to be a screwy map script here in Civ6, between the large reaches of tundra at the poles, the cramped starting positions for the actual civilizations, and the complete lack of city states anywhere nearby. Very strange. Someone from Firaxis needs to take a look at this one and make some tweaks. It does make for a memorable game here though.
 
I was amused at how Ruined Everything was so happy with chopping a monument… but swapped out of the God King policy (+1 faith/gold) five turns before we would have founded a pantheon and could have taken the pantheon that adds +1 culture on all pastures. That would have been worth two monuments completely for free, since we’re working 4 pastures at the moment. I wrote about that in my turn report but I know there was a lot of other discussion following those initial turns. So we probably could have gotten to Early Empire civic even faster with a little bit of swapping around the civics research. That’s about the only critique I would make, I thought the turnset was very impressive overall. We are set up for fast early expansion and can do what we want from there.
 
One of things that I want to see is how well things go with heavy forest chopping in the early game, the way that Ruined Everything did here. I haven’t tried that in my games yet and it does seem like a strong option. That chocolate region is going to have a ton of jungle tiles to clear, and as long as we’re not saving them for Chichen Itza (or whatever the wonder is that boosts jungle tiles), we’ll want to go after them with a vengeance. First the jungles, then the world!
 
Sullla
Ruined Everything
Molach <<< UP NOW
Ichabod <<< on deck
Ranamar
Good luck Molach!

[Ichabod]

Nice turns. I like the far reach to the chocolate land. I'd try to keep the archers around there for now, because Pedro doesn't have the same restriction as Gandhi and the AI seems to be very aggressive this early. Well, considering that mountain choke point to Pedro, defending there won't be very difficult...

Gandhi seems to have stolen the God of Open Sky pantheon from us (you can see in one of the screenshots that he's getting culture from pastures), so we need to think of another option.

If we are going for a heavy chop strategy, perhaps we can make the goddess of harvest pantheon work. It gives the same yield you get from chops as faith, so if we plan to clear all that jungle... That's quite a lot of free faith!

In that case, we'd need to invest into a religion, because faith is almost worthless without one. I'm pretty sure we can get one if we go for a Holy Site now + a holy site project.

Alternatively, we can get the faster cultural borders expansion pantheon (which will save some gold on having to buy tiles), or the one that gives free GPP per district. Both of these options work in a no-religion strategy. There's the pantheon that gives +1 food from cocoa and other resources, but I don't think that's worth it. I get the feeling housing is the main growth constraint, rather than food. I never seem to lack food in my games.

By the way, Sullla makes a great point about no CSs so far. It's likely that most of them are up in the north, so we should prioritize getting a scout or 2 there as soon as possible, to perhaps get some free envoys. And the early we meet them, more chance that we'll randomly complete one of their quests.

Any suggestions about districts?

[Ruined Everything]

I was amused at how Ruined Everything was so happy with chopping a monument… but swapped out of the God King policy (+1 faith/gold) five turns before we would have founded a pantheon and could have taken the pantheon that adds +1 culture on all pastures. That would have been worth two monuments completely for free, since we’re working 4 pastures at the moment. I wrote about that in my turn report but I know there was a lot of other discussion following those initial turns. So we probably could have gotten to Early Empire civic even faster with a little bit of swapping around the civics research. That’s about the only critique I would make, I thought the turnset was very impressive overall. We are set up for fast early expansion and can do what we want from there.

Welp. That was clearly the superior solution. I totally blanked on that option. (Leave religion alone said the man. Leave religion alone says I. And now look.)    

That little slip cost us an extra worker, a forest, a handful of g/t and probably God of the Open Sky. Boy do I feel silly. Live and learn, I guess.

Gandhi seems to have stolen the God of Open Sky pantheon from us (you can see in one of the screenshots that he's getting culture from pastures), so we need to think of another option.

If we are going for a heavy chop strategy, perhaps we can make the goddess of harvest pantheon work. It gives the same yield you get from chops as faith, so if we plan to clear all that jungle... That's quite a lot of free faith!

In that case, we'd need to invest into a religion, because faith is almost worthless without one. I'm pretty sure we can get one if we go for a Holy Site now + a holy site project.

Alternatively, we can get the faster cultural borders expansion pantheon (which will save some gold on having to buy tiles), or the one that gives free GPP per district. Both of these options work in a no-religion strategy. There's the pantheon that gives +1 food from cocoa and other resources, but I don't think that's worth it. I get the feeling housing is the main growth constraint, rather than food. I never seem to lack food in my games.

Pantheon-wise: I've always wanted to try Goddess of the Harvest (Harvesting a resource or removing a feature receives Faith equal to the other yield's quantity) - if we want to go down the religious route, that's certainly an option. (You can tell that I tend not to play with religions much   ) Depending on what's north of Brazil, it looks like we have a ton of forest to chop.

That being said, with all the tundra around, Dance of the Aurora (Holy Site district get +1 Faith from adjacent Tundra tiles) is awesome. We can bury all of our holy sites deep in the tundra for tons of +6 adjacency bonuses. I notice some frozen mountains down there - can we get a +7/+8 holy site? Maybe. 

Finally, River Goddess (+1 Amenity to cities if they have a Holy Site district adjacent to a River) might be ok if we think we're gonna have an amenities crunch given that we're spamming cities?

Discuss!

which government...

tech to apprenticeship?

do-we-really-want-tons-of-science-while-rushing-cities-and-districts?

On general principles, I like the classical republic (I tend to run influence points, boosts to workers/settlers, and boost to military or GPP/turn policies.) (On a side note, the current great scientist - Hypatia gives +1 to all libraries, forever - pretty good.) I'm far from sure that's the best option though.

I also think classical republic's bonuses (+1 amenity if you have a district/great people generation) works better for our game than oligarchy (+4 unit strength, +exp per unit) or autocracy (+1 to food, cogs, gold, science, culture, faith at the capital/wonder boost) (although we may want autocracy for a little bit if we're going for Oracle/Pyramids.) In general IDK though.

IMO we should probably move towards apprenticeship Edit: unless we're still going faith - in which case we should probably detour to astrology (even if we can't find a fricking natural wonder   ). We'll pick up horsemen for defense that we know we can build on the way. We don't have cities on the sea (fishing/harbor) and we don't need early swordsmen. Maybe going to masonary is good if we want to take a shot at the 'mids?

The more I think about it the more I become convinced that rushing cities (and later districts) is superior here to building campuses. We're getting 0.7 science/population, so we'll get a little bit of zerg research anyway.

[Ranamar]

I deleted and reposted one of the images (check T50 to marvel at the wonders of the chocolate river.) If that doesn't work for you, I'll link to all the images below like I did that one.

They work now; thanks!  Checking it out now...

edit: seems like we're off to a solid start. I don't have any suggestions at the moment, but claiming all that jungle space for money is great.

Also, building plantations doesn't remove the rainforest bonus, so don't chop the cocoa tiles. You'll keep one extra food that way, as far as I can tell.

[Ruined Everything]

By the way, Sullla makes a great point about no CSs so far. It's likely that most of them are up in the north, so we should prioritize getting a scout or 2 there as soon as possible, to perhaps get some free envoys. And the early we meet them, more chance that we'll randomly complete one of their quests.

Any suggestions about districts?

Our scout is on the other side of the world now (take a look at the T50 minimap - he's just about to reach the northern end of the sea) so he *should* be about to meet city states. I'd be tempted to scout out the area around Gandhi/Pedro first so we know if there are any more city sites we want to steal (given that we can settle all over Gandhi forever) but I agree that we should take care of this. 

Districts? If we're going religion, a couple of holy sites (maybe in the Eastern tundra if we go dance of the aurora) could be nice. There's a big clump of mountains over there we could abuse. Beyond that, IDK how much science we need right now, so maybe we should just start getting i-zones up? (The moment we get astrology/writing/apprenticeships we should probably lay down districts immediately - even if we're not planning on building them. I think this freezes their costs (anyone know this for sure?))

I deleted and reposted one of the images (check T50 to marvel at the wonders of the chocolate river.) If that doesn't work for you, I'll link to all the images below like I did that one.

They work now; thanks!  Checking it out now...

Great!  

[pindicator]

This game is just begging for renamable cities!

[Brian Shanahan]

<snip>

Colours coming up black on your post and font set extra large for me. Gremlins may be acting up again.

[HansLemurson]

<snip>

Colours coming up black on your post and font set extra large for me. Gremlins may be acting up again.

I can confirm this.

Regarding Faith accumulation, you don't need a Religion to use the Theocracy ability, do you?