Civ6 Succession Game 1: Commercial Free Programming

[Sullla]

Overview picture from Turn 100:



Quick bullet points from my turn:

* We have one settler unmoved this turn in the far north, and two more settlers about to finish. Need city locations for these guys!
* Brazil is attacking India. Keep an eye on things and enjoy the fireworks.
* Keep selling resources to the AI civs.
* Do we want to snipe the upcoming Great Writer from Brazil with a cash purchase?
* Builders, builders, builders!

Sullla
Ruined Everything <<< UP NOW
Molach <<< on deck
Ichabod
Ranamar

10 turns apiece from here on out. Savegame file is linked here. Good luck!

[Ichabod]

A theater city project might be enough to steal the writer from Brazil. It'd be worth 20 writer points.

[Ruined Everything]

Lurkers comment:

You are really lucky with the chocolate and India next door. Otherwise, your economy would look very different for this variant. If you would have a 'normal' AI next to you, you would have to build a far more sizeable military early on. Currently, there is basically nobody who challenges you, allowing you to have almost zero military.

I don't think our economy would as look different as you think. I think this variant only really has teeth in the late game!

I definitely agree that we've been lucky to have Gandhi as a neighbor - we've basically played a farmers gambit the entire game. But had we needed a strong military, we could easily of afforded it. Look at our economy! We're making 50 g/t and ancient age units are cheap! Archers are just 1 g/t, and horsemen/swordsmen are 2 g/t. We could have an army of 10 horsemen and 20 archers, and still be making 10 g/t profit.

I also agree that the chocolate has been very nice - easily worth 30 g/t to our economy. But while the chocolate is nice, it certainly isn't essential. Why? Seafood! On our coast we have 9 crabs, and 4 fish. We have tapped 0 of them. Crabs are 4/5 gold and fish are 3/4 gold (before/after cartography.) We could be making 50 g/t from seafood alone right now if we didn't have chocolate. When cartography comes in, we'll haul in 65 g/t. The seafood economy is unappreciated because commercial zones are so ubiquitous, but it is good!

This gets me onto the point that I wanted to make to our team: we have not yet really begun to experience this variant. In the early game, there is not much need for commercial zones. We don't need their gold. Tier one districts are cheap - only 1 g/t! Ancient/classical units are cheap - only 1-2 g/t! Trade routes are always nice, but their effects are minimal when even your best cities only have 1 or 2 districts at most. There is plenty of time for new cities to get off the ground - rapid boosting isn't as vital.

In civ6, an empire is mostly dependent on its tile yields in the early game, and mostly dependent on its districts in the late game. As we leave the early game, our tile yield economy is going to start falling off.

Our empire is going to get gold hungry! A base district only costs 1 g/t, but a district with tier 2 buildings (factories, universities, etc) costs 4 g/t! Each of our 4 gold chocolate plantations can support 4 districts in the early game, but only one by the renaissance era. A top tier district costs 7 g/t. The map only has 100 g/t on it. We may not be able to afford to build power plants! We certainly won't be able to afford research labs. We should have just enough to afford broadcast centers.

Our army is going to get gold hungry as well! 10 archers cost 10 g/t. 10 cavs costs 50 g/t! As the game progresses, it's going to be increasingly difficult to field a modern army.

Our lack of trade routes is going to begin to be felt. In the early game, trade routes are nice but not all powerful - when your best city only has a couple districts, trade routes give a noticeable but modest boost. In the late game, when a city can have 5-6 districts, the opportunity cost of a trade route is huge!

Without trade routes, it's going to become more and more difficult to stand new cities up quickly. In the early game, there's plenty of time for a city to take 50 turns to slow grow into productivity. Cities founded past ~T150 or so almost require trade routes to stand up quickly if they hope to be relevant. We should spam settlers quickly, because the ROI for new cities is going to start to decrease sharply.

TL DR - our variant as not yet begun to fight.

[Ranamar]

Looks like a solid turn set. "Need Food Plz" definitely captures my sentiments about that city.

I had actually forgotten about Chichen Itza for a bit, but... if we were going to build it, I think Chocolate river is the best choice anyway, so I'm not concerned about clearing stuff around Candy Mountain. Chocolate River has a bunch of plains/hill/rainforest tiles, which are the tiles that are actually good with the wonder. The flatland tiles are kinda underwhelming in the long run, IMO, even if they do end up as 2 each food, production, and culture. I don't see you clearing anything around there, so, even if we decide to go for it after all, it's not like we've lost anything important.

I personally feel that it's acceptable to lose the first Great Writer. If nothing else, we can probably send a spy to Brazil and steal his work back, later! The thing is, unless we're already vastly outstripping them in GPP production, sniping an artist just means they'll get the next one. Besides, the big theater district tourism wins come from themed paintings and artifacts, from what I understand.

[Ruined Everything]

A splendid turn set, Sullla.

I'll have time to give some more in depth thoughts Monday morning before I play my turns in the evening, but:

1. We absolutely want that writer. We're already at the industrial great musician and renaissance great artist - we want great people. I'll do need to do the math to work out whether we can snipe the writer with a project as per Ichabod, but I'd be tempted to buy if we can't.

EDIT: It looks like there's a consensus against it - I'll do some more thinking when I have the time. If nothing else, we should be sure that we'll get the remaining great writers if we do buy.

2. As you know, I'm very pro that seafood peninsula. If we have the workers, I'd push them east, and then push settlers out to meet them. If we don't have the workers yet, I'd put the next settler out between chocolate river and candy mountain. Is there any interest in making a push to the west of Gandhi? If only Pedro would raise Hyperbad. (If Pedro succeeds in taking Delhi/Agra and Gandhi's on the way out, maybe we should grab it for ourselves? )

3. I'm going to finish up outstanding culture/industrial combos and do a big builder/settler push. We're rapidly approaching the point in the game where without trade routes it'll take too long for new cities to stand themselves up - after we claim the East (and possibly the West, depending on what happens with the Pedro-Gandhi war) we should swap into to better mid-game civics and start heading for our culture victory in earnest.

4. I'm going to see what I can do to get us an encampment. The encampment-armory-military engineer branch is good for 3 Eurkeas. (It might also be worth sending a musketman down to sack a tundra barb camp for square rigging...) A little more military might be nice, as a just in case thing. It's no longer the ancient era!

EDIT: Need food pls could sure use a couple of TRs about now, no?

EDIT 2: Got the save file Sullla! Will play in about 22 hours. Need some sleep first.

[Singaboy]

Ruined Everything,

thanks for your reply to my post. You are right about the late game. I am looking forward to the way it plays out.

By the way, as districts can't be razed, does this mean that you can not take an AI city as it surely as a commercial district?

[Ruined Everything]

Ruined Everything,

thanks for your reply to my post. You are right about the late game. I am looking forward to the way it plays out.

By the way, as districts can't be razed, does this mean that you can not take an AI city as it surely as a commercial district?

We'll cross that bridge if we come to it. We can presumably raze and replace. We could theoretically pillage and not rebuild, I guess, but I feel like that goes against the spirit of things - we don't want yucky commerce districts on our build screen.

[Ichabod]

I think the Renaissance artist and the Industrial musician are the first ones avaiable, so the AI didn't get any of these GPs yet.

I support trying to steal the Writer from Brazil, if only for the fact that it is Lady Murasaki and we are Japan.

I support the Encampment building too, since it'll also give the Eureka for Mathematics, if we can delay it that long.

We can try growing Iron Chef to size 10, to get the boost to Civil Service. Probably not worth the trouble, though.

How about just going straight for the Theater Square (and amphitheaters -> museums) in new cities? I don't see how any other builds benefit our variant. We can rushbuy granaries, if needed, but I'd say stagnating the cities with mines is likely the best way to go. When the Theater District takes too long to build, perhaps we should consider just stop expanding.

And I'd be willing to try the idea of just spamming Theater District city projects past a certian point. With 10 cities, that's 600 GPP (divided between the 3 artistic GPs), if every city completes a project. That's a lot of GPP.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

I have found a nice way to use faith with no religion is to speed GPP production along a tad - when close to a GP get them with spending some accumulated faith/gold.

[Ichabod]

We can spend the accumulated gold on builders too. Makes sense when we are using the +2 charges policy and the 30% bonus one expired.