Civ6 Succession Game 1: Commercial Free Programming

[Ruined Everything]

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.

Out of curiosity, how do you know? Did you check early on in the game? Or is this generally true? (I forget that there are 4 more ages in civ6 after the industrial age - I'm used to thinking of the industrial age as pretty close to the end of the tree.)

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.

If we can hit these in my turn set/next couple turn sets without a massive cost of opportunity, I'll go for it. Any longer and I agree it's not worth the trouble.

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.

Totally agree. However, bear in mind that (according to that civ6 chopping thread) chops scale along with districts. I think someone mentioned that 2 chops is always a base district, another 2 is always a tier one building, and so on. We might wanna try spamming the tundra with useless size-2 (non amenity cost) cities - as long as we can get a worker/settler pair down there and they have 4 forests in range (and the one thing the tundra does have is a lot of forests), any ice ball can be a functioning part of our empire!

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.

I don't know if this is a reasonable payoff for investing in faith though - especially given the exorbitant costs of districts/faith buying GP. Unless you've found someway of accumulating faith at a reasonable clip without much investment?

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.

This (or even upgrade gold) is IMO the biggest argument against sniping the GP. There's definitely a growth cost of opportunity.


TLDR: I basically agree with everything Ichabod said.

I'm playing my turns when I get back from work (9:00pm-ish EST) - any further thoughts on city placement & settling priorities/sniping a Gandhi city if it comes to that?

[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.

Out of curiosity, how do you know? Did you check early on in the game?  Or is this generally true? (I forget that there are 4 more ages in civ6 after the industrial age - I'm used to thinking of the industrial age as pretty close to the end of the tree.)

From other games, I realized some type of GPs start with a way higher GPP cost than others. The first Musician costs 420 GPP (I'm almost sure about that), and the first artist is 240 (not that sure about this one). I think the GPP cost is tied to the era and some types of GPs don't have early eras avaiable (so they cost more from the get go). They probably made it that way to avoid early Cultural Victories, where you'd get all the 60 GPP artists, writers and musicians. 

If I'm not mistaken, Merchants also start with a higher GPP cost than 60 (or is it engineers?). Anyway, there's a tab in the Great People screen that shows the GPs that were already claimed, so you can see there if any musician/artist was already claimed. In our game, I think Brazil must have claimed Homer already, as the first Writer avaiable (writers initial cost is 60). Not sure, 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.

Totally agree. However, bear in mind that (according to that civ6 chopping thread) chops scale along with districts. I think someone mentioned that 2 chops is always a base district, another 2 is always a tier one building, and so on. We might wanna try spamming the tundra with useless size-2 (non amenity cost) cities - as long as we can get a worker/settler pair down there and they have 4 forests in range (and the one thing the tundra does have is a lot of forests), any ice ball can be a functioning part of our empire!

That's a very nice idea. Considering Theater Squares, the most important building is the second one, with the choice of Art Museum and Archeological Museum (in my early cultural tries, I had lots of Great Artists and Artifacts laying around, but very few places to stuff them in). If we can get some backfill cities to reach Museums with a combination of chops and natural production/TR production, we'll be in a very nice position. Otherwise, even just the Theater Square/Amphiteater might be good enough (though we could make the math to see if just doing city projects isntead of settlers isn't more profitable, which may very well be the case).

[Ranamar]

We're going to need an art museum for every great artist we get, and an amphitheater for every great writer, so we should probably make sure we have enough of those before we stop building theater squares. after that, archaeology is kind of meh. We'll have to go outside our borders, for sure.

[Ruined Everything]

Urgent question: is anyone online and know how many great writer points the theater square festival project gives?

Google has failed me once again.

[Molach]

It seems to depend on how many civics we have researched. 10 + x. Maybe 15-25? Impossible to say.

[Ruined Everything]

This turn set was the turn set of the QUESTS.

WRITER QUEST
Fact 1: There exists a great writer called Murasaki Shikibu.
Fact 2: We are Japan.
Fact 3: We are cultural Japan.
Fact 4: Getting Mr Shikibu is not optional.

But all is not so simple, dear reader. Pedro has 103.2/120 great writer points, and is making 7.1 gwp/turn. We have 80.1/120 great writer points, and are making 5.8 gwp/turn. He’ll get Shikibu in 3 turns, and the fastest I can chop out a theatre square festival is 4. Why, I hear you ask, is Pedro rollin’ in the GWP? He stole our great prophet, got Jesuit Education, and faith-bought amphitheaters everywhere. This is why everyone hates him.

However, all is not lost. For just 800 gold, we rescue Mr Shikibu from the clutches of Pedro forever. 800 gold is a steal. That’s less than 2 workers. Unfortunately, even I can’t justify doing that unless we can get the 240 gwp great writer - spending 800 gold merely to get a slightly earlier great writer (if we leave Shikibu to Pedro, we’re a lock for the 240 gwp one) when we don’t even have amphitheaters to store his works in is unwise indeed. Can we do it?

If we buy Mr Shikibu this turn, Pedro will need 240 - 103.2 = 136.8 gwp to steal his successor.
Assuming his gwp/turn don’t change, he’ll get him in 136.8/7.1 = 19.3 (i.e. 20 turns.)

We have 5.8 gwp/turn.
Assuming our gwp/turn doesn’t change, we’ll get him in 240/5.8 = 41.4 turns. 
Is all hope then gone, I hear you ask?

Nay, gentle reader. For you see, we have the power that Pedro knows not. We have… stockholm syndrome. Stockholm's suzerain bonus doubles the base GPP/turn of districts. Hell. Yeah. (I actually stood up and cheered when I noticed that. My contingency plan might have been a bit …uh… extreme. I would have done it though!)

Here’s the plan.
T100: 0 gwp, 11.5 gwp/turn
T103: 34.5 gwp, 13.8 gwp/turn (Candy Mountain finishes Theatre Square)
T105: 62.1 gwp, 16.0 gwp/turn (Iron chef finishes amphitheater)
T106: 72.1 gwp, 19.5 gwp/turn  (Wheathes finishes amphitheaters, Feeling Crabby finishes Theatre Square)
We then burn Mr Shikibu, and staff our two amphitheaters!
T115: 240 gwp and glorious victory. 

I declare WRITER QUEST a go.


ENCAMPMENT QUEST
So, we need an encampment to Eureka Mathematics and Military Tradition. Initially this looked impossible - every one of our cities is maxed out on districts. But then I came up with cunning ruse. We'll chop a jungle so Chocolate River can grow, catch the overflow using 58/60 monument (after a bit of micro), and put the rest into a speedy encampment.

Why is Chocolate River so nice? Because while there are many sensible places to put an encampment, there's only 1 hilarious place to put one.

Yes, this does involve burning a precious worker charge. Yes, the joke is worth it to me. What can I say?  I came to RB to ruin SGs and pester T-Hawk about cherished RB traditions. And T-Hawk’s gone to bed.


VARU QUEST
Before my time is up, I expect to see at least 1 Varu in action. I will gift Gandhi horses if that’s what I need to do to make it happen.


SIDE QUESTS
AMPHITHEATERS: We need 2 more amphitheaters by T115 for the 240 gwp writer. I’m going to configure Frosted Flakes and Chocolate River to pop by T112 in case we do anything to speed things up.

CITY STATES: We can hit Vilnius’s city state quest by eurkea-ing celestial navigation (two seafood tiles improved) and then put the T113 envoy into it for a fat +2 culture per theater district, jade for more happy, and +2 per district by the sea. (NB - by layering Nan Madol and Vilnius’s city state bonuses on top of each other, each district by the sea spits out +4 culture - we should do this a lot.)

[Ruined Everything]

Unfortunately I'm getting too tired to play correctly. I'm going to grab some sleep, and then finish my turn set over lunch. Sorry about the 36 hour delay - I thought I'd be done by midnight, but I ...uh... spent a long time working out how to poach that Great Writer before I noticed the Stockholm thing.

[rho21]

Fact 4: Getting Mr Shikibu is not optional.

Murasaki is the surname, not Shikibu (actually it's all a pseudonym anyway, but even so). And she would probably have objected to Mr.
The usual rendering in English is Lady Murasaki.

[Ichabod]

The plans sound pretty nice. The Theater Square project gives 20 writer points, 20 artist points and 20 musician points (from my testing, it doesn't scale based on techs, but I could be wrong). For curiosity sake, the Carnival city project from Brazil gives all this plus 20 engineer and 20 merchant points.

Stockholm is going to be great in this game.

[Ranamar]

That encampment location is A+, if we can afford the tile and still bring in Lady Murasaki. (and, at 800 gold for her, we definitely can...) Not only is it hilarious because it's right in Pedro's face, but it is also strategically sound, because it blocks off land movement past that range of mountains. We've got a couple turns, as you noted, and I'd personally buy that tile now, so that it doesn't accidentally get poached. Unfortunately, it won't eject that slinger, because we have open borders, so chopping that tile might be dicey.

Regarding Varus, I swear I saw one during my turn set, so you may need to send an observer over to the shoving match between India and Brazil. There are definitely some over there. Also, given that it's a war elephant, I'm pretty sure it doesn't require horses. (Arabia's knight replacement notably does not require any resources either.)

Since you're interested in the jade from Vlinius, you should check our city-states first. We may already have jade from Nan Madol, but it's also possible that city-state got taken away from us. If it hasn't, I'd be tempted to advocate putting the envoy towards consolidating our hold on Stockholm... but it's true that just getting to 3 gives us another +2 at all our theaters.

edit: Yeah, a quick check says Nan Madol has jade. Vilnius would also reveal a bunch of land, though, so it might be a good idea purely for scouting... and apparently nobody else has sent Stockholm an envoy yet, anyway, so just having 3 gives us a leg up as it is. I'd send the current envoy to Stockholm first, for sure, anyway. Why do we have one lying around? (Who cares! We need it now...)

edit2: It also looks like we're set to grow onto the jungle tile for the encampment. I'm still feeling paranoid, though, so I think you should buy it. We can definitely afford it at 100 gold.