Adv1 TimmyTrajan

[timmy827]

As has become common I didn't finish.  At least this time it was for better reasons - I took a lot more time than usual thinking about what to do compared to Civ4.  I was trying not to look up strategies and figure strategy out for myself, but with the subpar UI that wasn't very likely.  (Need to do some forum reading to understand how all the undocumented stuff works, and pretty hard not to see some strategy that way).  Still spend a lot more time thinking.   
Oh, if I type 'Hatty' I mean 'Cleo'.  Habits hard to break

Started off, founded on starting square, and quickly found that we are bad at geography (probably old news to those reading the earlier Roman writeups

For those who didn't see, there are tea and jade (both lux) under the popup.
Rome rushes through culture faster than any other civ presumably with the free monuments.  I went with the +1 hammer over faith/gold policy for early pantheon.
Barbs got intense early!  Poor warrior died horribly

Sorry, I didn't take great notes on early build/tech order.  Cumae was founded in 2720 BC, this is from a few turns later after I started spending gold

Would eventually buy the other cows and the 3rd-ring wheat for total of 5 purchases!  Wasn't sure how fast city state borders would pop, turns out they seem pretty slow so may have been ok to wait for the cows.  I got three envoys for first meeting (Mil Kabul, Culture Nan Madol, Gold Jakarta) and have to say that the capital bonus in the early game seems more unbalanced by a good deal vs the 30 gold in civ5 for first meeting.  
One nice thing was being able to use the "build units faster" policy to assemble a credible anti-barb force, then swap into the "+str against barbs" when using them.  Only my little army had nothing to do really once assembled:

Yeah, besides killing one scout-warrior above and hampering other faraway scouting barbs actually didn't do much.  Cities don't have the ranged attack w/o walls but they're basically invulnerable to early barbs.  The above scary party would chase units that I'd hide in my cities then the barbs would suicide on them (AI bug?  they only seemed to attack cities with units inside).  could have given me major pillage pains but they seem not to ever pillage?  and then the camp-spear ran out of camp here.  I guess having a barb raid come up with a settler/escort on the move could be hairy.  Later on in the game, still plenty of camps (lots of unsettled space) but the city-states had so many spare units running around that they cleaned them up, and the barbs never really got stronger units either.   The geography was probably favorable to me though with Rome on a corner and the lakes creating narrow isthmus, so not that likely for barbs to wander from the main landmass w/o hitting a city state first.
Political Philosphy in 2120 BC, went Republic with this loadout

I think I got to change policies a little too often to the point of abusive.  for example think I built almost every settler/builder from here one with a policy boost (while also spending time in other stuff) and rarely had to sit in the +prod for more than a turn.  Other things were often taking Land Surveyors and buying lots of tiles then swapping out 2-3 turns later, or swappign the first two diplo policies when you were almost at envoy-earning influnece or on a civic discovery that gave Envoy.  But maybe that's Rome and Nan Madol (more on them later), other civs can't do this as easily.
City #3

I went back and forth on locations for this and didn't make the best decision.  It was ok but really should have been my 5th or so (esp since opposite direction of the AI's).  Didn't realize at time of foundign that couldn't build aqueduct/bath and would be longterm gimped on housing; also didn't realize that iron didn't matter because A)legions don't need it and B) would need two anyways or the silly encampment-for-1-strat resource.  

Should have waited a couple more turns for my army to clear barbs here, was a much better city.  Ostia would go where the hurt barb spear is but not until 6 turns later or so.  About this time I was going for late religion, built holy site at Rome and took the +2 Prophet point policy.

Great stroke of luck for me.  Cleo got dumb here.  She had conquered another CS early before I met them, and I worried here as well (would have built/gifted a couple units if you could still do it like civ5), but Cleo failed to do much of anything (NM had a narrow isthmus in the Egypt-direction, basically guaranteed that 1UPT would not be able to swarm it, both sides traded some warriors and slingers but the city never got damaged). I got to 3 envoys early (one free first meeting, one normal, one 'send trade route' quest) and the lord ability (+2 culture in any coastal district) applies to coastal city centers and was a big help for basically all my cities after the first two.   Lucky was that I could sit on that forever - the war meant Egypt never sent envoys, and it was out of the way that no other AI ever found it; I kept it the whole game w/o having to spend more envoys.  Also luck that this lord-bonus seemed way, way stronger than the other ones on offer .
Reached a pantheon T72.  Took God of the Sea (fishing boats on sea resources all give +1 production).  More on religion later.  Finally met 3rd and 4th AI's (tojo, Sal) on same turn a bit later, with another bug with Tojo's picture showing for both of them.  Techwise I was beelining Apprenticeship (one strategy thing I saw was "beeline production or the tech/civic escalation of district costs gets to the point where you can't build them.)

yeah that's why religion later.  Lost the prophet and had to go all the way to 120 instead of 60, major drag.  I was ahead (forget by how much) but I guess the AI gold-spent or faith-spent on it.  Not sure I like this new feature of GP.  It seemed uneven as well with regards to cost - this time the cost increased but other times they did not and it's very frustrating; you have an unknown chance the AI will pay to jump ahead of you in the GP pool and unknown cost after that happens (and for non -GProphets, what the next great person of that type does).  Building wonders (and risking losing them) seems much 'better' in the sense that you know exactly the effects wil be if you lose the race.

Also got a bit of sour taste here, with the new builder policy at Feudalism replacing the old one, I wanted to stack them sometimes.  The hoverover for "policies obsoleted" is way less obvious than say the civ4 tech tree having the red X over the wonder.  Still I have several partially-built workers at the time I got Feudalism so I kinda-sorta got to double up those policies for one batch.  

Some planning.  I was 'part-rush-buying' districts - buy tiles with gold to plop them down but not necessarily work on them before your civ advancement makes them cost ever more hammers.  
In general I went
-Ind Zone at each of my first 4 cities, all had places with +3 or +4 adjacency eventually.  Then I realized that spending hammers to get hammers on a 30-40 turn payback (for the district) or an 87-turn payback (the Workshop building) probably wasn't a great thing overall.  (the +1 mine bonus from Apprenticeship is the better part of that tech by far...)
-Early holy site at Rome
-couple of campuses but not many
-one encampment at Cumae that sat undone for a gazillion years.  I thought I could use one military when placing it, but then barb threat disappeared so sat around.
-lots of harbors and comm. hubs for trade routes

Hi Kongo! Glad to see you are settling something as lots of AI's are lame in that regard (note the open space on the minimap...)

You're joking, right?  We're miles apart and you're DOWing + bribing another in the very next turn?  (I got notified Kongo-Arabia on same interturn, maybe Sal actually instigated Joint War but that's also crazy, he's lost his capital to Japan - and still in war with them, almost as far away as Kongo and only known for a few turns more).  

Ok fine whatever I'll steal your UNESCORTED SETTLER LEFT NEXT TO MY SCOUT WHEN YOU DOW'D.  Jesus.  Looking back, I totally should have sent my scout after the builder too instead of escoring the settler back (enough neutral-to-me, hostile-to-Sal japanese warriors to protect the settler long enough to meet it with another unit from my core).  It was a ways back, map coming later with next wave of settlers.

So, here's religion.  I guess I was underwhelmed by the boni and such (Took Work Ethic and the founder belief +2 gold per city of your faith).  They fixed the Desert Folklore problem (where your pantheon gave you tons of faith from working terrain that is supposed-to-be-bad like the other pantheons, but isn't b/c Civ5 floodplains triggered DF and desert hills have same yield as other hills, unless you have Petra and then they are better than most special resource tiles, and you get widespread religion benefits with maybe spending hammers on one shrine early).  Now you have to build a holy site + its buildings to get 2nd or 3rd religion, and probably have to build multiple ones to spread it fast and fight off AI's spreading their faith.  But, they left the benefits of different beliefs same or similar scale as civ5.  I think passive spread works more or less the same, but definitely fewer persons converted per missionary use (although I guess missionary use costs less faith in Civ6 than civ5 until you build a large number)..  So it seems to be pretty weak payoff.
In most ways the map was lucky (good land, I think, near the Rome start, useful city states for the early capital bonus, tons of space between the other AI's) but the one not so lucky thing was that Cleo was the strongest faith AI and she pushed her religion well, made it harder to establish my own.  It does seem the AI's listen to the 'please stop converting me' but you can't ask until they do it once, and can't do much if they convert nearby CS to pressure you when you still are trickling faith to your first missionary.  I wound up getting my faith inside the "colosseum core" and the island city, good for +2 gold/city and +5-10% production from Work Ethic in about 7 cities, and was fighting with other missionaries at the outer part of my empire when I retired.  (I was only using missionaries, no idea how the Theological Brawl works yet).  This was ok but not huge.  If I replayed the game I think the best bonus for hammer spent might have just been to use God King some, get the fishing boat pantheon, then call it a day and not go after religion.  

Jumping ahead, did enhance.  Yeah also not great options here.  Didn't realize that one apostle only gives one more of two more beliefs.  Other options seemed silly (30% cheaper missionaries, which you spend 250 faith on to save ~35-40 over your next ones, meh better to just buy them at full price and get them converting sooner), or just not that good (the 'cathedral' buildings I think only built on holy sites, so you have to build a HS in most cities to really use them).  After this I didn't get another apostle, just missionaries for converting.  

Wow, 100 turns into the game for Hatty to make a settler.  Location doesn't look bad but wow that's far away from her - red boxes on minimap are her lands + new city.  (It was actually her 3rd city due to conquering a CS).  Land here is solid but not obvious it's better than several locations near her capital, odd.  (At least she didn't send a settler a long ways and put it in my face or right next to another AI).  

Here's my expansion overview at 1AD, too bad you can't zoom out very far so have to paste two together.  Red box was one more coming fairly soon, yellows are planned Colosseum and two more eventual fillers (within 6 tiles of Colosseum).  Antium was with the Kongo swiped settler.  Rush bought one more archer there due to war (also hit 3 for machinery boost).  So these other new cities were mostly fishing villages.  Mediolanum was a good site (and I learned having it off river but within 1 tile of Mountain for Bath) but I kinda got caught up doing other stuff and didn't give it the worker help it really needed.  It also had problems with slow border pops (not coastal so no Nan M bonus). More on those Kongo warriors in a sec.
 Other news:  I built Hanging gardens at Lugdunum (mostly with just two forest chops) and Pyramids at Cumae (one chop  plus 4-5 turns production?) in late BC years.  Didn't want to lose races for wonders, or land/settler races so had avoided for a long time until they looked too cheap to pass up.  As it turns out the AI's built hardly any wonders or settlers, so next game may go for these earlier.  And was closing in on more advanced Govt (culture flying with Rome + NM + wide expansion with lots of coastal cities, no Culture districts yet


Also amused by these late huts; some found late because AI seemed to be bad at scouting, the relic was between me and Nan Madol and I just missed it for a while, the 'hut on jungle' graphic actually a bit hard to see.  Popping half of a Medieval civic or tech seems a little weird, this was one thing I thought Civ5 > Civ4 (can only pop ancient techs, or culture that matters a lot in the early game but not later when its 5% of a policy cost).  And more amusement, I DOW'd myself apparently!

So, one of the logs said a CS ally of mine DOW'd Victoria of England (haven't met her yet! geez).  Think it was another joint DOW by Saladin (we had signed white peace earlier, he hated me b/c he founded Islam and I had a relgion but also liked me becuase I had 2nd or 3rd place Faith rate...).  Sigh.  Meanwhile the fighting finally came in the other war (Kongo wouldn't sign peace)

Yeah, AI is pretty bad here.  3 warriors not a threat.  Their pathfinding was odd too, kinda started going for Antium, then they chased Trader, and kind of circled back/split up (maybe because got wounded, maybe fighting some allied CS units in the area?).  Could have sworn they crossed ove that Trader of mine a turn or two before this pic but somehow it survived.  And you can see they bounced right off a legion in the forest.  I built a roman fort later on the road but didn't really need it.  Think one or two more Kongo units headed towards Antium later but CS allies roughted them up, no cities ever got attacked.
2nd part coming Monday night (pacific time) hopefully.

[timmy827]

About 200 AD I meet Qin, who still has just his capital.  Yikes!!!  What have you been doing???

Sorry bud.  Can't you grok mechanics?  (IE the way forest/jungle chops scale up in value the same way districts do, means that the only way your 5th and later cities will build districts in reasonable time is to chop chop chop, I was doing a lot of this)...I suppose this is better than civ4 global warming though.  Lucky for me, there isn't a Great Bureaucrat type so I needn't fear him sending Gifford Pinchot after me.

Little grr here.  The barb ships with ranged attack seem much more lethal to scouts.

Long running plan comes to fruition!  I mentioned the hammer paybacks on the IZ and its buildings were rather blah but put me on track for this GEngineer.  (Also 3rd workshop in progress to boost the tech above in that pic).    Now, it too long enough that by the time I got the GEng, Cumae could have built the wonder in only ~8 turns (Rome built the EC but the goal site was shared, either city could build the wonder), but still nice to have almost zero chance of losing the hammers.  (2 charges of 215 hammers, so there is theoretically a one turn window to lose it after investing...).  This was a strong wonder, giving bonus to 4 core cities and 2 more fillers on the coast..  (Although going mildly negative vs positive on amenities doesn't seem to be a big deal, it was enough to not worry about them at all besides connecting luxuries by 1080AD).  

But the dice came up snake eyes on the next GE - that ability seems like crap normally, and in fact by the time I got there it was totally useless (Had gotten the Industrial civic that gives walls to all cities and appears to obsolete the ancient/medieval wall buildings).  And 'passing' meant I just ran up GE points for nothing - cost goes down to 96 for all AI's but doesn't matter much when they aren't making any points!  This random stuff is kinda irritating, could get.  Would have been nice if more like civ4 (when multiple uses for each GP; then you could do this so they aren't all interchangeable but less risk of some being situationally useless).  There was a good surprise though

Kongo grabbed the not-so-useful one and let me get a better Merchant.  (Nice that this time, cost of GP didn't go up, although I don't understand what controls that).  

Another interface oddity/bug above.  Looks like my scout could attack the barbs 2 squares away but not move one more???  He got the Guerilla promotion which I thought was going to save him - moving NW to his spot only took 1 of 3 moves - but guess the ZOC overrides that in some ways without being totally clear.  Sigh.  He died to a barb catapult of all things a turn or two later.  

Another policy look as I hit Industrial civics.  Logistics was great for moving builders and settlers around; actually doubled moves on roads  cases.  ("Industrial Road" is 3/4ths move per tile, but that doesn't help 2 move units at all).   I thought was going to use the amenity-for-garrison unit one and dropped it for logistics.  The housing one was good temporarily (had goal of getting Cumae to 15 for the civic boost on Neighborhood one) although after Cumae hit 15, I dropped it.  Fine if Cumae never grew again (more on this later).  Getting both Rome and Cumae to the pop for 5 districts was nice too as I was using a lot of domestic trade routes.

Peace at last, though a little odd.  I had been trying peace every few turns and nothing would be accepted (not even with gold from me), but then they give a fair amount when coming to me.  Like EU2 AI.   (Did meet Victoria finally a bit later to complete roster of AI's, guess we were technically at war from earlier bug, but at least she agreed to white peace rightaway).
The fall patch hit when I was about 800 AD, which nerfed/fixed the domestic trade routes (basically some districts were giving 2 food or prod when supposed to be 1, so Rome/Cumae TR's went from 5f / 4pro to 3/3 or so).  But still continued with expansion plans.  Wonders seemed expensive, distircts seemed kind of expensive, but hey settlers don't increase in cost all that fast so let's get some more land (and while settlers get pricey you have the +50% hammer policy).  So here's an overview after one more round of 4 settlers when I ran out of time (all these cities new, though jungle choppping mean they grow quite fast)

Japan and Egypt complained (with latter going to denounce), but I really don't care.  With that civic giving every city 200-HP walls, plus CS allies, 99% sure I'm invincible even in small frontier towns.  My mil score well behind leader TR but on par with 2nd/3rd place AIs.  And as for other stats, it's a pretty gross blowout.



Two nearest in tech, Japan and Kongo, have 4 cities each, and 4, 5 districts viewable on trade screen (Plus whatever in their capital, can't see that totally on the screen.  For Kyoto I can see 3 at least for 7 total).  I'm at 15 cities and maybe about 30 districts.  Think the 'domestic tourists' is a proxy for total pop, at least since overall levels of international tourism low.  

So, called it there for the writeup.  Assume I would win space but seemed like a lot to play out.  Was toying with ideas of building a bunch of old legions/spears/catapults, then crashing through the mil side of the tree and abusing the "-50% upgrade policy" for conquesting fun but also didn't want to spend the time.

Oh and this, if I tried to conquer egypt its conceivable one of my CS allies could actually get the cities themselves

[timmy827]

Some general thoughts on the game balance and features...

-Wonders seem pretty weak/overpriced
At reporting point Colossus looked like maybe a build - was getting cheaper than another comm hub + trader, although somewhat weaker being unable to put a bank etc on it.  But really doesn’t feel “special”; in civ5 BNW a wonder-for-trade route made some sense as only got TR’s for certain techs, seems very redundant here with the functions of the CH and harbor districts.  The HG and Pyramids seem useful but again basically long term food/hammer tradeoffs, making things you do anyways more efficient not really opening up something different.  I was starting or thinking about some of extra-policy wonders, although costly and not sure if best buys.  IE probably the Potala Palace would add the +1 gold per envoy policy most of the time at time I left (Raj was usually in the diplo slot) is a 1100 hammer wonder for +35 GPT?  Also I’d probably at or close to the top tier governments with 2 diplo slots by the time its done, so really have to think about the 3rd best option or decide if anything on the way is better.  (also very odd that the wildcard one is 2nd-cheapest of that quartet, and an earlier tech than Big Ben)
Maybe Petra or the lake, rainforest boosting ones are attractive given more of that terrain, and of course I was not too interested in the wonders clearly oriented at culture or religious victory.  

-What are the AI’s doing?  Like, not just my vast leads in tech and culture and cities….
They really didn’t seem to be wonder happy, only Stonehenge, Oracle, Petra built by AI’s (first one hilarious fail, Hatty built it after getting Great Prophet from normal way).  That’s somewhat ok for balance/challenge as mentioned in the ‘wonders weak’ above.  

Full city counts (total/self founded, if first # is bigger they conquered a CS or Japan conqureed Saladin’s capital.  These include the starting caps…)
Hatty 4/3
Japan 4/3
Qin   2/1  (!)
Kongo 4/3
TR 3/3
Vicky 3/3
Saladin 2/3  

As mentioned in the city counts, expanding really poorly (maybe some holdover from civ5), certainly not playing ‘wide’, but they don’t seem to be doing ‘tall’ all that well either (in last turns getting reports of early buildings like libraries and shrines finishing at AI capitals.  Only America had an IZ and no buildings in it).  Also it seems all the AI caps are sizes 8-12 (maybe that doesn’t update on the map always, not 100% sure, but think it does).  I have 15 cities with largest sizes 15,15,13,11,10, and all else but 1 in the 6-8 range.  

They don’t see to scout well either; Kongo’s agenda was actually + towards me saying “Kongo is happy you have explored less than them” - but I don’t think I saw any western AI scouts come through the Thebes - Antium isthmus to the Egypt/Rome part of the map at all; only those warriors during war and (just a few turns before report) some Saladin missionaries. As of report turn no AI has met all the players yet.  
Fear that they all may be spamming warriors/spears and throwing them away on city state wars; Hatty fought two (one successfully) which seems totally dumb when you have ample land to settle and could get benefits from the CS instead.  I guess Hatty and Saladin have gone pretty heavy on faith production as well and some of the GP types (scientist, writer, merchant) show some AI productivity.  
Yes this first Adventure only on prince but... think Civ4 on prince is easy at this point of course (with benefit of tons of playtime, and learning from other’s reports, civfanatics threads, SG discussion etc…) but I still get the impression there that prince AI’s do more, IE they will fill up the map eventually, get a few techs before you (also assisted by breadth of Civ4’s tree), will take more than 3 wonders off the board by 1080AD…

-worries about diplomacy
By reporting time, everyone was unfriendly or denouncing me.  OK, maybe I don’t understand the system, have seen some threads suggesting that the +/- apply each turn.  So possible I made poor choices by not doing the early cheap embassies (skipped until the pricier diplo service ones) and could have invested in relations via foreign trade routes over domestic (note:  with the patch change fixing/nerfing domestic, this may be more attractive anyways in the future).  
Although a couple of the malus seems a bit cheap; the - for diff governments when I’m on whole different tier of governments than all the AI, -for any troops on the border when you’re moving them through a mixed settlement area, Tojo and China disliking me for “more wonders” = any wonders as they haven’t built a single one...).  But on the whole, I’m not that worried about my poor diplor elations yet, willing to say “ok next game I will pay more attention to this and see if better:

More worried that at report time, AI’s also all dislike each other as well!  Vicky had two good relationships, and a couple other neutral pairings (plus others that haven’t met as mentioned above), and the remaining vast majority of AI-AI relationships were negative or outright war.  
Plus the DOW’s from laughably far away AI’s just after meeting them (and one I hadn’t met!) seem like terrible programming.

And, it seems to be worrying again that consequences for poor relations are small, as long as not so angry they DOW they still buy lux for cash and you can’t do a ton else).  It’s surprising to me that they fixed one civ5 issue with ‘joint war’ - the prices for doing so still seem a bit low, but at least you have to join the war yourself and presumably take warmonger penalties, can’t just get two AI to fight for pocket change while keeping your nose clean anymore - and reintroduced the ‘lux for gold sale as soon as you meet an AI’.  Although used it plenty, really don’t like for a few reasons
-issues with lumpsum vs per-turn goods, others have covered plenty.
-rushbuying seems too ‘lucky’ now.  IE whether you run into an AI scout and can sell a lux may mean you can buy your 2nd builder 10-12 turns earlier; seems a little too swingy for early growth curve.  So this also a criticism of removing the science slider really (issue would be fixed with removing rushbuy, at least from early game - but then without gold costs slowing research via science slider, what do you do with gold in the early game?)
(sorry, fighting Civ4->Civ5 changes at this point...one more though)
-seems very immersion breaking, as the game has caravan units for trade routes that have finite range and can be attacked by barbs, but gold-for-lux can happen immediately at any distance without any maps of the terrain between you…



A few other things seemed glitchy, Cleo repeatedly yelled at me for weak military, true at first but happened several times more despite A) being on par with her and then stronger from middle of game on and B) diplo screen showing a + for my military by the end.  



This also seemed off, even if AI has a spare lux you can't do an even trade for it.  This was soon after meeting TR, before he went Unfriendly.  

-specialist slots are both more expensive/rarer and more useless than previous versions; moving GPP to the buildings themselves instead of working specialists reduced their value and nothing was done to make up for it.  An IZ-engineer at 0f/2h seems laughably weak.  And maybe I'm missing something but their seem to be no techs, policies, or wonders that boost specialists like civ4/civ5 had
-slight concern that getting large cities seems pointless
Hill tiles have good yield but you're limited usually by geography there.  (Cumae was an even better site than I realized when settling, not just for the river + cattle + wheat but just having a dozen+ hills).  The specialist slots have crap yields, so do sea squares.  Flatlands can only have farms, which are ok for growing early but once you get past #hills, what do you do?  You can keep working more + food but for real diminishing yields after size 10 or so (you get the .7 sci/.3 culture per pop but food for growth becomes tremendous, + hammer costs for the builders and maybe housing and maybe amenities if you care about them).  Adding more districts sounds ok, but it seemed that by size 10 or 13, districts expensive enough that their paybacks started looking pretty meager as well.  
And all this in addition to some issues well addressed by T-Hawk in in civ5: 

...It's always correct to add a new city to take advantage of the more efficient low-end costs for both food and buildings and freebies. Seriously, do you truly understand how brutal the math is for tall? Growing from size 14 to 19 takes over 1000 food, more than from size 1 to 14! And considering that a new city gets new instances of the constant food bonuses (granary, maritimes, Tradition finisher), growing a new city is literally FIVE TIMES more food efficient than growing a tall city. The restraining factor is supposed to be happiness, but that falls apart too when new cities even build happy more efficiently, getting a new 100H / 2 happy colosseum instead of a ludicrous 500H / 2happy stadium.
Civ 4 had the same problem but masked it well, that every crappy city would turn positive. With the midgame trade routes from Corporation tech and Free Market civic, any new city becomes positively productive almost immediately, at worst after it grows onto a few coast tiles and whips a courthouse. But these cities could be neglected in the overall picture. A 6-pop fishing village would produce a tiny fraction of the multiplicative splendor of a core city with mature towns and economic multipliers, so could be skipped with no material difference in the outcome.
But in Civ 5 G&K you must build these cities, where every village gets showered in cheap efficient goodies and rapidly maritime-mushrooms to 12 population with a 75-hammer library and represents a significant fraction of a mature city foolishly trying to pay 200 food for another growth and 300 hammers for another science multiplier. And naturally, all these identical filler cities really kill the fun factor with the micromanagement. Civ 4 was about playing the terrain, Civ 5 about ignoring the terrain and exploiting everything else.

Now of course civ6 isn't the same but there are lots of similarities.  No maritime food to build small cities up fast; you can do it with trade routes (but that requires building CH's or Harbor's for more TRs to do on any large scale).  The buildings get more expensive effectively due to district costs going up. Hammer cost of settlers and builders gradually rises (also food cost kind of does as well, eventually you need larger cities to build the settlers in reasonable time so 1 pop takes more food).  But the food formula seems to be same as civ5, and worse in some ways for growing big cities (no civ4 granary/civ5 aqueduct building that stores % of food for growth as far as I can tell).   And BUILDING YIELDS ARE TOTALLY FLAT, even more so that civ5 (where at least the science buildings were all multipliers of pop, and the hammer line of buildings had some flat some weak multipliers).  In fact very few multipliers of anything - the Work Ethic belief, HG wonder for food surplus, a bit if happy/very happy, a few expensive wonders.  The ones that really jump out are the builder/settler policies.  housing mechanic definitely favors a lot of small-to-medium cities as well and think current state might be very REX-friendly.


Finally terrain seems wildly unbalanced.  Hills way too good with the better food than civ4/5 and probably the most important tile; almost every city will have enough flatland to get decent food surplus (again hills with more food now, you can work your mines without slowing growth much) but # of hills is what matters for ‘whether it can build anything’..  Water seems like total crap; with the combination of God of the Sea + Nan Madol bonus, the coastal cities with 3+ seafood were ok-not-great but you’d never work a 1F/1C common coast tile.  Related on the culture choice - unlike civ5, glad that (with the new patch showing the next tile) it doesn't seem biased against hills anymore.  But it seems to not grab 3rd ring whatsoever until 2nd ring totally grabbed; I liked civ5 better where it seemed to be able pick 3rd ring resources over 2nd ring sometimes.  so you basically have to plan on buying any 3rd ring resource.  Not sure that's good.  Also a little worried that culture expands too slow, I didn’t have enormous trouble but Rome + NM city state means I was way ahead of other civs in culture.   Might be rough for normal ones.  


I don't mean to imply I didn't enjoy - this was really fun, but a little worried that the above issues might mean it's a lot more like civ5 than civ4 in depth and longterm replayability.  Hope I'm wrong.  Might be potential for doing more scouting (both because its harder, and longterm planning of districts for city locations) and finding deep gameplay that way.  
Thanks Brick again for putting together!

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Some general thoughts on the game balance and features...

-Wonders seem pretty weak/overpriced
At reporting point Colossus looked like maybe a build - was getting cheaper than another comm hub + trader, although somewhat weaker being unable to put a bank etc on it.  But really doesn’t feel “special”; in civ5 BNW a wonder-for-trade route made some sense as only got TR’s for certain techs, seems very redundant here with the functions of the CH and harbor districts.  The HG and Pyramids seem useful but again basically long term food/hammer tradeoffs, making things you do anyways more efficient not really opening up something different.  I was starting or thinking about some of extra-policy wonders, although costly and not sure if best buys.  IE probably the Potala Palace would add the +1 gold per envoy policy most of the time at time I left (Raj was usually in the diplo slot) is a 1100 hammer wonder for +35 GPT?  Also I’d probably at or close to the top tier governments with 2 diplo slots by the time its done, so really have to think about the 3rd best option or decide if anything on the way is better.  (also very odd that the wildcard one is 2nd-cheapest of that quartet, and an earlier tech than Big Ben)
Maybe Petra or the lake, rainforest boosting ones are attractive given more of that terrain, and of course I was not too interested in the wonders clearly oriented at culture or religious victory.  

-What are the AI’s doing?  Like, not just my vast leads in tech and culture and cities….
They really didn’t seem to be wonder happy, only Stonehenge, Oracle, Petra built by AI’s (first one hilarious fail, Hatty built it after getting Great Prophet from normal way).  That’s somewhat ok for balance/challenge as mentioned in the ‘wonders weak’ above.  

Full city counts (total/self founded, if first # is bigger they conquered a CS or Japan conqureed Saladin’s capital.  These include the starting caps…)
Hatty 4/3
Japan 4/3
Qin   2/1  (!)
Kongo 4/3
TR 3/3
Vicky 3/3
Saladin 2/3  

As mentioned in the city counts, expanding really poorly (maybe some holdover from civ5), certainly not playing ‘wide’, but they don’t seem to be doing ‘tall’ all that well either (in last turns getting reports of early buildings like libraries and shrines finishing at AI capitals.  Only America had an IZ and no buildings in it).  Also it seems all the AI caps are sizes 8-12 (maybe that doesn’t update on the map always, not 100% sure, but think it does).  I have 15 cities with largest sizes 15,15,13,11,10, and all else but 1 in the 6-8 range.  

They don’t see to scout well either; Kongo’s agenda was actually + towards me saying “Kongo is happy you have explored less than them” - but I don’t think I saw any western AI scouts come through the Thebes - Antium isthmus to the Egypt/Rome part of the map at all; only those warriors during war and (just a few turns before report) some Saladin missionaries. As of report turn no AI has met all the players yet.  
Fear that they all may be spamming warriors/spears and throwing them away on city state wars; Hatty fought two (one successfully) which seems totally dumb when you have ample land to settle and could get benefits from the CS instead.  I guess Hatty and Saladin have gone pretty heavy on faith production as well and some of the GP types (scientist, writer, merchant) show some AI productivity.  
Yes this first Adventure only on prince but... think Civ4 on prince is easy at this point of course (with benefit of tons of playtime, and learning from other’s reports, civfanatics threads, SG discussion etc…) but I still get the impression there that prince AI’s do more, IE they will fill up the map eventually, get a few techs before you (also assisted by breadth of Civ4’s tree), will take more than 3 wonders off the board by 1080AD…

-worries about diplomacy
By reporting time, everyone was unfriendly or denouncing me.  OK, maybe I don’t understand the system, have seen some threads suggesting that the +/- apply each turn.  So possible I made poor choices by not doing the early cheap embassies (skipped until the pricier diplo service ones) and could have invested in relations via foreign trade routes over domestic (note:  with the patch change fixing/nerfing domestic, this may be more attractive anyways in the future).  
Although a couple of the malus seems a bit cheap; the - for diff governments when I’m on whole different tier of governments than all the AI, -for any troops on the border when you’re moving them through a mixed settlement area, Tojo and China disliking me for “more wonders” = any wonders as they haven’t built a single one...).  But on the whole, I’m not that worried about my poor diplor elations yet, willing to say “ok next game I will pay more attention to this and see if better:

More worried that at report time, AI’s also all dislike each other as well!  Vicky had two good relationships, and a couple other neutral pairings (plus others that haven’t met as mentioned above), and the remaining vast majority of AI-AI relationships were negative or outright war.  
Plus the DOW’s from laughably far away AI’s just after meeting them (and one I hadn’t met!) seem like terrible programming.

And, it seems to be worrying again that consequences for poor relations are small, as long as not so angry they DOW they still buy lux for cash and you can’t do a ton else).  It’s surprising to me that they fixed one civ5 issue with ‘joint war’ - the prices for doing so still seem a bit low, but at least you have to join the war yourself and presumably take warmonger penalties, can’t just get two AI to fight for pocket change while keeping your nose clean anymore - and reintroduced the ‘lux for gold sale as soon as you meet an AI’.  Although used it plenty, really don’t like for a few reasons
-issues with lumpsum vs per-turn goods, others have covered plenty.
-rushbuying seems too ‘lucky’ now.  IE whether you run into an AI scout and can sell a lux may mean you can buy your 2nd builder 10-12 turns earlier; seems a little too swingy for early growth curve.  So this also a criticism of removing the science slider really (issue would be fixed with removing rushbuy, at least from early game - but then without gold costs slowing research via science slider, what do you do with gold in the early game?)
(sorry, fighting Civ4->Civ5 changes at this point...one more though)
-seems very immersion breaking, as the game has caravan units for trade routes that have finite range and can be attacked by barbs, but gold-for-lux can happen immediately at any distance without any maps of the terrain between you…



A few other things seemed glitchy, Cleo repeatedly yelled at me for weak military, true at first but happened several times more despite A) being on par with her and then stronger from middle of game on and B) diplo screen showing a + for my military by the end.  



This also seemed off, even if AI has a spare lux you can't do an even trade for it.  This was soon after meeting TR, before he went Unfriendly.  

-specialist slots are both more expensive/rarer and more useless than previous versions; moving GPP to the buildings themselves instead of working specialists reduced their value and nothing was done to make up for it.  An IZ-engineer at 0f/2h seems laughably weak.  And maybe I'm missing something but their seem to be no techs, policies, or wonders that boost specialists like civ4/civ5 had
-slight concern that getting large cities seems pointless
Hill tiles have good yield but you're limited usually by geography there.  (Cumae was an even better site than I realized when settling, not just for the river + cattle + wheat but just having a dozen+ hills).  The specialist slots have crap yields, so do sea squares.  Flatlands can only have farms, which are ok for growing early but once you get past #hills, what do you do?  You can keep working more + food but for real diminishing yields after size 10 or so (you get the .7 sci/.3 culture per pop but food for growth becomes tremendous, + hammer costs for the builders and maybe housing and maybe amenities if you care about them).  Adding more districts sounds ok, but it seemed that by size 10 or 13, districts expensive enough that their paybacks started looking pretty meager as well.  
And all this in addition to some issues well addressed by T-Hawk in in civ5: 

...It's always correct to add a new city to take advantage of the more efficient low-end costs for both food and buildings and freebies. Seriously, do you truly understand how brutal the math is for tall? Growing from size 14 to 19 takes over 1000 food, more than from size 1 to 14! And considering that a new city gets new instances of the constant food bonuses (granary, maritimes, Tradition finisher), growing a new city is literally FIVE TIMES more food efficient than growing a tall city. The restraining factor is supposed to be happiness, but that falls apart too when new cities even build happy more efficiently, getting a new 100H / 2 happy colosseum instead of a ludicrous 500H / 2happy stadium.
Civ 4 had the same problem but masked it well, that every crappy city would turn positive. With the midgame trade routes from Corporation tech and Free Market civic, any new city becomes positively productive almost immediately, at worst after it grows onto a few coast tiles and whips a courthouse. But these cities could be neglected in the overall picture. A 6-pop fishing village would produce a tiny fraction of the multiplicative splendor of a core city with mature towns and economic multipliers, so could be skipped with no material difference in the outcome.
But in Civ 5 G&K you must build these cities, where every village gets showered in cheap efficient goodies and rapidly maritime-mushrooms to 12 population with a 75-hammer library and represents a significant fraction of a mature city foolishly trying to pay 200 food for another growth and 300 hammers for another science multiplier. And naturally, all these identical filler cities really kill the fun factor with the micromanagement. Civ 4 was about playing the terrain, Civ 5 about ignoring the terrain and exploiting everything else.

Now of course civ6 isn't the same but there are lots of similarities.  No maritime food to build small cities up fast; you can do it with trade routes (but that requires building CH's or Harbor's for more TRs to do on any large scale).  The buildings get more expensive effectively due to district costs going up. Hammer cost of settlers and builders gradually rises (also food cost kind of does as well, eventually you need larger cities to build the settlers in reasonable time so 1 pop takes more food).  But the food formula seems to be same as civ5, and worse in some ways for growing big cities (no civ4 granary/civ5 aqueduct building that stores % of food for growth as far as I can tell).   And BUILDING YIELDS ARE TOTALLY FLAT, even more so that civ5 (where at least the science buildings were all multipliers of pop, and the hammer line of buildings had some flat some weak multipliers).  In fact very few multipliers of anything - the Work Ethic belief, HG wonder for food surplus, a bit if happy/very happy, a few expensive wonders.  The ones that really jump out are the builder/settler policies.  housing mechanic definitely favors a lot of small-to-medium cities as well and think current state might be very REX-friendly.


Finally terrain seems wildly unbalanced.  Hills way too good with the better food than civ4/5 and probably the most important tile; almost every city will have enough flatland to get decent food surplus (again hills with more food now, you can work your mines without slowing growth much) but # of hills is what matters for ‘whether it can build anything’..  Water seems like total crap; with the combination of God of the Sea + Nan Madol bonus, the coastal cities with 3+ seafood were ok-not-great but you’d never work a 1F/1C common coast tile.  Related on the culture choice - unlike civ5, glad that (with the new patch showing the next tile) it doesn't seem biased against hills anymore.  But it seems to not grab 3rd ring whatsoever until 2nd ring totally grabbed; I liked civ5 better where it seemed to be able pick 3rd ring resources over 2nd ring sometimes.  so you basically have to plan on buying any 3rd ring resource.  Not sure that's good.  Also a little worried that culture expands too slow, I didn’t have enormous trouble but Rome + NM city state means I was way ahead of other civs in culture.   Might be rough for normal ones.  


I don't mean to imply I didn't enjoy - this was really fun, but a little worried that the above issues might mean it's a lot more like civ5 than civ4 in depth and longterm replayability.  Hope I'm wrong.  Might be potential for doing more scouting (both because its harder, and longterm planning of districts for city locations) and finding deep gameplay that way.  
Thanks Brick again for putting together!

Good analysis. I got my Rome cap to size 27 before I triggered a science victory on immortal. I probably could have pushed it out higher. I plonked all my 30 odd TRs through it to do that though with the communism +4 food/route boost. It wasn't getting much stronger though. I would point out insta selling luxes with the new amenities bonuses isn't as sure fired as you point out.

The districts are weak and the wonders - the other thing you don't mention is they also remove a tiles ability to be worked! Not too bad in case of flatland a lot of the time, but I had mids/rhur/HG in Rome and with needing an aquaduct, neighbourhood as well as the actual useful districts with some moderate packing of cities I was really struggling for workable tiles.

Even on the much higher difficulty, I was rocking 12 cities, England had 3, Sumer 4... They had loads of unused good land around them too. On my continent Russia had around 8 and very good cultural game, decent sci. America 6 good science game. They don't seem to like expanding at all.

[scooter]

But the dice came up snake eyes on the next GE - that ability seems like crap normally, and in fact by the time I got there it was totally useless (Had gotten the Industrial civic that gives walls to all cities and appears to obsolete the ancient/medieval wall buildings).  And 'passing' meant I just ran up GE points for nothing - cost goes down to 96 for all AI's but doesn't matter much when they aren't making any points! 

Hah! I ran into this same scenario where I got GE points and this GE came up. It seemed completely useless, so I hit "Pass" not realizing fully what that mechanic did. I don't think I ever got a GE because I won the game before an AI ever got enough GE points to open up the next one for me. Oops.

I don't mean to imply I didn't enjoy - this was really fun, but a little worried that the above issues might mean it's a lot more like civ5 than civ4 in depth and longterm replayability.  Hope I'm wrong.

I pretty much agree with all of your analysis. These two sentences especially summed it up for me.