Civ6 Succession Game 1: Commercial Free Programming

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Turn set looks excellent! Thoughts:

- Pedro's AI actually seems ok vis a vis the culture victory. I recall being pretty impressed by his performance in Sullla's latest write up, and in this game the only reason he's doing less well is that we went on a determined push to deny him his great writers. And that push meant we had to hit 20-odd GWP/turn (tying up most of my turnset) and spend 800g (most of Sullla's accumulated gold) - Pedro very much forced us to take opportunity costs to beat him.

- I notice that we've stopped building settlers. I think there's only one obvious dot left that we were planning on settling. Are we continuing expansion, or do we think we've reached the point in the game where new cities ROI < cost of the settler?

- Are wonders a cost-efficient source of tourism? I've never really spammed them in any of my games.

- Why are we working on Colonialism? Do we want archaeologists before the Grand Opera policy? What are our current "culture tech" priorities? I read over the last few pages of the thread, but I can't find them.

- Civics-wise:

If we have enlightenment I would consider: "Liberalism (Enlightenment): +1 Amenity to all cities with at least 2 specialty districts". I think Ranamar mentioned that Need Food Pls had an amenities crunch? Even if we don't +1 amenity to all cities will only help boost our production. If we don't, I would recommend that soon on our way to Opera and Ballet and "Grand Opera (Opera and Ballet): +100% Culture yield from Theater Square district buildings."

Since we have more districts, maybe "Aesthetics (Medieval Faires): +100% Theater Square adjacency bonuses." or "Meritocracy (Civil Service): Each city receives +1 Culture for each specialty district it constructs." is worth another look at?

Does anyone know if "Logistics (Mercantilism): +1 Movement if starting turn in friendly territory." applies to workers? Might be a fun way of saving worker turns, provided that we're not upgrading units heavily.

Do we need the GPP/turn policies any more? I agree that speeding along our GP is important, but after Ranamar's district spam those policies might be getting pretty incremental - as long as we're not in an active GP race with Pedro I'd be tempted to switch out for + culture or + science policies.

Would your theatre square adjacency boosts be of little value though? That would just be extra culture, as with the meritocracy. You guys will probably jump out ahead quickly with enlightenment and never look back - could you even possibly win pre Effiel tower/Redentor with enough GP?

[Ruined Everything]

Would your theatre square adjacency boosts be of little value though? That would just be extra culture, as with the meritocracy. You guys will probably jump out ahead quickly with enlightenment and never look back - could you even possibly win pre Effiel tower/Redentor with enough GP?

There's 143 tourism points from GP on the table so.. probably? (Maybe with archeology/wonders pushing over if necessary.) That being said, we can get Natural History, Conservation, Opera and Ballet, and Cultural Heritage all without researching any other civics.

We're running two +2 GPP civics. Since we're >20 GPP in all of the relevant great people, those civics are bringing our GP 1 turn closer for every 10 turns we spend in them. I haven't done the math, but I suspect speeding the civics above up with an additional +20 culture/turn or so will result in a quicker win than getting all of our great people a couple turns sooner.

[Ranamar]

Forgot to say thanks for the turnset, easy to follow writeup and good decisions with reasons.

Frosted flakes could build campus near one (or both) of them peaks to the south. Harvest the marsh for insta-growth. We've got cash to buy some workers too if needed.

You can harvest marshes for food?  I've been missing out!  (Okay, I haven't paved many marshes, but...)  That location is probably the best one we have for a campus, though... or alternately near Rice bowl, but we haven't claimed those spots yet.  Frosted Flakes urgently needs more workable tiles, though.

Also, I tend to write essays when I hit a hard decision if I'm logging my turns.  If I need to lay out my thinking anyway, I might as well share it.

[Ruined Everything]

Also, I tend to write essays when I hit a hard decision if I'm logging my turns.  If I need to lay out my thinking anyway, I might as well share it.

 
Yup.

My reports are basically my stream of consciousness during the playset.

[Sullla]

Ha! My succession game reports are stream-of-consciousness notes too. I do more high level writing for full game reports, but for 10 turns? Just type everything that pops into mind.

Very nice discussion in this thread. I'm going to play my 10 turns tomorrow, largely because I'm feeling a bit under the weather and I'll be able to concentrate better tomorrow. Thanks for all of the suggestions.

[Ruined Everything]

Some thoughts on our tech/civic path:

Techs that boost culture:
Printing: double Tourism from Writing works
Flight: Bonus Tourism to all improvements that provide Culture. (Anyone know more about this? )
Computers: Double all Tourism yields

Should we detour to Printing after Industrialism? Does Printing -> Radio -> Flight -> Computers miss anything key?

I would be tempted to push to Ballet & Opera after Archeology for the culture civic and through to Cultural Heritage for:

Heritage Tourism (Cultural Heritage): +100% Tourism from Great Works of Art and Artifacts.

The only other two tourism civics:
Satellite Broadcasts (Space Race): Triples Tourism from Great Works of Music.
Online Communities (Social Media): +50% Tourism output to civilizations to which you have a Trade Route.

are right at the end of the tech tree, and I've never been there. We could take a shot at a beeline at one of them , but I'll doubt we'll get there.

[Sullla]

Turn 130: OK, back in the saddle again for this succession game. Everything looks pretty reasonable for the moment, although the fact that we are actually in THIRD place right now for tourism is a little bit concerning. Pedro of Brazil in particular is playing a nice game here, leading in almost every category in the rankings and only slightly behind us in score. I guess these AIs didn't get the message that they are all supposed to be terrible in Civ6?

We have way more culture than science - waaaay more culture than science. There are actually zero completed Campus districts anywhere in our territory. We're going to need to fix that, as there are some techs that do a lot to boost science. (In particular Computers, which doubles all sources of tourism.) The converse is that we have outstanding culture output, and we should be able to clean up the remaining cultural Great People without too much trouble. I'm more concerned about having enough "slots" to put all the cultural stuff into, one of the sillier aspects of Civ6's design.



I check diplomacy, and we have a chocolate resource available for sale. Saladin will pay a huge sum for it: 126 gold and another 12 gpt. We'll happily sign up for that. I also sign Open Borders, to boost relations and because Open Borders increases tourism output. We should also look to start sending our scanty trade routes to other civs once we really get the tourism engine going, as trade routes also increase tourism output. I sign Open Borders with Victoria, Tomyris, and Pedro for the same reason; we now have Open Borders with everyone other than Gandhi. I paid a few pennies (1 or 2 gpt) to get some of those deals, which is a pittance. Try to maintain Open Borders as much as possible to speed along our tourism.

In terms of research, I swap us over to Printing tech (10 turns), as that will double the tourism output from Great Works of Writing. That's where almost all of our tourism is coming from right now, and well worth grabbing. Afterwards, I think we should probably go for a Computers beeline, which may take the rest of the game. Not much else we want though. For civics, I will finish Colonialism and then go for Natural History. The sooner we start digging up those artifacts, the sooner we'll start producing relic-based tourism. The serious beeline to Cultural Heritage for the Heritage Tourism policy is also likely in our future plans.

I leave all current builds in place for now. We need more places to store works of art, and we need more production in the form of factories. Lots to build, as usual.



Turn 131: Finish Colonialism civic, time to change policies. We have good relations with our neighbors (and Gandhi won't declare war on us) so I did not spend the money to upgrade our archers to crossbows. I swap out the discounted upgrade policy (Professional Army) for +1 movement on units starting in your territory (Logistics). That one does apply to builders, and I'm a huge fan of it. I also drop the +2 Great Writer points card in favor of Aesthetics (+100% culture from Theatre district adjacency bonuses). We will clean up the remaining Great Writers with ease, and Aethestics will make a big difference in our culture output. (It ends up being worth about 10 culture/turn, not bad.) I'd like to swap in something to boost science, but we have zero completed Campus districts, which means none of the options will do anything. Heh. Maybe we can return to that in the future.

Start research on Natural History civic (6 turns). Otherwise this is a pretty quiet turn.

Turn 132: Iron Chef hits size 10 and boosts Civil Service civic to 99% completed status. I'm going to finish that civic because I want the policy that grants +1 amenity for cities with a garrisoned unit. We can pull our archers back from uselessly running around in the tundra and get some military police use out of them. Iron Chef finishes its workshop, goes back to complete its Campus district at a cheap 3 turn build.

Turn 133: Civil Service finishes, back to Natural History. I swap out the Great Artist policy for the one with +1 amenity per garrisoned unit (Retainers). Now watch this: we get the boost for Natural History by having an archaeological museum. I take our treasury and cash a large portion of it in to rush an archaeological museum in Need Food Pls, which just finished an amphitheatre on this very turn:



This will save us a couple of turns on our current civics research, and let us start building archaeologists to go explore those ruins.

Turn 134: Rice Bowl finishes its Industrial district, goes back to complete the Theatre district (only 5 turns). A number of our cities will need more housing soon; I like to use the policy that grants +2 housing to all cities with 3 completed specialty districts (Medina Quarter) but that's currently zero cities, so it wouldn't do anything.

Turn 135: Natural History civic finishes. We can now see the ruins sites on the map; Need Food Pls starts a very expensive archaeologist unit (15 turns). The capital will be able to help with that a little bit, as it starts an electronics factory. We're going to need more production to build some of this lategame stuff. We start the very long research beeline towards Cultural Heritage, which will take us through Guilds, Diplomatic Service, and The Enlightenment first.



A barb camp has annoying spawned inside our territory. We have archers closing in on the camp to deal with it.

Turn 136: Our Friendship with Brazil ends and Pedro will not renew it. We'll have to keep an eye on him... Start another archaeological museum in Chocolate River, as we'll need more places to house the artifacts that we dig up. Frosted Flakes starts an amphitheatre; the next player will have the choice on whether to build the art museum or archaeological museum. Mostly a quiet turn.

Turn 137: Wheaties finishes its art museum, allowing us to wake up our Great Artist who has been sitting around for lack of Great Work slots.

Turn 138: Between turns, Pedro pops up and asks if we want to declare an official Friendship. This makes no sense because he rejected my offer of Friendship the last two turns in a row, but this is what we wanted, so I happily agree. We have no military right now and are playing farmer's gambit - being friends with mighty Brazil seems like a very good idea. We finish Guilds research, on to Diplomatic Service... which will take all of 1 turn to research. Our culture is rocking along right now at a very nice clip.

Turn 139: Printing tech finishes and we get a big boost to tourism: from 35 tourism/turn up to 59 tourism/turn. Doubling the output of our Great Works of Writing helped a lot. I set us to the Computers beeline, which only requires 5 techs in total. Unfortunately we probably won't be able to boost any of them; perhaps Electricity if we would get 3 privateers somehow? Probably not though. We also finish Diplomatic Service on the civics tree and move on to The Enlightenment.



Here is our current Great Work status. We don't seem to have enough works of art to be able to theme our museums yet; hopefully the next Great Artist will be able to fix that. Printing tech has doubled our Great Writings and they are providing the bulk of our tourism at present.



Because we have 6 envoys currently saved up, I drop 2 apiece into the cultural city states of Nan Madol and Vilnius. This gets another another 4 culture/turn in every Theatre district, and we have a lot of them. We'll want to remain the suzerain of these three city states if at all possible.

Turn 140: We end with a very quiet turn, nothing of particular interest taking place. Well, except that the culture from those two city states finally kicks in, and we are now up to 228 culture/turn.

[Sullla]

Here's the tourism screen showing our progress towards a cultural victory. No tourists yet, but we should be picking up our first ones soon. We will get a new tourist for every 900 tourism that we accumulate; two more turns will suffice here with India. Note that having a trade route provides a +25% bonus, and Open Borders provides another +25% bonus. Without these additions, we would only be getting 49 tourism/turn with India instead of the 79/turn listed here. If you want to read more about the tourism mechanics, I highly recommend this article at CivFanatics that goes into great detail: https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources...ide.25713/



An overview picture of our civilization. Hopefully we can improve our science a bit in the upcoming turns; I suggest building some Campus districts once cities grow over size 7 and can place a third specialty district. That plus the Rationalism policy once we have a few universities built should help speed us along to Computers a bit faster. We also need to get those archaeologists out and investigating relics ASAP; it may be worthwhile to cash-rush one of them when Chocolate Mountain finishes its archaeological museum.

Unit are mostly sitting inside cities to provide extra amenities via our policy choices. I did not build any settlers as I think we've essentially reached the natural limits of our territory. I don't think it's worth putting down more cities unless we would see something unexpected pop up. I also didn't construct any builders on my turn, since we're about to get the upgraded builder policy on the civics tree shortly. Try to keep borders open with the AI civs, and go hunting for those artifacts!

Sullla
Ruined Everything <<< UP NOW
Molach <<< on deck
Ichabod (skipped)
Ranamar

Savegame located here

[Singaboy]

Pedro of Brazil in particular is playing a nice game here, leading in almost every category in the rankings and only slightly behind us in score. I guess these AIs didn't get the message that they are all supposed to be terrible in Civ6?

Let's not get silly here. I mean I can almost feel the tension in the air due to this nail-biting cliffhanger you have here.

I mean, Civ6 does have nice aspects, but the AI is not really one of them. By the way, if you really want to have a tight game, where the AI is able to even take a city, try the same map (Inland Sea) on deity Always War with barbarians enabled. It can certainly be nail-biting stuff.

[Ruined Everything]

Another excellent turn set. Some questions about plans for my turn set.

- This looks like a peaceful builder-y turn set. I'll probably spend it churning out buildings. I'm thinking of building Art/Archeology museums > Archaeologists > Industrial zones > Campuses.

- I think it's cheaper to research Stirrups and Gunpowder (Stirrups with the Eurkea), buy a musketman, and thwack a barb than it is to research the second half of square rigging. I might preserve that barb camp for barb thwacking duty. I'm also going to look at building those privateers.

- Tech-wise, is it wise to delay radio for computers? Computers gives a earlier boost, but it does delay our high-production broadcast centers/great musicians, perhaps to irrelevance. If we go computers first, we should make sure we take the opportunity to get power plants up to boost the broadcast centers the moment we get Radio.


- Is it worth building Portola and Forbidden city to get an 8 policy slot government for computers + tourism? Is it worth going archaeologist or Ruhr at Iron Chef? Where were we planning on putting Ruhr? I know somehow had a great location but I can't find it in the thread.

- We need 7 art museums to store all of our great works of art. We should make sure we have them built on time/we don't accidentally build too many archeology museums.

- We should wait until we get power plants, and then use the higher production to start spamming settlers for throwaway culture cities.