Civ 6 SG2 - Duty Free Egypt

[Gaspar]

I'll review and discuss in a bit, but it appears save is not attached.

[Ruined Everything]

Mea culpa. Attached.

[Gaspar]

Taking a quick look at the save, I'll play tomorrow.

First thought, the missionary spam is ridiculous. Firaxis really needs to clean this up just in the interest of aesthetics.

Second thought, if Tomyris joins in, this would be a pretty ugly scenario if the AI were remotely interested in fighting a war. Fortunately we all know this isn't the case.

Do we want to press the war with Spain? I'm fairly certain we could claim Zaragoza without much difficulty. A few unit builds and I'm sure we could press on and take out Valencia and/or Madrid. Stirrups is almost done and we do have Iron. I mean we could honestly do it with what we have but it would be a long slog. Alternately, we could do a little pillaging and kill a couple units and I'm sure sue for peace and just continue being focused on infra. While more land is always better, I'm not really all that certain it matters all that much in the grand scheme of things vs getting the machine going faster.

I'm going to put Silk Road on Colosseum on the riverside tile next to the Colosseum District at the cap unless someone objects. Its current Settler is done this turn and we could really use the Amenities. Shame we got a shitty GEngy.

If we want a reasonable launch date, we do need some Campuses. They have a much slower payoff than other districts but later on with policies and all the buildings, generate quite a bit of science. Our research rate atm isn't all that impressive. Obviously, that's also partly due to the amenity crunch and the fact that our land sucks.

I'll play in about 24 hours, so hopefully y'all have some thoughts.

[pindicator]

I'm going to put Silk Road on Colosseum on the riverside tile next to the Colosseum District at the cap unless someone objects.

As long as you're talking about the tile to the west or southwest (overriding the citrus) then I'm okay EDIT: Can't overwrite luxury tiles. DO NOT plant it to the southeast as that is the Ruhr tile site.

If we want a reasonable launch date, we do need some Campuses.  They have a much slower payoff than other districts but later on with policies and all the buildings, generate quite a bit of science.  Our research rate atm isn't all that impressive.  Obviously, that's also partly due to the amenity crunch and the fact that our land sucks.

I'll play in about 24 hours, so hopefully y'all have some thoughts.

Grow. We have so few farms. Use Entertainment Districts to get past Amenity crunches and use farms for housing. Plus growing will open up more district slots for campuses.

Another way to grow is to take over cities from Spain, but that risks Warmonger penalties and losing our friend status with Norway.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

I'm going to put Silk Road on Colosseum on the riverside tile next to the Colosseum District at the cap unless someone objects.

As long as you're talking about the tile to the west or southwest (overriding the citrus) then I'm okay.  DO NOT plant it to the southeast as that is the Ruhr tile site.

If we want a reasonable launch date, we do need some Campuses.  They have a much slower payoff than other districts but later on with policies and all the buildings, generate quite a bit of science.  Our research rate atm isn't all that impressive.  Obviously, that's also partly due to the amenity crunch and the fact that our land sucks.

I'll play in about 24 hours, so hopefully y'all have some thoughts.

Grow.  We have so few farms.  Use Entertainment Districts to get past Amenity crunches and use farms for housing.  Plus growing will open up more district slots for campuses.

Another way to grow is to take over cities from Spain, but that risks Warmonger penalties and losing our friend status with Norway.

I thought if you didn't declare the war then you didn't get penalties?

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Genuine question - is Tomayris near a religious victory? Do we need to be concerned by that at all?

[Ruined Everything]

First thought, the missionary spam is ridiculous.  Firaxis really needs to clean this up just in the interest of aesthetics. 

Is it any worse aesthetically than military unit spam if the AI was producing decent amounts of military units? Units all over the map is just a consequence of 1-UPT, for better or worse.

Do we want to press the war with Spain?  I'm fairly certain we could claim Zaragoza without much difficulty.  A few unit builds and I'm sure we could press on and take out Valencia and/or Madrid. Stirrups is almost done and we do have Iron.  I mean we could honestly do it with what we have but it would be a long slog.  Alternately, we could do a little pillaging and kill a couple units and I'm sure sue for peace and just continue being focused on infra.  While more land is always better, I'm not really all that certain it matters all that much in the grand scheme of things vs getting the machine going faster.

I suspect that taking cities is the best play here. The hammers required to churn out a couple knights and take all of Spain's cities << the hammers required to plant a similar number of cities for ourselves & grow them to size. Spain's cities probably represent ~50 beakers/turn worth of research from their population alone.

If we want a reasonable launch date, we do need some Campuses.  They have a much slower payoff than other districts but later on with policies and all the buildings, generate quite a bit of science.  Our research rate atm isn't all that impressive.  Obviously, that's also partly due to the amenity crunch and the fact that our land sucks.

I would argue that we should finish industrializing while taking Philip's cities and beelining for chemistry and enlightenment. Since we don't have mountains for adjacency bonii, there are only two sources of science - population, and district buildings. The moment we get a bunch of enlightenment boosted research labs up we'll win in 30ish turns. The bottleneck to getting our research machine going is production. We should boost our production, while supplementing our research rate with population, which gets me onto...

Grow.  We have so few farms.  Use Entertainment Districts to get past Amenity crunches and use farms for housing.  Plus growing will open up more district slots for campuses.

Another way to grow is to take over cities from Spain, but that risks Warmonger penalties and losing our friend status with Norway.

I wanted to do this on my turnset (and I should have done more), but I only had 3-4 worker charges available and I wanted to get our new cities up and running. We have 2 more workers finishing in 2 turns, and a 4 charge worker and a 3 charge worker to the West (we also have Action Worker™ if you can get him back safely, I guess.) At 100g/turn we can also buy a worker every 5 turns.

Why do we care about friend status with Norway? So we can get 2 food/2 hammers from a policy 5/6 of the way along the culture tree? Foreign trade routes suck for growth. There's no way around it. In retrospect we probably massively overbuilt harbors and commercial zones, which are just not that useful in a world where trade routes are good for at most 1/2 hammers (gold is cheap!) My vote is to screw the world, spend Gaspar's turnset putting together a small army while building farms, and then quietly conquer everything with like 15 units while we build factories and then research labs.

[Gaspar]

Ok, so some semi-competing goals for the turnset.

1. We want to continue to industrialization effort apace.
   
2. We want to mobilize for war and/or at least put enough pressure on Spain to sue for a favorable peace.
   
3. We want to lessen the amenities crunch via trading, Entertainment District(s) and building the Colosseum.
   
4. We want to prepare our cities to grow via the aforementioned amenity solutions and getting some farm clusters down for food and housing.
   

That's some heady goals for a turnset.  Also if we can hack the game to eliminate 1UPT and reduce the carpet of faith, that'd be great. (@RuinedEverything - yes, 1UPT is the main culprit but there's also zero reason for the Scythians to have a cluster of 13 missionaries and an apostle headed towards our territory.  She could convert all our low-population cities for much less than that.  A continuation of increasing the faith cost/increasing individual effectiveness of religious units that began in the first patch plus some sort of improvement in AI faith priority decisions and better AI for where to send said units would also reduce the unseemly carpet.  It would still be a thing, but this is absurd in its current incarnation.  /endrant)

Anyway, whichever way we head with this, my turnset is mostly going to be a maneuvering proposition.  There are 4 settlers in production which realistically is going to be the end of our peaceful settling.  Either through purchases or hand-building, more builders is going to be an additional priority for the turnset.

My plan basically is thus:

• Get the Colosseum started on t131.  This will have to be on the tile to the west of the complex as its the only eligible tile since Ruhr is claimed.  This probably will mean buying a tile which is going to slow down both the militarization and builder purchasing efforts but I do believe its worth it.
  
• Trade for Pericles marble.
  
• Finish upgrading Archers.  I'm going to take a quick diversion to Divine Right before Guilds to procure the 50% increased production towards Cavalry medieval policy and then try and squeeze a pair of Knights out of Hudson's Bay and Petra. I'm also going to do a quick Catapult out of Petra before the Knight.  This will delay some of its growth projects but I want to at least have the units on hand should we need them.  Interestingly, because our UU upgrades to Crossbows rather than Knights and the vanilla Heavy Chariot does, we can't spam out a few of those and the upgrade them, we have to build 180h Knights.  That's pretty dumb - Xbows already have an upgrade path from cheaper and resourceless Archers - but that cost means building them without policy seems pretty crazy.  
  
• Start moving towards planting the rest of the cities - most of that will happen in the subsequent two turnsets, but I'm not going to build any Settlers beyond those in production.  I will have eastern cities focus on builders, traders, industrialization and amenity-related tasks.
  
• Look to harass Phillip and put the next player in position to take him out.
  

In the immortal words of Leeroy Jenkins, time's up - let's do this...

Inherited turn:  

Swap cultural research to Theology > Divine Right.  I'm sure this is a semi controversial choice but I just feel fairly comfortable that our Culture production is a lot less valuable than actual production and a couple of Knights in the field will make a big difference in time taken to smack Spain around.  Maybe this 6t diversion will give us time to get a pair of Markets down for the Guilds boost but I highly doubt it.

Set Petra to build a Catapult.

Decide Bi Sheng's best use is probably in the Petra city so send him there.

Attempt to send 25g to Pericles for Delegation, get told to pound salt.  Pericles will give us Marble, 13g and 12gpt for Oranges and Horses.  Decide to make this deal.  Pericles has 6 great works!  I'm sure we can keep cultural production high enough that he won't be a threat to win this way but it is food for thought.  We are currently dead last in culture.  Pericles is also 1 tech ahead of us in Science.  Fairly impressive performance by him but the fact that he only has 4 cities means he'll never be able to stay ahead of us long term.

Hit end turn.

Turn 131:

Stirrups in, decide to grab Cartography since it will it give us a couple of passive effects and we already have the boost.  Afterwards, will do the 5t for Banking which should just about line up with when Guilds comes in to finish the tech. Silk Road finishes Settler which I send towards one of the iceball sites.  Buy Colosseum tile at Silk Road, start Colosseum, due in 15t.  Fire Bi Sheng's effect in BP.  Shuffle units around.  Upgrade an Archer.  Send Pericles a delegation which he accepts this time.  Fire at a Spanish warrior.

Turn 132:

Barb camp sprouts at where I sent the Settler to.  Preslav will clear for us eventually but I can always divert to the other iceball. Theology in, onto Divine Right.  Decide to swap out Caravansaries for Corvee, since I figure shaving some time off Colosseum is more important than 8gpt right now.  We obviously can swap back later.  Colosseum down to 12t.  Silk Road grows in 6 and we can configure for production at that point, I'd guess we'll finish around 10t.  Columbian Exchange finishes a Builder, I start a Trader.  Regardless if we think the international TR are worth it now (they aren't really, but they will be down the road when we can use all the policies that increase them) since we bothered to build all these Commercial Districts, we should take advantage of them.  We earn an envoy, which I send to Seoul to recapture the Suzerain bonus.  Send Trader to Preslav to get 1 cog in Seoul towards Colosseum.  This shaves another turn off completion.  Kill a Spanish Warrior and Spearman and Battering Ram.

Turn 133:

Pericles builds embassy at our cap on IT.  TPP finishes Settler, start a Builder.  Start getting some farms going in the northwest corridor.  Pretty quiet turn.

Turn 134:



So we have that going for us.  Hudson Bay completed its Workshop to generate that eureka, still 1t to get Divine Right and swap in the Cavalry production policy, so I set it to work on a Lighthouse.  Its a +1 housing boost which is a problem there and I'll start a Knight next turn.  BP finished its Catapult, I let it work on a Workshop for a turn before it also swaps next turn.  I send our 1 charge worker next to Zaragosa to hopefully bait the city warrior out so we can kill it:  



Upgrade all up-gradable Archers to Crossbows before we swap the policy out next turn.  Colosseum build down to 8t with the Industrialism boost in.

Turn 135:

We hit Industrial Era.  This unfortunately obsoletes 15% classical wonder boost.  Colosseum is back up to 9t. Seoul bonus gives us Sanitation boost.  Divine Right in, onto Guilds.  Definitely not building any Markets.  Meet Yerevan.  Look at the policy scenario.  We're definitely going to want Medina Quarter eventually, but we haven't quite laid enough districts to really get any bang for the buck yet.  I debate Caravansaries (+2g per trade route) vs Trade Confederation (+1c,+1s) from international TR vs Conscription (-1 maintenance per unit.)  I decide that 8gpt is probably worth more than 4c,4s given our desire to buy some Builders.  Conscription is actually equivalent right now, but we'll have a few more TR coming on line before the next policy swap, so go with this configuration:



We'll swap out of the Settler policy when Guilds comes in.  Probably work both Guilds policies in as we have a fair few IZ and CD down and I suspect that bonus will be better than the 1 culture per district.  We can bang out Naval Tradition quickly if the culture hit is too large.  The new city state quests suck.  Reup up Silk Road to Seoul TR.  We can buy Truffles off Pericles for Iron, OB, 2g and 16gpt.  I'm not going to take this because we really need the gold generation atm but buying those Truffles off him should be a thing we're looking at every turn-ish until we can grab them.  While housing is a bigger problem than Amenities at the moment, they go hand in hand and we're going to need to stay aggressive on both fronts with all the cities going down soon.  Start Knights in Hudson's Bay and BP as discussed, 6 and 4t respectively.  I think I'll build 1 more in BP after that and then we swap out of the Cav policy into the maintenance one likely.  That should really be enough units for a good long while.

Turn 136:

Greece settles Knossus on the IT.  Finishing Aqueduct gives us the Military Engineering boost.  Cartography comes in, good for 6 gpt. Start Banking, due in 10t but we'll hit the Guilds boost well in time to halve that.  Tradewinds finishes Settler, starts Builder.  Common Market finishes Trader, starts another.  Market Peak finishes Aqueduct, starts Granary.  Send Tradewinds settler towards north of Nan Madol spot.  Send TR Common Market -> Seoul.  Have to send southern Settler to shittier spot because Preslav hasn't dealt with barb camp yet.  Pericles wants another gpt for Truffles than last turn.  Dial up Phil, he's willing to make peace now that I've killed another warrior.  He'll do it for Jade, 1g and 3gpt.  Gonna have to do better than that, sir.  You have Chosen Unwisely™.  Particularly we'll probably capture Zaragosa right after my set is up, which at a minimum will get us a better peace deal.  Some combination of team chatter and the next player will decide if we want to wipe Spain out.  Qin hilariously wants 11g and 30gpt for peace.  Yeah buddy, good luck with that.  After we peace Phil, I recommend going and beating on Qin long enough to extort a great work or two from him.

On the IT, Phil realizes his goose is cooked and ups his offer to Jade, 163g and 4gpt.  Not even really getting warmer, champ.  I tell him to start thinking more Overmars and Pettit than Alex Hleb.  (I absolutely despise Barcelona and Real Madrid, but especially Barcelona, those who haven't been following my threads here.)

Turn 137:

Bombard Zaragoza, kill a Spanish Spearman in the north.  Tomyris has made us very, very Jewish.  She's really on the crazy I am tip - I don't think the AI is capable of converting the guys on the other continent, but its something in about 30t or so we'll have to start keeping an eye on and maybe need to raze her holy city or whatever.  Man I hate religion in this game.  Still not as bad as the AP in BTS, but pretty actually much worse than religion in Civ5.  Hopefully it gets some real work in the expansion.  No change in the Pericles offer.  Found Hanseatic League south of NAFTA.  

IT Pericles offers Friendship.  Sure buddy, maybe that will loosen the purse strings a bit.  A Chinese Caravel shows up and starts bombarding NAFTA.  I don't think this matters, Naval units can't capture cities.

Turn 138:

OPEC finishes Settler, send it south, starts a Builder.  Guilds in next turn, so we'll swap off the Settle policy.  Silk Road grows, Colosseum down to 5t.  East India Company finishes a Workshop, starts a Granary.  Continue bombardment at Zaragoza.

Turn 139:

Guilds in, Banking boosted.  I slot in Craftsmen (IZ adjacency bonus) for the Settler policy.  I really debate hard Town Charters (CH bonus) vs Meritocracy vs Caravansaries.  Decide I don't want to lose the Meritocracy bonus at least until Enlightenment and probably Mercantalism so its really a question of whether we'll get more gold from Caravansaries or Town Charters.  I don't think there's enough from the Adjacency bonuses to overcome the TR especially with 2 more coming online, so just make the one swap.  Next policy change should swap Chivalry for Conscription.  Start Diplomatic Service, due in 6t.  If the next player wants to optimize, we could swap to Naval Tradition with 2t left on BPs Knight and make the Chivalry swap then.  Policy swap brings Colosseum down to 3t.  Preslav doesn't seem all that interested in clearing that Barb camp, so if we want to get our city in the South settled we're going to need to get a unit over there.  I move the Horseman in that general direction.  Found Cobden-Chevalier in the iceball. Buy Builder in NAFTA.

On the IT, Phil offers all his resources and most of his gold for Peace.  Sorry, Charlie.


Turn 140:

Columbian Exchange finishes Trader, starts Market.  Probably can take Zaragoza next turn, but I decide to leave the tactics here to the next player. Pericles is not any more willing to part with his last Truffles than before we were best buds. I think we might just want to bite the bullet because with all these new cities and growth and such the amenity situation is only going to get worse. Counterpoint: Colosseum is almost done.


I'll start a new post with the game sitation en toto, what's going on and a review of whether I accomplished my goals.

[Gaspar]

Diplomatic stuff:

Either Pericles or Harald is happy to take an Alliance which would boost Diplomatic Service which we are currently researching.  This would obviate need for the Naval Tradition detour.  I recommend we take the deal with Pericles, the stronger of the two, and then just go ahead and buy his Truffles for too much stuff.  We will get another Pearls once we get a Builder over by Liquidity Trap as well as another Jade once we take out Zaragoza, we can sell those off to make the money back.

I'm totally undecided on how hard to press with Spain.  It would be fairly trivial to take Phillip out, press China to give up the ghost with some targeted pillaging.  We could ally both Pericles and Harald and then once we take care of Spain and bully China turn around an get some sort of Casus Belli to take out Tomyris and stop worrying about losing to Religious Victory and just make our whole continent yellow.  While that would be relatively easy, I'm not certain how much any of us really want to go to war for the next 100t.  I suppose we could just switch gears and go for Dom?  I think I'd probably just maybe take Zaragoza, sue for peace and then transition our troops across the sea to harass Qin, pillage a bit until he accedes to a favorable peace and then call time on war for this game.

Military stuff:

I don't really have the world's greatest setup, but here's the situation at Zaragoza.  We have other units which can come into play if we want to take it slow but honestly full bombards and attacks from the Swordsman this turn and next should be enough to conquer the city.



I'm not going to lie, I really half-assed this situation.  Partly because I mostly was waiting for the Knights but mostly because I hate the 1UPT shuffle.

Qin only attacked with his Caravel one turn, then its just been sitting healing.  NAFTA will be back to full health next turn.  There are Chinese and Spanish scouts in our backlines but AI scouts don't do anything from what I can tell.  We're also dancing with our embarked scout in the ocean against a pair of embarked warriors.  I don't think there's anything to worry about there.  There appears to be a Chinese city south of Yerevan which we got eyes on the borders of after I moved the scout this turn (that's the only unit I moved this turn.)

Domestic stuff:

In the north:



Settler disembarks this turn and can settle at the pin next turn.  Liquidity Trap really needs a Builder, so Tradewinds dude should go there when he's finished in 3t.  I'd probably build another right after.  Common Market finishes a Trader next turn, I'd probably bang out an Arena for the Amenity.  Columbian Exchange's Market is far from an essential build but it was relatively cheap so there it is.  

Centrally:



Silk Road finishes the Colosseum in 2t.  I'd do Granary then Factory the Ruhr after that.  The little guys around Silk Road all need to grow.  Beyond Builders they need to start dropping their districts. Ruhr will obviously help with that.  

South:



These guys are really nowhere yet.  They all need builders and are plugging away on their Granaries except for East India which finishes its Granary next turn.  It should get its factory up right after to help those little guys in the south get established.  The Settler is moving towards that last pin down there.  I suspect Preslav will clear that camp by the time we get there but I should have moved the Horsie in that direction a little sooner.  My bad.  FWIW, everytime I look at Laissez-Faire Forever I want to rename it Workers of the World, Unite.  Fuck Capitalism.

West:



BP needs to grow.  It needs food which we really can't do for it but after this Knight, I would definitely just focus on selfish infrastructure projects.  Petra is so great.  Market Peak is pretty decent as well for a new site.  Hudson's Bay definitely wants Colosseum completed and needs its Lighthouse as well.  It will blow up once Neighborhoods are unlocked.  Cultural expansion is pretty slow in the pastureless areas, I would probably plump for Monuments over here where we don't have them as well as at least one Theatre District - we are going to swap out of Meritocracy eventually which is responsible for a significant portion of our cultural generation.  This is probably one of the few games where we'll actually want to get to one of the last government types relatively quickly, the benefits of being able to run more policy cards greatly exceed what we're going to get from two trade routes and the gold buy discount, IMO.  Democracy is probably the winner due to card spread but Communism is certainly worth some discussion.  

Civics discussion:



We're setup pretty well to get the 4 middle key civics soon.  We're about 30t from grabbing the next Great Merchant.  We could accelerate this by building more Markets and Banks, but probably not enough to boost Enlightenment and Mercantalism.  After these 4 I would head for Urbanization for Neighborhoods and then push towards Suffrage or Class Struggle for the 8 slot government.

Tech discussion:



Banking is in next turn.  I don't know if we have a spot eligible for Great Zimbabwe but if we do and a build queue, its surprisingly good.  Anyway, we have boosts for all the crummy military policies we have that aren't shown in this spot and could be cleared in about 8t.  I would probably aim to get Printing, Astronomy and Economics for Forbidden City, Potala Palace and Big Ben with the 3 free policy spots before buzzing to Electricity and starting the Space Race in earnest.  With a large empire, the policy cards are the biggest boosts to yields and they're only going to get better as the game goes on.  I'm far from an expert of course.

General thoughts:

We zipped ahead of Pericles on my set and now have the most techs researched.  We are a distant second in culture generation and third in military strength.  I think we're in pretty good shape but I don't think we're on pace for a particularly fast finish.  I'd guess something like 110t to win from here.  But maybe I'm underestimating the snowball potential.  Ruined Everything put me in a decent spot and I just basically kept moving things along.  We settle the last two cities during REM's set.  Key civil policies come in over the next two sets.  Then its just a matter of getting the tiles improved and slamming all the districts and buildings and going from here.

T140 SAVE

[Gaspar]

Gaspar -- Just played
>> ReallyEvilMuffin - UP NOW <<
Sareln - on deck
Pindicator
Ruined Everything