Civ 6 SG2 - Duty Free Egypt

[Gaspar]

If Pindicator can't play tonight, the out of pocket skip would be to Ruined Everything.

[Gaspar]

I'll assume that's Pindicator needing a skip. Ruined Everything, can you play it or would the team rather take a break for the holiday? I can play but I'd rather not do two skips.

[Ruined Everything]

Got it. I can play in the usual 48 hours.

[Ruined Everything]

Ruined Everything Studios presents a Gaspar™ Production

Marvel at a people sent to sea.

Wonder as an empire is entertained by spammed scout stand-up.

And be touched as legions of free traders discover the magic of communal farming and learn about a curious disease called friendship.

SG 2 - Electric Boogaloo

Coming tonight to a thread near you.

[Ruined Everything]

We join our empire on the horns of a dilemna. Without factory adjacency bonii, how will our poor free traders wring value from the meager lands the gods of Capitalism have given them? The answer: grow. Grow and grow and grow.

In order to grow, we need amentities, housing, and food. Here's how we're going to obtain them.

Amenities
Liberalism: +1 to every city that has at least two districts. That's +1 to Columbia Exchange, Tradewinds, Common Market, NAFTA, Silk Road, OPEC, BP, Hudson, Market Peak and Madrid. East India will join the party on my turnset as well. 
Retainers: Scouts are ridiculously cheap. Like 30 production cheap. And they only cost 1 g/t in upkeep. We can get a flat +1 amenities across all of our cities with Scout Stand-up Spam ™
Zoos: +1 to every city. I took 5 zoos to cover our empire. You could possibly do it in 4, but I'm not convinced that it's possible to get both the south-west and east coast in a single zoo. I'll build the arenas on my turn set and research the tech so that Gaspar can immediately knock out zoos on his.

Housing
Lighthouses: At just 100 production, lighthouses are a cheap +1 housing/+1 food for our bigger cities. I'm going to have every city that can bang one out in 6 turns (basically all of the big cities) do so.
Farms: I suspect the main focus of this turnset will be farm spam. I tried to fully plan farms for our empire, but I ran out of pins. Suffice it to say that I'm going to try and build 3-4 farms for each of our big cities. At +244 g/t we can buy a worker every 2 turns, and with our biggest cities churning out a couple we should have the 8-9 workers required for the project in no time. I'm going to go civil engineering before zoos so that we can start putting the occasional farm on hills.
Neighborhoods: Our eventual long term source of housing. +6 housing is good! We won't get here in my turnset, but we'll get here soon.

Food
Did I mention the farming project? Lots of triangles will be completing all over the empire for mad foodz. Lighthouses + amentities will also give us much needed boosts here and there.

Aright. And with that, let's begin!

T160
We start by buying some silks from Harald, bringing 4 of our biggest cities out of unhappiness. 

Next we grab a great merchant, and pop him to bring Seoul into our Suzenarity. Our tech jumps up a little. We then spend the 200g that the merchant gave us to instant-change policies. Our empire is in a happiness crunch! You can't expect me to wait half my turn set to get out of it! Retainers instantly makes another 3 cities happy. 

Next, we change our tech priorities. We want astronomy now, please. Market Peaks will take a long time to build its university, and gettting the eurkea for colonialism will shave 3 turns off zoos. Tech route: Astronomy -> Gunpowder -> Metal Casting for defense. Civics route: Civil Engineering (farms) -> Colonialism -> Natural History (zoos.)

I change all of our builds to begin scout spam. Here's what that looks like:

T161
After liberalism + Scout Stand-up Spam, our happiness crunch disappears into nowhere. All of our cities have > +1 happiness, most, like Silk Road, are sitting on +2 or +3. Yay for policies!



(Ugh - it occured to me that I should have bought workers last turn so they'd be ready this turn. Oh well.)

I start moving our crossbowmen east in case Tomyris tries anything. I ...uh... also take the liberty of naming a few.



T162
Basically impossible to move with Tomyris's swarms of units in our land. Why did we offer her open borders again? The next great merchant is the Toys merchant! I'm going to queue up a few econ buildings to make sure we get it.

T164
The housing crisis is being solved one farm at a time. Kinda amusing watching our free traders learning to live in kibbutz style farm housing, heh. As our amenity and housing caps dissolve, I begin to switch our cities onto the newly built farms and growth begins to throttle up.

---

T165
We get John Watt, who increases our factory bonii to +5, and builds a factory in NAFTA to supply the East coast.

[Ruined Everything]

T166
I make a slight slip. I should have built Common Market's commerce zone one to the east, so I could fit in Tradewind's commerce zone to the west of it. As it is, Tradewinds commerce zone gets orphaned (because I didn't want to give up a hill tile at one of our best production cities for a +1 gold bonus. Oh well. 

I/T 168
China pops up, and complements us on keeping our people happy. Ha! Some of our cities are on +4 amenities.

T168
Ballistics comes in. I decide to move towards Scientific theory with an eye to the early modern techs.

T170
I just realized that I really should have been microing city tiles as they grew. I've barely touched that screen all turn set. Ugh. I belatedly fix what I can. Here's what our empire looks like.

The North



The North has seen concerted progress. Because of the slow growing nature of Civ 6, most cities have only gained 1-2 pop up here, but don't let that fool you. Columbian was over its housing cap at size 7 when we last saw it. Now it's 1T away (the UI hasn't updated yet) from size 10, and has room to grow. Each city up here has gained +3-4 housing/amenities - I think Common Market is still sitting at +4 amenities.

We do need more worker labor to improve Liquidity Trap and Tradewinds -  buying some tiles for some more farms wouldn't go amiss either. 
Micro note: Gaspar, that scout is going up to ACME for the +1 amenities bonus. 


The East



The East can be divided up into two parts. Silk Road and OPEC are coming along - OPEC needs a little more housing, but otherwise they're fine. Since the next great merchant (toys!) is an important one, I decided to build some great merchant buildings in Silk Road - feel free to switch it back to Ruhr afterwards - or train more workers. The East Coast is in dire condition. The free factory in NAFTA helped a lot (thanks James Watt) but I couldn't really find the time until the end of the turnset to build here. Stupidly, I started NAFTA on a harbor rather than a amenities district for a zoo (I wanted the lighthouse, I guess.) I would either quick grow it or have Hanseatic start on it after its i-zone. It needs some worker love - I would buy a couple.

The South



There wasn't much I could do for the South. East India is working on its zoo, and finished its factory, which will help. I also did a little farming around East India, and Laissez-Faire will appreciate the worker attention. This area needs about 3 more workers - Cobden-Chevalier would like its fish netted and a couple of mines, and BigNLarge really wants that farm triangle.
Micro note: The plan at Laissez-Faire is to chop that forest when the monument is one turn away and let the overflow essentially build its aqueduct. I built the monument as a hammer catcher for that explicit purpose. Try to do this - Laissez-Faire *needs* housing, and slow building that aqueduct will take ages.


The West



Obviously the biggest gains are around Madrid (growing faster than the UI suggests - not updated yet), which is being steadily cut out of the jungle, but we're starting to make progress on Market Peak and Hudson as well. I would actually cancel the uni/harbor in BP/Madrid and build 3 more workers - one for Hudson, one for Zaragoza, and one for Madrid. I have Madrid configured for rapid growth, but as that finishes up I would start chopping and mining hills for it to work.

Save is attached. Good luck, Gaspar!

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Don't worry. It is really awkward to hit each city each turn. The advisors do make some really stupid decisions especially near the housing limit. Looking good!


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[Gaspar]

Well played and great report, Ruined Everything. I see it, I'll play sometime in the next 28 hours or so.

[pindicator]

Thanks for taking the turn when I was doing my holiday visiting. Good job getting things growing!

[Ruined Everything]

Any thoughts on tech path? I went for scientific theory as an open ended tech that accessed most of the 'radio/electricity' group modern era techs, but I don't have a specific goal in mind. Electricity for power plants? Chemistry for research stations? Banking to start work on Big Ben?