Civ6 PBEM: Sullla of Rome

[fahbs]

Fahbs: I'd better do a good job in this game because I inevitably always give away all my tips and tricks by posting so much. That's what happened in Civ4: Speaker and I kind of wrote the book on how to play Civ4 MP here at Realms Beyond, and then everyone else learned and used it against us over and over again. But it was all part of the fun, and that's the whole point of these games.

I've just read a lot of your old Civ 4 reports where you and your Realms Beyond team crushed everyone despite ridiculous odds stacked against them. The biggest were the ones where you were India and basically every other team in the game declared war on you at once due to your reputation, and then the one where the incompetent map maker stuck you with terrible starting resources (while one team on the other continent got like 6 starting gold resources on flood plains O_O).

It makes me dread facing you/RB on equal footing. And I can't imagine the pain you're going to bring these poor guys in this game playing as overpowered Rome

(I feel like Rome could have one of their bonuses completely removed and still easily be an above average Civ, like do they really need the road+trading bonus on top of the crazy legion/monument/bath bonus?)

[T-hawk]

Brian: Did you invoke HinBudJew the Magnificent?

Totally sidetracking the discussion, but man, HinBudJew set back the community's strategic understanding of Civ 4 by years.  You had thousands of people chasing that religious hydra because you did it in that first widely publicized game, even though that really isn't good strategic play.  More than one religion doesn't really do anything in Civ 4; people like to think about big shrine income but the missionaries to spread it are a poor hammer investment.  It took everyone years to realize the best approach in high-level play is to put your resources elsewhere and piggyback off whatever AI religion comes to you, since then you'll have diplomatic friends and they'll often do the work of spreading it for you.

[kjn]

I pasted in the production bonus from the forest chop at the bottom of the screenshot. It says that a forest chop is worth 54 production, which gets doubled to 108 production, then that gets added to the 79/80 production currently invested into the city walls. Aquileia ends up with 187/80 production, which instantly finishes the walls and then overflows 107 production into the next build:

So overflow isn't capped like it is in Civ 4 (to the hammer cost of the item being finished), and any multiplicative production bonus isn't compensated for either? So what happens if you put a chop and production into a wall with a 100% bonus that's overflowed to a warrior with a 50% bonus? Do you manage to get (107 + production) * 1.5, minus the cost of the warrior as overflow into something on the third turn?

No way that can't be abused, and it certainly won't speak well of their testing or balancing.

[shinghand]

Brian: Did you invoke HinBudJew the Magnificent?

Totally sidetracking the discussion, but man, HinBudJew set back the community's strategic understanding of Civ 4 by years.  You had thousands of people chasing that religious hydra because you did it in that first widely publicized game, even though that really isn't good strategic play.  More than one religion doesn't really do anything in Civ 4; people like to think about big shrine income but the missionaries to spread it are a poor hammer investment.  It took everyone years to realize the best approach in high-level play is to put your resources elsewhere and piggyback off whatever AI religion comes to you, since then you'll have diplomatic friends and they'll often do the work of spreading it for you.

Yeah, I remember that happening. I started playing Civ 4 in 2011 after Civ 5 came out, so by then it was known that founding a religion wasn't super important, but that SG thread had just  about 1 in every 3 people asking if religion was balanced, whether it was absolutely necessary to land a religion at the beginning of the game. Kind of amusing in hindsight.

Strange how Civ 4 was so popular here when it was first released whereas now people are so much more cautious about Civ 6.

[antisocialmunky]

I think the solution is that there's a civ in between the 2 you mentioned, shinghand.

@Sullla what do you think about the housing/amenities system compared to the simpler hard cap based on happiness and soft cap based on health from Civ4? For me, I don't really like stacked percentage based penalties because there's always math ambiguities (oxymoron I know, the the idea is that the extra math makes things unclear) as opposed to working arithmetic ones.

[T-hawk]

So overflow isn't capped like it is in Civ 4 (to the hammer cost of the item being finished), and any multiplicative production bonus isn't compensated for either? So what happens if you put a chop and production into a wall with a 100% bonus that's overflowed to a warrior with a 50% bonus? Do you manage to get (107 + production) * 1.5, minus the cost of the warrior as overflow into something on the third turn?

Civ 5 doesn't multiply overflow by the production modifier for the next item. I remember seeing something around here that demonstrated that Civ 6 doesn't either.

If it did, Agoge would go infinite by multiplying with itself. Overflow 80 hammers somehow, which multiplies to 120, build a warrior for 40, overflow 80 hammers to do it again infinitely.

[Sullla]

Hey, we were playing the deep con game in RB1 Succession Game. The DEEP con game. By making so much of the online community think that multiple early game religions were an amazing stroke of genius, we fooled the Templars into following that disastrous opening setup three years later, thus paving the route to success in the Apolyton Demogame! It was all part of the Pink Dot master plan!

More seriously though, Cuban Isolationists was never intended to be a ruthlessly optimized series of opening moves. It was a variant lark that Sirian and I set up to showcase what was possible with Civ4, specifically involving religion because that was the game's biggest selling point on release. For that matter, we didn't know ourselves what the best moves were in the early days of Civ4. The game had been in constant flux during the pre-release period, and many of the tactics that worked well in earlier versions of the game no longer applied when the thing finally shipped. The civics in particular changed again and again and again throughout the testing period. Slavery civic didn't work anything like it does now back then; it was widely viewed as useless for most of the pre-release period, and it wasn't until the last few weeks before going gold that Soren tried out some different mechanics and we ended up with what we have now. Oh sure, in retrospect it's obvious that growth-oriented openings come out stronger than fooling around with religions and wonders and all that jazz, but that wasn't nearly as apparent when the game was still in major flux.

And Civ4 was pretty rough in some ways at release. Remember how I promised earlier in the thread to post a picture of the initial Demographics screen? Here's what that looked like at release:



Yeah, not quite so much polish for even our beloved Civ4 when it first came out. And there were the balance issues too, like horses visible from the start of the game (not at Animal Husbandry tech), allowing the "settle on horses and rush with chariots immediately" tactic, stuff like that. Axes had no chariot counters until the Warlords expansion released - only axes countered axes in the early game. Anyway, I could go on, but you get the idea. As much as I love Civ4, I want us to keep in mind that it had its share of issues too, and it didn't release to the public in its fully patched state.

Kjn: T-Hawk has correctly answered your question about production overflow, since it appears to work the same way in Civ5 and Civ6. I'll add a few more details and see if I can help explain as well. In Civ4, the modifiers for overflow are tracked based on what you are building. If you chop a bunch of forests into a wonder with stone/marble in play, you get +100% production on the chop's shields, and if you overflow into a non-wonder, those shields are divided back out by 100% again. The overflow then takes the production modifier of the new thing being built, after losing the initial +100%. Each build item is tracked separately.

Civ5/Civ6 doesn't work that way. Production modifiers are tracked only at the moment that they are in use. In the example from the current turn, I was building city walls with +100% production in play, so the forest chop received the full +100% bonus and I ended up with 107 production overflow. That's how many shields I received in overflow - full stop. It doesn't matter at all what the next build will be, I will overflow exactly 107 production. If I were to start building a settler next with +50% production, the modifier would only apply to the production applied on the new turn; it would not affect the overflow at all. Let me try to use some numbers for a contrasting example between the two games. Imagine I have the same scenario: 10 base production, 50 production from a forest chop, and +100% production into first city walls (100 production cost) and then +50% production into a settler (also 100 production cost).

Civ4
Turn 1: 20/100 production (natural 10 production, doubled with +100%)
Turn 2: 140/100 production (natural 10 production and 50 forest chop, both doubled with +100%)
Turn 3: 20 production overflow (40 divided by 100%) -> 45/100 production ((20 overflow + 10 base) * 1.5)

Civ5/Civ6
Turn 1: 20/100 production (natural 10 production, doubled with +100%)
Turn 2: 140/100 production (natural 10 production and 50 forest chop, both doubled with +100%)
Turn 3: 40 production overflow (40 with no division) -> 55/100 production (40 overflow + (10 base * 1.5))

I don't know if that helps at all, but I think the math works out.

Antisocialmunky: I'm OK with the amenities/housing mechanics in Civ6. I don't know that they're necessarily better or worse than Civ4's mechanics, mostly just functioning in a different way. In practice, the unhappiness doesn't matter all that much. Losing -5% to your yields isn't the end of the world, although obviously having +5% is much better. I think the more significant effect of unhappiness/happiness status is the effect on city growth, since it's -10%/+10% there, and that's a fairly dramatic swing. But happiness is still a relatively small part of the system. Housing is much, much more crucial because once your cities hit the housing caps, they pretty much stop growing. I always find myself needing housing much more than I need happiness in Civ6. As a brake on expansion, the combination of needing to settle for housing in the early game plus the scaling cost of settlers works reasonably well in practice. The one place it falls apart is military conquest, since that allows the player to bypass all the intended tradeoffs and simply get everything. In Multiplayer though, that should be self-correcting, as you're simply not going to get cities easily against anyone who knows what they're doing.

Overall, it's a little bit wonky as a system but I think it's pretty decent in practice. Speaking only for myself, the happiness/health and expansion systems always made intuitive sense to me in Civ6 in a way that the global happiness setup never did in Civ5. At least, once I understood how housing and amenities actually worked, which are horribly documented in-game. For a game with this much money behind it, I still can't get over how bad of a job they did on the interface. Sheesh!

It doesn't look like we're getting another turn in tonight, so thanks for the lively discussion in the thread.

[Tyrmith]

Since you were talking about demographics screen - how much knowledge do you think is too much knowledge? I understand that being able to read and calculate helpful game knowledge from the demographics is good in separating differentiating players by skill (or I guess by laziness :P), but do you think that it can reduce too much the strategies you have to play against? You right now have a pretty nailed down view of what everyone's strength is. If you were more uncertainty don't you think the choices you have to make would have to be made more carefully and thoughtfully? I feel in someways it's essentially a fog of war on the map, that you can lift if you happen to know the obscure formula's and leave, at least in the early game, everything out in the open.

[kjn]

Good that the overflow system isn't insane, then. I think it can be more readily abused than the Civ 4 one, and that the pressure to micro it will be higher, but also that the effort to micro it will be lower.

[Rowain]

... but also that the effort to micro it will be lower.

Which was a major design-point in civ5 and 6.

This system allows to get huge overflow into things you don't have a bonus for (example districts).