Civ6 PBEM: Sullla of Rome

[T-hawk]

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.

Except your audience didn't perceive it as a variant lark, they took it as the holy gospel of Civ 4 strategy.  "What you could do" got interpreted as "what you should do" and we're still clearing up misconceptions from that hydra twelve years later.  Not your fault for how your audience reacted of course.

Hey, that's actually pretty much how real-life religions get started, right?  Someone writes a new holy text as a variant lark, then somehow piles of people take it seriously.    There was this Hubbard guy...

[T-hawk]

As for the overflow mechanics, Sullla has it right on how it works in each game.

The Civ 4 system is supposed to be simpler in concept. It abstracts away the boundaries between items.  It's meant for you not to have to worry about that.  You can trust that Expansive really makes your granary half cost; all your hammers onto it are multiplied and no other hammers will be.  You can trust that you don't have to chase ways to maximize that multiplier or exploit it onto something else, because none are possible. The fundamental principle is very simple and intuitive: overflow gets your new modifier not the old one. The division is just the mathematical way to get to that principle.

Thing is, intuitive isn't good enough for serious players, who demand to track every single hammer through dozens of turns of production and overflow cycles.  They will run into the rounding artifacts and obscure corner cases, like where overflowing from a forge gets penalized because it gets divided by the forge multiplier that didn't exist last turn when the hammers were produced.  These players need to work through every mathematical step and get confused by it.  Not that dividing overflow by the modifier is hard to understand... it's that people don't want to understand it because they feel they're getting cheated out of overflow they earned and would rather feel rightfully entitled to complain.  I think Civ 4 could have fixed its perception if the UI displayed the overflow after dividing but also after multiplying by the new modifier.  That's what people need to understand to know that the overflow mechanic isn't cheating them.  Of course, we didn't foresee any of this in Civ 4's development and maybe not even by the later expansions.

Civ 5 didn't do that because Shafer and the rest of the development team quite simply didn't understand or care about it.  Civ 6 most likely ported the code without really thinking about it, or if they did they decided it wasn't worth confusing people with a difference from Civ 5.  Civ 6 takes a lot of care to make the player never feel penalized, and the overflow-division mechanic feels penalizing even if it's not mathematically true.

Also, most of what we typically call overflow abuse in Civ 4 is really whip abuse. That's where those corner-case distinctions over rounding and small amounts of hammers blow up into significant leverage, when that determines the size of your next whip. Slavery is really the culprit as to why there's so much angst over the overflow.

[Sullla]

The turn didn't come around to me until this evening. First, I'll try to answer some more of the comments in this thread posted today. Tyrmith: I don't think that the Demographics information here in Civ6 is any more revealing than it is in Civ4. There's certainly more information provided in Civ4, although that information is a bit less straightforward and harder to interpret. For example, Civ4 provides GNP numbers which are highly transient from turn to turn depending on the research percentage in use, known tech bonus, and a half dozen other factors. Civ6 simply provides the beakers/turn and culture/turn rate of all the civs that you have contact with. Similarly, Civ4's military power rating is a composite of unit power rating, population, and certain techs. Civ6 simply adds up the power rating of each unit and displays that score. But Civ4 also provides information on production, health/happiness, trade routes, and a bunch of other stuff not available in Civ6. Furthermore, while you can see the beaker rate and number of techs discovered by your rivals in Civ6, there's no way to see which techs they've researched, or what specifically they have/don't have in their possession.

Long story short, I don't think Civ6 presents any issues here that Civ4 didn't also present. I mean, we could literally track the exact production in every enemy city every turn with the espionage formulas in Civ4. It's hard to think of situation that gets closer to "too much information" than that.

On production overflow: Civ4 definitely has the better mechanic in my opinion. It comes at the expense of being less intuitive and more difficult for new players to understand, much like a lot of the other more complicated mechanics in the game. I agree with T-Hawk that Jon Shafer probably didn't think too hard about this when creating Civ5, and the same math was simply carried over into Civ6. There are a lot of systems like that in Civ5, things that are much more intuitive than Civ4 but don't hold up nearly as well to the scrutiny of expert players. I think we need more experience with Civ6 to get a complete verdict on this, but in a perfect world I would prefer that it also used the Civ4 setup for production overflow. Hey, at least we have overflow though - Civ5 shipped with zero research overflow, remember?

Now let's get to the turn, which was pretty eventful as these things go.



The horseman finished at Aquileia, and I chose to put the remaining overflow into a worker. I probably won't finish that worker until I have Feudalism civic done and can slot in the Serfdom card for +2 builder actions, but we'll see. This is a good opportunity to comment on how the defensive rating for cities work. You may have noticed that the defensive rating for Aquileia suddenly jumped up to 38 this turn, after sitting around 10 or 20 for the game up to this point. That's because city defensive rating is based on the strongest military unit that you've built to date in the game so far. Here's the official formula:

City Defenses

The strength of the city is the strongest unit you've ever built minus 10. Capital gives +3, districts give +2 each. Hills' bonus won't ever show up, but is active when attacking the city - it's the same as with units fighting.

Garrisoning a unit will increase the strength of the city to the strength of the unit, if higher. Thus garrisoning your strongest unit is +10.

Walls shoot with the strength of your strongest ranged units from both the archers and the artillery lines.

Up to this point, my strongest unit has been a warrior (melee strength 20). That means all my cities had the default strength of 10, and if I had a warrior stand inside the city, its defensive strength increased to 20. I have been keeping a warrior outside both of my frontline cities (Arretium and Aquileia) for exactly this reason, to increase the defensive strength if they would come under attack. A city with 20 strength is obviously a lot more sturdy than one with 10 strength. Now that I have a horseman (strength 35), the default city strength is 25. With the horseman standing in the city as in this screenshot, it goes up to 35, and the walls add another +3 defense for the 38 you see here. Once I upgrade a warrior to a legion, I'll have strength 30 everywhere, which is VERY strong for this early in the game. No one will crack my cities without horses and swords, and in pretty decent numbers.

Now you can see why it's so important to have visibility on at least one city of the other players. I can tell instantly what their best unit is even without power tracking in the Demographics. I'll know the instant that teh gets a legion, because his cities will leap up to 30 defensive strength. That's a major reason why I'm trying to move fast here. Even one legion will make a massive difference in attacking his cities. Ummm, don't pass on that knowledge if he doesn't know it yet, ok?



I finished both Iron Working tech and Military Training civic, setting up this policy swap. Agoge is out with no more warriors to train, and I don't need Limes with the city walls done. Maritime Industries is one replacement here for the forest chop going into the galley pair at Hispalis, and I need Conscription to cover at least some of the cost of the units I'll be building/upgrading into. Battering rams and archers cost 1 gold/turn in maintenance, while legions and horseman cost 2 gold/turn each. That will drain my income quickly, probably down to zero without Conscription blocking some of the costs. I will likely be using this policy for quite some time to come. Urban Planning stays because it's so useful everywhere, and I felt that I needed to run Caravansaries even with only the one trade route to pull in 2 additional gold/turn for upgrades. I really wanted Veterancy for the capital's upcoming barracks build, but I needed the extra gold income more.

So now with that policy swap done, it's time to chop the forest on the spices at Hispalis and... what the heck?!



Oh you've got to be kidding me! I couldn't chop the forest at this city because there was already a plantation on the tile. This is seriously so dumb I don't even know what to say. I have to remove the plantation first, and THEN I can chop the forest. What a stupid, stupid way to do the programming of the builder improvements here. I'm also only about 80% sure that I can chop the forest at all because there's a resource present, but I think that you can indeed do the forest chop so long as you do it before building the tile improvement. All this is because Ravenna swapped which forest tile it picked up with its culture at the last second possible. I was supposed to chop the forest northeast of the spices and none of this would have been a problem. If only I could tell the darned game while cultural tile I want! Sigh.

This is probably going to delay my attack by one turn, since I had to waste a turn removing the plantation with my builder. (And now I need to burn another builder charge later to re-add that plantation back again! Sheesh.) In a worst case scenario though, I can choose to go harvest the stone if the game won't allow me to chop the forest next turn. I'm pretty confident that it will, but I do have that as a backup in my pocket. And I'll have enough beakers to insta-complete Shipbuilding tech once the boost hits without having to wait for the end of a turn to arrive, so I can still embark starting on Turn 70 even in the worst case possible. This is mostly just annoying... although it does guarantee that I'll never forget about how this mechanic works ever again, since it hit at such an important moment here.

Oh, and I also recruited a Great General this turn too.



Boudica is my Great General! I'll take that as a good sign, having a Civ4 leader marshaling my forces. There's the specific bonus: +5 combat strength and +1 movement for all Classical and Medieval units within 2 tiles. Interestingly, this means the bonus does not apply to warriors and archers, which are Ancient era units. However, it definitely does apply to legions and horsemen... and will remain in effect for crossbows and knights later on. Note that the Great General also sees everything within 3 tiles, which is another very nice ability while in enemy territory. After recruiting Boudica, I checked to see what the next Great General would be:



Temujin is the next one up on the docket. I should be the favorite to claim him as well in about 50-60 turns, which is roughly when I'd be ready to go on the offensive again. I'm thinking in very vague terms right now about a legion -> musket upgrade timing attack in the distant future, aided by a pair of Great Generals. By the way, did you know that Great Generals stack in Civ6 if you have units in the appropriate era? Knights and crossbows could potentially get the bonus from both Boudica and Temujin. I would love to introduce some of the other players to 58 strength knights with 6 movement points, backed by crossbows that can move 3 tiles before firing. Now that would be fun.

I also picked up an envoy this turn, which I saved for now since I had no real need to use it. Nothing of note internationally, aside from Yuris spending even more gold on tile purchases. Him and teh must have a contested border somewhere that I can't see.

[Sullla]

One more thing: those of you who have watched my Livestream have probably seen our dog Sidney in the background or on camera at some point. He's going to have a minor surgery tomorrow to remove bone fragments from his doggie elbows, so feel free to wish him good luck.

[Dp101]

I need to watch your livestreams more often if it means seeing that dog.

[gunnerxtr]

Good luck Sidney!!

[shinghand]

I'll know the instant that teh gets a legion, because his cities will leap up to 30 defensive strength. 

I assume you meant TheArchduke? And wow, I would never have noticed that.

On the topic of forests and inefficiency - I noticed that you usually don't chop forests/rainforests out of tiles when you place districts (was watching your American Tourist stream) - do you find that it's not worth it to chop it out or are you just not paying too much attention in SP games? (Edit: I guess my question is more of in general, it is worth delaying placing districts/delaying tile improvements for harvesting forests/marsh/rainforest)

Any updates on TheArchduke's defences? Is his power rising? We haven't really heard much from him in his thread since a week ago... 

How many units do you have now, and how many are you sending off to fight TheArchduke soon? Also wondering how many units you keep around in a SP game in general during peacetime - movement is so slow, I often keep one archer in each city, but that can quickly get expensive.

Sidney looks gorgeous in HD as compared to in your streams - wishing him all the best!

[Ianus]

This seems like a good time for lurkers to say "hello" so Good Luck Sidney!

[AverageBear]

Good luck Sidney!

I normally prefer to read rather than watch (as I read faster than most people can speak) but I do remember seeing him in your streams. Definitely off topic but do dogs like to watch games / TV? I have a (neighbor's) cat who loves watching me play Darkest Dungeon. Probably enjoying all the misery and suffering!

[antisocialmunky]

Get better soon, doggo. :D