[Spoilers] The games they are a changin' - Ichabod Civ 6 PBEM 3 as England

[Ichabod]

Played 2 more turns, basically exploring the surrounding land. We start to see some potential city sites.



1W of the deer is a good production, low builder requirement spot (it gets 7 prod at size 2, working deer and copper). Housing is a problem, short term and long term, being a coastal spot, with likely no aqueduct possibility. But tile wise, it's really good. The luxuries avaiable, as usual, are on the third ring.



The only 2 green water spots are on the tile the Geneva warrior is standing and the wheat tile (so there's likely a river in that direction). The Geneva Warrior tile could be a good stepping stone spot to conquer Yerevan, it has fresh water and it's on a plains hill. Tile wise, though, it suffers a bit. And no food in sight, right now.

Man, those marble placements are really playing with us. Those are very good tiles, but they are always so far away!



Domestically, I bought the stone tile and we are about to finish AH and Code of Laws. I'm thinking of going for the +XP for scouts right now, to see if we can upgrade our scout to one of the terrain promotions.

[pindicator]

+XP card is the greedy one. Once you see a barb I'd switch over to discipline as we're going to be light on units until the first settler is out. (EDIT: Craftsmanship civic is estimated complete on turn 22 or 23. Builder won't get 3 tiles improved until t22.)

Speaking of which, where's all of our freshwater at?

[Ichabod]

Two more turns.



I went with the greedy option, trying to get that sweet scout promotion. Not exactly sure what gives scouts XP, I'm guessing tribal villages and Natural Wonders. It's a long shot, but there you go.

The city sites options are getting better the more we explore. We found water to the west:



Here I consider settling on the marsh. Any more to the south, we'd need to buy a lot of tiles to make the city decent, which is a no/no when you consider that we'll spend a lot of gold on tile buying in the Capital.



To the northeast, the bananas make the city on fresh water way better. We can grow it without needing buider turns. That plant is a little light on the hills, but there are some on second, third ring. This seems like the best plant if we go for the plan to attack Yerevan. It's very close to the target, so any produced units would be right there for the battle.



The tile picker continues to be indecisive. It began highlighting the 1/3 tile, but it changed the following turn. I don't think I mind, since the current tile gives us an opening to buy the wheat and improve it with the builder, as a tentative third improved tile (or we can just improve a mine, to get the 1/3 tile). Either way, I don't think it's a bad result.

[pindicator]

Scouts also get XP for discovering tiles, so that helps gain XP in that capacity as well. I've found the barb defense better in my SP games. Not sure how that plays out in MP.

Nice to finally see some city locations!

If we keep finding locations on tundra i'm going to seriously start wonder amount the pantheon that gives +1 faith to holy sites for neighboring tundra tiles

[pindicator]

So after reading over the post on the tile picker in the civ 6 expanded wiki post, it sounds like the 1/3 tile being taken next is unlikely. I think we still want to improve the copper with the worker, but working a 1fd 2cog 2gold tile isn't that bad.

It also means I was wrong earlier and we definitely should have bought the 1/3 hill instead on the stone. Sorry about that

[Ichabod]

So after reading over the post on the tile picker in the civ 6 expanded wiki post, it sounds like the 1/3 tile being taken next is unlikely. I think we still want to improve the copper with the worker, but working a 1fd 2cog 2gold tile isn't that bad.

It also means I was wrong earlier and we definitely should have bought the 1/3 hill instead on the stone.  Sorry about that

The 1/3 tile was picked.   I gave up on trying to understand that thing.

Sorry for not reporting lately. I had a very important work case this wednesday, and I'm still exhausted because of it. I'm just not in the mood to think and write about the game.

I chose God of the Forge as the pantheon, again, because I just couldn't make myself think for too long about it.

Next week it'll be back to normal.

[Ichabod]

By the way, I had a dream this night that Mackoti was our eastern neighbour in the game. He was boxed in and we were his only avenue of expansion. 

[Ichabod]

So, quite a lot to cover in the past turns.

Our scout met Kaiser coming from the east (also worth noticing the barb camp, which will give us some inspirations in the future). I was just about to backtrack with the scout to explore the west, because the east was looking to be be a coastal dead end, but it just so happens that the terrain is a bit weird there. Kaiser looks to have first met 3 CSs (science, culture and faith) and 2 other players, so I decided to keep going east to find all this. The first thing we found, though, was the crater lake natural wonder, which was enough to promote our scout. The crater lake was the water giving full housing to the wheat tile, and it seems to be a very important early settle for us, since it also gets horses.







Crater lake gives no food, so the yields are not that good. But a city there gets horses, wheat, future harbour, full housing. Everything we need. Also, since Kaiser is east of us and he met 2 other players, I'm confident our west is backfill. This means we need to forward settle to the east and do it as fast as possible.

Based on this info, I decided to use our third builder charge for a forest chop. Considering we won't be getting the Craftsmanship Inspiration by doing this and that a new builder will take a long time, I decided to full research Craftsmanship, to open up the civics it gives, specially agoge. More early hammers are better than more early culture, I think, and a chop to speed things up is better than just improving a tile in the Capital that we won't work for a long time.

So, I put the slinger on hold after almost building it and started a settler. The settler will finish almost together with Craftsmanship, when we'll switch into Agoge. After that, the chop will come into the slinger, which will give a 75% boosted chop overlfow to our next build, which can be either another settler or a district (for the Eureka). I'm leaning towards another settler, since the banana spot and the horse spot are pretty strong without builder labour.




Our scout kept going and we caught a lucky break. We found 2 more CSs, scientific Stockholm and cultural Kumasi. Kaiser met both first, but the lucky break was Kumasi's quest, which is to get the Inspiration for Foreign Trade (Stockholm is get a Great Writer, so I consider just declaring on them to void that quest, we'll never reach it). Considering the east seems to be where every other player is, I'm positive we'll get that inspiration soon enough, which will greatly help the culture situation. I promoted the scout to wood movement with the last movement point, so he can get there faster.




Meanwhile, Kaiser reached our borders and, due to some weedy movement on my part, he could pillage our Pasture. I think he really considered it, but decided to not do it. I was pleased with that, so I sent him a gift of 5 gold, as a token of appreciation. He could have pillaged the tile regardless of what I did with the warrior, what my weedy movement did was make me not able to attack him after the pillaging. Actually, he can still pillage the tile, but I don't think he will.




The east has a very narrow settling pattern, but pretty good, I think. I have to say that conquering Geneva and Kumasi is looking like a great option. We have boosted early military production, and the Civ AI sucks. People won't be going for Masonry soon, so CSs won't have walls soon too. Considering all this, we could make an army capable of conquering 3 CSs very early, which would catapult us to a very strong position. I have to say I'm leaning torwards that option.




Even Stockholm could be within our grasp.




About the forest chopping plan, it's either a settler or a district for the overflow. The problem with the district is that it'd have to go on the copper tile, because we can't afford the other 3 adjacency one. By the way, I decided to go Campus as the district option (so Writing before the Holy Site tech), because I can't see religion working for us in this game. Too much competition, to little gains with low amounts of avaiable faith. Still time to change our mind on it, though.

Anyway, the problem with using that copper is that we'd lose the avaiability of the Wheel Eureka, so we could end up delaying the tech for Heavy Chariots, that would help in the attack plan.

All things considered, I think the early district won't really payoff. The main benefit is the Inspiration it would give, that would speed up PP, for the new government. It's a complex scenario, overall. Pretty interesting.

That's basically what happened in the past few turns. Hopefully we can get a new continent soon to get the free culture from the Kumasi quest envoy. We also need to decide if we want to settle horses or the banana site first. Banana is faster in the yield returns, while horses is more important strategically, though I don't think Kaiser can compete with that spot. Settling bananas and start on the warriros, archers needed to take Yerevan seems pretty interesting. We'd be pretty fast to 4 cities.

[pindicator]

I agree with the settler priorities: banana first, crater lake second. I'm good with another settler before the district. In fact, I'd forcus on getting an army out to take Yerevan before the district. Which means we should get some slingers out towards that barb camp so we can trigger the Archery eureka, then upgrade those for the assault on Yerevan. That would get us to 4 cities, hopefully some time around turn 40.

You could consider buying the tile beside the Copper and chop that forest. How much would that cost? I imagine 55g at the most. But we will want 90g for archer upgrades (at least), so it might not be worth it.

[Ichabod]

I like the idea of buying the forest tundra to chop. It costs just 55g and it opens up the tile for our Campus (even if we just place it to stop the cost from improving), which save us the copper for The Wheel Eureka and later harvesting. We don't need to gold upgrade all our archers, we can slow build them too. Slinger is 35h, archer 50h. We have 75% bonus on both, so it's not that much in actual hammer cost.

I'm considering going straight for archery after Writing, even if we don't get the Eureka. We have good science production with the free envoy and I don't think getting fixated on the Eureka is worth delaying our more important objectives. It's a matter of timing.





My other screenshot didn't work, but a barb scout messed the movement of our own scout in the east. No second continent yet, which is a shame. Hopefully Kaiser is on a different continent, so when we conquer him, we'll get free units.