Singaboy and Sullla's team thread

[Modo]

Sinagaboy, with the growth this turn and the settler completing next turn could you also keep an eye on the amenities distribution and see if it changes for Shanghai?

[Singaboy]

@Modo,

sure, I will do that. Currently it looks like this:
Hangzhou 3+4 (pop 9)
Quanzhou 3+3 (pop 6)
Shangdu 3+3 (pop 5)
Beijing 0+4 (pop 4)
Shanghai 3+0 (pop 4)

I can't see a clear pattern here. Beijing's 4 come from entertainment district and Colosseum, Hangzhou's 4 is capital + Colosseum. There is some sort of distribution going on, but not entirely smart. I wonder what will happen with a 6th, 7th and 8th city founded which all get +3 from Colosseum.

[Sullla]

Ichabod, suboptimal, and Athmos: thanks for clarifying how that works with production. I honestly had kind of forgotten that I even built the city walls in my city - I had been thinking "forest chop = district" in my head and the city walls kind of dropped out along the way. Those mechanics make perfect sense as you described them.

Now a bunch of stuff related to Singaboy's turn:

* Quangzhou: the city management seems fine here. My one point of caution is that we'll need this city to build a temple soonish to pick up the boost for Divine Right. I know that we still need to go through Civil Service first and there's time to do so, but China and Rome both have strong culture and we'll be knocking out the civics faster than it might seem. Hopefully when Petra finishes Quangzhou will have a lot more production to play around with and the temple will be a short build.

* Hangzhou: yeah, this was the city where I thought a granary purchase might make the most sense, since we have the need to reach size 10 in the near future. It's unfortunately that the settler will knock it back to size 8 for a bit. With a jungle chop though, I agree that Hangzhou should be able to reach size 10 in a relatively fast period of time (seriously 28 food at size 9, that's +10 food/turn with 20% bonus from being Ecstatic = +12 food/turn, sheesh). We also look to have enough gold on hand that the granary purchase should be OK, we just can't be too aggressive with more purchases in upcoming turns.

* Kongo units: your point here is well taken. I also think that Nubia/England are thinking about attacking their team in the near future. I can't see why Nubia would have built three Encampment districts without planning to attack someone, and Khmer (who borders their team) has been running Strategos policy for the last dozen turns. The ideal scenario for us would see Nubia/England attack sometime in the next few turns, they go and rush off to defend their eastern border, and then Rome slides in with little resistance from the west. At the very least, we want to be ready to strike as soon as the Declaration of Friendship wears off.

* I'm amused by the mutual standoff with Germany in the southwest. Remember that Germany has 1 settler out on the map right now and likely moving to this region. Hopefully you can secure the spots you want in this region with the upcoming three Chinese settlers.

* Upcoming research path: when it comes to civics, Rome is going to research Mercenaries next for the unit upgrade policy, then backtrack for Theology to secure the extra envoy (for 6 total) with Lisbon. After those two civics, Rome will pursue some combination of Medieval Faires (I'm trying to get the 4 trade routes set up) and following China on Civil Service and Divine Right. For China, the main two civics that we'll need Singaboy to pick up are Civil Service (via the size 10 capital) and Divine Right (requiring the second temple). I think that Rome wants to spend at least a brief period in Monarchy to line up Limes + Monarchy super forest chops at the three new cities going up in the southeast. It's hard to beat +150% production on those forest chops, that will be worth about 80 base value * 1.5 = 200 production (!) by then. Then on to Exploration and Merchant Republic from there.

For techs, Rome will probably be leading the way on the boosts for the moment since they line up a bit better with my civ. After Machinery, I'm probably going to pick up Mathematics for the +1 water movement bonus, thanks for passing that along to me. (Rome has 7 districts completed but they're all Campus and Commercial districts, heh.) China will also be able to pass along the Celestial Navigation boost when the second seafood resource gets improved at Shanghai and then the tech finished. The next big techs for Rome are Education (with a Great Scientist hoping arriving in about 10 turns to boost it) and Stirrups for knights, with the one issue being a need to build some heavy chariots for upgrading first before obsoleting them with Stirrups. I think every single one of the remaining Medieval and Renaissance tech boosts are doable with some planning. Rome is going to build two Harbors for the Cartography boost and set up an Encampment district for the Armory. Everything else should be pretty easy to do.

One other note here: Divine Right civic obsoletes Manuever, the policy that provides +50% production on Ancient/Classical mounted units (chariots/horses). Neither one of us should grab that civic until we're done building chariots for upgrading. Singaboy, you already have a good number of chariots so this lines up nicely with you researching Divine Right civic first with the double temple boost.

With Friday being my day off, I'm going to put together a strategy post about plans for the potential (likely?) upcoming war with Kongo today. Probably have to wait until after my turn though since I'm next up to play again already.

[BRickAstley]

By the way, in your screenshot, there is no citrus at Lisbon. However, if you look carefully at my screenshots, there is actually a citrus tile there.
As for the finances for Rome's war against Kongo, there is a need for 760 + 260 (ram) gold on T84? If I am calculating correctly, Rome will have 610 gold and China 560 gold. That seems more than sufficient.

When you gain fog-of-war vision on a tile (meeting a city-state or exchanging info on another player's capital), you do not see a resource, only the underlying tile. But you can still see the improvement and the tile-yield with the right filter. Only when one of your units gets actual sight on the time, will the resource be visible.

[Singaboy]

Quick Response:

Quanzhou will build a temple immediately after its current builder. The builder will be done T85, Petra T88. With this, construction of the temple at 120 hammers should speed up a bit. Production will be boosted to about 17 hammers a turn, netting the temple around T95. We need to remember that Quanzhou needs to invest 50 hammers into both Petra and Jebel Barkal to make up for the shortfall for the lack of Corvee.
The question is how fast can Hangzhou grow to pop 10. A jungle chop might be needed to get there. However, this means yet another builder will have to be produced.

Civil Service will cost 275*0.4 = 110, which is really not that much. I will burn through that in 5 turns currently. How on earth is Hangzhou going to grow in such a short while...guess I will have to side track to mercenaries and medieval fairies for a while. By the time , we can research divine right, the temple is surely done.

What about faith production as this will be all important in a potential standoff with Germany/Russia? Currently China makes 44 faith a turn. With two additional wonders (4 faith for Petra, 20 for Jebel Barkal), a temple and wat in Quanzhou (7 faith), it's 75 faith a turn. This will be a great base for theocracy and unit purchases. Of course, I could run Simultaneum to double faith generation of Holy Site buildings. That would be worth 18 faith a turn from Hangzhou and Quanzhou alone. With Shangdu being next in line to build a Holy Site district, shrine and temple + wat, that could add another 18 faith a turn.

[Sullla]

Well, we shall see how things shake out at Hangzhou. I'm hopeful that we can get the city to size 10 without being delayed too long. I think there's enough other things to research while we're waiting to avoid wasting culture for either China or Rome. I'm looking forward to having Meritocracy available from Civil Service, that's one of the best-scaling policies throughout the game. Anyway, on to an early Turn 79:



The barbarian spearman stupidly just stood in place between turns. Seriously, what is wrong with the combat AI in this game?! Anyway, my archer shot and killed the unit with no damage taken. Next up, clearing the (hopefully empty) barbarian camp.



Here's the picture of the front lines in the southeast. I have a lot more to say about this area, which I'm going to break off into a separate strategy post later on. For the moment, I finally noticed that Mpinda is in the process of building city walls, which apparently it's been doing since it was founded on Turn 75. Somehow I missed this before the current turn, I don't know how. Mpinda doesn't have that much production and I don't think it will have the walls done before an attack can be launched. However, best not to take any chances, so we'll make sure that a battering ram is present when (if?) the war starts.

I'm hoping that Japper is letting the quiet turns over here and the building of city walls lure him into a sense of false security. City walls are important to have when defending, but they're something that augments a defense with units, not replaces it. City walls alone will fall very quickly without units to back them up. I'm not exactly sure what Japper's doing over here, he seems to be leaving himself completely open to an attack. Hopefully there aren't a bunch of units just out of view in the fog.



This was annoying. A barbarbian archer blocks the route back home in the deep south, and I had no choice but to run past it with my galley. I stopped on the tile pictured because maybe the barb archer will be too stupid to shoot my galley, although I don't really expect to get that lucky. There's no other way around though, I had to run this gauntlet. (By the way, the barb archer is injured. Does Japper perhaps have a unit down here fighting off the barbs? That would be amazing. More likely, it's units from Seoul though that inflicted this damage.)



Here's the overflow from Venezia's final forest chop last turn displaying the district discounting formula in action. The Commercial district is undiscounted and takes 7 turns while everything else gets the discount and takes 3 turns. The math lines up here exactly as expected according to the formula Cornflakes worked out (and I had a "refresh" on the discounting formula because I finished a civic this turn). To be honest, I would have gone ahead and put this overflow into a district to make use of the discout, except that the district that I wanted wasn't available. I'm planning to put a Harbor district east of Venezia for its second district, largely because I need to build two Harbors for the Cartography boost. (The other Harbor will come from either Firenze or one of the new cities.) Since that option wasn't available, I went ahead and put the overflow into the Bath district, which will get Venezia out of the housing penalty essentially forever. There should still be a little production overflow left over, which I'll use for either a builder or trader, not sure which.



This is the civic swap in action, with the big new policy being Natural Philosophy. It's worth +5 beakers/turn right now, and that's not chump change when my whole civ is only getting about 30 beakers/turn. I will run this for the time being when there's nothing else important to have slotted in. The other change was replacing Limes with Maneuver for the +50% on early Mounted units. I don't expect to get too much use of this right now, but there was nothing else I needed at the moment. Milano will be working on a chariot after it trains its builder to 1 turn away from completion (waiting on the next Serfdom policy swap), and this policy will provide some help there.



The Turn 79 overview picture. I love this image with so many units moving across the map. I think that I can actually found one of my new cities next turn, the one northeast of the truffles. Founding there would allow the settler in the water to move E-E without missing a beat, and that wouldn't cost me any turns towards founding the forwardmost city in the southeast. Hopefully the city founding dates will therefore be Turn 80, Turn 81, and Turn 83.

Firenze grow to size 5 this turn and finished its Bath district. (Sheesh, between the Colossuem and these Bath districts we have a ton of amenities! This will all be super useful when combatting war weariness later.) It's going to get the trader that Ostia is finishing next turn, and produce a builder for one of the new cities in the southeast. The current builder near Roma is moving over to Firenze to mine a pair of hills with its last builder charges. At Roma itself, the Commercial district project scaled up in cost from 112 to 119 production, which delayed completion by a turn. This did not add enough Great Merchant points to let me finish it a turn sooner; I would be 2 points short if I just built the thing to finishing. So the target date is still Turn 82, working on the district this turn and Turn 81, but not on Turn 80 to avoid finishing too soon. There's no sign that TheArchduke is planning his own district project at the moment. Really hoping that he hasn't been watching this too closely. (I already know which tiles I'll claim with the Great Merchant if I can claim it, and it will open up some really abusive chopping/harvesting at Roma. I'll write about it if we do land the Merchant.)

Two items of note internationally: Woden has finished a settler for what will eventually be his sixth city, and TheArchduke finished his first Hansa. Fortunately Germany does not get double Great Engineer points from them, only the half production cost and bonus output. Otherwise nothing too interesting from the other teams. Still wondering: when is someone going to make the first attack? Everyone seems to be all Friendshipped up with one another. If no one else does anything, I guess we'll just have to make the first move.

[Modo]

@Sullla
Nothing unites civs like a common threat, maybe everyone waits for you to make the first move so that they can more easily bring everyone else in the opposite camp. That off course doesn't mean you should not make your move and it's also a matter of Rome being consistent and swiftly take the initiative in your PBEM's

@Singaboy
Thank you, was trying to figure out a relevant test to see how the amenities are distributed and if the Colloseum ones are added after the natural distribution (like Sullla suspects) or before it or in a different way alltogether. If you still have an autosave from before and after the Colloseum completion maybe we can learn more from comparing the amenities distribution at both moments.

[Sullla]

Alright, time for some wartime strategy thinking. I'm going to start at the big picture level and then work down to the more specific level.

How does a team win the game in PBEM7? Let's face it: reaching any of the official victory conditions is extraordinarily unlikely to happen. Spaceship would require finishing the whole tech tree, and that feels very unlikely indeed. Someone will almost certainly get ahead in tech and defeat their rivals before the whole tree is researched. Domination would require taking every capital city, and the losing teams would concede before that happened. Religious would require converting all 8 teams to one religion, and I can't see that happening either with multiple major religions in the game. Russia/Germany would simply concede to our team before China could convert all of their cities, and we'd have to do the conversion by force since they would never let missionaries walk in and convert the cities on their own. Cultural is the only victory condition I could see having a small chance of happening, but even that seems really unlikely. The teams are stacking up a lot of defensive culture from civic boosts, and having 8 teams in the game makes it a lot harder to accumulate tourists. (It requires 1200 tourist points with each civ for each tourist.) And unlike the AI, other players won't just let a team sit around running trade routes and Open Borders to boost their tourist output. Right now, Singaboy has been leading in tourism all game, and he still doesn't have even one tourist yet, 0/18 required to win. I can't see this happening either barring something truly weird happening.

So this game will almost certainly be won through the traditional "gain an overwhelming military/economic position and wait for the other teams to concede" ending. The surest way to reach that point is to attack and eliminate at least one of the contending teams, stealing their land and snowballing into a dominant position. With the scaling cost of settlers, Civ6 is not a game where a team can play peacefully the whole game and expect to win. Defeating your rivals militarily is invariably the way to go.

Fortunately for us, there's one team that's much weaker than the other three, and we have that team sitting on our eastern border. It seems obvious to me that our best chance to get ahead is to attack and overrun the Khmer/Kongo team. This also gives us a chance to extract revenge for the cheating that took place in the early game, which has a real appeal to it. Here's an overview picture of the southeast border region (all these pictures are from last turn FYI):



Mpinda is the key to unlocking the Kongo border region. If that city falls, then units can swing down to the south and cut off The Jungle Book from the rest of Kongo. Seoul is similarly exposed and vulnerable to attack, and the Kongo capital is just out of sight further to the east, with a road running through the jungle for convenient movement. The Jungle Book has a strong defensive location from the north and west, but it's much more easily attacked from the east. Mpinda is the one spot where we would need to break through, and after that everything gets much easier to pull off.

One of the questions I've been asking myself is whether it's a good idea to attack when our Declaration of Friendship wears out, or to wait until later on down the road. I tend to think of this in terms of timing windows. Military action in Civ6 is all about hitting the correct timing window for an attack, when one side has an advantage in units and before the other side has a chance to catch up. If Mpinda builds walls and Japper stuffs it full of crossbows, then there's no realistic chance of breaking through without suffering huge casualties. It will be his own "Bastion" from PBEM6 and we'll be stuck banging our heads against it for a long time. We would potentially have to wait until the next tier of units (muskets and field guns) to be able to go on the offensive.

Obviously that's one possibility. But I think we have a timing window that lines up well with the ending of the Declaration of Friendship here. We'll be hitting two key things at the same time: Machinery for crossbows and Professional Army policy (at Mercenaries) for cheap upgrades. The combination of those two provides an opportunity that will be difficult to impossible for Kongo to match. Japper may be able to get to crossbows in the next 10 turns - maybe - but there's no way he'll be able to get the cheap upgrades. Kongo has 3 Ngao Mbemba swords and 4 archers at the moment; he's also already obsoleted his warriors and will be forced to build more of the expensive swords if he wants to keep adding to his army. By contrast, Rome will be able to hit with 4 legions and 6 crossbows at the instant of attack due to mass upgrading them all once. The real game changing units there are crossbows; if Japper doesn't have crossbows of his own to retaliate, or he has like 1 solitary crossbow as the result of an emergency upgrade, he'll get steamrolled. When people look back at the PBEM1 game, they might think that it was Roman legions that won that game, and they certainly did do their part. But it was crossbows that really did most of the work, especially against teh's Germany. If one side has the next tier of ranged units, it's almost impossible for the other side to fight back effectively.

Long story short: Turn 88 is a good time to hit Kongo because we'll have cheap legion/crossbow upgrades and they lack the same tools.



Here's a closer view of the front lines. I will plant the city of Ravenna on the white dot on Turn 83 if all goes according to plan. Crossbows arrive on the same Turn 83 and Mercenaries civic finishes the following turn on Turn 84. There's just enough time to get the units upgraded and move them into position for a Turn 88 attack plan. Now there are two additional factors that will help an attack be successful:

1) Religion. This will be the first big test of Crusade belief and we have time for Singaboy to spread his religion into Mpinda. I was counting out the movement and there should be enough turns for Singaboy to spread religion in two of the new Roman cities in the southeast with his missionary, then use the last charge to spread religion in Mpinda right before the Declaration of Friendship ends. By using the last charge, Japper will never even see the missionary itself, he'll just have the religion in his new city out of nowhere. He might not even notice. Then we can use a followup missionary to convert the third Roman city and The Jungle Book later, moving that second missionary along the western coast to convert The Jungle Book from the sea. Rome can cover the unit with a galley for complete safety. With luck, Rome can not only hit a timing window but get the +10 strength bonus for attacking too.

2) Trade Route. This was an idea that I had: why not send a trader from the new city of Ravenna over to Mpinda in the last turns before the war starts. It would build a road over the grassland hill tile and open up the chance for a legion to move from the cattle tiles over the hill and then directly next to Mpinda on the first turn of a war, plus let a crossbow move onto the hill and shoot immediately. Here's the tactical diagram of how I would do those moves on the first turn of the war:



I kept this one full size so it could be seen easier. I would have a legion moving next to the city, three more legions in the water ready to land next to the city on the second turn, and then five crossbows in prime position to provide covering fire against any incoming Kongo units. Even better, everything remains out of vision until the turn that the attack gets launched. Tiles within your border see exactly one tile distance, with no additional visibility for hills. (I've always thought this is a bit silly; units and tiles in your borders literally have different vision rules in Civ5/Civ6. It was much more logical in Civ4 where every tile in your borders functioned as though a unit was standing on it for vision.) Anyway, the point is that I can stage everything with no warning unless Japper moves up some of his own units, and he's shown no signs of doing that yet... which he really should have done. I've been playing this like we have a system of peaceful coexistence, with two units on the border for blocking purposes and nothing else visible, but Japper really should be scouting about to make sure I'm not preparing something nasty. Especially since I am.

There's one crucial thing that we need to figure out: the exact moment when the Declaration of Friendship wears off. The past sequence went like this:

Turn 57: Meet Kongo
Turn 58: Offer Declaration of Friendship to Kongo
Turn 59: Message appears stating that Kongo accepted Declaration of Friendship.

Kongo plays before me in turn order, which means that I offered the DoF on Turn 58 and Japper signed his acceptance on Turn 59. Does anyone know the exact turn it will wear off? I need to know the exact turn when I can declare war. My reading of this is that I can declare war on Turn 89, but if that's wrong and it's actually Turn 90, then I really need to know that ASAP for planning purposes. If Singaboy or any of the lurkers know the answer to this, it would be extremely helpful.

I think that covers things for now. As a bonus, here's the district planning for the new Roman cities:

[Modo]

So we know the interface is not reliable and we've seen previous reports of DoF not expiring when expected (or even at all in some cases) so the only reliable source of information on this is past experience (especially Oledavy in PBEM4) but we've also had a new patch in the meantime and we've seen new undocumented changes as a result so I don't think you can take either Turn 89 or 90 for granted.

Given that and the fact you could plan for both and the fact that you can keep your units hidden and the fact that Japper goes before you in turn order...wouldn't be best to have them in place by turn 89? Then you can check at the start of your turn if the DoF expired on the diplo screen and act or wait for the next turn if not.
In case it's Turn 90 and not 89 what are you realistically losing? If Japper doesn't prepare well before that how much more can he do in that extra turn that he wouldn't already do once the attack starts?

[pindicator]

I am really interested in seeing how using Crusade in an aggressive manner like this works.