Singaboy and Sullla's team thread

[Sullla]

Hmmm, is it worth it to have China finish Military Science on the off chance that we'll get a doable quest at Nan Madol? I think the answer to that depends on whether or not Singaboy expects to faith-purchase any more horsemen. What do you think, Singaboy? If you think you have enough, then we may as well finish Military Science, roll the dice, and see if we get a doable quest. If you think that we're going to faith-purchase any more horses though, then it's definitely not worth the low chance of having a doable envoy quest. One thing to point out is that we aren't that far away from being able to merge units together into corps and armies. (We should be extremely close if only Nationalism wasn't bugged.) The point there is that we could potentially merge two horses together into a horse corps, and then upgrade the combined unit into a cavalry corps to save money. Then again, we definitely won't reach Mobilization civic by Turn 146 so this is probably all theorycrafting to no real purpose.

Woden reaching the Industrial age isn't all that surprising. I'm confident that he picked up Ballistics as his Industrial era tech so that he can upgrade his crossbows into field cannons. Nubia's army was heavy on crossbows and knights, and we can expect to be up against field cannons and knights when we face off against them. That was all to be expected - I was certain that they would have field cannons by the time that we fought them. However, if Woden does have Ballistics tech now, that also means that he can't build crossbows any longer, and he definitely hasn't reached Nationalism civic yet for the policy that grants +50% production on field cannon production. We just need to kill his current force with an army of cavalry, muskets, and our own field cannons, with naval support from Rome.

That's pretty much it for easy military tech on Nubia's part, however. They need to go through Siege Tactics (which they almost certain didn't get the boost for), Military Science, and then Rifling to reach Steel, and it will be an unboosted 1140 beaker cost if they don't detour up to Industrialization + Steam Power at the top of the tree. With Woden only making 90 beakers/turn right now (and Chevalier down at 71 beakers/turn), it's going to take them a long time to reach the next generation of military tech. They will have field cannons and maybe cavalry but nothing further. Singaboy, we might want to adopt Logistics policy for +1 movement on our units to counter Woden's Great Generals. Obviously there's a lot of time yet to go before Turn 146.

Singaboy, it's up to you if you want to upgrade a few horses into cavs in the next few turns. I think that I can get you another civics swap sometime in the Turn 140-145 range from finishing Natural History civic. Between the borders of Napoli and Acre, there should be enough space to upgrade all your units. Also, since Nubia and England play before China, we likely need you to start the initial turn of the war on the defensive so that they can't get in the first strike for free. I'm probably leaning towards holding off upgrading at the moment; maybe one token unit so that your cities all hop up to 52 defensive strength (?)

Mobilization being 1410 culture is indeed brutal. I think we'll get there before the end of the game though; it will probaly be down to roughly 12 turns of research by the time we get there, and I think we can hit the civic around the Turn 165 range. There's a good chance that the game will still be going on then, although I agree that we're getting close to the finish now. If we can capture a bunch of cities from England/Nubia with this war declaration, then we'd just have to get in one good strike on Russia/Germany and they might be willing to call the game. For that matter, if we absorb the remaining Khmer cities and start carving into England's core, that might be enough to end things too. I think TheArchduke might be willing to stop if we're both getting close to 20 cities and his team is still sitting at 10 cities apiece.

[Sullla]

So this was a bit different. Today I had the turn waiting for me when I woke up in the morning before work, and I had the choice of either playing the turn at 5:30 AM or holding up the game for the next 14 hours. I was able to play my way through the turn, and this was the pattern that we used for most of the PBEM1 game (when we were doing two turns per day), but I hope that we don't get stuck in this pattern longterm. Anyway, here's what I spotted on Turn 135:



The first thing that I checked was Woden's territory to see if his Industrial era tech turned out to be Industrialization, and what do you know, he did indeed have 1/5 yield on his plains hill mines. That confirms that he did discover Industrialization and that I was incorrect with my guess of Ballistics yesterday. Whoops. I didn't think that he would be heading for the top part of the tree because Woden doesn't have any Industrial districts and therefore had no chance to land the boost for the tech. However, based on the fact that Woden researched Industrialization in 6 turns, it now appears that it was one of the techs boosted by his Great Scientist (Emilie du Chatelet), which awards boosts to three random Renaissance and Industrial era techs. If so, then that was a lucky dice roll for them. Woden's tech rate is still hovering well below ours at 90 beakers/turn, but if he landed some useful boosts he may be able to keep pace, at least in the short run.

Woden has 31 techs discovered to Rome's 34 techs, and Rome has every pre-Industrial tech except Banking and the useless Military Tactics that everyone has surely skipped. This lets us make a decent estimate of what Woden has right now; he must have Square Rigging and Mass Production to have researched Industrialization, so he's probably missing Astronomy, Banking, and Siege Tactics at a guess. I expect him to have Ballistics soon for field cannons (with all of his Encampment districts he can surely manage to come up with a military engineer), but he has a long slog ahead of him to reach ironclads and cavs, at least unless he was lucky enough to roll the boost for Steam Power along with Industrialization. Chevalier is further behind, I believe at only 27 techs and 70 beakers/turn, and it's questionable as to whether he'll be able to reach field cannons in time for the upcoming war. I suspect he'll be focusing on the naval part of the tech tree at the top, so I tend to doubt it. We'll see. If he can't manage to upgrade his crossbows into field cannons our units are going to have a fun romp against them.



I finally founded my "doughnut hole" city this turn at Lucca. It's a pretty crummy spot but it does come with three advantages: a cocoa resource to improve for China, deer and wheat tiles to harvest for districts/population, and another place to build a districts. I'm going to harvest the deer tile (using the standard Limes + city walls combo) and that along with chopping the forest underneath will give me a Commercial district here. The district alone will be worth 9 gold/turn and then I can build another trader for roughly 15 more gold/turn. Food will come from harvesting a wheat tile, and that will be enough to reach 3 or 4 population, which is all that this spot needs. If I can get to 4 population, I can chop out another district here, perhaps an Entertainment district since it will cover 6 different cities. And I naturally get a free monument here by virtue of being Rome. While this city is never going to amount to much, I want to make use of the resources and the forests in this part of my territory. I'd also still like to get one more city down in the Kongo jungles; perhaps I can have an inland city produce that if there's nothing else for it to do.



Trade route time! This trade route at Firenze expired and I ran it to Lisbon for 15 gold/turn. Even better, I'll get a little bit more faith generation in Lisbon and this is a short enough trade route duration ("5 tiles" = 20 turns length) that I'll probably have a chance to reassign this again before the end of the game. Shorter trade routes can often be better than long ones in that respect.



And then Savoia was able to run another route to Lisbon again for 17 gold/turn, as well as another useful road connection along the way. Together these trade routes boosted my income up well above 200 gold/turn; Rome is now the richest country in the world from an income perspective. More than China, more than even Germany and TheArchduke's gazillion Commercial district envoys. Here in the lategame, you really do want to start swapping most of your traders over to a gold focus, at least in a multiplayer game. Arguably even in a Single Player game when playing for Spaceship victories, since the speed of your victory is mostly determined by your ability to patronage Great Scientists. The good news is that I'm running well out in front of what I was expecting in terms of income for upgrades, and with a copper and crabs harvest planned, I'm now thinking that I should be able to upgrade all my quadriremes into battleships along with my crossbows into field cannons, hopefully with a little gold left over for some caravel into ironclad upgrades. Even though it might look like I have tons of money on hand, it will disappear very fast once the upgrades begin - and my income will crater once I convert everything over to Industrial weaponry.

It's pretty much impossible to have too much gold on hand, trust me.



This barb camp is well in hand right now. The musket with Battlecry promotion should be able to one-shot the spear next turn, and either my knight or Singaboy's knight will claim the scout. Potential annoyance averted. Elsewhere in the southern ocean, TheArchduke didn't appear to make a move on the Bandar Brunei city state. I moved some embarked units towards the city state in a bit of a feint, but I'll have to continue moving them back towards the Kongo lands next turn or they won't arrive in time for Turn 146. Just trying to mess with TheArchduke this turn and see if I can potential dissuade him from an attack. I doubt it but hey, why not.



Overview for the turn. I love having a bunch of builders out on the map right now; that's always been one of my favorite things about Civilization games, moving workers/builders around and seeing them physically improve the landscape. Lucca, Ferrara (on the island), and Parma are all getting ready for city wall chops when I swap into Limes policy next turn. My capital needs a bunch of plains hill tiles mined and there are some forests to chop there as well. Elsewhere I'm mostly building universities, at least until I swap back into Press Gangs next turn and go back to building caravels/frigates. I have 3 caravels completing before Steam Power completes and then we'll see how many frigates I can manage to build in the turns leading up to Steel's discovery. (OK, maybe I won't have any leftover funds after all, heh.)

In research terms, science continues the long slog to Steam Power. On the civics sides, Colonialism will finish at the end of this turn and the boost will pass to Singaboy next turn (Turn 136). I'll put the two envoys into Lisbon to take me from 4 envoys to 6 envoys, which will unfortunately knock Singaboy out of suzerain status. One of us will hopefully be able to fulfill a quest there to reach 7 envoys. The next time that I pick up envoys, I'll probably put them into Muscat to reach the 3 envoy bonus there - better to have 3 envoys in Bandar Brunei and Muscat each than 6 envoys in one of them. Safer that way.

The only noteworthy information that I could see in the numbers from other teams is that Chevalier's power went up significantly, from about 900 to 1200, and his gold also went up at the same time. That's pretty unusual, normally when you see a big power increase it's from upgrading units and therefore spending gold. Perhaps he harvested a seafood resource while also having several ships complete via Venetian Arsenal? Thats my best guess. Woden's power has remained static, and his income is still fairly low at only 80 gold/turn. I suspect that he's going to have enough to upgrade his current forces but not enough money to do too much more than that.

11 turns to go until we can declare war.

[Singaboy]

Turn 135:

A very quiet turn. Tianjin finished its library driving science beyond 100. I decided to start a builder there, one can always use those later on. I might swap to frigates when Press Gangs are enabled. All other cities are humming away waiting for the war.
The builders in the north are each left with 2 charges. One will use those to chop the forest at Shanghai and mine the hill. This will be combined with a frigate via Press Gangs to get the maximum benefit.
The other will move south and mine a hill at Kashgar and then improve the dyes at the new city.



In the east, my knight took care of the scout and I got the quadrireme to collect some modest experience of 3. The camp will be history next turn. By the way, further east, my knight has landed on another Island with a camp and will be ready to strike in 2 turns.

I switched from nationalism to civil engineering to be done next turn when I can then complete colonialism a turn after that. I decided to stay on course for industrialization. Due to the slightly increased science output, it will now only take a total of 4 turns for me to get industrialization. 

I am not finishing military science yet in case I decide to draft more horsemen. Next turn, I will enable Press Gangs in place of retainers (bye bye ecstasy). With civil engineering, the very important details is, that instead of serfdom, I can use public works, which will add +30% for builder production. That is crucial for Acre as its builder is at 120/126 and it might shoot up to 120/134 thanks to the other two builder that will finish in two turns. Without the added 30%, this city might end up with no builder a turn later. Thanks to public works, the city will make around 15 hammers which is just enough

By the way, since I have to get rid of one civic card for a turn, I will keep meritocracy and rationalism as both culture and science are now critical. One turn of less faith output won't hurt me though. What hurts is the gpt. I would love to have Rome's output.

[Modo]

First the city growth project, now the builder project...China is the eye in the middle of a brewing tornado

[Singaboy]

One is connected to the other, because some builder has to harvest those resources, remember.

[Modo]

Very true, I was underlying the evolution of this team's composition with China no longer being the only brain and Rome no longer the only muscle. As opposed to the Russia / Germany divergence for example, always nice to have the capability to split focus and refocus as needed.

[Sullla]

We seem to be settling into a new turn pattern where I get the saves very early in the morning. Not a huge fan of that, but here's Turn 136:



Now this was surprising. A barbarian caravel appeared out of the fog and attacked one of my quadriremes. At strength 50 against strength 20, there was a decent chance of killing my unit outright, and it turned out that my ship survived with ONE HEALTH remaining. Not making that up. Thank goodness I didn't lose a future frigate/battleship to something as stupid as this. Anyway, I surrounded the barbarian unit with quadriremes and pelted away at it, knocking it down to about half health. That should stop the barbarian unit from being able to kill anything else on its turn, and I'll finish it off next turn with a caravel of my own moving into position. The Great Scientist super medic will be able to heal the quadrireme limping away with a few health left. I'm going to try to clear the barbarian camp up there in the tundra (probably with that scout that I faith-purchased during my brief stint in Theocracy, heh) and I think there's just enough time left to do that before Turn 146 arrives. Maybe, maybe not. Random barbarian spawns of technologically advanced units can certainly be annoying, and I'm glad that this spot of poor luck narrowly averted a disaster.



TheArchduke is preparing to attack Bandar Brunei, and unfortunately I'm not in a position to challenge him. I had to move these land units back towards the Kongo territory this turn, as they will be needed for our upcoming campaign against Chevalier and Woden. The caravels I did keep in place though; they are faster than the embarked units and they might be able to interfere with the attack. Maybe if TheArchduke really bungles it I could even slip in and capture the place, although TheArchduke is too slick of an operator to give me much chance of that. I'll settle for holding position here and making it a bit tougher for him to shoot at the city state with his frigates.



Here are some of Chevalier's naval units. I haven't seen all that many ships from him, and I'm trying to find the rest of the English navy. He has to have more units stored somewhere than this. England's power has been going up significantly in recent turns, and apparently it hasn't been from upgrades because Chevalier's gold has also been increasing. Is he still mass building quadriremes with the doubled effect of Venetian Arsenal? That would probably be the scariest thing that he could do right now. Our best chance against Chevalier will be to hit him with a tech edge, such as ironclads against caravels or battleships against frigates. We need to knock out at least some of his naval production centers to cut down on the effectiveness of the Venetian Arsenal. Too bad the city holding it (Navarino) is so inaccessible for us. If nothing else, building a ton of ships will cripple Chevalier's income and stop him from being able to mass upgrade them.



The barbarian camp in the south was cleared with this extremely one-sided combat result. Singaboy and I are doing the world a favor by mopping up so many barbarian units right now. (The fact that barbarians keep spawning in the tundra with advanced units is one of the most annoying aspects of Civ6.)



I had one more forest chop to pull off before changing policies this turn, chopping this forest for another builder at Parma. No overflow mechanics to exploit here, just the goal of getting out a second builder before swapping out of Serfdom. The builder in the picture will be chopping the forest on the tile to the east, and then heading west to go build three mines at Ravenna and Savoia on various hill tiles. Gotta get those other two coal resources connected so that Singaboy and I each have two coals. The new builder that just popped out is going to harvest both stone resources and the copper resource, which should be enough along with another forest chop to get at least one and maybe two districts completed. I'll put the initial stone harvest into finishing the city walls, and with Limes bonus that should be worth roughly 260 or so production from the harvest. Then I have another chop and another stone harvest to play around with; perhaps I'll do the second stone harvest with Press Gangs in place for another frigate along with the Bath district and a monument, that would be nice. We'll see, lots of options here.



Finishing the builder at Parma allowed me to drop Serfdom policy for Limes. This will be the last time that I run this policy before it gets obsoleted at Civil Engineering, and I'm only planning on being in this policy for about three more turns. That's enough time to chop out walls at Parma, Napoli, Ferrara, and Lucca and take advantage of lots of production overflow. As soon as those various chops/harvests are finished, I'll finish Civil Engineering (thanks to Singaboy passing me the boost) and then swap back into Press Gangs to continue working on my navy. I will probably also need to drop Conscription for Professional Army, as I don't think there will be time for another policy swap before we have to be in position for warfare. That's a real shame, as I calculated that Conscription is saving me about 40 gold/turn right now, heh. Well I won't be in Professional Army for too long, just long enough to upgrade a ton of units into the next era.

How much longer until we reach those 8 policy governments? I could really use one or two more policy slots right now.



I put the two envoys from Colonialism into Lisbon to bring me up to 6 envoys there. This will cancel out the envoys that I lose in Bandar Brunei when it gets conquered by TheArchduke. Fortunately I'll be able to dump the envoys from Natural History into Muscat (using the 2 for 1 Diplomatic policy) and get back to the 9 total Commercial state envoy level again. Singaboy, hopefully one of us will be able to fulfill a quest for Lisbon soon and get back to suzerain status. I apologize for tying you at 6 envoys and losing you the suzerainship. It might be worthwhile to check and see if you need any resources from me as a result.

By the way, with so many city states getting conquered, Merchant Confederation policy is looking a lot less appealing as an option. Unfortunately, most of the other Diplomatic policies are pretty terrible picks, not even worth the 10 gold/turn that we get from Merchant Confederation. I may think about doing something with spies down the road, and some of the Diplomatic policies help with that. Have to read up on what spies can and can't do somewhere since I don't know that much about them.



This jungle chop at Milano gave me minimal progress towards the university, but more importantly it grew the city another size. That's an underrated aspect of clearing jungle tiles here in the lategame, as cities tend to be maxed out on population or close to it and it's much easier to grow in size via terrain harvesting than it is from natural growth. Arguably, this is a little bit too powerful and it just becomes broken in the expansion with Magnus. With another jungle tile to clear with this builder, I should be able to get Milano up to size 9 and up over 30 production/turn. I'm not exactly sure what to do from there; perhaps another Commercial district project to go along with the one in the capital in pursuit of that tasty Great Merchant worth 500 gold and 2 envoys.



I put the Commercial district project at Roma on hold because there's no pressing need for it right this moment. Instead, I had a better idea. There are still two forests to chop at the capital and I had a brainstorm this morning: what if I turned them into the Terracotta Army wonder? It's not a terribly expensive wonder to build at 400 production cost, and few cities even have the opportunity to build the thing because it requires an Encampment district with a finished barracks/stables. I don't think anyone has built this thing yet in any of our PBEM games and therefore it's probably not on anyone's radar right now. With Limes policy running, I can have the capital build Medieval walls for the next three turns and knock out 210/225 production cost, leaving almost everything else free to be used for overflow purposes. As we just saw, a forest chop with Limes policy is worth 117 * 2 = 234 production, and then I can chop the other forest for another 117 production. That gets the Terracotta Army down to 2-3 turns production time, not much time for anyone to react and steal the thing. I'll check the map again to make sure no one is working on the wonder before I invest any chops, but I think this is likely to be pretty safe, and I can have it finished in about six or seven turns from present... right before we start our war.

Let me refresh everyone's memory about what this wonder does: one free promotion on all military units. Oh yes, that's a tasty deal indeed. Based on my one experience building this wonder in the past, I believe that it simply adds a free promotion to each unit without affecting the experience bar at all. In other words, you get the first promotion immediately and then another promotion at the normal 15 XP; it doesn't raise your units to 15 XP and then leave you to slog to the more expensive second promotion at 45 XP. That's very, very useful indeed if I have the mechanic understood correctly. Every single one of my frigates/battleships would immediately start with Line of Battle (+7 strength versus naval units) and they could quickly go on to Preparatory Fire (+7 strength against land units). Perhaps a small number of them could specialize in Bombardment (+7 strength against district defenses) and Rolling Barrage (+10 strength against district defenses). Give me two battleships with those promotions and they'll be shooting at 87 strength against cities from 3 range away, sheesh.

If you read through the PBEM4 game, you might remember that naval melee ships with the Embolon promotion (+7 melee strength) were vicious killers, and if they were able to get to the second promotion tier for Reinforced Hull (+10 strength against ranged attacks) they become almost unkillable. I think Singaboy still has nightmares about that Embolon/Reinforced Hull ironclad that TheArchduke was fielding as England in that game. On the land side, this of course grants all the melee units another promotion to get the same Battlecry/Tortoise combo going, and Ranged units the Volley/Arrow Storm combo. I have two crossbows that are nearing level 3 promotions, and therefore would need only a tiny bit more experience to hit the level 4 promotion for the ultimate ranged promotion: Expert Marksman (+1 attack per turn if unit has not moved). Anyway, you get the idea. Promotions are very strong in Civ6 and a free promotion on the 40-50 units that Rome has right now would be pretty insane. If we can set up a tech lead *AND* a promotion lead on Rome's units, that could be a game-ending situation for us. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about this idea.



Overview in the north. Lots of university builds in production right now; the four that you see underway here would take me up to about 175 beakers/turn when they all complete.



And the southern part of Roman territory. Singaboy, I will have cocoa connected for you in three turns at Napoli, once I chop the jungle tile with this builder next turn and then move onto the resource to the north. Savoia's archaeological museum looks like it will be arriving at a great time to boost Natural History to completion, I can take advantage of that to swap into Professional Army in seven turns on Turn 143 and then still get my ships into position to attack on Turn 146. The land units are disembarking at Savoia and hurrying back towards the front lines. We'll have to come up with more detailed battle plans in a few turns, but I think the general plan should be to have Rome take the north where the land units can coordinate with Roman ships on the eastern ocean, while China focuses more on the Nubian cities to the south. Obviously this is subject to change depending on what happens over the next ten turns. (Rome also can get the first strike in against England while China can't get the first strike in against Nubia due to turn order.)

Science continues chugging away on Steam Power. Singaboy, let me know whenever you want me to finish Ballistics tech for the boost there. I assume that holding off for now so that you can faith-purchase a few more crossbows works for now. You might also want to start moving those units in the north down to the Napoli region before the roads get too clogged up with the return of my units from the sea. I think three or four more crossbows would be handy for this front to go along with all the horses. In civics research, I'll put one more turn into Civil Engineering and then wait to finish it until I'm ready to swap out of Limes. Research will then go into Natural History as mentioned before.

Rome is also making a cool 230 gold/turn right now, pretty sweet. Trade routes are awesome.



Finally, with the conversion of a few more cities to Marco Polo, we're back to being tops in every world ranking category, along with tops in score. I know that seeing us in first place every turn has an effect on the morale of the other teams; it's mentally exhausting to spend the whole game trying to catch up. Chevalier has posted in his PBEM8 thread about how taxing it's been trying to catch us the whole game, and I'd like to continue to encourage him in that effort. The more that we can make ourselves look certain to win, the more it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as the other teams decide that they're ready to concede. I don't think that we're a shoo-in at all right now, maybe something like 60% odds for us, 25% for Russia/Germany, and 15% for England/Nubia, but we are the favorites for sure. We need to knock out a good portion of England/Nubia's power with this upcoming attack, and then be ready to wheel and confront Russia/Germany when the alliance wears off. The good news is that we can see the location of all their units so there's no chance to surprise us. If they are planning a Turn 161 attack against us, we'll be able to see it and get ready. That's in contrast to our situation right now, where England/Nubia do not have vision on our units. I'm sure that they expect an attack, but they don't know for sure what we have or where we will be striking.

If this goes as planned and we smash into Chevalier's cities on the eastern ocean with a dozen Terracotta Army-promoted battleships... well, I'm looking forward to reading the reactions after the game is over.

[Singaboy]

That Terracotta wonder is a great idea. Go for it. Having naval units all with at least one promotion would be awesome.

[Modo]

Does Civ6 also have a cap on xp you can earn from barbarians?
I'm assuming TA is viable only in MP games that go long enough for large armies to make use of it so farming xp for lower cost promotions before building the TA to get expensive ones on top of them could be a thing?

EDIT: it seems there is a cap, once a unit is promoted it will only gain 1XP from combat with barbarians...if that's the case it is a limitation but not a hard one especially for a game like this where you had to deal with so many barbs.

Would it be feasible to keep outputs around to farm them?

[rho21]

Once a unit has its first promotion, it gets a flat 1XP from all further barbarian fights. It's 30 more XP to reach the second promotion, so you can't farm effectively. Can be a good proving ground for new troops though, if you have some to spare.