Singaboy and Sullla's team thread

[Athmos]

(...)

what if I turned them into the Terracotta Army wonder?

(...)

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. 

(...)

You will want to test this. I might be remembering poorly, or the mechanics might have changed, but when I built it it certainly didn't seem to give an extra promotion as advertised, but giving each unit enough XP to reach the next level, which is still very good but not quite as good as what you described.

[heinzelotto]

(dedlurker here) Please correct me if I am mistaken, but doesn't the Terracotta Army only upgrade land units? Anyways, I am enjoying following your team thread very much!

[Singaboy]

Turn 136:

Interesting developments, some good, some bad and some decisions to make here.

First of all, I am greeted by entering a new era via civil engineering. Didn't think of that, sometimes the most obvious stuff slips through my mind, sloppy play really. Anyway, with civil engineering and the industrial age, I get three new quests including the very doable quest for Lisbon. I will surely get the Inspiration for Natural History from Rome sooner or later. More importantly though, I get a new quest for Nan Madol and that quest is pretty doable too. Once ballistics is done, I could get that quest done immediately (Inspiration for Scorched Earth is to have two field cannons, the upgrades of crossbows). That begs the question, should we go for that? Which turn should we enable it? If we know the turn, then Professional Army should be one of the civic cards in my government. More about that later.



I change the civic cards and choose public works, of course. I also test Press Gangs to see its effects. This means in turn no more retainers and no Simultaneum for the time being.

I mentioned some bad news about the turn and it is the fact that battering rams are made obsolete by civil engineering. I simply missed it as the game doesn't mention it in an obvious way. Now, China doesn't have a ram on Nubian soil when the war starts. The good thing here is, that Rome can fire away with frigates and battleships at any coastal installation and walls will be gone in no time. When attacking land locked cities, we will have to rely on those two Roman battering rams. And, no, there is no way to build siege towers and the likes too. Guess, it's all about bombards (useless) and their upgraded units that would have to serve to bring down walls. Or simply the sheer number of field cannons and cavalry. We might have to ensure that each city siege has a Roman battering ram in place. Since the coordination on city attacks has worked very well in the past, I don't see a reason why we would fumble this time.

That said, I followed Sulla's lead and started to pull my units from Pisa southeast. It is up to the Roman navy to defend the coastal towns there. I drafted another crossbow at Acre as we might have to get to ballistics soon.

Acre swapped to the builder and got the missionary to work on the city. Let's hope it will convert the city the following turn to Marco Polo.

The lone knight is reaching the barbarian camp and it has another spear in it. Time to gather experience and maybe get it to the first promotion during this exercise.

In the core, I founded Xiangqi. It is interesting to note that Germany bought quite a few third ring tiles to hem the new city in. Upon founding, this means that the city grabs the bananas in the second ring automatically. I don't mind that. I am working on a monument first as I hope we will reach automatic walls by the time we go to war with Germany. Without Limes, I don't want to waste time to build walls. I rather go for some culture first.

Hangzhou and Shangdu both swap to the builders to be completed next turn. I put three cities on naval units and frankly, I am not impressed at all. I now question the use of Press Gangs at this point in time. It takes both Tianjin and Shanghai 10 turns to finish a frigate and Pagan needs a mind numbing 15 turns.

If we want to pull off the take over of Nan Madol, I might need Professional Army in place any time during the next couple of turns. With the finishing of Colonialism though, I have to make a choice as natural history and nationalism are both quite a few turns away from kicking in. Nationalism still takes at least 7 turns to complete, while natural History would take slightly less than 4 turns (of course it would need the Inspiration too).

So, what I am considering right now is to enable Professional Army next turn with Colonialism in place of Press Gangs. This will give me some flexibility to upgrade units when needed before the war. It would make the sneaky take over of Nan Madol possible if Rome gets the Eureka for Ballistics (I would need one more turn to finish it). I guess it will be a few more turns before Rome is ready for this undertaking. China can easily finish industrialization. Then, I have the flexibility to finish military science, ballistics etc, whichever is the best option at this time.

In other news, the end of retainers dropped all outputs a little. Faith is below 100 due to the fact that Simultaneum is gone. Next turn, I could enable that again or do something different. China needs more gpt to upgrade all those units (still drafting 3-4 crossbows). Next turn, I can start a trade route from the new city, Xiangqi for 12 gpt to Lisbon. The new trade routes will give me more gpt for sure (there is currently room for around 30 gpt with reassigned trade routes). Universities should more than make up for the loss in science from trade routes. What about enabling Colonial Taxes? It gives +25% gold in cities not on your original continent. It happens so, that any city west of Hangzhou is NOT on the same continent. All those cities could give income a nice boost (does the 25% apply to trade routes too?

What do you think Sulla? Some decisions to be made here.

[Singaboy]

*Alternatively to Colonial taxes, I could enable triangular trade for an immediate 24gpt and 6 faith a turn in place of Simultaneum. I feel that currently, gold is more important to China for all the upgrades than faith. The drop in faith is around 30, which is not game breaking. However, to have 8 turns with additional 24gpt could make some difference.

With regards to Terracotta Army, the description doesn't mention only land units and I recall someone using it fr naval units too. I need to check.

[Sullla]

Heinzelotto, first of all thanks for reading along! For the Terracotta Army, I was going off of the in-game description which reads "all current units gain a promotion level." After reading your post I checked the Civ6 Wikipedia, and it states that the Terracotta Army only applies to land units. It's a sad reflection on Civ6's user interface that I have more faith in the third party website than the in-game text descriptions. Sigh. It's still worthwhile to build the wonder if I can add an additional promotion onto all of my 20+ land units though, and we'll get a chance to test the mechanic firsthand. There might have been a stealth buff to Terracotta Army after the Civ6 wiki was written that was never corrected, something like that. Let's test and find out.

Singaboy: that quest from Nan Madol is awesome! Yes, yes, yes! We definitely want to make use of that and set up an attack on Nan Madol as soon as possible. I think we can put it together in the next 5 turns, let me see here. I will need another policy swap to get into Professional Army, and I can do that as soon as my forest chops / stone harvests with Limes policy in place are done. I looked at where my builders are on the map, and I can set things up to complete Civil Engineering at the end of Turn 139, therefore swapping into Professional Army on Turn 140. I can upgrade on Turn 140/141 and probably be in position to attack by Turn 143. I would therefore need China to dump three envoys into Nan Madol on Turn 142, six turns from right now. Let's see if we can set that up together.

How about I propose this: Rome finishes Ballistics tech on the next turn (Turn 137) which will pass the boost to China on Turn 138. Singaboy, you mentioned that even after the boost came in for Ballistics, you would still need one more turn of research to finish the tech, so even Rome completing Ballistics and sending over the boost wouldn't finish the tech for you, and you could complete it at your leisure. I think that you may as well keep faith-purchasing crossbows for the time being at Acre since I think it's going to be almost impossible to have too many field cannons down there. On the policy front, swapping into Professional Army next turn is not a bad idea if you won't be able to change policies again for a while. (Perhaps in retrospect it might have been better to hold Colonialism 1 turn from completion for a little bit to keep a policy swap in your back pocket? Oh well.)

So in summary, Rome to finish Ballistics next turn and pass the boost over on Turn 138, China to faith-purchase crossbows for another few turns and then upgrade some crossbows into field guns by Turn 142. China dumps three more envoys into Nan Madol on Turn 142 and then Rome attacks on Turn 143, with Chevalier's units getting rudely booted out of position just before the main war kicks off. Obviously we call this off if Chevalier puts more envoys into Nan Madol in the intervening turns. What do you think Singaboy?

Other issues:

* How many builders do you have in production at the moment? I think Simultaneum may be more useful to keep running than Public Works. Triangular Trade would also be a nice option since it gives faith as well as gold. I concur that gold/turn income is paramount right now. Up to you of course.

* Battering rams going obsolete on China is definitely annoying. Fortunately Rome has two battering rams, and I'll plan on using one of them at sea and one of them on land. If we can coordinate our attacks, we should be able to use the battering ram to deal with city walls at Woden's cities. With China playing before Rome, we can probably set things up so that China "clears a path" for Rome to move the battering ram next to the city center tile and then pound it with melee attacks. It's annoying but we'll manage.

* Converting Acre to Marco Polo religion would be really nice. Once we do obsolete crossbows by finishing Ballistics tech, I would seriously consider getting some missionaries out of Acre to try and make use of the Crusade bonus in the former Khmer cities. Obviously we need a shrine in Acre as well to purchase missionaries there, so that's a little ways away, but still worth thinking about for the future. A lot of Woden and Chevalier's cities are weakly attached to religion and could be converted rather easily.

* Germany purchasing third ring tiles over by the canal city feels like a waste of money to me. (Very interesting as well how the borders shaped up there; I didn't know that cities were always guaranteed to get 6 tiles upon founding.) Third ring tiles cost about 200 gold each and that could be an upgrade or two of older units. To be fair, it does look like he only purchased one tile, although I don't know what purchasing that tile was really supposed to do. I agree that there's no need to build city walls in the new city, we will definitely both have Steel tech by the time Turn 161 rolls around.

* With regards to your question about Colonial Taxes and income, trade routes technically have their gold yield (and other yields) show up in the origin city of the trade route. As a result, a lot of my cities over in Japper's former territory have huge gold yields right now because they're running trade routes up to Lisbon. Based on where your trade routes are starting from, it may or may not make sense to adopt Colonial Taxes - try checking the gold output of your cities when you scroll through them. I'm glad you mentioned this because I may try to get all of my gold/turn trade routes running off of Japper's continent and see if it's worthwhile to adopt that policy. Probably not right now given everything else that we need to run, but maybe when we reach the 8 policy governments.

I think that covers everything. FYI for Singaboy and everyone else, I will be traveling in Chicago for the next few days on a work trip but I don't expect that to interfere with playing the turns. The turn reports may be a bit shorter though.

[Singaboy]

That sounds like a plan. The beauty is that we both play without England in between. On T142, I will know how many envoys England has in that city. It will be this precise turn, that I am going to upgrade two crossbows into field cannons and potentially drop two more envoys into the city. England wouldn't even know what is happening to them. Hence, it is important to make them feel safe enough to not invest more envoys into the city state for the next 6 turns.

As for civics, I am not planning to run public works beyond this one turn to finish three builders. It would be an utter waste of policies. I am replacing it with triangular trade or colonial taxes. Professional Army will replace Press Gangs which has very limited use for me at this point.

As for my governments, I feel the need to swap to a more modern government soon. Once the current faith has been exhausted by buying 3 more crossbows, it might be a good idea to use faith to purchase apostles. They might be a lot more efficient to rid cities of other religions. Unfortunately, I would need a temple for that. in the meantime, missionaries would be good enough. I am going to purchase another missionary next turn to convert Rome's and China's new cities.

I might even want to swap to merchant republic before any newer government is available. The net effect of 2 additional trade routes can be huge at this moment, something like 30 gpt.

[Athmos]

(dedlurker here) Please correct me if I am mistaken, but doesn't the Terracotta Army only upgrade land units? Anyways, I am enjoying following your team thread very much!

When I used it, it upgraded all military units, including ships. I don't think I ever managed to sandbag it for long enough to try it with planes, but I'm quite sure that ships were ok.

[Modo]

Given how game development works these days I'm not even sure if we should still call Civ6 a new game or not but it becomes apparent that every time Sullla / Singaboy have a question about the mechanics the best we can offer is "you guys better test it out"

[Singaboy]

Unfortunately, the civilopedia, which used to be a gem in Civ 3 and especially Civ 4, is utter crap.

And if the game tells me for example, that certain civics get obsolete with civil engineering, why is there no warning that certain units are obsolete too? Why do we need to guess the effects of wonders? Why did nobody mention that Great People can not be destroyed on the battle field (was for us to figure that out).

Anyway, I worked through my cities and triangular trade is way better than Colonial Taxes. Trade routes with triangular trade will give me 16 gpt if routed to Lisbon. That's 96 gpt with those 6 trade routes currently available to me. With merchant republic's two additional trade routes, I should be able to make up for the increased maintenance for all those upgraded units.

[Kerberos]

(dedlurker here) Please correct me if I am mistaken, but doesn't the Terracotta Army only upgrade land units? Anyways, I am enjoying following your team thread very much!

When I used it, it upgraded all military units, including ships. I don't think I ever managed to sandbag it for long enough to try it with planes, but I'm quite sure that ships were ok.

Same experience here, even spies got the promotion in addition of naval units

Unfortunately, the civilopedia, which used to be a gem in Civ 3 and especially Civ 4, is utter crap.

And if the game tells me for example, that certain civics get obsolete with civil engineering, why is there no warning that certain units are obsolete too? Why do we need to guess the effects of wonders? Why did nobody mention that Great People can not be destroyed on the battle field (was for us to figure that out).

Anyway, I worked through my cities and triangular trade is way better than Colonial Taxes. Trade routes with triangular trade will give me 16 gpt if routed to Lisbon. That's 96 gpt with those 6 trade routes currently available to me. With merchant republic's two additional trade routes, I should be able to make up for the increased maintenance for all those upgraded units.

Civilopedia has gotten better with RnF , but still needs a lot of attention before getting to "Civ4 level"