[SPOILERS] scooter tries Civ6

[scooter]

Turn 32

It’s a big turn, so let’s use a lot of pictures.





We’ve exited the desert and stumbled upon another fertile but mostly flat river valley. I haven’t taken pictures or mentioned it often, but I have been checking settler view nearly every turn while scouting, but we haven’t so much as sniffed a city border of any kind yet. On to the main event.





DO IT.









We’ve completed Stonehenge. First of a few wonders. This netted us 5 era score, so we’re up to 9.





I transferred our shiny new John the Baptist from Xian to Longxi. We’ll hit 25 faith for our Pantheon in 3T. I assume we’ll get it right away, but I suppose it depends on whether other people hit it on the same turn. Nearly there.





I thought about taking a shot at that warrior from the rice tile which would bring it down to nearly no health, but I elected instead to pull back into the capital and start healing. If he decides to enter our territory next turn, I’ll just hit it then. I started moving our other warrior northwest as planned. I don’t think I need it to hold down the fort here. We picked up the fissure this turn as well. I forgot to check how many turns until our next tile, but I’ll check that next turn. It’s mainly useful for the extra visibility at this point. We could get a decent +3 adjacency campus on that hill between the fissure and the mountain in the future.

[Sullla]

Very nice! The first major goal of any China game is finished, on to the Pyramids next. Now there's one detail that a lot of people don't necessarily know about completing a wonder: the city that finishes a wonder immediately expands borders and grabs two tiles for free. Longxi apparently picked up the other stone tile and one of the two cattle resources. You can actually swap the improved horses resource over to Longxi at this point if you want; no idea if that's worth doing but it is an option. It might be useful to play around with tile swapping and see what makes the most sense between the two cities. At this point, you probably improve one of the stone resources with the last remaining current builder charge (for the Masonry boost), right?

Since you're about to hit 25 faith, it's also worth revisiting pantheon choices again. With a horse and two cattle resources here, I think God of the Open Sky (+1 culture on pastures) makes the most sense as far as snowballing ahead an early game cultural lead. I also like taking that pantheon because it denies something useful to the other three players. If it's gone, other good options could be:

* Earth Goddess (+2 Faith from tiles with Breathtaking Appeal): Could be useful if you have some tiles that qualify. Check the Appeal lens and see if this would do anything? It can be an easy way to generate faith without any investment at all.

* Lady of the Reeds and Marshes (+1 Production from Marsh, Oasis, and Desert Floodplains): My pantheon from Civ6 PBEM1, you actually have a decent number of tiles that would benefit from this. I'd count up the number of tiles that would get the +1 production bonus and see how much it might help.

* Goddess of Festivals (+1 Culture from Plantations): This is OK but I think it's inferior to the three other options mentioned above. You have only two tiles that would benefit, the silks and sugar resources, and it wouldn't do anything until researching Irrigation tech and building the plantations themselves. That's in contrast to God of the Open Sky, which would immediately add culture from the already-existing pasture, plus cows/horses are just more common in general than plantation resources. This is still a solid pantheon but it's a fallback option if better stuff is gone.

Here are pantheons I don't like:

* Fertility Rites (When chosen receive a Builder in your capital. City growth rate is 10% higher.): This is not as good as it sounds. 10% faster growth sucks (housing is what slows growth in Civ6, not food) and so you're basically just getting a single free builder. Even for China there are much better options for a pantheon.

* Monument to the Gods (+15% Production to Ancient and Classical era Wonders): I think this is a trap choice even for China. Your civ constructs wonders with builder charges, not actual wonder production, and that +15% bonus from the pantheon takes you from 15% wonder production per charge all the way up to... 17.25% wonder production per charge. Pretty underwhelming. I'd much rather just get more base production from Lady of the Reeds and Marshes, which helps out in the many cases where you're not building an early game wonder.

* Divine Spark (+1 Great Person Points from Holy Sites (Prophet), Campuses with a Library (Scientist), and Theater Squares with an Amphitheater (Writer)): Terrible. Only good if you need to generate a Great Prophet against the AI in Single Player, and you already have your Prophet. Stay away.

* City Patron Goddess (+25% Production toward districts in cities without a specialty district): Also terrible. Slightly more production on the first district built and exactly nothing else, ever? No way.

Curious what the other Civ6 players in this thread think.

[scooter]

Oh interesting! I honestly did not even notice the two tiles of culture because of how distracted I was by everything else. It appears to be an undocumented feature? I actually did have a passing thought at one point when I had Xian opened and noticed the cattle tile was available to swap, and briefly thought “huh, hadn’t noticed that” before immediately moving on to the thing I was looking at . Interestingly, I reopened the save to count tiles for the Pantheon, and upon rebuilding Stonehenge to replay the turn, it gave me the other cattle tile instead of that one the second time. I guess we got very mildly lucky to get the more useful cattle since it opens up tile swaps. (Also, yes, I definitely plan to use the final charge on a stone quarry to boost Masonry.)

As for Pantheons, I agree with your thoughts broadly. I was especially against Monument to the Gods when I did the math on how little a difference it makes. And as much as I would like the free builder from Fertility Rites, I can’t help but feel similarly about the fact that it’s literally one unit and then otherwise a near-total blank for the entire rest of the game. I’m open to being convinced otherwise if anyone else disagrees, but Sullla’s comments kinda matched where my head has been lately. I went ahead and tallied up the various Pantheons that needed tile counting. Here’s what we have:


God of the Open Sky: We have 3 pasture tiles in our borders, and 5 total visible. This is definitely a strong choice.

Lady of the Reeds and Marshes: We have 1 Marsh in our borders, and 3 total in addition to 2 desert floodplains and an oasis outside of our borders but visible. However, there’s a big catch. 2 of the marshes are under rice, so we would lose them if/when we were to farm the rice. Leaving it as a 4/1 tile isn’t crazy at all I don’t think, but it’s worth noting. Also, the desert floodplains tiles are 1) under wheat and 2) our Pyramids location. So we’re unlikely to get value from either of those. I don’t think this necessarily rules this one out, but it does ding the value of this one a good bit.

Goddess of the Festivals: We have 2 plantation tiles in our borders (Silks and Sugar), and 2 more visible (two silks, far northeast and near southeast). Okay I guess, but I’m a bit underwhelmed because the 2 outside our borders are less likely to be hooked quickly, so this would just be +2 for awhile.

Earth Goddess: Now this one is interesting. It’s easier to discuss with a picture.




(The copper tile out west is also Breathtaking, though a mine would likely nix that)


So we have a lot of Breathtaking tiles here. The catch of course is these are largely on hills, so some mines will kill some of these. That said, a lot of these tiles could hold up if we’re very careful. For example, the 2/2 forested hill 1SE of our Xian Silks is actually 5 appeal, so if, say, we lumber-milled it (no appeal damage) and placed one mine adjacent to it (-1 appeal), this tile would still be breathtaking. With very careful tile improvements, we might be able to get some real value out of this? Any thoughts?

[Banzailizard]

My vote is for Earth Goddess. Open Sky would be second choice.  Why?  You can always generate the same culture as open sky by building a theater square or two if you really need it.  You also plan to take Choral music which will give you plenty of culture. More culture is not bad but 5 is a drop in the bucket and there is an opportunity cost.  Namely that you could instead be collecting faith, which is almost like a source of production, and can be used to grab great people if you see one you really want.

The main use of Open Sky if you take it, is that it boosts you early which is why it might not be a bad backup.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

* Earth Goddess (+2 Faith from tiles with Breathtaking Appeal): Could be useful if you have some tiles that qualify. Check the Appeal lens and see if this would do anything? It can be an easy way to generate faith without any investment at all.

I'm always a big fan of Earth Goddess. I called it a poor man's Goddess of the Harvest, which of course was so good that Firaxis straight removed it from the game (and, uh, replaced it with a pantheon that gives a free settler?! Interesting balance moves going on over there). More faith is always good - it's become kind of a wonder do-it-all currency, able to be converted into anything you like. Military units via Grand Master's Chapel, civilian units via Monumentality, Great People, science and culture buildings via Jesuit Education, city center buildings via Valetta...you won't be able to do ALL these things in any game, but often you'll be able to do many of them. Civs that pursue faith have an advantage over civs that neglect it.

Earth Goddess generates a really nice stream of faith throughout the game - it scales well with population. You lose some as you develop your core mines & chop forests, but at the same time you're growing onto new tiles and settling new cities in virgin lands. Plus, I'm pretty sure Gathering Storm has more appeal generating tiles between reefs, volcanoes, steam vents, etc. I think you can calculate that at any given time you'll be getting about 3 faith for every 4 pop you have, maybe 1 for every 2. 

I used this one in my Arabia game, I can go back through my (admittedly verbose) archives and see how much I ultimately got out of it. But you can never have too much faith. 

* Lady of the Reeds and Marshes (+1 Production from Marsh, Oasis, and Desert Floodplains): My pantheon from Civ6 PBEM1, you actually have a decent number of tiles that would benefit from this. I'd count up the number of tiles that would get the +1 production bonus and see how much it might help. 

Is it only Desert floodplains? If it was any floodplains, I was surprised by how many tiles would qualify - I counted fully 9! If it's limited to desert, this seems like we'd get less long-term utility out of it than we would out of Earth Goddess. My general rule of thumb is to follow the purchasing guidelines of 1:2:4 productiongold. I'd favor EG over this. 

* Goddess of Festivals (+1 Culture from Plantations): This is OK but I think it's inferior to the three other options mentioned above. You have only two tiles that would benefit, the silks and sugar resources, and it wouldn't do anything until researching Irrigation tech and building the plantations themselves. That's in contrast to God of the Open Sky, which would immediately add culture from the already-existing pasture, plus cows/horses are just more common in general than plantation resources. This is still a solid pantheon but it's a fallback option if better stuff is gone. 

It's not as good as GotoS, for sure, especially since we have those cows (and I think pastures are just kind of stronger in general than plantations). But I think it's close - there are 4 qualifying tiles visible, and the map likes to generate similar luxury resources near each other, so there's a decent chance there's more silk or sugar out there. Plus, the jungle belt in the north is likely to hide some bananas, which I believe qualify. That said, I don't like this as much as Earth Goddess - it's just a handful of extra culture that will probably be quickly outpaced by our own Holy Sites. Culture is good to have, but you don't need a lot of it - at least, not at the expense of other currencies. Once you've hit a certain minimum amount to move steadily through the culture tree and reach important civics in good time, I think you're set. There's nothing culture-wise that leads to a game-ending scenario if an opponent gets there first, unlike the science tree with its key military techs. 

Here are pantheons I don't like:

* Fertility Rites (When chosen receive a Builder in your capital. City growth rate is 10% higher.): This is not as good as it sounds. 10% faster growth sucks (housing is what slows growth in Civ6, not food) and so you're basically just getting a single free builder. Even for China there are much better options for a pantheon.  

I haven't done the math here, BUT isn't the real benefit here the early snowball? For most civs, probably not too great - improvements are kind of marginal, after all. But for China, this is basically a free wonder we don't have to spend hardly any production on. Does it change the calculus if this pantheon is a free Temple of Artemis? Or if it lets us get the Pyramids up at city #3 within 6 turns of planting it? Which then snowballs into ANOTHER builder...Like I said, I haven't done the math. And the 10% growth rate is terrible. And we give up hundreds of faith down the road for this, which is kind of the deal-breaker for me. But I don't think a free builder is so easily dismissed.

* Monument to the Gods (+15% Production to Ancient and Classical era Wonders): I think this is a trap choice even for China. Your civ constructs wonders with builder charges, not actual wonder production, and that +15% bonus from the pantheon takes you from 15% wonder production per charge all the way up to... 17.25% wonder production per charge. Pretty underwhelming. I'd much rather just get more base production from Lady of the Reeds and Marshes, which helps out in the many cases where you're not building an early game wonder.

Yeah, I think this comes out even behind the free builder in terms of net builder charges gained. You'd have to build damn near every wonder to come out ahead there, and building every ancient and classical wonder is just dumb. Pass.

* Divine Spark (+1 Great Person Points from Holy Sites (Prophet), Campuses with a Library (Scientist), and Theater Squares with an Amphitheater (Writer)): Terrible. Only good if you need to generate a Great Prophet against the AI in Single Player, and you already have your Prophet. Stay away. 

I've always hated Divine Spark. Agreed.

* City Patron Goddess (+25% Production toward districts in cities without a specialty district): Also terrible. Slightly more production on the first district built and exactly nothing else, ever? No way. 

There are definitely better choices, but since chop overflow was nerfed, this is the only way to gain a boost towards district building at all. I guess the best way to exploit it is to use this to build your lead district in each city, in order to trigger the 40% discount on all the rest? But yeah, really underwhelming compared to Earth Goddess/GotOS/Goddess of Festivals (which is the order I value them in). 

tl;dr: I nitpick some of Sullla's rankings, but on the whole I agree with him on which pantheons are desirable vs. which ones we should skip. None of my nitpicks change the order in any way, other than perhaps ranking Earth Goddess over Open Sky. Either is fine. 

One idle thought: How much faith, maximum, could we net from the desert adjacency for Holy Sites? I don't think enough, since we'd get at most 2 holy sites in the desert there, and it'd need to come out to like +10 faith each to come out ahead of Earth Goddess long-term. But it might be more faith in the short-medium term, again, I haven't done the math. Probably not worth it but I should look at that.

[scooter]

Turn 33

While this Pantheon discussion is ongoing, a quick pause to dump this morning’s turn.





Continued exploring in the southwest. The wounded scout is interesting and suggests he’s run into either another player or a city-state recently. That said, I still don’t see anything with settler view, so I’m not sure where he got hit.





I’m definitely getting tired of barbarians. I hit the warrior from inside our city with the Slinger, but I wasn’t quite able to finish him. Hopefully he suicides into the capital. My hope is once these units are clear I can push my slinger forward and sit on one of these hills south of the rice (maybe the fissure) and defend from there. My plan is to camp the deer first as that’s safe, and I’m hoping I can swing back by and farm the rice for the irrigation eureka, and then once irrigation comes in, improve the silks to raise our amenity cap. Seem sensible?

I got a large point spike thanks to the wonder. I was also the only one to 9 civic points until Alhambram joined me this past turn. TheArchduke and I are behind on tech, but I’m assuming that’s just because both of us detoured to Astrology with (likely) no eurekas. Everything else looks pretty balanced.

[scooter]

For what it's worth, my current leanings are:


1) God of the Open Sky
2) Earth Goddess
3) <everything else>


I think 1 and 2 are close in my mind, and the rest are a bit further behind. I suspect Earth Goddess would be a bit better, but it seems harder to manage (worrying about whether improvements will kill breathtaking status) and slower to benefit us. God of the Open Sky sounds immediately very useful given the state of my tiles and would speed us to crucial early/mid civics, while I think Earth Goddess would kick into gear more in the mid-game. I suspect it would be stronger eventually, but it might be awhile before it is. That said, I'm changing my mind near constantly, so who knows.

[scooter]

Turn 34

Pantheon next turn. Barbarians this turn.





Here's the situation as I opened the save. My slinger in Xian was able to completely kill the slinger on the rice, so I took that shot since it was the healthier enemy unit. The barbarian warrior on like 1hp lives another turn. The northwest barb warrior attacked me, and I hit him back and redlined him. I imagine he'll suicide into me on the inter-turn. If you were paying good attention to the above screenshot, you may have noticed something I didn't notice until after I did the barbarian combat.





Good news: we met Palenque, a scientific city state. Bad news: someone else got to it first. I moved northwest (more forested hills), but I'm halfway expecting to run into the other player in question soon. This has some ramifications on the map that I'll have to get into later, but it's safe to say my early guesses were way off. If you can make out the text, the quest given here is to build a galley. That's a tricky one that I can't imagine we'll get to during this era, even though I'd really like to be able to contest this city-state. We'll see.





Picked up the Masonry eureka and said goodbye to our purchased builder.





Extra-large shot of everything. Pantheon next turn unless someone else is also getting theirs on the same turn.

[Alhazard]

farming doesnt remove marsh so it would get the reeds bonus.

Have you thought about district planning? Open sky looks tempting but the cattle tiles are also next to mountains so maybe campus and holy sites should go there? Tiles that are not high in production are also in flood zones except for a triangle next to horse so they can get damaged by floods if districts are there.

[Sullla]

Pantheon next turn followed by religion the following turn is exciting. Let's hope that either God of the Open Sky or Earth Goddess is still present; I would be surprised if they're both gone by this point. I think the culture from plantations pantheon would be the next best choice if they're both taken already.

"Build a galley" is a very easy city state quest to achieve, that's a nice draw. There's a good chance that you can land that city state quest with the 2 for 1 diplo policy in place for two envoys instead of one, and perhaps get an easy path to the three envoy library bonus. (There's no need to put any more envoys into Mohenjo Daro or worry about trying to fulfill its quests, that city state will be conquest bait at some point in the next 50 turns.) It also suggests that city #4 might be situated on the coast somewhere, although the exact spot will depend on more scouting. There's a decent spot along the coast northeast of Longxi if nothing else pops up.

For next turn, I'd suggest farming the rice tile immediately with the builder since you seem to have cleared out the barbarians in the immediate area. Even if it would get pillaged later, you can always fix the tile without losing a builder charge. And I would probably go right onto a settler in the capital rather than wait for Early Empire civic (Colonization policy) to arrive. You're OK on military and there's nothing else that seems better than speeding up the arrival of the third city a turn or two sooner.

What are you thinking in terms of tech path? Irrigation next after Pottery using the boost from farming the rice tile?