New turn rolled in thanks to playing earlier than normal today. I popped open the save real quick eager to see what Pantheon options are available, but I wasn't given the choice to found one. I assume this is the dreaded same-turn Pantheon bug? Seems like this is "sucks to be last in the turn order" situation.
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[SPOILERS] scooter tries Civ6
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(October 16th, 2019, 17:24)Alhazard Wrote: farming doesnt remove marsh so it would get the reeds bonus. I don’t know why I thought farming removes the marsh. Good call. I’ve thought about districts a little bit. The cattle tile is definitely unique in that it’s got 3 mountains there, although generally speaking I’m more interested in Fissures/Reefs for campuses. Bonus if those are also next to mountains like the one southeast of Xian. (October 16th, 2019, 17:31)Sullla Wrote: What are you thinking in terms of tech path? Irrigation next after Pottery using the boost from farming the rice tile? Yeah, definitely Irrigation next. We’re already over the amenity cap at Longxi and up against it at Xian because we have 0 hooked up. Irrigation will let us plantation the silks and solve that. The unhappiness penalty isn’t really that onerous or anything at the moment, but it’s an annoyance. The more important thing probably is it just lets us improve one of our best tiles in the Silks. More on tile improvements in the forthcoming report. Past Irrigation, obviously we want Masonry for the Pyramids, and that’s boosted already so that’s nice. Still, that’s a 10T research even boosted right now (in addition to the 6T for Irrigation), so we may have to get to that pretty quickly. Other techs worth discussing: Writing: Surely we’ll get the eureka for this any turn now. This might be able to wait a tad longer. We have a couple more pressing things, and we won’t have production free to build a campus for a little bit longer since we need to keep expansion up during these wonder builds. Bronze Working: Already boosted. I’d definitely like to know where iron is located. It’s likely to be close by given where the horses are placed. Downside of course is it increases district costs by making another one available, which we may not want until we’ve placed a campus or two. Sailing: I wasn’t dying for this, but now we do have a city-state quest for this. Archery->HBR: I’ll lump these two together. Both already boosted. It’s noteworthy because Horsemen are likely to be a good early unit for us given that we’ve already got a horse supply stockpile. That said, HBR is expensive and our science isn’t the best, so I’m kinda hoping we can just use declaration of friendships early on to avoid worrying about potential neighbors. Archery at least will probably be necessary for barbarians at some point. What’s the current RB meta for DoF usage? I think that wraps up early techs of note. Civic side of things is more boring - just straight to Political Philosophy. We just need to meet one more city-state to boost that, so hopefully that’ll be soon. Played the new turn, so I’ll write that up next.
Turn 35
 We start with the good news.  And the aforementioned bad news. No Pantheon this turn, better luck next turn?  So the map is really interesting. Notice the land bridge here just like the land bridge up north of Longxi. It kinda looks a bit spoke-like? That said, east of us seems like a large blob of land rather than a land bridge, but perhaps it’ll narrow. It kinda makes me think we’re arranged in sort of a diamond shape with land bridges in most directions, with us at the southern tip of the diamond shape.  Let’s talk a little bit about tile improvements and what to do with our builder. The rice is first. I’ve moved onto it this turn, and next turn the farm will complete. I haven’t been working it lately because the builder was much quicker (and our policy more effective) running in a production maximizing config, and we’re at the amenity soft cap anyway. Working it requires giving up one of the horse/deer/silks, and that just hasn’t seemed worth it, especially given how foodboxes have a sharp increase rather than a basic +2 linear growth like Civ4 had (not to mention lack of granaries). Even at size 4, we’ll be in the settler boosting policy, which means working a 1/3 tile rather than the rice is pretty killer as that’s more like 1/4.5. If I’m working deer-horse-silks-foresthill at size 4, that’s gonna come out to 19.5 production/turn, which seems really great at this stage. We can get that settler out lightning fast. Back to the builder, we still need that rice farm for pop regrowth and Irrigation eureka. Then I think we want the deer and silk improved next? Improving the deer and silk will basically double our gold income on tiles that will always be worked, plus the silk happy is useful. If we assume those are our first 3 charges (open to different ideas), it’s really just about where to use our 4th charge. Cattle or Sugars at Longxi are both solid options, as is the wheat at the new city. We may even want to save that 4th charge for Pyramids so that we can have a turn where we get two charges in. Of course, we may end up letting our Pantheon dictate which tile we improve. God of the Open Sky, and maybe we want to save a charge for that cattle versus the plantation booster in which case silk/sugar may make the most sense.
Turn 36
Another big turn. Pottery in, started Irrigation and farmed the rice, so 5T left on that. Onto the real news.  God of the Open Sky was gone, so I went ahead and took Earth Goddess. The plantation boosting pantheon was also available (as was the free builder), and while sure I’m tempted by those, I decided to give Earth Goddess a shot and go with it. I think we can get some decent value out of it. This allowed us to immediately found a religion, so I happily did so.  Choral Music and Defender of the Faith were the choices. Choral Music has always been the top choice, and overall I like the prickliness Defender of the Faith affords too much to pass it up. These actions added up to net us +3 era points along with inspirations for Mysticism and Theology. Side note: I noticed on the great person screen that TheArchduke seems to be getting more than 1 great prophet point/turn right now. I’m thinking this means he has built a second holy site. It doesn’t really affect us, but it does seem to indicate he’s interested in playing a religious game too.  Further scouting off to the west. I’m kinda inadvertently chasing this scout. I don’t intend to attack him unless he attacks me first, though. For all I know he found or may find an opponents borders, and I’d hate to do them that kind of favor.  I withdrew our northern warrior as he had gotten a bit too far from our otherwise empty city of Longxi. I would also like him to scout a bit east/northeast of Longxi, as I think we have some potentially promising city sites up there. Plus if we intend to build a galley, that’s a good spot to do it from. Our western warrior is healing a bit, as is our Slinger. I handed the horse off to Longxi for just this turn as we grow to size 4, but it’ll go back to Xian’s control next turn to build the settler. Speaking of, we’ll go into Colonization next turn. I’ll keep us in discipline for the time being because we have an upcoming fight with that barbarian camp up by our wounded warrior in a few turns, and I don’t anticipate building any more units during that time. 
Very good news, I think Earth Goddess has a lot of potential use as a pantheon, especially given that you have your own religion. There's a lot of synergy there with Choral Music since you can use faith to purchase the Holy Site district buildings, which provide even more faith plus culture via Choral Music. Obviously you can build the Mahabodi later on to pick up two more apostles to enhance your religion for the last two beliefs. And by getting the first religion, you've also denied two excellent beliefs to TheArchduke. He's invested a lot of early resources into a religion (double Holy Site districts it seems) and at best he's going to get Jesuit Education for his troubles, which is a lot less useful in Gathering Storm. All in all, pretty good stuff.
Earth Goddess means that you get to play the tile appeal game, and it's going to be important to try and pick up as many "Breathtaking" (4 appeal) tiles as possible. Here's the background on how the tile appeal mechanics work: Quote:Appeal value by default is 0, which is then modified by the terrain type, features, and improvements in surrounding tiles as follows: The main factors to keep in mind are that forests and mountains and coastal tiles are +1 appeal to neighboring tiles while mines and rainforests are -1 appeal to neighboring tiles. (Why rainforests take away appeal makes no sense to me logically, but that's how the game works.) Later on in the game, you can eventually plant forests and manipulate the appeal of tiles pretty easily. Earth Goddess therefore scales REALLY well into the lategame, although this game will probably be decided long before that point. In the more immediate future, you want to try and line up tiles with 4 appeal to get the free faith bonus. The most likely one at the moment is the second cattle tile at Longxi (the one that the wonder didn't grab) which will become a 3 food / 1 production / 2 faith tile with a pasture. However, you can manipulate other tiles to pick up the Earth Goddess bonus as well. For example, I'm pretty sure that if you built a Holy Site or Entertainment district two north of the capital, that would take the horse pasture up to 4 appeal as well. (That tile gets +1 from the mountain, +1 from the river, +1 from the forest on the silks, and -1 from the marsh tile; replacing the marsh tile with a +1 appeal district gets it to 4 appeal.) I'm not saying this is necessarily practical, especially since you have to avoid chopping forests and planting mines to keep tile appeal up, but some careful longterm planning should enable you to get a decent number of tiles up to the 4 appeal bonus. Long term, this makes Eiffel Tower a must-build wonder for you, since it adds 2 appeal to every tile and will unlock vast amounts of faith for free. You can also get the Liang governor up to 3 promotions and pick the Parks and Recreation option:  That unlocks city parks as a tile improvement, which suck on their own but add +2 appeal to all neighboring tiles. A couple of these in key locations can boost surrounding tiles into the Earth Goddess zone for more faith, and I don't believe you even need to work the crummy yield of the city park itself. Overall then, I think Earth Goddess is a better choice just because it will make the city planning more fun to do. 
Good turn! Earth Goddess + Choral Music should ensure a healthy faith and culture income for the rest of the game, so now our only real worries are gold and science. Defender of the Faith makes us spiky and means we can be a little more relaxed in the military department - not that we can actually relax but we don't need to obsess over security either. So long as we have military parity we should be able to defend ourselves comfortably (for example, Cornflakes' Varu are neatly cancelled out).
Rambling about the next 30-50 turns: Next steps are to get the settler out and begin a push for the Pyramids. Other things to think about, needs in the immediate future: 1)State Workforce also means the Government Plaza will unlock. It's a half-cost district, but the Ancestral Hall is quite expensive. Finishing it will grant us a title, though, and that title COULD be spent on Liang's second promotion (assuming we take Liang with our first title out of State Workforce), which grants +30% towards plaza and city center buildings. That would speed it up a bit, and we'd get a title back out of the build that could then go towards - probably Magnus or Pingala. I'm not sure, though, if it's worth it to spend a whole title just to boost basically that one building (and the Grand Master's Chapel later). Maybe if we're going for Liang's City Park which has some synergy with Earth Goddess? 2)Other districts - Campuses and Commercial Hubs will be relevant soon. The Government Plaza will also grant adjacency to those, so you COULD potentially start to plan a megalopolis between Longxi, Xian, and City #3 - a plaza on the plains tile 2SW of Lonxi would be able to boost districts from all 3 cities, possibly even 3 Commercial Hubs and 3 campuses/holy sites down the road (or an IZ, which would reach all 3 cities easily, or anything, really). This isn't pressing at all, I'm just rambling mostly to myself, thinking out loud. 3)More military units - I'd just like one or two more scouts (either warriors to scout, or slingers to free up our garrison warrior to go scout). Maybe even enough to think about an early push on our city-state. The sooner those fall, the bigger a snowball you get. Especially if we can get to it before it builds a theater square. 4)After the Ancestral Hall and the Pyramids are established, the time will be ripe for a big settler push - each new city will get a 5-charge builder out of the gate. If we push to Feudalism for Serfdom, each new city means an astonishing 7 charges! Note that the Hall's production bonus only applies to the city it's built in.
I Think I'm Gwangju Like It Here
A blog about my adventures in Korea, and whatever else I feel like writing about.
Thanks Sullla for the appeal rundown
 . I was quite literally googling appeal mechanics yesterday because I had never paid any attention to it, but that explanation help clarify some stuff that was in doubt for me. And thanks Chevalier for the district thoughts. I spent some time district planning this turn. I think the most pressing thing right now is to nail down some district placements as we’re about to unlock more, and I think we can kinda work backwards from there on a few things.Turn 37 I was greeted with the Early Empire civic completion, which means it’s time for a policy swap.  I stayed in Discipline, but I got us into Colonization as planned. We’ll pick up another chance to swap in 6ish turns, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  Still scouting out this way.  I took the horses back from Longxi, and as configured like this, we’ll complete the settler in 6T, and I think we’ll pretty much immediately grow back to size 4 since the foodbox would be close to 5 setup this way. Going max-production would speed the settler by 1T at the expense of a ton of food, so this seemed better. Because we completed Early Empire, we got our first governor tile. I went with what I felt was the obvious choice.  I picked Liang and assigned her to our capital of Xian. State Workforce is listed as taking 7T to complete, however Longxi will complete its holy site in 5T which will complete the inspiration for State Workforce. So I’m putting 1T into it now, and then we’ll complete it with the Holy Site inspiration, and we’ll swap back into the builder production policy. We’ll then put out a 5-charge builder or two from Xian, and that’ll help us lock down the Pyramids. State Workforce will also give us a second governor tile, and I’m leaning towards taking the Zoning Commissioner boost since we have 0 districts complete in Xian, but we’ll want to add some soon. SPEAKING OF, let’s talk districts.  I took a stab at a few things here. I have a bunch of stray thoughts on these. * Sullla mentioned a Holy Site or Entertainment Complex 2N of the capital next to the horses. The pastured horses are indeed 2 appeal shy of breathtaking. My thought instead is to place it 1E of the horses where it gets +3 adjacency rather than 0, and simply bulldoze the marsh to wipe out the malus. SE of the Silks on that forested hill is actually a +4 bonus (mountain in the fog maybe?) according to the UI, but that’s still technically inferior because we get more faith by elevating the pasture to breathtaking. * The campus spot I tacked is a +3 adjacency spot thanks to the +2 from the fissure in addition to the mountain. * I tacked Chevalier’s spot for the Government Plaza just to see how it looks. I think the idea here would be to slap some Commercial Hubs along this river next to it to stack some adjacencies. That said, I kinda wonder if it may be better off 1SW of here adjacent to the marsh but still in range to boost river districts. I think we really want the Government Plaza to be built by Xian, and it may be easier to pickup that plains tile? I’ll have to check. I don’t know if it makes much difference beyond that. Broadly speaking, I think Xian will be our builder/settler pump due to its production potential, and it needs a few districts, so I don’t think we’ll want to build any military out of that city anytime soon. Longxi will have to supply us on that front I think. Liang fits Xian quite well then, at least for the next 40+ turns. Does this plan seem reasonable?
One reason we'll want an Entertainment Complex, which is on the whole a fairly weak district, is that it unlocks the Colosseum for us. That's a really nice wonder to have, in my opinion only a step or two behind the Pyramids and Stonehenge - if placed correctly, it can generate a wondrous (hehe) amount of culture and basically solve your amenities problems for the rest of the game. I don't BELIEVE it benefits from the plaza, however, unless it get like an extra amenity or something.
Moving the Plaza southwest is fine; the reason my quick glance selected the riverside tile is because that allows maximum district packing while sacrificing a minimum of tiles - but in multiplayer that's probably not so big a deal, you don't have the leisure to surround the plaza with 6 districts like I always enjoy doing in SP. Moving southwest means the Pyramids occupy one spot, and a plains hill another (I hate building districts on hills unless I have to).
I Think I'm Gwangju Like It Here
A blog about my adventures in Korea, and whatever else I feel like writing about.
Another one of the best features of the expansions: the ability to create those district pins on the map.
I like the projected Holy Site and Campus district spots, especially since the Holy Site at the capital will boost the horses up to 4 appeal if the marsh tile is also drained. It may be worthwhile to purchase the tile for the capital's Holy Site to place the district and lock in the cost, since both the district cost and the tile purchase cost go up over time. I'm less certain of the exact location where the Government Plaza should go but somewhere in the middle of your first three cities seems correct. And I think that you're correct to work those four tiles at the capital, regrowing back to size 4 right away is definitely better than getting stuck at size 3. The rice tile with 5 food is very strong and the capital definitely wants to run it pretty much all the time. On governors: Liang is a good initial choice since the extra builder charge is a really big deal for China. I like the idea of going settler -> builder at the capital next (with a swap back into Ilkum) and rushing out the Pyramids quickly at the third city. You might even want to save the last builder charge from your current builder for the Pyramids, since that would get you up to 6 charges * 15% = 90% of the production cost of Pyramids. Remember that the Pyramids awards a free builder upon completion in addition to granting +1 builder charge forever, so you'd effectively be getting those 5 builder charges right back again for use in improving terrain. And the Pyramids is even +2 culture as well, a big deal this early in the game! I mean, why not build the thing early, right? Also really like the idea to have Longxi train some military while the capital does the settler / builder / districts thing. You could swap back into Agoge at the next policy change and Longxi looks like it can output 8 base production/turn right now, 10 base production/turn at size 4. That translates into either 12 production/turn or 15 production/turn with Agoge, enough to get some 3 turn slingers and warriors. I personally like warriors as scouting units over actual scouts: they are cheaper with Agoge policy, they defend much better than scouts, and they upgrade into highly useful swords later on. A couple units to defog the east and then come home later to capture the Cultural city state would be very useful. For future governors, you probably want to pick up Pingala and Magnus before diving too deeply into Liang's promotions. A standard play in Gathering Storm is to get three early promotions on Pingala and put him in your largest city to take advantage of the +15% culture/science along with +1 culture and +1 science per pop point. If you have a size 8 city, he's worth about 10 science and 10 culture per turn. Obviously Magnus is fantastic to have for any chopping that takes place, although with Earth Goddess pantheon you'll probably do a bit less chopping than usual. As you mentioned, you'll have to swap off State Workforce in a couple turns to avoid wasting culture. (This is easy to forget about, be careful!) I would suggest going for Mysticism in the meantime, which you've already boosted by landing your pantheon. Mysticism leads directly to the religious civics at the bottom of the tree that you'll want anyway, and it also grants a free envoy. You could place that envoy in the Scientific city state, which would lose the option to get the 2 for 1 envoy policy later on, but it would also yield 2 beakers/turn immediately and take you up from 5 science to 7 science. That's almost certainly worth doing - 2 additional beakers at this stage of the game is a lot! The only other option would be Military Tradition civic, and it doesn't seem too useful for your situation given that you aren't pursuing an early Great General. I also want to mention that I'm really enjoying the reporting thus far. ![[Image: smile.gif]](http://www.sullla.com/Smilies/smile.gif)
(October 18th, 2019, 07:48)Sullla Wrote: For future governors, you probably want to pick up Pingala and Magnus before diving too deeply into Liang's promotions. A standard play in Gathering Storm is to get three early promotions on Pingala and put him in your largest city to take advantage of the +15% culture/science along with +1 culture and +1 science per pop point. If you have a size 8 city, he's worth about 10 science and 10 culture per turn. Obviously Magnus is fantastic to have for any chopping that takes place, although with Earth Goddess pantheon you'll probably do a bit less chopping than usual. Ahh, that makes a lot of sense. It may kind of tricky figuring out which governor goes where, as our capital would kind of want both Liang and Pingala. I’ll look a bit more into these promotions. (October 18th, 2019, 07:48)Sullla Wrote: As you mentioned, you'll have to swap off State Workforce in a couple turns to avoid wasting culture. (This is easy to forget about, be careful!) I would suggest going for Mysticism in the meantime, which you've already boosted by landing your pantheon. Mysticism leads directly to the religious civics at the bottom of the tree that you'll want anyway, and it also grants a free envoy. You could place that envoy in the Scientific city state, which would lose the option to get the 2 for 1 envoy policy later on, but it would also yield 2 beakers/turn immediately and take you up from 5 science to 7 science. That's almost certainly worth doing - 2 additional beakers at this stage of the game is a lot! The only other option would be Military Tradition civic, and it doesn't seem too useful for your situation given that you aren't pursuing an early Great General. I played the next turn just minutes before these suggestions came in, but I actually did all of this, so it looks like I agree. I also like that it opens up Theology, which is already boosted and unlocks the Mahabodhi Temple. That’s going to be useful to us, although it’s less urgent, so the civic itself will wait a bit longer. Glad you’re enjoying it! Turn 38  Still scouting this way. Nothing to noteworthy.  I started Mysticism this turn, as State Property is now half-completed, and the Holy Site in 4T should finish it off. China’s 50% eurekas contrasted to 40% for everyone else has been nice so far for sure. It effectively increases our science/culture rate by a small amount every time we’re researching something that’s boosted.   Quick scoreboard rundown. I’m the only person to complete 4 civics, and I’m one tech behind Cornflakes and TheArchduke. Empire score is the same, although I suspect at least on TheArchduke’s part, districts play a role in that. Seems like the field is still very even in terms of early growth, albeit with different priorities. I’m of course also getting a ton of points from the Stonehenge-Prophet-Religion trio that nobody else has, so that over-inflates my overall score a bit.  This pretty much tells the same story. Lagging a small bit in science, strong in culture, default leading in religion. |
