Warning: incoming wall of text.
I had the spare time to type up a bit of a big picture post today and thought I'd share some of my musings. Leaving aside food and production for the moment, there are four major currencies that get spent in Civ6: science, culture, gold, and faith. Let's take a look at how these might apply to TheArchduke's Russia in terms of emphasizing general civilization development and district production. I'm going to run through these currencies in the order that makes sense for Russia, not necessarily the order of individual importance.
Faith: We'll start with faith as a currency. Faith is one thing that Russia should have in spades throughout this game. The unique Lavra district is in the conversation for best overall district in the game, a half-cost Holy Site that produces double Great Prophet points and a small trickle of Great Writer/Artist/Musician points. The Lavra virtually guarantees Russia the first religion in any non-China game and with luck TheArchduke will land the first religion here. (It's tough to beat 4 Great Prophet points/turn as early as Turn 30.) From what I remember reading, there was a small change in Gathering Storm that made the Lavra even better: after recruiting a Great Prophet, excess Great Prophet points are converted into faith. This will instantly add another 2 faith/turn to every Lavra that gets built as those Prophet points magically become faith. Since it should be possible to place most Lavras with some kind of adjacency bonus, these very cheap districts should be worth 3-4 faith/turn apiece. There's really no reason not to build one in basically every city.
Faith also comes from TheArchduke's Earth Goddess pantheon, which grants 2 faith to every tile with an appeal of 4 or greater. This may well end up being the best pantheon in the game before all is said and done, even better than the culture on plantations since it affects so many more tiles. Taking full advantage of Earth Godddess will require careful planning of tile improvements and districts, but it should be possible to get lots and lots of tiles up to 4 appeal with some micromanagement. We've already mentioned how Lavra and Campus districts add +1 appeal to neighboring tiles, and there's going to be a huge incentive to get 3 promotions onto Liang to unlock the city park improvement (+2 appeal to all neighboring tiles). The city park doesn't have to be worked by a population point to provide this benefit, it also adds +1 amenity to the city if placed next to water, and it remains even after Liang herself gets moved somewhere else. Again, with help from williams and myself on the planning front, I think we could get potentially dozens of tiles up to 4 appeal for the Earth Goddess bonus to kick in. It's enough that I'll probably play another cultural victory game again at some point to take advantage of Liang's city parks for tourist resort abuse (something I didn't know about the last time I did such a game).
So what is the purpose of all that faith? The obvious first use would be to grab apostles and pick up additional beliefs for the religion. If Choral Music and Defender of the Faith are taken upon the religion's founding, that leaves slots for the follower belief and the worship belief. I'm of the opinion that the worship building has a low priority; it doesn't benefit from Choral Music and there will be tons of faith coming in from other sources. Better to invest production into libraries and universities as opposed to wats for this game. But the founder belief spot has the awesome Church Property belief to grab (+2 gold per city following the religion) which would be a major target if it doesn't get picked up by someone else. If that's gone then Tithe (+1 gold for every 4 followers of the religion) or Stewardship (+1 beaker/+1 gold per Campus/Commercial district following the religion) are decent fallbacks. Some faith will also have to be spent on missionaries to spread the religion and convert other Russian cities, although with an early religion in place there should be a fair amount of natural spread.
But by far the best use of faith in Gathering Storm is the Monumentality dedication unlocked with a Golden Age. The first Classical era Golden Age should already be a lock at this point and I don't think it will be too hard to land one for the Medieval era as well. Monumentality of course unlocks purchasing settlers/builders with faith and further discounts their purchasing cost by 30 percent. Since rushing things with faith already costs 2x production instead of gold's 4x production cost, this represents a massive form of savings. The current settler being trained at the capital costs 110 production by virtue of being the second settler; this would cost 440 gold normally but only 154 faith. TheArchduke could spend 10 turns building this by hand at his capital... or he could faith-rush it with 10 turns of accumulated faith, leaving his capital free to work on districts and buildings. It's obvious which is the better option.
Now someone might correctly point out that the Colonization policy unlocked at Early Empire boosts production of settlers by 50%, and that therefore it's somewhat wasteful to spend faith on purchasing settlers instead of something else like builders. While this is a fair point, it overlooks the best aspect of purchasing a settler instead of building it naturally: the *LOCATION* where the purchased settler appears. If you've played a fair amount of Civ6, you're probably familiar with the scaling food costs in this game. It only costs 15 food to grow from size 1 to size 2 but it costs close to 100 food to grow from size 9 to size 10. The scaling math means that settlers are cheap to produce in terms of food cost at smaller sizes but highly expensive to produce at larger sizes. Conversely, due to the scaling cost of settlers whereby each one is 30 production more expensive than the previous one, players are normally forced to build the settlers in their oldest and largest cities anyway. A new size 1 city just can't finish a settler that costs 210 production or whatever in any kind of a decent timeframe. And new cities need to get their districts up and running anyway if they're ever going to be useful.
Monumentality offers a loophole that gets out of this situation entirely. Suddenly *ANY* brand new city on the frontiers of the empire can faith-rush out a new settler as soon as it hits size 2. The growth of that city is almost unaffected because the food costs to get back to size 2 are so cheap (especially if a trade route has been routed there). The new settler furthermore doesn't have to waste long turns walking out of the heartland off to the corners of the empire, using the exceedingly slow movement system that we all know and love from this game. Instead, the new settler pops into existence right where it needs to be, then has a short walk to its intended destination. Furthermore, there isn't much need to spend faith on builders via Monumentality because every new city should be getting a builder for free via the Ancestral Hall. (Just make sure to be running Serfdom once it's available so that they all pop out with 5 charges.)
We haven't seen this yet in a Civ6 Multiplayer game, but if done properly, I think that accumulating mass faith via Lavras and shrines/temples and Earth Goddess could fuel a tidal wave of rapid expansion across the map. This seems to be a pretty large map with no one close by, making it a perfect test case. Ideally, TheArchduke never builds any settlers by hand after the first few (before Monumentality unlocks with the first Golden Age). All of the settlers come from faith purchases - all of them. It should be really easy to get up to 20, 30, 50, eventually even 100 faith/turn and pop out the settlers left and right. The Archduke is already at 15 faith/turn with a mere 2 cities, and he isn't even having the Great Prophet points get converted into faith yet! All of this is super exciting, and best of all, it synergizes perfectly with the next currency as well: culture.
Culture: TheArchduke has repeatedly pointed out the importance of culture in Civ6. We've seen over and over again in these PBEM games how the player leading in culture hits all of the key civics and policies first, thereby snowballing to an eventual winning position. There's little question that some kind of strategy is needed for picking up extra culture, and the obvious solution for Russia comes in the form of the Choral Music belief. This causes shrines and temples to produce culture equal to their faith output, in other words causing shrines (70 production) to have a value of 2 faith + 2 culture per turn, and temples (120 production) to have a value of 4 faith + 4 culture per turn. The temples in particular are absurdly valuable under Choral Music, converting production into culture at a 3:1 ratio (plus adding faith as well!) Compare the cultural conversion rate of the poor buildings in the Theatre district by way of contrast: the Amphitheatre costs 150 production for 2 culture/turn (7.5 to 1 ratio) while the poor Art Museums cost 290 production for the same 2 culture turn (14.5 to 1 ratio). Of course those buildings can hold Great Works from Great People for additional culture, but that requires having the Great People to begin with as well as building the Theatre districts themselves. Long story short, culture is great to have but difficult to get, and Lavras with Choral Music-boosted buildings are one of the best ways to obtain it.
Since every city is going to be building a cheap Lavra anyway for faith purposes, they can also go ahead and build a temple and shrine as well to cash in on culture via Choral Music. There's no reason ever to build a monument (60 production) when a shrine kicks in extra faith for a slightly higher cost (70 production). The temple costs double the monument but also provides double the culture, along with that hefty 4 faith/turn output as a bonus on top. Again, since cities ideally won't have to waste time training settlers or too many builders, there will be more space available for knocking out shrines and temples. Cash-rusing a quick shrine in new cities would also be a great way to get them up to speed quickly and contributing to the wider empire. The positive feedback loop here practically speaks for itself.
Now that I've written this, I have surely doomed TheArchduke to losing out on Choral Music to a self-destructive Stonehenge build from another player.
Science: One of the other great currencies of Civ6 comes in the form of beakers. As we've seen repeatedly in past games, science is not optional for serious Multiplayer. You basically need a Campus district in nearly every city to be competitive with the other players, as falling behind in military tech is a sure recipe for disaster. Fortunately TheArchduke will hopefully be able to pick up both faith and culture simultaneously from his cheap Lavras, allowing him to construct a Campus district as the second choice in nearly every city. There's nothing particularly clever or fancy here, just a need to keep emphasizing science by building lots and lots of Campus districts. Don't chase after Hypatia or worry about any individual Great People at this stage of the game, quantity > quality for the most part. More cities with more population and more Campus districts are the way to go.
Gold: That takes us to the last major currency in Civ6, money itself. We've also seen that gold is extraordinarily useful in Civ6, both for purchasing things via cash-rushing and (arguably more importantly) for upgrading units. That's been toned down in Gathering Storm by introducing the stockpiled resource requirements, but a quick upgrade of units remains very important for military considerations. Basically, players need lots of money and and as many trade routes as possible. This makes for another obvious point: every city should get either a Commercial district or a Harbor district to unlock its own trade route, most commonly as the third district at size 7. Maybe some cities want this district as the second choice but that should be the general pattern: Lavra, Campus, Commercial/Harbor. What about all of the other districts? Don't build them, they aren't worth it. Just get one or maybe two of them to unlock their related boosts and nothing more. One or two Industrial/Entertainment districts are plenty to spread their benefits around to neighboring cities. As for the others, Encampments are only helpful if you're going for early conquest (which this game doesn't appear to be doing) and Theatre districts are just bad in general. These districts can be squeezed into the few cities that grow above size 10. For everything else, the Lavra/Campus/trade route district trio should be the way to go.
One other thing that does bear mentioning is how much better Harbor districts have become in Gathering Storm. These districts were basically garbage in the release version and have been vastly buffed over time into quasi-overpowered status. Aside from letting inland cities build ships, the first tier building in the Harbor district (the lighthouse) now grants +1 base food, +1 food on all water tiles, and +3 housing if the district is placed next to the city center. This essentially means that cities can be settled anywhere along the coast and have decent housing even if there's no fresh water anywhere nearby; base housing on coastal tiles is 3 and a granary + lighthouse combo takes that up to 8, more than enough to get the city to size 7 and three districts. (If you add an Aqueduct to that same dry spot, it's worth another 3 housing and the city can make it to size 10! Dry coastal spots near mountain peaks are now totally viable for large cities in the second expansion.) So overall then, inland cities on rivers want Commercial districts while the cities on the coast will want Harbors. With some planning it should be possisble to get the district discount on those Harbors too and help make them cheaper to build. (Churning out lots of Lavras helps activate that discount formula quite nicely.)
Conclusion: So what would this look like in practice? I'm envisioning a setup where a steady stream of new settlers are being faith-rushed at the borders in little size 2 and size 3 cities using Monumentality. The settlers move quickly to their destinations and receive free builders upon settling from the Ancestral Hall. These builders use the huge borders granted by Russia to chop/harvest a tile or two that won't interfere with the Earth Goddess bonus and knock out the cheap half-cost Lavra almost instantly. As soon as the Lavra is finished, the new city either cash-rushes or chops/harvests a shrine to get some faith and culture flowing. Trade routes back to the capital city (worth at least 3 food and 1 production thanks to the Lavra/Campus combo) ensure that rapid growth to larger city sizes where more tiles can be worked that pick up the Earth Goddess faith bonus. Meanwhile, the inner core cities are working on more districts, more buildings, and enough military to keep everything safe. The whole enterprise is an exercise in snowballing, taking advantage of the lack of maintenance costs in Civ6. The only slowdown comes in the form of more expensive settlers, but if you faith income keeps snowballing right alongside the rising settler cost, there's very little to stop the whole process. (This is basically what I did in my Mansa Musa game on Livestream, only using gold instead of faith; if anything, the cheaper faith-rushing cost should be even more effective.)
Hopefully I didn't ramble on too much there. I don't know how well this will work in practice but it's something that I'd love to see in action just to test it out.
I had the spare time to type up a bit of a big picture post today and thought I'd share some of my musings. Leaving aside food and production for the moment, there are four major currencies that get spent in Civ6: science, culture, gold, and faith. Let's take a look at how these might apply to TheArchduke's Russia in terms of emphasizing general civilization development and district production. I'm going to run through these currencies in the order that makes sense for Russia, not necessarily the order of individual importance.
Faith: We'll start with faith as a currency. Faith is one thing that Russia should have in spades throughout this game. The unique Lavra district is in the conversation for best overall district in the game, a half-cost Holy Site that produces double Great Prophet points and a small trickle of Great Writer/Artist/Musician points. The Lavra virtually guarantees Russia the first religion in any non-China game and with luck TheArchduke will land the first religion here. (It's tough to beat 4 Great Prophet points/turn as early as Turn 30.) From what I remember reading, there was a small change in Gathering Storm that made the Lavra even better: after recruiting a Great Prophet, excess Great Prophet points are converted into faith. This will instantly add another 2 faith/turn to every Lavra that gets built as those Prophet points magically become faith. Since it should be possible to place most Lavras with some kind of adjacency bonus, these very cheap districts should be worth 3-4 faith/turn apiece. There's really no reason not to build one in basically every city.
Faith also comes from TheArchduke's Earth Goddess pantheon, which grants 2 faith to every tile with an appeal of 4 or greater. This may well end up being the best pantheon in the game before all is said and done, even better than the culture on plantations since it affects so many more tiles. Taking full advantage of Earth Godddess will require careful planning of tile improvements and districts, but it should be possible to get lots and lots of tiles up to 4 appeal with some micromanagement. We've already mentioned how Lavra and Campus districts add +1 appeal to neighboring tiles, and there's going to be a huge incentive to get 3 promotions onto Liang to unlock the city park improvement (+2 appeal to all neighboring tiles). The city park doesn't have to be worked by a population point to provide this benefit, it also adds +1 amenity to the city if placed next to water, and it remains even after Liang herself gets moved somewhere else. Again, with help from williams and myself on the planning front, I think we could get potentially dozens of tiles up to 4 appeal for the Earth Goddess bonus to kick in. It's enough that I'll probably play another cultural victory game again at some point to take advantage of Liang's city parks for tourist resort abuse (something I didn't know about the last time I did such a game).
So what is the purpose of all that faith? The obvious first use would be to grab apostles and pick up additional beliefs for the religion. If Choral Music and Defender of the Faith are taken upon the religion's founding, that leaves slots for the follower belief and the worship belief. I'm of the opinion that the worship building has a low priority; it doesn't benefit from Choral Music and there will be tons of faith coming in from other sources. Better to invest production into libraries and universities as opposed to wats for this game. But the founder belief spot has the awesome Church Property belief to grab (+2 gold per city following the religion) which would be a major target if it doesn't get picked up by someone else. If that's gone then Tithe (+1 gold for every 4 followers of the religion) or Stewardship (+1 beaker/+1 gold per Campus/Commercial district following the religion) are decent fallbacks. Some faith will also have to be spent on missionaries to spread the religion and convert other Russian cities, although with an early religion in place there should be a fair amount of natural spread.
But by far the best use of faith in Gathering Storm is the Monumentality dedication unlocked with a Golden Age. The first Classical era Golden Age should already be a lock at this point and I don't think it will be too hard to land one for the Medieval era as well. Monumentality of course unlocks purchasing settlers/builders with faith and further discounts their purchasing cost by 30 percent. Since rushing things with faith already costs 2x production instead of gold's 4x production cost, this represents a massive form of savings. The current settler being trained at the capital costs 110 production by virtue of being the second settler; this would cost 440 gold normally but only 154 faith. TheArchduke could spend 10 turns building this by hand at his capital... or he could faith-rush it with 10 turns of accumulated faith, leaving his capital free to work on districts and buildings. It's obvious which is the better option.
Now someone might correctly point out that the Colonization policy unlocked at Early Empire boosts production of settlers by 50%, and that therefore it's somewhat wasteful to spend faith on purchasing settlers instead of something else like builders. While this is a fair point, it overlooks the best aspect of purchasing a settler instead of building it naturally: the *LOCATION* where the purchased settler appears. If you've played a fair amount of Civ6, you're probably familiar with the scaling food costs in this game. It only costs 15 food to grow from size 1 to size 2 but it costs close to 100 food to grow from size 9 to size 10. The scaling math means that settlers are cheap to produce in terms of food cost at smaller sizes but highly expensive to produce at larger sizes. Conversely, due to the scaling cost of settlers whereby each one is 30 production more expensive than the previous one, players are normally forced to build the settlers in their oldest and largest cities anyway. A new size 1 city just can't finish a settler that costs 210 production or whatever in any kind of a decent timeframe. And new cities need to get their districts up and running anyway if they're ever going to be useful.
Monumentality offers a loophole that gets out of this situation entirely. Suddenly *ANY* brand new city on the frontiers of the empire can faith-rush out a new settler as soon as it hits size 2. The growth of that city is almost unaffected because the food costs to get back to size 2 are so cheap (especially if a trade route has been routed there). The new settler furthermore doesn't have to waste long turns walking out of the heartland off to the corners of the empire, using the exceedingly slow movement system that we all know and love from this game. Instead, the new settler pops into existence right where it needs to be, then has a short walk to its intended destination. Furthermore, there isn't much need to spend faith on builders via Monumentality because every new city should be getting a builder for free via the Ancestral Hall. (Just make sure to be running Serfdom once it's available so that they all pop out with 5 charges.)
We haven't seen this yet in a Civ6 Multiplayer game, but if done properly, I think that accumulating mass faith via Lavras and shrines/temples and Earth Goddess could fuel a tidal wave of rapid expansion across the map. This seems to be a pretty large map with no one close by, making it a perfect test case. Ideally, TheArchduke never builds any settlers by hand after the first few (before Monumentality unlocks with the first Golden Age). All of the settlers come from faith purchases - all of them. It should be really easy to get up to 20, 30, 50, eventually even 100 faith/turn and pop out the settlers left and right. The Archduke is already at 15 faith/turn with a mere 2 cities, and he isn't even having the Great Prophet points get converted into faith yet! All of this is super exciting, and best of all, it synergizes perfectly with the next currency as well: culture.
Culture: TheArchduke has repeatedly pointed out the importance of culture in Civ6. We've seen over and over again in these PBEM games how the player leading in culture hits all of the key civics and policies first, thereby snowballing to an eventual winning position. There's little question that some kind of strategy is needed for picking up extra culture, and the obvious solution for Russia comes in the form of the Choral Music belief. This causes shrines and temples to produce culture equal to their faith output, in other words causing shrines (70 production) to have a value of 2 faith + 2 culture per turn, and temples (120 production) to have a value of 4 faith + 4 culture per turn. The temples in particular are absurdly valuable under Choral Music, converting production into culture at a 3:1 ratio (plus adding faith as well!) Compare the cultural conversion rate of the poor buildings in the Theatre district by way of contrast: the Amphitheatre costs 150 production for 2 culture/turn (7.5 to 1 ratio) while the poor Art Museums cost 290 production for the same 2 culture turn (14.5 to 1 ratio). Of course those buildings can hold Great Works from Great People for additional culture, but that requires having the Great People to begin with as well as building the Theatre districts themselves. Long story short, culture is great to have but difficult to get, and Lavras with Choral Music-boosted buildings are one of the best ways to obtain it.
Since every city is going to be building a cheap Lavra anyway for faith purposes, they can also go ahead and build a temple and shrine as well to cash in on culture via Choral Music. There's no reason ever to build a monument (60 production) when a shrine kicks in extra faith for a slightly higher cost (70 production). The temple costs double the monument but also provides double the culture, along with that hefty 4 faith/turn output as a bonus on top. Again, since cities ideally won't have to waste time training settlers or too many builders, there will be more space available for knocking out shrines and temples. Cash-rusing a quick shrine in new cities would also be a great way to get them up to speed quickly and contributing to the wider empire. The positive feedback loop here practically speaks for itself.
Now that I've written this, I have surely doomed TheArchduke to losing out on Choral Music to a self-destructive Stonehenge build from another player.
Science: One of the other great currencies of Civ6 comes in the form of beakers. As we've seen repeatedly in past games, science is not optional for serious Multiplayer. You basically need a Campus district in nearly every city to be competitive with the other players, as falling behind in military tech is a sure recipe for disaster. Fortunately TheArchduke will hopefully be able to pick up both faith and culture simultaneously from his cheap Lavras, allowing him to construct a Campus district as the second choice in nearly every city. There's nothing particularly clever or fancy here, just a need to keep emphasizing science by building lots and lots of Campus districts. Don't chase after Hypatia or worry about any individual Great People at this stage of the game, quantity > quality for the most part. More cities with more population and more Campus districts are the way to go.
Gold: That takes us to the last major currency in Civ6, money itself. We've also seen that gold is extraordinarily useful in Civ6, both for purchasing things via cash-rushing and (arguably more importantly) for upgrading units. That's been toned down in Gathering Storm by introducing the stockpiled resource requirements, but a quick upgrade of units remains very important for military considerations. Basically, players need lots of money and and as many trade routes as possible. This makes for another obvious point: every city should get either a Commercial district or a Harbor district to unlock its own trade route, most commonly as the third district at size 7. Maybe some cities want this district as the second choice but that should be the general pattern: Lavra, Campus, Commercial/Harbor. What about all of the other districts? Don't build them, they aren't worth it. Just get one or maybe two of them to unlock their related boosts and nothing more. One or two Industrial/Entertainment districts are plenty to spread their benefits around to neighboring cities. As for the others, Encampments are only helpful if you're going for early conquest (which this game doesn't appear to be doing) and Theatre districts are just bad in general. These districts can be squeezed into the few cities that grow above size 10. For everything else, the Lavra/Campus/trade route district trio should be the way to go.
One other thing that does bear mentioning is how much better Harbor districts have become in Gathering Storm. These districts were basically garbage in the release version and have been vastly buffed over time into quasi-overpowered status. Aside from letting inland cities build ships, the first tier building in the Harbor district (the lighthouse) now grants +1 base food, +1 food on all water tiles, and +3 housing if the district is placed next to the city center. This essentially means that cities can be settled anywhere along the coast and have decent housing even if there's no fresh water anywhere nearby; base housing on coastal tiles is 3 and a granary + lighthouse combo takes that up to 8, more than enough to get the city to size 7 and three districts. (If you add an Aqueduct to that same dry spot, it's worth another 3 housing and the city can make it to size 10! Dry coastal spots near mountain peaks are now totally viable for large cities in the second expansion.) So overall then, inland cities on rivers want Commercial districts while the cities on the coast will want Harbors. With some planning it should be possisble to get the district discount on those Harbors too and help make them cheaper to build. (Churning out lots of Lavras helps activate that discount formula quite nicely.)
Conclusion: So what would this look like in practice? I'm envisioning a setup where a steady stream of new settlers are being faith-rushed at the borders in little size 2 and size 3 cities using Monumentality. The settlers move quickly to their destinations and receive free builders upon settling from the Ancestral Hall. These builders use the huge borders granted by Russia to chop/harvest a tile or two that won't interfere with the Earth Goddess bonus and knock out the cheap half-cost Lavra almost instantly. As soon as the Lavra is finished, the new city either cash-rushes or chops/harvests a shrine to get some faith and culture flowing. Trade routes back to the capital city (worth at least 3 food and 1 production thanks to the Lavra/Campus combo) ensure that rapid growth to larger city sizes where more tiles can be worked that pick up the Earth Goddess faith bonus. Meanwhile, the inner core cities are working on more districts, more buildings, and enough military to keep everything safe. The whole enterprise is an exercise in snowballing, taking advantage of the lack of maintenance costs in Civ6. The only slowdown comes in the form of more expensive settlers, but if you faith income keeps snowballing right alongside the rising settler cost, there's very little to stop the whole process. (This is basically what I did in my Mansa Musa game on Livestream, only using gold instead of faith; if anything, the cheaper faith-rushing cost should be even more effective.)
Hopefully I didn't ramble on too much there. I don't know how well this will work in practice but it's something that I'd love to see in action just to test it out.