[Spoilers] Chevalier Gives You Something to Cry Aboot

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Turn 8 

Thanks for taking the weekend turns. Right now I don't have any definite plans for the next weekend, but I am seeing a girl in Yeosu, which is a couple hours away by bus, so odds are that will happen again. 

I push the scout east to try and see if there's a decent city-site around the lake. Here's what I reveal:




Ehhhh...the only good tile is the silk tile, everything else needs improvement. Builder labor can make this a decent city-area, but on its own it's really uninspired. I am wondering if Bronze Working might be a good target - we may have horses and iron concealed nearby, because otherwise, our land is really poor so far. 

In the south, I can't seem to spot the barb camp, but I have found coast:




So the camp is either southeast, over the river, or southwest, along the coast somewhere. I'll keep pushing south, to see if I can get eyes on. There's room for a mediocre filler backlines city here, with the silks and rice, but that's a very very long term priority. 

Score-wise, everyone except Kaiser has grown to size 2 sometime in the last couple of turns - Kaiser plays after us so will probably grow this turn as well. Sub leads in domination order, then Ichabod, then us, then Woden/Kaiser, so I think sub opened slinger first while Ichabod went scout first like we did. Woden and Kaiser have finished no military units (again, Kaiser plays after us, so it's possible he built a scout or is popping something out this turn). Science-wise, Ichabod leads, then Kaiser, so either Ichabod leads or they're tied and ahead of everyone else = science city-state for both? Since Kaiser hasn't grown, my guess is Ichabod is at +3 from cs/pop, Kaiser is at +2 from a cs, and the rest of us are at +1 from pop. Everything else seems unchanged.

[TheArchduke]

Wow, our capital would have been a lot better fit on tile w, right now any city in the east is really not all that good.

I stand ready to do Saturdays and Sundays and if permitted will do so on my own accord.

In any case, at least you have great company in your misery.

If things continue like they are the flooded tundra tile south is actually one of our better city placements.

[Sullla]

Not much to add in these slow early turns aside from a suggestion to purchase the 2/2 forested grassland hill tile in the third ring as soon as there's enough money available. I think it should cost 70 gold so that would be in about half a dozen turns. Ideally the scout defogs the tiles to the north of the capital before that happens to see if there are any better tiles to purchase up there.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

We should also think about what to spend our builder charges on. I see 4 useful tiles to improve with only 3 charges to do it with. One will naturally be a pasture, so we can choose two of the following three:

1)Pasture the second sheep. Pros: Gives us another 5 yield tile, very important. City will have 9 production (eesh) at size 4 and a decent growth rate. 
Cons: No new inspirations or eurekas, so it slows down tech a bit. No amenities. 

2)Farm the rice. Pros: 5 yield food tile, eurekas irrigation for plantations on our wines and silks. 1/6 of Feudalism inspiration. Cons: No production on this tile, no amenities. Farms suck.

3)Plantation the wines. Pros: Connects an amenity to keep the city ecstatic. Adds gold (food later?) for 3f/3g tile. Cons: Tile is still otherwise weak. Have to hard-research Irrigation first if we don't farm the rice. 

A lot of this might be dictated by our pantheon. Woden will get first dibs if everything continues as it has, then we might have a shot at #2 if we can go into God-King before anyone else, although Egypt DOES have the Sphinx. So it's up in the air if we'll be able to land either culture from plantations or culture from pastures, either of which I'd be happy to take if we get there. Whichever one we land would push us towards one improvement or the other - except our builder is going to beat the pantheon by about 18 turns, so we can't exactly wait around with our thumbs in our belts to decide. 

Note that we could skip the plantation and still hook up an early amenity - settling ON the silks in the east doesn't look totally moronic at first glance. It would connect the silks and give us two first ring hills. Settling one south is possible but we'd need a builder to connect and I don't know what the rest of the city's first ring looks like. Note that both sites could share the sheep with the capital.

[TheArchduke]

Not much to add in these slow early turns aside from a suggestion to purchase the 2/2 forested grassland hill tile in the third ring as soon as there's enough money available. I think it should cost 70 gold so that would be in about half a dozen turns. Ideally the scout defogs the tiles to the north of the capital before that happens to see if there are any better tiles to purchase up there.

I am not a big fan of early tile purchases or at all as money is always so tight. But production is an issue. I would lean towards doing this, although it hurts.

We should also think about what to spend our builder charges on. I see 4 useful tiles to improve with only 3 charges to do it with. One will naturally be a pasture, so we can choose two of the following three:

1)Pasture the second sheep. Pros: Gives us another 5 yield tile, very important. City will have 9 production (eesh) at size 4 and a decent growth rate. 
Cons: No new inspirations or eurekas, so it slows down tech a bit. No amenities. 

2)Farm the rice. Pros: 5 yield food tile, eurekas irrigation for plantations on our wines and silks. 1/6 of Feudalism inspiration. Cons: No production on this tile, no amenities. Farms suck.

3)Plantation the wines. Pros: Connects an amenity to keep the city ecstatic. Adds gold (food later?) for 3f/3g tile. Cons: Tile is still otherwise weak. Have to hard-research Irrigation first if we don't farm the rice. 

A lot of this might be dictated by our pantheon. Woden will get first dibs if everything continues as it has, then we might have a shot at #2 if we can go into God-King before anyone else, although Egypt DOES have the Sphinx. So it's up in the air if we'll be able to land either culture from plantations or culture from pastures, either of which I'd be happy to take if we get there. Whichever one we land would push us towards one improvement or the other - except our builder is going to beat the pantheon by about 18 turns, so we can't exactly wait around with our thumbs in our belts to decide. 

Note that we could skip the plantation and still hook up an early amenity - settling ON the silks in the east doesn't look totally moronic at first glance. It would connect the silks and give us two first ring hills. Settling one south is possible but we'd need a builder to connect and I don't know what the rest of the city's first ring looks like. Note that both sites could share the sheep with the capital.

Anything to increase production. I would highly recommend pasturing both sheep. If not for the irrigation eureka I would do the wine first, but eurekas are terrible important.

Settling on the silk hurts but no fresh water on the tile NE of it and the NW being unable to settle makes this a rough decision. 

I think we need to seriously hope that the terrain gets better, because I do not like what I am seeing.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Turn 9

Well, good news and bad news this turn. The bad news is that none of our dilemmas got any easier. The terrain is still garbage and I see no easy site for our second city. This is without a doubt a game on Challenge Mode - good thing we've got such a powerful civ to make up for our very difficult start! 

Good news is a couple things. 




We finish Code of Laws and from the scoreboard, we're first to it. No one else has finished a civic yet, but Kaiser shouldn't be far behind us. Suboptimal, though, has moved up in the religious rankings and trails Woden, without Code of Laws. Odds are that's his city-state manifesting. So we'll be third to a pantheon assuming no one is working a faith tile...which is impossible to know. So let's just assume pantheon on turn 24 and otherwise not worry about it. We'll see what we can take. I lean GotOS first, with GoF as a secondary. In test games the camp-boosting pantheon worked well since Canada typically had so many deer, but I've not seen much this game. I haven't explored the tundra extensively, though - and I don't plan to, since the terrain is still garbage for us. I slot Discipline for the upcoming barbarian war and God-King to get started on pantheon generation. Culture research is directed towards Craftsmanship - I want to finish that first. Foreign Trade can wait while the scout hunts for another continent. I'll swap to it once Craftsmanship is ready to be inspired. 

Speaking of terrain, in the east, nothing good still.




The 2/2 stone tile is coastal and is basically the best tile visible. Note also that the desert tile is within 3 of a city - probably our eastern city state to match the northern one in Antananarivo. It's almost certainly not a player since we named the Rocky Mountains ourselves. Militaristic or Religious would be best now. Woden met his CS early, so we won't catch him to 25 faith, but we can still nip in before sub, possibly. Ichabod and Kaiser are no religious threat at all.

In the south...




The camp is on the far side of the river. I'll cross to the silks next turn, if possible, in order to fight the warrior on even ground. Then heal, promote, and press on to the camp. How many barbs surge from a camp this early? More than 2 warriors would get a bit hairy. 

It's disgusting, but I think Archduke is right and Tundra City - which is by no means great - is looking like one of our stronger candidates. I wont' be settling it for a while, don't worry, as it's 100% backlines, but down the road a city here might more or less work. With terrain to the east, northwest, and south scouted I pin a few tentative candidate sites  to begin discussion.

...and I failed to screenshot those sites, so we'll save that discussion for tomorrow.

For now, I incline towards pasturing both sheep and farming the rice. We need Irrigation anyway to get our plantations going, so may as well make use of it. 

Scorewise, Woden got 3 points and finished what I believe is a warrior. Kaiser is last on the domination scores so he wasn't building a warrior, or is working poor production tiles. He is the first one to finish a tech thanks to his science state. Ichabod will be next.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Turn Whatsit 10

And we're back. I talked some with Archduke over Steam, and we both agree that a)this start really sucks and 2)it's fine if he plays for me on the weekends. I'll drop a line in the general chat here soon to make sure everyone else is cool with it, but I don't see any objections.

Today I'll show off the latest exploration, and some of our potential city-sites.

First, the scout contacts the city-state we spotted last turn:




Yerevan, a religious state, and we get the envoy for first meeting. Apparently our neighbor to the east scouted east first? Anyway, this speeds up the pantheon. We're now due a pantheon turn 18, unless Ichabod or suboptimal gets there first. Sub I think had a religious state for 2 turns before we contacted Yerevan, meaning our extra faith from God-king will catch him in 4 turns - so we should be #2 in line. Again, my priority is GoTOS, GoF, and then, I dunno, Fertility Rites? We could send the builder with our settler to city #2 since we've got NO good spots that are good without builder or gold investment.

So let's look at sites:




This site, which I have dubbed "Capitals," for extra confusion (but don't blame me, blame Vegas), has two possibilities. Settling on the silks gets us 3 first ring hills, a second ring forest and +2 campus site, and can share the sheep. It instantly connects silks, at the cost of the forest - but I believe the city center gets +1 production anyway so it's a wash? We do get less gold and housing from not building a plantation. The B site has an unknown tundra first ring to the south - our settler can scout it as he arrives - and has only the silks first ring, while the hills become 2nd ring and the campus site becomes 3rd. It does bring in another pasture from the 3rd to the second ring. Both sites can share the Blues' sheep. It's not a spectacular site by any means, and from the location of Yerevan it seems fairly safe to settle later if we have a better location.




Our best raw site is ironically here in the tundra (fortuitously named "Penguins," which no, I did not deliberately set up - this time it's Nashville's fault). It has first ring rice and silks, second ring deer and a 2/2/ hill, plus several hills and some stone, plus fish and crab. It needs quite a bit of gold or culture to really get going, but in terms of raw yields it looks like the best available. Note that the deer are so far the ONLY three production tile we've found in our entire neighborhood so far, and there are flatly no 5 yield tiles anywhere. It's...a really tough start, guys. Like, so tough that I feel like 10 turns in our fate in this game is more or less already decided. The Penguins site is thoroughly backline and can wait, I think. 




To the west we have the Blackhawks site. I labelled it A since I thought I might find another nearby candidate, but nothing jumps out. It has lots of wheat, a few hills, and can share the 2/2 tile and some silks with the capital. The silks are RIGHT where a great Government Plaza could go, frustratingly. Blackhawks can grow like a weed with builder labor, but will be very low on production (like the rest of the empire - there's just no cogs to be found anywhere in a 5-turn march). This site would be best saved for an ancestral hall, but we may not be able to delay it that long. It would probably claim more territory than either of the other two sites, but if an opponent settles here it's a hell of a pink dot so we'd probably just invade and try to take it over ourselves. Not a priority. 




Our best hope for a good second city, then, must lie here, in the north, an unknown location which will be named Kings. It's totally in the fog still, so right now with Yerevan contacted my priority with the scout is to pull him around to the north and west, hopefully through a mountain pass, and defog this area so we can establish a colony. I hope we find something because everything else in the vicinity is total crap. :D Fingers crossed, ladies and gents! 

The known world on turn 10:




Abroad, Ichabod grew to size 3, while suboptimal became second to complete a tech. No rankings changed, no new era points. Let me know if you want me to cover anything else! Sorry for the gloomy tone, I'm just starting to feel the strain of the task looming before us.

[Sullla]

Thanks for the illustrative turn report Chevalier, it makes things much easier to follow along in this thread. Out of the terrain identified thus far, Capitals A is probably the best spot since it has some actual production available even if it's low on food. Ideally none of the locations spotted thus far will be where the first settler goes; hopefully northeast of the capital along the river will have something stronger. I don't think expanding south into the tundra is a good idea from a strategic standpoint even if that deer resource in the tundra would be a strong tile with the Canadian bonus. There's still time to do more exploring before having to make any decisions on where to go.

More broadly, this map is probably closer to a "natural" setup than what we've been seeing in recent Civ6 PBEMs. The community has been getting used to running all the settings that juice things up for faster starts: "New" world terrain with more hills, "Wet" conditions with more forests to chop, "Abundant" resources everywhere, etc. This is probably just closer to the default settings. If everyone else is in the same boat, it might even be an advantage for the crippled Canadian civ since it's harder to play weak maps as compared to abundant maps. I've always felt poor-quality maps do a better job of testing overall skill, even if I completely understand why there's not much desire to run them for MP.

A religious city state is good news if not quite as good as a Militaristic city state would be. This should lock down either God of the Open Sky (+1 culture on pastures) or Goddess of Festivals (+1 culture on plantations) which are clearly the two best options. With double sheep at the capital and another cow/sheep pair down to the south, the former looks like the better option for now, but both would be highly useful given the various silks/wines/incense in the order. Now here's the real task: setting up a civics swap in exactly 8 turns to ditch God King in favor of Urban Planning as soon as possible. Is that manageable? Probably not since it looks like it will take slightly longer to get the builder out and improve three tiles. (Finishes T15, improve rice T16, sheep T18 and T20). But you should be able to drop God King on T20 by finishing Craftsmanship via the builder's actions, then hopefully time the next civic to complete right when the settler is finishing to pop into Agoge for 5-10 turns and crank out a few units. That's getting a bit ahead of things but the timings should work out pretty well, especially if God of the Open Sky is kicking in another 2 culture/turn from double sheep pastures.

I'm also concerned at the lack of good spots for an early Campus district near the capital. Hopefully further exploring to the northeast will find somewhere useful.

[TheArchduke]

Some thoughts on the current situation.

Yerevan is actually a terrible site, which makes our "ability" to not conquer CS a bit more endurable.
It is a shame though, a mil cs would have been the best boost after a culture one and would offset our terrain a bit.

I REALLY dislike the placement of a city on dyes with Capitals, especially as you loose the plantation gold as well. I know everything speaks for it, but I much rather would settle this later NE with an aqueduct. I hope that N and W we find a somewhat decent city site.

Sullla´s critique of Penguins is valid, it does not claim territory and should be a big no-no until we at least know the lay of the land and have established borders with our human neighbours. Unfortunately as it is our best site so far.

Blackhawk and the placement of the wine is unfortunate. I would settle Blackhawks 1 SW so it is on the plains hill tile for the invaluable +1 hammer on the city tile itself. Also apart from a third ring elephant I do not see us missing anything thrilling by settling NE.

Here is another one that the Kings site is the answer to all of our settling problems. If it is any good that should be a priority as it probably gets us closer to the middle of the map and our neighbours as well.

Apart from the slight divergence in regards to Sulla´s recommendations to settling capitals I would also recommend preplanning a switch to agoge and minimizing military builds till then. I am still partial to a second slinger (moonlighting as a scout) to get more information quicker.

EDIT:

Friday morning, game has been up till 9 hours, so doing turn.

[TheArchduke]

This feels a tad weird, to comment and then to play, but as Chev pointed out his Saturday and his Sunday are difficult for him.

Anyway,

Turn 11

Our warrior was attacked over the river into rough terrain and encounters another warrior. Thanks to discipline this not a problem. We fortify in place. The scout crosses the river NW to swing by the Kings site and the continue on for much needed intel. AH is done next turn.