[SPOILERS] ljubljana embraces the dark side

[ljubljana]

Both west of the rice and northwest of the rice look like good spots for a city. They get the 2/3 deer tile available immediately and then the Russian extra borders should pull in the 1/3 forested plains hill tile and the pair of 2/2 forested grassland hill tiles to the west. One question for you: there's been a good bit of discussion in your thread about the religious bonuses that you want from founding early Lavras. Have you thought about what your pantheon might be? That should arrive earlier and there should be a number of useful options. Any idea yet?

I'll talk more about a potential city site up there in the main body of the post, but as for pantheons, a few seem strong here. In order, we have:

City Patron Goddess: I don't really think this is worth it, since our cities will likely all build cheap Lavras as their first district, so this doesn't get us as many hammers as it would with a campus-first gameplan.

Dance of the Aurora: This would be very strong with visible tundra, but I have yet to find any.

Desert Folklore: Same as above, unfortunately . Even a single decently-sized desert patch close to the capital would likely cause me to take this, but having seen literally zero desert tiles so far, I don't think there's much evidence that this would end up being worth anything.

Divine Spark: Well, this is in play for a very simple reason: it'd shave enough turns off of the religious timing to get DoTF before thrawn's attack rather than during it. It does very little else for us, with the +1 faith/Lavra that this would turn into post-religion being completely outclassed by Earth Goddess, but our position with respect to thrawn might be so dire that this benefit alone makes it the pick. If thrawn already has multiple Pítatis out at t25, which unfortunately is quite possible, this may have to be the pick.

Earth Goddess: The favorite from what we can see so far. The capital will have three strong breathtaking tiles after the Lavra completes, and while a second city in the NE would have only one such tile, the second-ring sites in the west and the third-ring MT site, should we manage to land it, are absolutely loaded with them and would provide a ton of faith to snowball with should we land this pantheon.

Fertility Rites: I think this is a second-tier option in most circumstances, but the builder is more useful than usual here since we're otherwise going to skip the Craftsmanship boost, and the increased growth rate is also more useful than usual since we're going Lavra first in every city and thus our science growth curve is heavily dependent on how quickly we can grow our cities to size 4. That said, I think I'd still prefer the previous two options, if we can land them.

Fire Goddess: No visible tiles that benefit from this, and it'd likely be weakish even if there were.

God of Craftsmen: Well, maybe if there are a ton of horses I'll give this a look, but I think our gameplan prefers +4 or more faith per city from EG to the +1 faith/+1 hammers per city that this is likely to top out at.

God of Healing: Hmm. So, I think the faster DoTF time from Divine Spark beats this from a military perspective, but if that's +30 health per turn, that's actually a pretty good amount of healing, and if we used this to justify taking Tithe instead of DoTF, it could effectively turn us a huge profit compared to the counterfactual. Unfortunately, our defensive line at Pilcrow probably needs to be too far forward to really make effective use of this; if we had dropped the Lavra 1NW of Pilcrow, though, this could actually be quite a strong option.

God of the Forge: How desperate are we to avoid being run over in the Ancient and Classical eras? Desperate enough to devote exactly one of our Pantheon/Religion beliefs to defense, yes, but desperate enough to devote both of them, I don't think so. This probably gets us another archer before thrawn attacks, and taking it ourselves does have strong denial value with this map full of Classical rush civs, and we could use it to justify taking Tithe with the religion instead of DoTF. However, this also means foregoing the extra faith from Earth Goddess, which is the only route we have to generating Monumentality faith from what we can currently see. All else being equal, I think I'd rather have the +4ish faith/city from EG than the +3 gold/city from Tithe, since faith-rushing costs are so much cheaper than gold-rushing costs both in Monumentality and with the GMC. That said, this does deserve at least some serious consideration for the denial value and because it is more likely than DoTF to come online before thrawn's attack, and its secondary benefit of letting us take Tithe instead of DoTF does get us more economically than, say, Divine Spark would once the military crisis period has passed (should we somehow manage to actually live to see such a time ).

God of the Open Sky: I only see three pastureables in our immediate neighborhood right now, but this could be worth it if we see enough horses. I'd much rather sink hammers into an early builder that then builds two pastures than into a monument, if it's an option to do so. That said, we'll probably need to see horses at both the capital and second city for this to have much chance of outweighing Earth Goddess.

God of the Sea: This looks like a pangaea map, and I haven't explored much of what coast there is, so this is probably out.

God of War: If we're doing enough fighting for this to pay off, I think we've probably already missed our chance to win the game, unfortunately.

Goddess of Festivals: Only three plantation resources nearby, and not much likelihood of any more appearing in the next 6 turns as with God of the Open Sky, so this is probably out.

Goddess of the Harvest: Harvesting is not usually the most efficient use of builder charges early, so I'm skeptical of this, especially since we don't actually have a ton of harvestables around.

Goddess of the Hunt: Three nearby deer is okay, but not amazing, though at least this is buffing tiles we'd want to be working anyways, unlike Lady of the Reeds and Marshes. None at the capital, though, so this would take a little while to come online.

Initiation Rites: I doubt we'll get to clear that many barb camps with the defensive military positioning that the geopolitical situation seems to require...and even if we did, I don't think this would be that strong.

Lady of the Reeds and Marshes: Four marshes at Pilcrow is fairly strong for this pantheon, but several of these are third-ring and will be out of reach for a while, and its other tiles are so good that this is actually worth less than its nominal 8 additional yield until it would run out of GFH to grow onto. I don't really think we've come across enough tiles in the fog that would benefit from this to make it worthwhile here, but maybe the boost to Pilcrow itself is significant enough that it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand either.

Monument to the Gods: I don't see much chance of us building any Ancient or Classical wonders, especially since doing so would actively undermine our Monasticism gameplan. We might maybe try a late run at the Pyramids if we can find a site for it, but this isn't going to be worth it just for that.

Religious Idols: I don't see enough mineable luxuries nearby for this to come close to beating Earth Goddess.

River Goddess: It's usually pretty tough to find good Lavra sites that are also riverside. This map has more than most, but I still doubt we could get this to work for enough of our cities for it to be a strong pick.

Sacred Path: No visible jungle, so this is out.

Stone Circles: Nowhere close to enough quarry-able resources for this to beat Earth Goddess.

Turn 15



A barb scout appears in the W, but thrawn attacks it for us! That's very nice of them; I move our warrior E so we can capitalize on this by finishing it off should it try to return to its camp (which, since I assume that this is the same scout from t9, is likely in the NW). I'm not really sure how Russia's border expansions interact with the camp activation mechanic, to be honest - it seems from my practice games that scouts only get the red ! if they move within 2 tiles of the city center itself, and this one appears to not have received it. Hopefully, this means it hasn't been activated and we won't now need to scramble to forestall barb problems.

In the E, our slinger spots a third mountain, giving us a +3 campus site on the cow, although it's just a bit too far away from the good tiles for us to grab with a city next to the rice. Between the spots to the NW and W of the rice, the latter can get a +3 campus by building an (admittedly weak and somewhat wasteful) +2 Lavra to its SW, then the campus 1SE of that, 1E of the government plaza site. It shouldn't need to buy any tiles to do so either; Russia gets 8/12 of the second-ring tiles upon founding, and that site has 3 second-ring mountains that I'm confident that the tile picker will deprioritize as well as a number of dry plains and grassland that I'm cautiously optimistic that it will deprioritize relative to the prospective campus site. 1NW of the rice could also get a +3 campus, but it'd have to be on the deer, so I think that site's weaker despite the better tiles. Since such a city would mean forgoing the ES from founding near a natural wonder, possibly for the whole Ancient Era, I'm placing a pretty high priority on getting those campus ES points up ASAP, since right now we're on pace to be in real danger of missing Monumentality. Unfortunately, neither of these sites is coastal, so neither can buy a boat if we really run into trouble in that respect; hopefully this will be unnecessary, but a third city placed at MT that immediately buys or chops a boat could get us +5 ES relatively cheaply if we end up really cutting it close to the GA threshold.

...oh, and 1W of the rice is also on a hill and behind a river relative to whoever tries to rush us from the other direction, to satisfy the same paranoiac streak that compelled me to move Pilcrow . If it weren't totally not in the spirit of a no-diplomacy game, I'd probably rename the capital to something like 'I moved t1 just so you wouldn't kill me' at this point . I'm not going to do that, but hopefully there's at least some chance that they get the message anyways .

Everyone except Ioan picks up CoL this turn, which is interesting - that means nobody has met a culture CS. We swap to Discipline, of course, and to "God King, I guess" . I still think GK is worth it because of how much faith Earth Goddess will produce with it and because I don't think we can realistically stand up a second city at MT, much though I'd like to be able to.

I've spilled a lot of ink over pantheon choices at this point, but I'm actually still not completely confident about what the best religious beliefs are for this start, either. I'm inclined to think Work Ethic still beats the likes of Choral Music and Feed the World - after Theology, it'll be worth something like +6 hammers per city even with these weakish Lavra sites, which pays back the cost of a monument or granary very quickly and without requiring any upfront investment other than a district that every city will build ASAP anyways. I also really want there to be some way to take Tithe instead of the mandatory-seeming DoTF, but I'm not sure how that could possibly work. Maybe if I offer the bribe on t35 and thrawn both accepts and there genuinely seems to not be an attack incoming (especially if I can somehow get a DoF after the denouncement expires), there would then be a remote possibility of getting away with such a move...

I also think that our immediate research targets after Archery are, unfortunately, probably going to need to be Pottery - Irrigation - Writing rather than moving on straight to HBR if we go with a NE site for the second city, since there's not really any other way to get our +3 campus up in time otherwise. I'm a bit worried that even that tech path will prove to be too slow, though we should be up to 5.5ish bpt by the end of that to speed things up.

[Jabah]

What about the forest hill SW of rice?

[ljubljana]

What about the forest hill SW of rice?

That would work as far as the +3 campus goes, but it seems like the tiles at such a city would be substantially weaker. 1W of the rice should get three forested hills and the deer in range thanks to Russia's ability, while 1SW gets the deer but no other four-yield tiles as far as we can currently see.

Turn 16



Well, I guess we know where the eastern camp is now. One big reason that I don't love slinger-first in generic situations is that it leads to difficult combat situations like this one whenever we happen to wander close to a barb camp. We flee onto the rice for now, but should it pursue, we'll have something of a tactical dilemma on our hands. Should we stand and fight on either the plains forest hill (which gives them the first attack) or on the floodplains (not a hill, as I erroneously reported earlier) 1W of the river? If not, we could try to flee and wait for our warrior to come around to help, but that would mean weakening our barb defense in the S and would likely require giving up on a second city in the NE. Hmm, dilemmas, dilemmas. I'll take a look at Civ6's map editing capabilities and see if I can figure out how people sim out this kind of thing.

Also note that Thrawn's military score has started fluctuating, though I don't know if that's because the scout was damaged last turn or if this reflects some further action off in the far west. Since the scout promote-healed this turn (which is presumably why they were so obliging in attacking that barb scout), we should know for sure next turn.

[marcopolothefraud]

Honestly, I don't see a situation where you can take care of the barbarian spearman fast enough so you can quickly settle NE. Maybe if a city-state luckily comes in?

One good choice is to retreat the slinger to the deer hill (the 2/3 tile 1W of the barb scout pin). This would give you first strike (probably knocking off ~20 HP from the barb spearman), and then you would have a +6 defence bonus when the spearman attacks you. However, a ~80HP spearman attacking you on that deer hill would still be 23 combat strength vs 16 combat strength, which means you might lose 40HP, and then I would advocate a retreat back to Pilcrow while your warrior comes up.

Or you can just directly retreat back to Pilcrow, which might let the barb spearman occupy the Lavra tile for a turn or two, but your warrior would have enough time to block it from doing any damage.


P.S. I don't suppose you would considering settling on Lake Ladoga or Lake Peipus? They have plenty of 2/2 yield tiles, but they also seem vulnerable to attack. Maybe if you find a nice hill tile, and have archers with the "+10 combat strength from a district" promotion, a western city might work.

[ljubljana]

P.S. I don't suppose you would considering settling on Lake Ladoga or Lake Peipus? They have plenty of 2/2 yield tiles, but they also seem vulnerable to attack. Maybe if you find a nice hill tile, and have archers with the "+10 combat strength from a district" promotion, a western city might work.

The main problems with the Lagoda/Peipus sites are the lack of a +3 campus location and the defensibility concerns. The latter is situated at a nice choke point at least, which goes some distance towards alleviating the second of these issues, and it's probably my second choice if we can't resolve this situation in the NE. NE seems like it needs to be the first choice if possible, though, not just because the terrain is strong and admits our +3 campus, but because it buys us the greatest number of extra turns to defend against thrawn's attack before one of our cities gets hit.

Turn 17



Here's a plan that could work in the event that the spear moves to the PFH this turn (which I expect to happen). Next turn, we can move the slinger SW and fire across the river; the spear will attack, and the settler will complete. We should then survive attacking and being attacked again on the next turn and (I think) will then have the experience to promote, while we move the settler NW-E to a spot where it will be unescorted but also unreachable other than by crossing the river. We can then promote the slinger if it has enough experience, letting it survive another attack, then move the settler onto the slinger's tile; on the turn after that, we can found our city and move the slinger into the new city to save it. All the while, our warrior will be 1t of travel time behind the settler; if something goes wrong, we should be able to resolve it by moving the warrior up at a delay of only one or two turns to the new city. My hesitance to divert the warrior last turn cost us a turn on its travel time, for which I'm kicking myself a little bit, but I now think it has to be done to guarantee that we can take out the camp over here. That'll be a very nice pickup from an ES and a gold perspective though, which is plenty of compensation for the lost exploration time.

As far as I can tell from Empire score tracking, nobody has a settler out yet, which is a little surprising and very encouraging. We should therefore be among the first players to a second city even with a delay from the barbs here, and could be competitive for the first second city overall without such a delay.

...hmm, wait, I am actually correct that 1E of the GP will be a +3 campus spot if it's also adjacent to the new city's Lavra, right? I believe the GP provides a +0.5 adjacency bonus from being a district in addition to the +1 from being the GP, but I could be wrong here due to being too used to Japan games (in which it gives +2 overall), which could culminate in a serious setback. The Civ6 wiki seems to support my interpretation, though, so hopefully we should be in the clear in that respect.

[marcopolothefraud]

We should then survive attacking and being attacked again on the next turn and (I think) will then have the experience to promote

ljubljana, this is an extremely dicey move. We've already seen other barbarians lurking south of Pilcrow, and thrawn's Nubia might invade us soon. This is not the time to lose a bunch of military score by absorbing barbarian attacks. Assuming that the slinger even survives (your plan involves taking a serious gamble, twice), your city would be founded on t21 and your slinger would be trapped there for 4-5 turns waiting to heal. I would recommend that your slinger lure the spearman to the area north or northwest of Pilcrow, hopefully taking 0-1 hits in the process. Maybe you should even waste one turn and ensure that the warrior can escort the settler, because your units need to keep as much health as possible.

Your second city location, which I think is 1SE of the deer, is pretty solid though. I think you're right in assuming the extra adjacency from the GP.

[ljubljana]

We should then survive attacking and being attacked again on the next turn and (I think) will then have the experience to promote

ljubljana, this is an extremely dicey move. We've already seen other barbarians lurking south of Pilcrow, and thrawn's Nubia might invade us soon. This is not the time to lose a bunch of military score by absorbing barbarian attacks. Assuming that the slinger even survives (your plan involves taking a serious gamble, twice), your city would be founded on t21 and your slinger would be trapped there for 4-5 turns waiting to heal. I would recommend that your slinger lure the spearman to the area north or northwest of Pilcrow, hopefully taking 0-1 hits in the process. Maybe you should even waste one turn and ensure that the warrior can escort the settler, because your units need to keep as much health as possible.

Your second city location, which I think is 1SE of the deer, is pretty solid though. I think you're right in assuming the extra adjacency from the GP.

Yeah, so I was thinking that 4-5 turns of healing wouldn't be hugely consequential because the odds of a rush coming before t25 are pretty small, but looking weak is a pretty valid concern, and the fact that I am not that confident that the slinger would survive and promote confirms that I should probably back away from this plan. As far as the second city site goes, it does have one major downside, in that there's only one breathtaking tile in range (though luckily it's a GFH that we'll want to work anyways). At this point, though, I think the defensibility concern outweighs that in the short term...once we have a few archers and either DoTF or a DoF from thrawn, we can then push our third and fourth cities westwards and start snowballing faith.

Turn 18



The barb situation intensifies. After much hand-wringing, I decide to move the warrior 1E onto the marsh, which cuts off the scout's southern escape route while still leaving us the option of diverting east. Because I'm a noob, I don't actually know if the scout will cross our borders to escape - I think the answer is no, in which case we're guaranteed at least one hit with the warrior, but if it does cross over to the east, we will still have at least some chance of catching it due to the fortuitous position of the coast and mountains. Something is nagging at me about this move in retrospect, though - maybe we should have moved onto the sheep? That would have defogged some tiles over there while giving us better positioning with respect to cutting off the scout, and I don't really think there's much chance of us being able to divert east until we've successfully killed the scout at this point. Hmm, I'm not completely sure what the right play was here.

In the NE, I also wring my hands about the spear/slinger situation. I ultimately decide to move NW onto the deer, by the following logic: if the spear does not cross the river, we can stand and fight with a +6 defensive bonus on our end and a -2 penalty on theirs, and the settler can move twice without getting in the spear's range and then found after the slinger takes two hits to guarantee its escape. If the spear does cross the river, it'll move onto our intended city site, making things a bit dicier; in that case, I think I'll move the slinger either E-NE to lure the spear back across the river or W to lure it towards the woods. The former plan is more likely to work without delaying the second city, but the latter leaves us less open to thrawn's scout appearing at the worst possible moment and ending our game.

CMF has a settler out, and also gained 6 ES (!) and a second tech to seize the score lead. Nobody else has a settler, though, so it looks like we tied for first with CMF in that respect...though it looks increasingly likely that barbs will delay our second city somewhat to regress our expansion back towards the pack. Thrawn's military score has started fluctuating again, which is the major piece of good news from this turn - this is the first real piece of evidence that the scout-slinger opening may in fact have been caused by early barb pressure, which would be a huge break for us. Of course, it could just as easily be thrawn's warrior starting on a easy camp clear, but still, I'd rather be seeing score fluctuations now than not seeing them, all else being equal.

[ljubljana]

Turn 19

We open the save to a huge break in terms of barbarian movement:



The spear didn't cross the river! That means we can move the settler N-NE this turn, NE-NW next turn, then found the turn after without ever exposing ourselves to danger, assuming that a) the spear does in fact attack our slinger next turn, b) thrawn's scout does not move out of the fog to spoil our fun on this upcoming interturn and c) I'm correct in my strongly-held but potentially-false belief that the scout can't cross the river this turn. I think those odds are good enough to start moving the settler - here's what that looks like:



Hair-raising, to be sure, but I'm confident that the scout can't eat our settler this turn, and I'm also pretty confident from some past SP shenanigans that it isn't programmed to do so even if it can. If both of those beliefs are wrong then gg lol . Also, it looks like I was wrong that the scout wouldn't escape through our borders...but, uh, where is it going? Don't tell me it can activate the camp in the east (and magically knows where to find it) despite having spawned in the NW? Update: I've been reading up on this on the various civ wikis and I think this, inexplicably, may well be the case, oh crap . I guess this just goes to show you the importance of being precise with every movement you make in the early game. The sad thing is, if I had made the right warrior move on t16, I could have attacked on t18 and likely avoided all of this, ouch. At least our warrior has a nice defensive chokepoint to occupy south of that mountain range, should it come to that, and we can add the capital's upcoming slinger build for a good shot at the Archery eureka.

Thrawn's military score is still fluctuating, which is probably good, but they also discovered a second tech this turn and grew their capital to size 4, which...I'm not sure what to make of either of those facts. I don't think that can be Archery unless they already have the boost, which is possible but would be pretty lucky on their part, and I'd also imagine they'd have upgraded a Pítati already if so (unless their slinger is currently out having just obtained said boost?). Growing to size 4 is also a bit strange...does that mean they're delaying the settler to build more troops, or just that they're building a settler while in growth configuration and so it'll be slow-ish to come out? I guess there's a third option, which is that the empire score increase that I'm attributing to them growing to size 4 was actually a monument build, but that would be really weird.

You can also see that our own capital finished the settler and started the Lavra, as promised. I think at this point I'm inclined to follow that up with a slinger rather than immediately pushing on to a monument, since I'm becoming increasingly nervous that thrawn's builds so far indicate some kind of one-city rush that might hit us even sooner than we're planning for. It looks like I messed up on the growth micro somehow though, which means we're going to spend two turns at size 2 rather than just 1; I thought I successfully put in four turns of +5 food into Pilcrow at size 3, but apparently not? Or is my understanding of how the math works with settler builds not completely correct? Either way, it's not a huge setback; we'll take two turns to grow back to size 3, then spend two more turns in production mode to finish the Lavra, then grow up to 4 while building the slinger as planned.

[ljubljana]

Turn 20



The spear fortified, perfect! The one thing that can now go wrong to prevent us from settling next turn is if the spear moves onto the intended city site; I decide that we now have enough of a health cushion on our slinger that it's worth moving it there to prevent this. The settler then moves NE-NW, still unescorted but with all the tiles in range defogged. Unless I've overlooked something, we should be guaranteed to settle next turn, with no delay relative to our original plan . In the south, I move our warrior onto the northern wheat, following the logic that the scout can easily be trapped by the slinger if it tries escaping northward, so we may as well do what we can to circle around it to the south in case it turns back this way. Not sure if that was the right move, though...

We also reveal horses this turn, and have some right there at Pilcrow - awesome! I think I now know what our first builder's jobs will be - farm a rice at city 2 for the irrigation boost, harvest the GP marsh into city 2 (usually a bad use of a charge this early but in this case growing to size 4 ASAP is very important), and pasture the horse for another 5-yield tile at the capital and the HBR boost (though this could turn into a sugar plantation depending on the amenities situation). In addition to slingers/archers and the monument, our next builds at Pilcrow should be this builder, the GP (more for the Pingala culture promotion than anything else), and a settler for the MT site in some order; I'll do some more thinking about the exact build order later. Unfortunately, I forgot my usual score screenshots this turn and therefore may have missed some international developments, but we do still get to see one interesting tidbit despite that - thrawn gained 8 gold this turn instead of 6! This could mean they met a financial city state, which wouldn't help us at all, but it could also mean they opened scout - slinger - builder, which could be a good sign for us if they're using that builder on economic things instead of chopping out Pítatis.

[ljubljana]

Turn 21



We found city #2, the first to do so . The new city immediately starts a sad Lavra, which is +0 now but will be +2 after the GP and, of course, has its placement dictated by the +3 campus requirement. As hoped-for, the tile picker is nice to us and we do acquire the latter district's site with Russia's free border pop. Meanwhile, the activated barb scout should be trapped now, unless it goes SE; I decided to move the slinger down only one tile this turn to (hopefully) increase the odds that it wanders W or NW instead. If so, I think we're essentially guaranteed to pick up the Archery boost on it with perfect play; W lets us double attack with the warrior and slinger, and NW lets us attack with the slinger and cut off its escape by crossing the river NW with the warrior. However, another scout has appeared to the south, and this one we don't really have the resources to block without catching another break from the barb RNG. That said, we should have Archery ready to go by the time it poses a real threat, so all in all I'm cautiously optimistic that the most dangerous period with respect to barbs is behind us at this point.

Internationally, CMF still has a settler out (and, like us, is already back up to size 3 at the capital), but it doesn't look like anyone else does, though I could easily have missed a telltale empire score fluctuation in the last few turns. Also, thrawn gained 10 (!) gold this turn - can that mean anything other than two camps next to each other at the capital? That would be really good news for us, I think; scout - slinger - builder could be a rushing opening in some circumstances, but I'd expect the builder to chop out slingers if so rather than worry about gold income and the craftsmanship boost.

Thinking way ahead here, I wonder if the Mahabodi should be added to our list of potentially-useful wonders in this situation? If we can get it before the second religion gets founded (which is admittedly a big if), we could potentially grab whichever of DoTF and Tithe we don't take without sacrificing our Monumentality snowball by investing a ton of faith into an Apostle. Of course, this approach would instead invest a ton of production into Apostles, which may not actually be any more efficient .