Sengoku Chevalier: Hiun no Kishi

[williams482]

I cannot resist the pull of another Chevalier thread. I also cannot resist the urge to joke about inevitably taking over for you when you move to a new continent midway through this game, although thanks to a Civ 6 DLC from 18 months ago (which I neither purchased for nor willingly downloaded) breaking compatibility with my old version of Mac OS, I will in fact be incapable of stepping in. Not that I expect you'll need me this time!

Interesting choice on the settler positioning and intended tech path. That spot is the only visible place that gives you two 4 yield tiles and some kind of water, so it's essentially the only viable choice for the capital, but it's also a pretty weak location long term (unless you get Mausoleum, which you very well might). In a singleplayer game I would have been tempted to strike out towards those plains hills, especially if that body of water to the west is a lake. 

Are you planning to snap up Animal Husbandry, Mining, and/or Pottery before sprinting to Harbors? Discovering horses on one of those plains tiles would hugely improve this capital, although of course the odds are very much against it on a random map.

[williams482]

That's a problem then. Check out post #135 in the main thread.

When I said "ruin everything" there was a bug that caused Woden's cities not to be able to fire. It didn't matter because thrawn was owning everyone but it could matter later. I blamed mods because there was other bugs like natural wonders not loading, so I guessed the problem was the game getting corrupted from mods.

I also remember that when mike4all gold-cheated it caused Sullla's units to heal randomly. That doesn't seem connected at all, just like aesthetic stuff is to gameplay. So just because something is just aesthetic, doesn't mean your safe.

UI mods which don't modify savegame files can't affect other players, which should be true with everything Chevalier is using. He can test that by disabling all the mods, starting a game, saving it, closing it, reenabling all the mods, and opening the same save again. If the game doesn't yell at him for that, it should be fine. 

Mikeforall's gold cheat came from editing the save files directly to give his treasury more gold. Either he or the tool he was using to do this accidentally modified/deleted data associated with Sullla's unit, restoring it to full health by default. This is totally unrelated to what user interface mods do. 

Finally, the Civ 6 default UI is a tire fire that leaves out such obvious information as "how much research have I invested in this tech." Requiring a purely vanilla interface seems absolutely brutal.

[MJW (ya that one)]

That's a problem then. Check out post #135 in the main thread.

When I said "ruin everything" there was a bug that caused Woden's cities not to be able to fire. It didn't matter because thrawn was owning everyone but it could matter later. I blamed mods because there was other bugs like natural wonders not loading, so I guessed the problem was the game getting corrupted from mods.

I also remember that when mike4all gold-cheated it caused Sullla's units to heal randomly. That doesn't seem connected at all, just like aesthetic stuff is to gameplay. So just because something is just aesthetic, doesn't mean your safe.

UI mods which don't modify savegame files can't affect other players, which should be true with everything Chevalier is using. He can test that by disabling all the mods, starting a game, saving it, closing it, reenabling all the mods, and opening the same save again. If the game doesn't yell at him for that, it should be fine. 

Mikeforall's gold cheat came from editing the save files directly to give his treasury more gold. Either he or the tool he was using to do this accidentally modified/deleted data associated with Sullla's unit, restoring it to full health by default. This is totally unrelated to what user interface mods do. 

Finally, the Civ 6 default UI is a tire fire that leaves out such obvious information as "how much research have I invested in this tech." Requiring a purely vanilla interface seems absolutely brutal.

Okay. Cmf just has to use reload trick to check and we should be fine

[Erasmas]

I will be following this also because I always love your write-ups. Dedicated but I have never played an on-line multiplayer game in my life so my advice will be limited to technical stuff.

And here is the first one: as far as I know, the build cost of districts is not just determined by your science progress, but also by culture progress, that is whichever one is further up the tree.

[ljubljana]

I cannot resist the pull of another Chevalier thread.

lol, when was the last time one of us was in a thread and not the other? was it PBEM20?

@CMF with respect to religion, how quickly do you plan to drop our first two holy site(s)? in these map conditions, the delta between feed the world and the next-best replacement (is it even still choral music if our civ ability provides gigantic amounts of bonus culture?) seems enormous, i don't know how we will ever get cities above size 6 or actually work all those hills otherwise.... with no half-cost holy site civs out there, i think we'll have a chance to get it, but we'll likely be racing TAD whose Khmer require heavy holy site investment to unlock their civ boni. i don't know if they'd take FtW though - their civ ability provides loads of bonus food already but only if there are rivers and aqueduct sites available. if their land looks like ours, i think they might still need to go for it (but also they are screwed if that happens, so maybe we should hope it does? ), and even if it doesn't, doubling down on their already strong food and housing snowball is probably a good move too

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Turn 2

Situation at turn start:



2 2/2 tiles are a decent enough start, even though the food situation is poor and our capital growth will be slow. A slow start, but what can you do on a random map? 

Founding on the coast inspires Sailing for us, which is great:

 
Sailing does two things, once we unlock. One, it will allow improvement of the excellent nearby Turtles tiles (albeit we'll need tile purchases to bring them on board), and second, it is one of the two prerequisites to the Celestial Navigation technology, which will open up Harbors for us. Harbors in turn will grant us food, housing, production, gold, and above all trade routes, as I noted above. With the poor food situation and the coastal start, it looks like we're going to ignore Commercial Hubs at first and beeline straight for Harbors. 

So, that brings up the two major questions now that our city is founded: What to research, and what to produce? Here are the opening techs:


 
We do eventually want all of these - regrettably the harbor path is more research-intensive than the more straightforward Commercial Hub path - but what order? Animal Husbandry and Mining are our basic builder techs. We'll need those to reveal and pasture horses (and cattle and sheep), as well as establish hunting camps for deer, truffles, and furs later. Mining allows us to plant mines and quarries, obviously, as well as chop down forests. Further, we'll need Sailing, as noted to improve the turtles. Finally, Astrology will be important for us to get our Holy Sites online.

We can eliminate Mining. We have 2 decent enough tiles to work here at the start, and I don't need immediate mines. We also have no stone or marble to quarry, so don't need that. Astrology is very important to get our Holy Sites up as soon as possible, but I need tile improvements first - these 2 forest hills won't cut it for long. That leaves animal husbandry or sailing. AH doesn't immediately help but MIGHT reveal horses nearby. Sailing WILL help and is a 13-turn research, and eureka'd. So, I open with sailing, probably with Astrology to follow so I can get the holy site down in good time. 

What to build? A builder, a military unit (a warrior for melee or a slinger for ranged), or a monument (for 2 extra culture) are all viable choices. Now, the builder is tempting to get our start improved as rapidly as possible, except...we don't have techs for him! He'd pop out in 8 turns, the same turn our city grows to 2, and have nothing to do while we finish Sailing, apart from planting a farm for the very marginal +1 food and half a housing we'd get. A monument WILL be important since we want as much culture as possible (the +2 culture from the monument is far more valuable than the +2 science we'd manage from a turn 1 campus, for example), but it's a slow build and culture is less critically important than getting our basic builder techs online. 

So, that leaves a military unit - a warrior, or a slinger? Slingers are very weak, have only range 1, and can be upgraded at almost no cost to archers, which are incredibly cheap themselves. Slingers I find all but useless for early barb control. A scout is a great investment if there were goody huts to pop, but sadly, there aren't. I'm still tempted to build one in order to more rapidly explore, scoop up first-meet bonuses on city states, and gain era score from meeting people, but with tundra visible to the north I know that I'll have lots of barbarian spawns around me. So, I need a unit with muscle. Warrior it is!

We scout a bit more to the west, revealing a pair of Wheat tiles near those hills - good spot for our second city, I think. Situation at end of turn:



 

Interestingly, scoreboard reveals that Archduke and Krill, both with 0 score, didn't settle last turn, either. Greenline settled and netted +5 era score. Era score earns you golden ages or dark ages when the game moves from age to age. +5 could come from any combination of finding/settling near a natural wonder, settling on a foreign continent, settling near a volcano or floodable river, etc. So we can assume Korea has a solid starting position. Whosit settled and has +1 empire score from his Monument, hence his 8 points to Greenline's 7. Every civ starts with a default 7 Empire points, I believe 3 from the city itself, 1 from the pop, and 3 from the palace? Or it could be default 5 per city, 1 per building (including your palace), and 1 per pop. Been a while, my memory is fuzzy on the details.

[williams482]

I believe empire score is 5 per city, 1, per pop, 1 per building (and 2 per district).

That second city site looks extremely promising.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Turn 3

As I noted in the tech thread, mostly we nudge our warrior and hit end turn:



We reveal stone, corn, and more hills. Note that there's still no sign of a river anywhere - the only freshwater anywhere near our spawn is that small lake. So if we'd gone for Commercial Hubs we'd be screwed! Happily we have the coast for harbors. 

A fun thing about Japan is that Meiji Restoration gives you twice as many yields from districts built next to each other as a normal civ - double adjacency. For example, here's a tiny megaplex I built in 13 seconds to showcase its potential:

 
A +7 campus, just from districts, and this thing could be in place when each city is at size 7! Not bad at all. Obviously we'll play around with different configurations to work out the most important use of the space. Most notably, I think I'm going to build industrial zones before campuses here. I want production over science! 

Score report, looks like Archduke is still wandering, and Krill's settle got him 1 era point:

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Turn 4-5

We reveal the south - no city-states or rivers in sight, and smack a barb scout that appears from the fog:

 

Everyone has settled and has 1 or 2 era score, apart from ourselves and Rome:

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Turn 6: There's a city state (or a player) southwest of the double jungle near my third city pin. Need to fend off the scout then head that way.