Civ6 PBEM17 Writeup

[Sullla]

Here's something that I've been working on for a little while now: a writeup of the recent PBEM17 Civ6 Multiplayer game: http://www.sullla.com/Civ6/PBEM17-1.html

Why this game exactly, considering that it's not one that I took part in? Well, The Black Sword kind of blew away the rest of the field in this game and I wanted to figure out how he pulled it off. That led to a lot of repeated reads through his spoiler thread for the game, and eventually I decided that it would be worthwhile to summarize things in more formal written form. This was also a good chance to discuss some of the changes to the Civ6 mechanics in Gathering Storm using the PBEM17 game as an case study. The report runs to five parts and it's focused on the economic side of the gameplay, hopefully providing a textbook example of how to snowball a game from a builder's standpoint.

I reserved some space on the last page in case anyone taking part in the PBEM17 game wants to add some additional thoughts now that it's been over for a few weeks. Let me know and I'll add whatever you want to say into the report.

[Alhambram]

EDIT: Thanks for taking time to write your report, it did help me understand better what happened in that PBEM at other side of world outside my happy builder paradise.

Here my overall comment, feel free to cut some parts for your report.

I did play till turn 100, afterwards I resigned mainly due slow turn pace and I lost interest to keep playing. Thanks Chevalier again for taking over from me!

Initally I was suprised to see concession message and shared Chevalier's opinion that game ended prematurely. But after reading TBS's thread and Sullla pointing out his production output in his cities, I realized that game likely would be go on for roughly 20 turns before everyone submitted their defeat.
My top three cities has strong production output, equal of Cree's best cities, but my remaining cities got poor production due being new or founded at desert next Uluru (Newcastle), having 10-15 at best while TBS's newly founded cities spitted out +25 two dozen turns after founding.
In short term that would make difference already, I complete lack navy aside some outdated galleys at same moment that TBS fielded a frigate fleet.
In such cases UI of civilization is poor, not only causing problems in some areas for example not telling that Mekewap couldn't built upon flood tiles. It also don't show graphs unless victory is achieved.
Therefore I (and Chevalier) didn't have sight upon production output of TBS's cities, that might cause us to think differently about concession at that moment.

Sullla basically already pointed out in his report everything what I did wrong. I fell in classic pitfall of happily building beautiful districts after other, sometimes added with wonders. I did complete Ancrestal Hall after turn 65 and till turn 100 I used Ancrestal Hall to produce a magical number of one settler...
Endless war between Pindicator and Suboptimal played a part in my goodfeeling to go with skeleton army and builder paradise. I practiced too much with single player and in this multiplayer I went in single player mode too much.

In single player you get away with few cities due weak AI and there isn't a need to have many cities to win. As you look back my previous games, you might notice same pattern: I am not really good at expanding.
Take example of PBEM 2: at moment that I did found 5th city of my own, Woden already founded his 11th (!!!) city. In that PBEM I was able to undercut this by capturing three city states and pecking off some cities from TheArchduke when oledavy and I invaded TheArchduke same time.
In PBEM 16 I simply rushed very early with Hungarian powered levied units and put end of PBEM before it hits serious expansion phase.

Civilization is a 4X game, I do bungle exploration sometimes, not good at expanding, doing well at exploit and sometimes good at exterminate.
If you ask me what TBS is really good at, I read reports of his civ 4 and civ 6 and came to this conclusion:
TBS isn't only good at building. He isn't only good at warfare either. Main reason why TBS is good, is becasue he is one of players at Realms Beyond who understand and master 4X better than anyone.

Cree of all possible civ 6 choices fits 4X idea the best, early economic powers to allow player snowball at right terrains quickly. It is almost made for players as TBS who excels at 4X.
Its UU is underwhelming and TBS simply made the best of it. But how TBS handled other economic powers and benfitted it in PBEM 17, I have to argee that it is best game I ever saw of civ 6 PBEM's.
I did say in my preview of opponents in my thread that TBS might make Cree work, but I didn't expect to his extent! I tip my hat off for truly strong game from TBS.


About civilization 6 in overall, it is fun to play in multiplayer against opponents of Realms Beyond but both poor AI, UI or silly game designs often make it painful to play.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

I don't have much to add to either Alhambram's thoughts (since we had the same Civ) or my postgame thoughts I put at the end of our PBEM17 thread. Great writeup, though! Definitely appreciate it, and it's worth studying closely to improve my own game.

[TheArchduke]

I think the report shows that the concession was warranted. Australia the only one with a decent chance to even compete was reachable by sea.

TBS would not waste his time to conquer my inner core but just keep Australia and Russia at bay whilst teching away.

Excellent writeup, much appreciated and TBS is a study in superior economic managment for sure.

[Charriu]

I would have loved to see a little conclusion/summary about the current gameplay state of Civ6. Otherwise great report.

[scooter]

Fun read for sure. Thanks for writing that up.

[The Black Sword]

Thanks for the writeup Sullla, and everyone else for the nice comments! I enjoyed the read, even if I did already know the material.

I'm not sure how much I have to add for a summation. I really enjoyed the game, so I was happy putting in time trying to find ways to improve things. Civ6 still feels very new to me, with a lot of unexplored areas, which contributed to that enjoyment. Maybe there are players in other communities who have disected it as much as we have civ4 but I haven't seen them. I think I did a pretty good job (and apparently you guys agree!) but there were still some opportunities for improvement where I didn't know the mechanics or didn't have the experience to figure it out in time. And there were also cases were there were radically different lines of play which seemed just as strong to me. And I'm sure there are opportunities that I missed altogether. So I think the economic side of civ6 has a lot going for it and it's certainly been improved since launch.

The biggest negative(even worse than the lacking documentation/UI!) is that the war-diplomacy system seems designed for SP play(which doesn't interest me). Combat is fun but it feels really hard to profit from attacking other players IMO.

[Sullla]

Thanks for providing those additional thoughts Alhambram and TBS. I added them into the last page of the report this morning. With regards to TBS' comments, I also think that we haven't explored Civ6 to anywhere near the same degree as Civ4 and there's still room for improvement from the community. We were getting closer to optimizing the release version of the game but the expansions made enough changes to shake things up significantly. Most of those changes were positive (especially toning down resource harvest/chopping which completely dominated the pre-expansion gameplay) with the glaring exception of the loyalty mechanic. I have two major suggestions that I think would improve the MP games run by the Civ6 community:

1) Play on mostly archipelago maps. The tactical combat system used in Civ6 is honestly pretty good overall, and we've seen some great large-scale battles in our past game. However, almost all of those big, impressive battles took place at sea and that's not a coincidence. Civ6 suffers from units not having enough movement points to operate on land and the maps not being large enough / open enough for units to maneuver. I mean, try comparing a screenshot of a battle in Civ6 to a battle in Old World:






I mean come on, it isn't even close. When I was maneuvering against Japper back in PBEM7, my units couldn't doing anything other than shuffle forward one tile at a time en masse because there were literally no tiles where they could go. Every jungle tile costs 2 or 3 movement points and that eats up each unit's entire movement allocation. Old World does this the correct way by spacing cities much, much further apart and allowing each unit to move 3-4 tiles per turn at minimum (subject to the global Orders restrictions). The way to get around this limitation is to play MP games on water-based maps. Naval units don't get stuck at the glacial pace of land-based units and the waters are open enough to allow for tactical maneuvering. Back in PBEM4, we saw some fantastic tactical positioning during the Battle of the North Sea and the Battle of Beija-Flor Bay. PBEM7 had the massive oceanic clash between Rome and England with almost 50 total ships engaged. Meanwhile, almost every land-based war boils down to one of two outcomes: a lightning conquest or a stalemate that achieves nothing for either side. Running archipelago maps will go a long way towards fixing this. (Besides, even the "land-based" maps seem to be getting decided by sea power anyway because it's the only place that units can actually maneuver properly. Why not lean into this instead of fighting against it?)

2) Consider making modest coding changes to make the game more amenable to military conquest. Everyone around here knows that I don't like modding but I increasingly think that Civ6 needs some modding changes to be viable long term as a MP game. The designers of the game seem to hate the notion of anyone ever conquering an enemy city - which is a really strange point of view considering that they made a tactical war game. There are way, way too many penalties attached to taking enemy territory in Civ6. The occupation rule is really bad, requiring a cessation in a peace treaty or else captured cities are basically useless forever. The loyalty mechanic introduced in the expansions may be even worse since it essentially makes any capture of any enemy city impossible. And although we haven't really seen it thus far in our MP games, Gathering Storm enormously buffed up defensive capabilities in general. Ancient walls have 50 HP instead of 100 HP, they can only be damaged by melee units with a battering ram (horse units no longer work), and battering rams are now useless against medieval/renaissance walls. It is really, really hard to capture territory now without a massive technological lead... and when you do take cities, occupation + loyalty makes them almost useless. I'm completely baffled as to why the designers went down this route - the AI is completely unable to capture anything in Single Player nowadays which completely removes any tension from the gameplay. We can do better than this.

Quick suggestions from me would be:
* Change the occupation rules such that the occupation period ends 10 turns after capture
* Remove the loyalty mechanic from the game entirely
* Rework the wall/siege mechanics completely. Instead of having a binary "wall die instantly with battering ram in place / walls are completely impregnable without rams" situation, I'd make it so that units do a bit more damage to city defenses across the board and then strip out rams/siege towers from the game completely. Basically city walls should buy some time for the defender to amass units but not be sufficient defense on their own.

I have no idea if any of this would be viable and I'm not volunteering for anything, just spitballing ideas and seeing what others think. I don't think Civ6 needs a big comprehensive mod, or an attempt to balance out the various leaders/civs, just fixes to some of its glaring SP-focused mechanics that make attacking mostly pointless.

[yuris125]

As far as I know, the problem with Civ6 modding is that Firaxis still haven't opened the DLL code, so modders are limited in how much they can change. I haven't been following it closely though, just saw it discussed somewhere in discord, so I could be wrong

[ljubljana]

I’m a little late to this thread, but what a captivating writeup and game, Sulla and TBS! If your goal was to spark interest in Civ VI MP among random AI Survivor lurkers, you’ve certainly succeeded in at least my case. I doubt there will be the appetite for more games anytime soon, given that PBEM18’s still at around T50, but I’ll definitely be interested when one does roll around in a few months