Thoughts on reading Yuris' spoiler thread:
* Since I never managed to explore the Aztec starting peninsula, I had no idea that your capital was located on the coast as well. I thought that you had moved inland like myself and teh. As you probably know, settling the capital on the coast ended up being a mistake since it stopped the capital from having much in the way of production. Your capital had plenty of food between the rice, the citris, and the seafood, but as I wrote a couple of times in my thread, what good is all that food, really? In Civ6, cities with high food but low production tend to grow to the housing cap and then sit there without accomplishing a whole lot. We actually had a discussion in my thread about whether it was preferrable to work the 4/0 citris tile versus the 2/2 horses tile after the capital grew to size 2 (with the first population point continuing to work the rice). I argued that the horses were the better tile to get more production into play immediately, and I think the results of this game tended to support that view.
* The problems with limited early production were exacerbated by your builder's choice of tiles to improve, and your early tech path. Everyone farmed the rice and pastured the horses, but I think the rest of us chose to use the third builder charge on mining a hill tile. You went for early Irrigation tech and put a plantation on the citris tile, and since your capital was already size 4 and about to suffer from the unhappiness penalty, that made sense. However, while you ended up with a lot of gold/turn income between the Commercial city state and the plantation and the seafood tile, the result was strictly limited early game production. Your capital was only making 6 production/turn here (1 from the city center tile, 2 from the Palace, and 3 from the horse pasture) while my capital was getting 12 production/turn:
![[Image: PBEM1-44.jpg]](http://www.sullla.com/Civ6/PBEM1/PBEM1-44.jpg)
Granted, some of that was coming from my pantheon choice, but it's still a huge contrast. Doubled production is just a lot more useful than doubled gold/turn income in the early stages of a game. I think this was the starting point for all of the issues that cropped up later, as the Aztec capial could never really manage to get meaningful production output since so many of the hill tiles were out in the second or thing ring of tiles. (And as a non-Roman player, the borders expanded much slower for you too.)
* The biggest early game decision was your choice to attack the city state of Lisbon. Do you have any different thoughts now about that choice after the game ended? I think that taking a city state was a good use of the Eagle Warriors, but I'm not sure that Lisbon (where you already had 2 envoys) was the right target. Did you consider attacking Stockholm instead? That would have been a game-changing move, and having +4 gold/turn on every Commercial district might have been a good incentive to keep Lisbon around.
* I see the biggest use of gold was to purchase the first settler for 320 gold. Generally speaking, I'm not a huge fan of settler purchases because you can get +50% production on settlers relatively easily with the Colonization policy. However, since you didn't have Early Empire civic available yet, and your capital was gold-rich but production-poor, I think this was a pretty strong choice. I'm curious why you picked a dry coastal location over a fresh water spot for your second city though; was there a particular reason for that choice?
* I think this screenshot summarizes a lot of the issues that took place in this game. The capital is investing 16 turns into a Campus district that will yield, what, 1 beaker/turn when completed? This simply wasn't a good map for Campus districts with so few mountains, and the return on investment for that district was really weak. The second city is forced to build a granary due to its coastal location, and Lisbon is also building a granary because, uh, reasons. I know that you were repairing a damaged granary there, but the city has no need for additional housing until reaching size 4, and the granary does cost 1 gold/turn to maintain.
If I had a word to describe this gameplay, it would be "unfocused". Some of these decisions are perfectly fine considered in isolation, but they don't add up to any larger picture. It was unclear reading your thread what you were trying to achieve most of the time. For instance, there was one post that included this statement:
yuris125 Wrote:I don't have anyone to attack nearby. I will heal the Jags and send them prowling around. If they have a realistic chance of doing the same to Stockholm, I'll go for it, otherwise the plan is just to scout and be opportunistic
And that's pretty much what the Eagle Warriors did, "prowling around" without really achieving anything over the next dozen turns or so. Those units gave you a strong early game advantage, and I don't think you were able to get as much out of them as might have been achieved. In addition, your three Eagle Warriors were split up and were unable to concentrate force even when the potential existed to do so. Like here:
A quick glance at the power rankings would show that TheArchduke had no military of consequence. If those three Eagle Warriors were together, they could slam right into Arpinum and take it over without much trouble. Stockholm also likely could have been taken, and then your civ would have a powerful base of influence at the top of the map. Instead, these units mostly wandered around in isolation and never achieved anything. (Were you watching the power rankings during this game? Just curious, since you seemed surprised at teh's military a couple times.)
* Regarding the infamous attack on teh, this is another case where I think a screenshot summarizes things better than words:
I've been defending the decision to attack teh in my thread, saying that Yuris needed to take over more territory to have a chance at winning the game, and that Yuris wasn't obligated to help teh stop me from winning. I don't think the plan was bad either: teh was blocking off access from the middle of the map, and this was a chance to hit teh while his army was out of position and engaged elsewhere. However, this screenshot basically summarizes everything that went wrong with this decision. Four units attacking, completely cut off from the rest of the Aztec civilization, no followup units being produced, home cities all working on districts. The idea behind this attack was fine, but the execution of it was not. I think you needed to be preparing for war much earlier than this, to then be in a position to capitalize when wars broke out between the other players. And that ties back into the slow production issues from the start of the game, which made it harder to be in that position to take advantage of what was going on elsewhere. Like everything in Civilization, a lot of this flows back to decisions made at the very start of the game.
* The whole knights/iron situation was a comical mismatch on both sides. You were researching Stirrups tech from an early date without knowing that knights require iron to be built. I saw that you had researched a Medieval tech, but for the very reason that knight require iron, I assumed that you had gone for something else; I was thinking Education for universities since you built the early Campus district. As a result, I sold you iron that allowed you to build knights, because who would research Stirrups tech at such an expensive price without having iron available?
Quite a mixup on both sides there.
At least I did learn something else significant here: you need 2 iron resources to START knights, but you were apparently able to keep building them after losing one of those sources. Interesting. The game must only check for the resource requirement when selecting something to build, not on a per-turn basis.
* Could you describe your thought process when you decided to attack me? I understand the strategic aspect (need to stop/slow down the leader), I'm more interested in the tactical side. Why spread everything out in a line like that, threatening two cities instead of one? While you couldn't have beaten me, I think you could have taken a city with better movement.
* Ah, I see that your postmortem post also concurred on the gameplan being unfocused. I typed earlier before seeing that. I think that was a good post, although I have to disagree that going build-first was a mistake. Starting with a builder worked just fine - the problem was settling your capital on the coast in a location where it had no production capacity. Teh and I both opened with a builder and did very well for ourselves. In a no-barbarians game, starting with a builder is a pretty good choice. (I would definitely not open with a monument; I think that would be a weak start.) Of course, this is a bit different for the Aztecs with their unique unit, so perhaps going for an Eagle Warrior first and hoping to enslave builders would have been better. I honestly don't know. Relying on the capture mechanic seems chancy.
Overall, I hope you had fun playing, and thank you very much for being so prompt at playing the turns. I think we had the least contact of the players in this game, and our relationship was good right up until the final turns. If you play the Aztecs again, I hope you're able to get more out of your "Jags" next time.
