Singaboy and Sullla's team thread

[Sullla]

Thanks for the kind messages all. I haven't seen any of the other players posting in the General thread or the rival team threads yet, which suggests that there was a general feeling of exhaustion across everyone involved at the end of this game. I think it was a good time to call an end to this one.

Japper, there will almost certainly be a writeup of this game eventually on the website, not least because it was so informative in shedding information on the Civ6 lategame mechanics. I will be taking some time off from this game first though and then I have all this moving stuff to do, so perhaps in a month or two. There was a lot that happened in this game and it's going to take some real work to type everything up. As of right now, I've only had the chance to read through the lurker thread and the Khmer/Kongo thread. I think there's a general consensus on what went wrong there (leaving aside the cheating stuff): second cities for Kongo and Khmer placed too far away from the capitals, early warfare with England/Nubia forced the production of even more units to slow down development further, and then there was little that could be done once both neighbors decided to attack. I think that the biggest missed opportunity was not going after the nearby city states and capturing some of them to get more territory. While Kongo did go after Nan Madol eventually, it could have been done much sooner, especially after your team built a series of units to defend against Chevalier and Woden. You also could have scouted a bit better; I don't think your team ever contacted any of the city states outside of your starting continent, and meeting at least some of the other city states could have proved helpful.

As far as a possible Civ6 mod goes, I've been giving that a lot of thought lately. I think that there are some modest changes that would fix a lot of the problems with the gameplay; I would tone down the scaling of chops/harvests and the scaling of districts while making upgrades more expensive and lategame units cheaper to build. I'd also love to see one or two small changes to make natural city production more viable than chopping, and introduce ways for non-hill terrain to be useful. It's silly that flat grassland tiles are almost completely worthless right now and that hills (especially forest/jungle hills) dominate everything. The core structure of Civ6 gives us a good foundation to work with, and I think we can tweak it with a few number changes here and there to create something that will work a lot better.

I also appreciate the excellent reporting from the other teams even if I'm just getting to see it for the first time. It makes reading through the other threads a real pleasure.

[timmy827]

Sullla - Congrats on all the adulting!  I'm amazed you're able to keep up what you did for several months, thanks for some great reporting!
Singaboy - also many thanks for a fun game to follow and lots of high quality writeups!

[Shimomo]

Singaboy, Sullla, really can't say enough about the work you have put into this. Thanks so much and congratulations to Sullla on the upcoming wedding!! Also hope the move goes well; it can be one of the more stressful life events.

[roland of gilead]

loved reading through this thread and following along. Bit gutted it fizzled out just as it looked to be getting interesting but understandable why. 

congratulation Sulla. 

for you mod perhaps look at builder cost scaling?

to me it's frightening but I play differently. I like marathon and huge empires.

[TheArchduke]

* There was a ton of discussion about killing the game off and starting fresh. I don't think that opinion was wrong necessarily; the cheating incident definitely made this a flawed game, no question about it. On the other hand, everyone had already invested close to two months into this game at that point and played out a full Civ6 opening sequence of moves. If we had started over again, it would have been an entirely different game. We probably would have needed to redraft the civs again, and we would have had a different map and different group of players. I wouldn't have been willing to start a new game, for example, and I don't think I was the only one. Was it better to continue with an interesting but flawed game, or scrap it at an early stage and replace it with something different entirely? I don't know. I do think that there was value in continuing this game, since it was fun to play and seemed to be one of the most popular parts of the Realms Beyond forums. Our thread had something like 90,000 views and the other teams were pushing 40,000 views so SOMEONE was enjoying reading about this whole venture.

I think the audience comes with you participating, not by the game itself. You clearly have a fanbase and following which would have followed you to a new game regardless on how it plays out.

* The discussion about city gifting between teammates was something that the whole group should have discussed before the game started. I don't think any of us thought about it collectively though, and each team went into the game with different conceptions about what would be fair game and what wouldn't be. We never considered it at all and didn't try to exploit city gifts for free Roman monuments/roads because we thought that would be cheating. TheArchduke and EmperorK went into the game with the understanding that teammates could swap cities back and forth to make use of unique civ benefits, and they weren't "wrong" or anything because none of us had clarified how to play things before starting. This is something that future team games will want to set the rules on before starting. I think that the rules we came up (one-time gift allowed) were still a bit on the permissive side but worked out OK given the context here.

As stated at the time, not doing something the game allows did not strike me as a rule on RB PBEM so far, especially after PBEM #4. Happy to see that it is not that way after all.

* There was also a lot of talk about how our team was lucky given that we had the weak team as one of our neighbors. To which I would respond with: well, duh, of course we were lucky there. Neighbor luck is ALWAYS the biggest element of any PBEM/Pitboss game, we established that years ago. I don't think there's any need to apologize or self-flagellate ourselves over having a weak neighbor and taking advantage of it. Yes, we had good fortune here but we also worked diligently to take advantage of it. Chevalier and Woden also had the same opportunity and they struggled to produce the same results as we did. They had plenty of good luck too: next to the weak Khmer civ, Nan Madol synergizing perfectly with England's districts, Valetta as another useful city state, etc. The only team that had genuine bad luck in terms of their starting position was Russia/Germany, and they chose to opt into a very passive "sit back and wait for Hansas/cossacks to make a move" strategy. I think TheArchduke and EmperorK have a legitimate complaint here, but that's really no different from scores of other Civilization Multiplayer games we've run here where one of the players proved to be weaker than the rest of the field. I don't think there was anything uniquely different about this game. If everyone was talking about our good fortune in the lurker thread, it just proved that we leveraged our position more effectively than the other teams.

I fully agree. The position of the isthmus and the aggressive plant by England/Nubia made a strike outside impossible.

* The other huge turning point was TheArchduke choosing to patronage Darwin with gold a single turn before Rome had double Campus district projects land and grab the Great Scientist. That was another huge turning point in the game, as if Rome had landed Darwin we would have had battleships in place before fighting Chevalier, instead of getting them several turns into the war and then slowly upgrading as we went along. If it had been 19 battleships instead of 19 frigates on that body of water, it would have been a complete and utter slaughter. Battleships with Line of Battle promotion are 77 strength and Chevalier's frigates had 45 defense, so that's a combat differential of +32 which averages one-shot kills. Instead of sinking 10 ships the first turn, we would have sunk 20 ships the first turn and that would have been it immediately. No loss of Genova, no losses of any significance to the Roman fleet, and then we capture all of the English cities on the eastern ocean (as Singaboy did anyway but after major losses) and turn to fight TheArchduke when the Alliance wore off. I think this also would have been enough to result in a confession. It was really frustrating to set up such a slick play by having the double Campus district projects land on the same turn only to find that TheArchduke had been one step ahead. He literally swung the game there with the foresight to grab Darwin on his turn in the nick of time. An outstanding play from him.

Getting Darwin is as strong as the denial of not letting someone else have him. I pushed aggressive for him in PBEM #4 as well, I think not doing so is a huge mistake.

* Planting the canal city to block TheArchduke... if we had known how TheArchduke would react, I don't think that we would have done it. The problem is always that you don't know how the other players will react or what they're thinking in these AI diplo games. Was TheArchduke serious about allying with us? We didn't know for sure one way or the other. In that absence of knowledge, we went with the stronger tactical play (denying Germany a canal city) to safeguard our cities in the southern ocean. If TheArchduke was serious about attacking Nubia, then yes, that was a gigantic misplay on our part. My only answer is that we really didn't know what TheArchduke or EmperorK were thinking. I agree that this is a weakness of my Civ gaming skills, and I probably should work harder to try and understand what other players are thinking. We may very well have shot ourselves in the foot here, I'll have to read the Russia/Germany team thread for more info. I really wanted to work together with Russia/Germany and I'm going to feel sad if it was the canal city that stopped us from getting the 2 vs 1 against England/Nubia (which, let's face it, would have been an autowin scenario for my team).

We were dead set on denying the VA team in our eyes to win. Little did I know that Woden/Chevalier absolutely not read the PBEM #4 thread or your analysis.
On the seas it is 1st strike, 1st strike and 1st strike.

As you guys would go first, I would have retreated my whole fleet on turn 160 as not to allow China a first strike. I wouldn´t care about loosing a city and neither did you, which was the smart play.

* It was weird to see comments saying that playing first in turn order (due to signing up first for MP games) was the source of my success. In PBEM1, I was last in turn order and in this game, I was a replacement player. So... Also, I did NOT have first strike against Japper who played first in turn order. He had first stike opportunities in both of our wars and didn't take advantage of them. I wouldn't have had a first strike chance against EmperorK either, who also played before Rome. And finally, Chevalier and Woden both played before China in turn order, so they had the first strike chance against Singaboy. The first strike advantage was absolutely real, but others had the chance to take advantage of the same thing. They just didn't make use of those opportunities.

Relevant first strike. Russia was never in a position to hit anything. Japper, well he is not that dangerous either. Rome, Germany and England were the most dangerous civs around especially on the sea, so first strike was a decisive advantage.

* I was surprised that the lurker thread misread the English tactical plan to attack and raze Genova. Losing that city really didn't do much of anything to hurt Rome beyond losing a mature city. The Roman navy was already concentrated in the eastern ocean and there was no immediate need for a canal, plus the city could be replaced before Germany could enter the war. Sending so many ships to attack a city instead of the Roman fleet was a massive misplay from a tactical perspective; if not for that, I don't think that Singaboy would have been able to win the naval clash and push on to capture the English cities. Killing the enemy fleet was the overriding goal of the combat in that theatre of war. I also think that the positioning of the English ships on the first turn of the war was also a mistake. With 7 move frigates, England could have kept all those ships completely out of range of being attacked by Rome. Having the first strike advantage would have been meaningless if they had been too far back to be attacked. Similarly, concentrating so many attacks against a double-promoted ironclad on the second turn of the war was another major tactical misplay. The ironclads were not the important units, the frigates were. With better tactical decision-making, England definitely could have won the war on the eastern ocean. I think we were fortunate to come out on top. (Also, not even one post in the lurker thread about building Terracotta Army? Give me a little credit there!)

Genova was a useless play. See my comment on PBEM #4. A city is actually easily replaceable and not worth 15 units.

* This is a good time to discuss the Venetian Arsenal. I genuinely think it should be banned in the future for any game that involves water, and arguably even on a Pangaea map since every coastal city would still be subject to VA-doubled ships from the player that built it. It's the combination of chopping and the +100% naval production policies that make this wonder game breaking. You can turn any forest on the map into two frigates, and that's just way too strong. In this game, it took having the promotion edge via Terracotta Army and the tech edge (Rome was almost a full era ahead of England) to come out on top, and frankly Rome still would have lost the war if England's fleet hadn't been split across two oceans. Honestly, Rome still might have lost with better tactical play from the English side. You should not need to have a tech edge and promotion edge just to narrowly win against an opponent. Under any other circumstances, being a generation ahead and a promotion ahead on every unit would lead to a crushing victory. And if this matters, the Venetian Arsenal is so incredibly frustating to play against too. Ask TheArchduke about this from PBEM4; it's soul-killingly annoying to be destroying enemy units left and right and see them replaced constantly. The thing is toxic for gameplay purposes. (For that matter, I would also ban spies in the future as well. 50% chance to steal 700 gold from an opponent?! That's terrible design. Get rid of those things.) This is not a criticism of Chevalier who made a great play to build the thing. But for future games, we're better off as a community for not having it around.

Yeah, finally someone understands my pain from PBEM #4. The losses that Oledavy sustained were huge but did not matter one bit.

* Suboptimal and Brian Shanahan correctly summarized my feelings about the end of the game in the lurker thread: I was looking to stop playing the turns due to a combination of frustration with the Civ6 lategame mechanics and growing exhaustion, and then the bug with the policy change not working properly was a "last straw" moment that killed enthusiasm to keep going. I appreciate the fact that the lurker thread was understanding of this and it wasn't full of posts about how "you killed the game!" or "you're a quitter!" or some such nonsense. The fact that lategame chopping/harvesting becomes so much more powerful than anything else was a major downer for me. This was the first time that we had a Civ6 Multiplayer game make it this far down the tech/civic trees, and the results weren't pretty. I would be interested in brainstorming solutions for a Realms Beyond mod to address some of these problems. At a minimum, I think that the scaling for the chops/harvests needs to be toned down significantly and the lategame units made cheaper to build. I'd also think about making unit upgrades more expensive so that they aren't the obvious One Right Choice that they are now; it really doesn't make sense that finishing more advanced technology can penalize you so much in Civ6, with it being so much better to build old units and upgrade them as opposed to build new units. I think that with some tinkering we could come up with a system that makes more sense.

Disagree there. I do not see how chopping is any way less broken for high end play then prechops and slavery from CIV IV. This probably comes down to age.

* I also did want to thank everyone else who took part in this game and for making it such an entertaining, if flawed/unbalanced, experience. Cornflakes first for making the map and filling in for the Khmer spot, and then EmperorK, TheArchduke, Chevalier, and Woden for being such capable opponents. I'm looking forward to reading some of those other spoiler threads, and none of you were pushovers. It's clear that the community has improved immensely from a year earlier in the PBEM1 days. TheArchduke in particular is now a terrifying opponent and I wish that we had been able to work together more effectively in this game. That's mostly my fault from what I've been able to gather thus far, and I'm sorry for that. A China/Rome/Germany/Russia alliance is about as frightening as you can get in Civ6. Last and most importantly of all, Singaboy was an exceptional teammate in this game and deserving of all the praise. If this game was a blast to play, most of the credit of that goes to him. Thanks again.

It was a pleasure playing against you. I understand RL commitments, although my answer was to move from Realtime Multiplayer (EU4) to PBEM (CIV VI) as work and a baby takes up too much time.

[T-hawk]

* I was surprised that the lurker thread misread the English tactical plan to attack and raze Genova. ... I also think that the positioning of the English ships on the first turn of the war was also a mistake. With 7 move frigates, England could have kept all those ships completely out of range of being attacked by Rome. Having the first strike advantage would have been meaningless if they had been too far back to be attacked.

Have you read Chevalier's thread now? England wanted to keep Genova to use for his own canal. Razing it was the backup plan once he'd lost enough fleet that he knew he couldn't hold it.

And Chevalier knew the positioning was a mistake, because he miscalculated how far Rome's frigates could move, and he also didn't know the Sea Dogs were visible and vulnerable. But it's also completely true that only the turn order made that matter at all. Your first strike still mattered significantly even if he'd positioned better. Given the geography, if Chevalier didn't have to dodge your first strike, he could have parked his fleet much closer to Genova, surrounding yours, with the first strike to kill your fleet first and then worry about Genova.

[Sullla]

Thanks for those comments TheArchduke, I think we ended up agreeing on a lot of those points. We may have to cordially disagree about lategame chopping/harvesting; I think the biggest difference from Civ4 is that the scaling in Civ6 is so much greater for the chops. Forests are capped at 30 production in Civ4, and while you can stack modifiers onto that with forges and civics and such, there's still a hard limit there. In Civ6, the scaling over time becomes so huge that junk size 1 cities stuck in the middle of forest/jungle regions are actually outproducing mature cities that have been built up over the game. It's really dumb that my capital gets 40 production/turn after 150 turns of building it up, while I can harvest a stone resource for 150 production and then double that output with a +100% production policy. The balance is too far out of kilter, and new cities with no infrastruture shouldn't be that powerful right away. I've been brainstorming some possible solutions for a Realms Beyond balancing mod, and I'm hoping to type them up for the forums this weekend. Your thoughts and everyone else's would be wonderful to have when I have the full proposal put together.

I've been reading the Russia/Germany team thread as well and have some thoughts there too! Still not done yet though.

T-Hawk, I haven't had a chance to read through the huge England/Nubia thread yet. I'm not disagreeing with you either, and it was obviously a huge advantage that Rome ended up playing before England on the first turn of the war. My point was that with two extra movement points on each ship, England likely could have manuevered to be out of range on the first turn of the war and find a way to get in the coveted first strike. Obviously the world in which England gets to move first before Rome is a vastly different and easier scenario for England. I did want to push back against the opinion in the lurker thread that Rome and China just had everything break their way and most of their success was due to being lucky. Sure, we were fortunate in many ways, but a lot of that success was also due to careful planning and preparation ahead of time.

[Cornflakes]

For a balance mod I here are some thought I had (other than fixing the chopping and production scaling):
• Making flatland useful, either through additional "workshop" improvement which give adjacency to IZ's and gain additional production down the tech tree similar to Mines, or making food more valuable so that farms aren't a complete waste of space and builder charges.
• Changing farms/mines/plantation to give additional housing at certain tech/civic triggers might go a long way towards making food more valuable. Giving Granary & Aqueduct additional housing at certain tech/civic could help as well.
• Increase the value of specialists at certain tech/civic triggers. Or better would be to make the buildings increase the value of specialists in addition to opening up more specialist slots (e.g. base campus specialist +2, library adds +1 to specialist yield, University adds additional +2 to specialist yield for a total of +4, etc.). Farms + specialists in combination with relaxed housing can make flatland cities valuable. Production can come from specialists in fully-equipped industrial and encampment districts.

[pindicator]

Cornflakes - would making mines open up on flatland (like how farms can be put on hills after Civil Engineering) be a potential solution? I was also considering moving plant trees ability to earlier in the civic tree

[Cornflakes]

Cornflakes - would making mines open up on flatland (like how farms can be put on hills after Civil Engineering) be a potential solution?  I was also considering moving plant trees ability to earlier in the civic tree

Back to Civ II that is indeed a simple change that would make flatland cities viable, but I don't think that is the best solution. Farms are essential worthless though except on a resource, so Mines would dominate the landscape. If farms were buffed in combination with specialists then another viable strategy emerges.

What really hurts farms (compared to previous games in the Civ series) is the dramatic increase in growth costs (roughly +10/pop early game, and increasing at larger pop) the +1 food from a farm has hardly any effect. By the time a city is size 4, the +1 from a farm is only 1/44th the cost of the next pop point . Grow to size 5 and work 2 farms for +2 is only 2/55 of the next growth cost. In Civ 4, working 1 farms at size 4 is [1/28?], and twice that with a Granary! With a granary, farms are 3x as effective in Civ 4 as in Civ 6 on a size 4 city with a granary ... and to top it off, farms become practically useless in Civ 6 once the housing cap is reached. Why put a citizen on the farm when he hardly speeds up growth and I can put him to work immediately on a different tile for production?

What might actually help farms is to dramatically scale UP both the growth costs AND the farm yields, in combination with relaxing housing caps. For example, a size 5 city needs 55 to grow, and a farm on a grassland tile has a marginal yield of +1 (+3 less the 2 that the citizen eats). If these values were increased say 4x the ratio would remain constant at 4/220 (the farm would remain as effective at speeding growing to the next size), but at the same time a single farm could support multiple specialists working in the districts of the city. ... 3 farms at +4 each could support 6 specialists at break-even. If those specialists could produce viable amounts of production/gold/etc. then cities on the plains could grow large on farms (and thus unlock more district slots) while at the same time being able to generate yields from specialists.

Gameplay would transition from cities planted for hills and resources early game, into farms/districts/specialists later game.