This is as good a moment as any to toss out some thoughts about where this game stands after roughly 80 turns. It's been fantastic to watch thus far and I'll keep suggesting that mostly naval maps work better for Civ6 MP than mostly land-based setups. Listed in team order:
Japan (Kaiser) / England (TheArchduke)
I did not like the picks for this team and I haven't been a great fan of their gameplan thus far. Japan was a poor choice for the first pick in the original draft; I would have loved it as the eighth pick but there were much better options with the initial choice. I think the cheap districts for Japan are pretty much a trap for a game like this. They're half cost but none of them are districts that you really want to have! Theatres are always a niche district, Encampments have little value on a water map, and the Holy Sites mostly ate up early production for little gain. Kaiser still ended up with the third religion and lacks enough faith (18/turn at the moment) to do anything with it as a currency. If you want to get into the religious game, take Russia or China or better yet Indonesia on this map. The +5 strength on coastal tiles is excellent without being worthy of first-pick status.
TheArchduke then ended up with England and that definitely did feel like an eighth pick choice, cheap Harbor districts and not much else. TheArchduke seems to be pretty checked out on this game with little in the way of posting and or his typical aggression. He had barbarians running through his cities and pillaging a trade route which normally would never happen to one of his civs. England just doesn't seem to have much development in general, with poor science/culture numbers and few districts. The team overall sank a lot of production into early ships to capture city states and then had the misfortune to get into a big clash with the early game naval powerhouses of Norway/Phoenicia. They do have some advantages going for them: Japan has good science output, England will have plenty of Great Admirals on hand, and creative use of Crusade could give them the edge if they can covert key enemy cities. Still, this team seems mostly stuck on roughly 5 cities apiece and they don't have good prospects for expansion. I think this team is in the worst position of the four at the moment.
Australia (marcopolothefraud) / Russia (Chevalier Mal Fet)
It's kind of incredible to think that Australia was the first pick for this team and Russia the second pick given how the game has played out. Chevalier is playing a brilliant game making use of cheap Russian Lavras along with the overpowered Work Ethic belief and Dance of the Aurora pantheon. Unlike a lot of the other players who seem to be winging things, Chevalier has meticulously planned out the development of his cities and turned a tundra wasteland into a booming empire. He has the full Monumentality snowball running and Russia is expanding far better than anyone else. (Declaring war on Woden/Ljubljana to get the last point of era score needed for a Golden Age was incredibly clutch, Russia would be nowhere near where it is now with a Normal Age.) Those Lavras are going to give every Russian city amazing production and at that point Chevalier can do, well, anything he wants. Russia's mediocre science/culture numbers are masking this on the scoreboard at the moment and I think that's a huge advantage for this team. But make no mistake, Chevalier is about to reach *TEN* cities in a game where the other teams are mostly sitting around 5-6 cities and he'll have enough faith to keep adding more without needing to train the settlers. I would say that this team is the clear favorite right now except...
...it's a game of paired teams and Australia is probably the weakest in the game. Marcopolothefraud is clearly new to Civ6 Multiplayer, and while there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, he also seems to be a poor teammate. He doesn't post much, he hasn't been great at communicating with Chevalier, and he seems to make snap decisions that ignore the direction the team has been planning to take. Cornflakes made some very good suggestions both at the beginning of the game and then again around Turn 50 about how to develop Australia better, only for marcopolothefraud to blow him off both times and take a clearly inferior path for his cities. Then marcopolothefraud decided to ignore Chevalier and take God of the Forge for his pantheon which makes no sense at all. How would Australia ever make use of extra production for Ancient/Classical era units? By the time Australia ever fights anyone those units will all be obsolete! The desert-boosting pantheon would have been immensely better and transformed the desert wastelands of eastern Australia into highly productive terrain. Terrible, terrible decision-making there and apparently done on a whim without talking to the other teammate. I hope that marcopolothefraud can use this game as a learning tool and improve from it but mostly right now I feel bad for Chevalier. He's completely carrying the team without much help at the moment.
Indonesia (suboptimal) / China (roland)
I loved the Indonesia pick for this team and I think Indonesia and Phoenicia were the two best picks for this map. Pairing Indonesia with China on the second half of the draft was even better, with China able to handle economic development while Indonesia focused on dominating the seas. Or at least I thought that would be the plan; I've been underwhelmed by many of the decisions made by this team after the picking phase. Starting with Indonesia, Earth Goddess was the best pantheon choice and allowed suboptimal to amass faith without having to build Holy Site districts. But then suboptimal chose to build a Holy Site district anyway - what?! Indonesia doesn't need a religion, China will supply one for the team! Then he built ANOTHER Holy Site district at another city! That's a ton of production not going into more useful districts like Campuses or snowballing ahead with builders/settlers/units. Then there's suboptimal's city placements where he seems to have no desire to put them on the coast in a game that's all about naval power. Sure, he'll get Harbor districts eventually, but that requires expanding borders and building the district post-size 4, delaying everything for long turns on end. I worry that suboptimal is off doing his Single Player builder thing again, treating the game as a sandbox exercise without ever focusing on a key objective. This is a team that should be driving hard to exploit Indonesian jongs and I'm not seeing much of it right now.
As for roland, I did not like the belief choices that he took for his religion. Choral Music is great for civs that want to build a lot of Holy Site districts, but again, the whole point of China is that you don't want to build them! (Yes, I realize that this is why suboptimal was building his own Holy Site districts but the whole idea is a mistake.) China wants Divine Inspiration which will provide faith from wonders, thus allowing faith to accumulate without having to invest in those districts. Choral Music requires the generally crummy Holy Sites themselves, then the shrines/temples for culture. Slow, slow, slow! I think Sacred Places was a good choice though I think I would have preferred Tithe since it would apply to Indonesian cities as well. It's good on its own while also denying a useful belief to other teams (no one but China can use Sacred Places while Chevalier's Russia is making bank with Tithe right now). Roland has developed his cities quite nicely and each one of them is strong... but he only has four of them 80 turns into the game. That's simply not enough and he's going to start falling behind the pack without more expansion. Even for China some of these wonders have marginal value and the need to keep building Holy Site districts to make use of Choral Music has wasted a lot of precious production. (It isn't even working; Russia has as much culture as China largely from having far more total population and cranking out cheap monuments.) This feels like another civ that's playing around in a sandbow without any clear direction on where it wants to go or what it wants to do. I think China will build a ton of wonders and still get eclipsed by other larger teams in the long run.
Finally, the natural disaster that struck roland prompts another question:
why are these games being played with disasters turned on anyway? 95% of the time they do nothing and then 5% of the time someone gets hammered. The disasters can't be predicted ahead of time and they single one player out for random punishment when they appear. It's the same kind of stupid RNG that we turn off in every other respect. I don't get this at all!
Phoenicia (Ljubljana) / Norway (Woden)
I loved the picks for this team and thought that they did great for having the fourth and fifth pick in the snake draft. These two teams have a lot of early game naval power so they would be hot out of the gate and needed to translate that into a longterm advantage, the Imperialistic equivalent for Civ6. They've been somewhat successful thus far, I'd say. I thought that Ljubljana did a good job of beelining to his unique district Cothons at an early date and then setting up for rapid expansion afterwards. Phoenicia has seven cities on the map (although one is the captured Akkad which will be stuck in the occupation penalty) and another settler on its way. All but one city is on the coast and Ljubljana prioritized Cothons along with early biremes. My biggest concern here is research: there are no Campus districts placed and Phoenicia's entire science is coming from Harbor adjacency bonuses via Golden Age dedication. That will time out down the road and then this team's research is going to collapse. So Phoenicia looks great for the moment but I'm concerned about the future.
After all, it's not like Woden has been building a lot of Campus districts as Norway. (He also emphasized Holy Site districts - so many Holy Sites across these teams!) Woden has mostly been training ships and he's done a nice job of claiming the city states in the immediate vicinity. Expansion has been good but internal development seems to be lacking, science/culture are lagging and there don't appear to be any Campuses on the entire Phoenicia/Noway island. Obviously the biggest story for this team was the clash over the city state of Akkad, which they did manage to win but only at the cost of losing half a dozen ships. It's obviously bad that this team and Kaiser/TheArchduke both had to invest huge amounts of production into ships that went to the bottom of the sea while other teams were developing in peace. Woden and Ljubljana really had no choice though since this is the era of their unique units and they had to leverage that into control of the seas around their starting island. They may have made a gamelong enemy though and their island seems to be lacking in infrastructure outside of Ljubljana's Cothons. I would be very concerned if I were them about getting outscaled by Russia or Indonesia later on.
Anyway, this has been a great read and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next!
