Civ6 PBEM: Sullla of Rome

[Sullla]

Welcome to our first PBEM game for Civ6! I'm hoping that this game will demonstrate that Civ6 contains much of the same gameplay depth that we've experienced over the past decade with Civ4, i.e. that the problems with Civ6 are mostly due to the game's AI, not due to the mechanics themselves. In the few Civ5 PBEM games that were played on this website, the basic concept seemed like it would be fun, especially with the tactical battles being played out between human intelligences. However, those games always seemed to be dragged down by Civ5's sloppy fundamentals, such as the fact that expanding penalized your civ's culture/science costs and the way that everyone always seemed to be losing money no matter what they did. From what I've seen over the last few months, Civ6 is a like a version of Civ5 where the mechanics actually work in practice, and expansion is no longer needlessly penalized. This game will be a good test of my expectations.

For anyone who's new to Civ6, here's the most basic thing that I want to emphasize for a MP game: production is king. Production in Civ6 holds the same role that food did in Civ4. It is the driving force behind the gameplay, it is the engine that makes your civilization run. In Civ4, food is king because it gets converted very easily into whatever else the player wants to emphasize: into production via Slavery civic, into gold/beakers/culture via the use of specialists, into commerce via cottages by working more total tiles (with cottages not growing unless they are worked), and so on.

All of these mechanics have been either removed or reworked for Civ6. In this newest iteration of the Civilization series, food is relatively easy to come by. Buildings like granaries and watermills supply food, trade routes supply food, and resources with big food bonuses are fairly commonplace. With no Slavery whipping going on, your cities grow relatively quickly and stay at those sizes. The restraint on growth in Civ6 is not food but the housing mechanic, which places a strict cap on city sizes in the early game. It really doesn't matter if a city has +10 food/turn once it runs into the -50% and then the -75% growth penalty due to lack of housing. And with no ability to whip population, what good is all that extra food anyway? You can't even run citizen specialists, and the other specialists are off-limits until expensive districts and their buildings are completed. High food cities in Civ6 tend to grow to the housing cap very quickly and then sit there not really doing much of anything. They are much, much less valuable in Civ6 than in Civ4.

The only way for cities to build stuff in Civ6 is through, well, building it naturally with production. (Or by using money for cash-rushing, which is also extremely powerful.) High production cities are therefore the hot commodities in Civ6, as it's typically easier to supply food to a city than production. Any location with hill tiles and fresh water is a very desirable location indeed. Similarly, anything that boosts production or saves production is something for the player to target. Food and gold are both cheap in Civ6. Production is extremely valuable. As best I can tell, all of the power strategies in Civ6 revolve around finding shortcuts to boost production in some way. I plan to explore some of these during my game here.

OK, here's the short version of the gameplan for this game. Details to be filled out in forthcoming posts:

- Pick Rome as civ
- Expand ASAP to claim disputed land
- Claim the first Great General
- Build cheap warriors/slingers and do a mass upgrade to legions/archers
- Conquer neighbor with timing push attack

In my test games, I've been able to get 4 cities out on the map by Turn 45, and hit a timing push attack with 8 legions/3 archers (with Great General) around Turn 80. I'm still working on the details and trying to refine things, but that's the general idea. That's the theorycrafting side of this game, at least. We'll have to see how much of this will work in practice. I doubt it will be quite so easy against the other players as it was while testing against Prince AIs.

Civ6 is still the new car in the garage right now. Let's take it out for a MP test drive.

[Sullla]

We've played one turn this far. (I hope that with only four people we can get in one turn per day; we shall see. Always been a Pitboss fellow in Civ4 for exactly this reason.) Here's the starting hand that I was dealt:



I'm playing as Rome in this game, although you would never know it judging by my civ colors. I actually thought I was Arabia when I first logged into the game. But no, since we have two Romes that means that someone gets the funky alternate colors, and since TheArchduke is ahead of me in turn order, it fell to my civ. I'm sure that I'll get used to it in time.

We've playing on the 4-Leaf Clover map script, and there's very little deviation in how this sets up the game. Each player starts on one of four small arms extending out of a central peninsula, with a contested area in the middle of the map. It's not a particularly big map, and everyone will have room for maybe 4-5 cities before the space runs out. I've started on the southwest arm of the map, which is a tiny break of bad luck. The two eastern starts begin with their starting warrior closer to the center of the map, located on the luxury resource (the jade in this case). That gives those two starts a 2 turn edge at reaching the center of the map, where there are two city states to meet. I will be heading for the closest city state ASAP, and have to cross my fingers that the player directly opposite me to the east will take an inefficient route there. Meeting that city state first for the free envoy will be a nice boost if I can land it.

There's another city state located just to my south. Each peninsula on this map script has a city state located on it, paired with a player's start. The city state type is random, and I've found that all of them are quite useful to have. Even a Religious city state allows the player to skip the God King policy and grab a pantheon for free, while a Military city state will speed up the production of settlers and builders in addition to units. The Cultural and Scientific options seem to be the best though from my tests, accelerating the pace of those early civics and techs. (I will also likely be attacking and killing the city state at some point later on, so the type doesn't really matter that much.) I found that the city state's starting warrior would always stumble into my borders in about 6 turns, which meant no need to send my own exploring warrior down there. We'll see who we have for our city state neighbor soon enough.



By far the best move for the starting settler is to head inland a tile and found next to the mountain. Settling on the coast is a terrible decision, since that brings a lot of water tiles into the immediate borders of the capital, and water tiles are almost always terrible in Civ6. I'm hoping that one of my competitors will be foolish enough to settle on the starting tile, as that will torpedo their game from the outset. Moving inland brings access to all those four hill tiles, moving them from the third ring to the second ring, and that's where the power of this capital will lie.

I'm opening builder-first this game. I've been watching some of the MP games on Livestream for the past week, and they uniformly open with a double scout start across the board. I'm choosing to go with the economic builder option for a couple of reasons. First of all, barbarians and goody huts are turned off for this game. That means that I don't need as many units, and I won't be missing hut rewards out on the map. Second, we're playing on the very rigid 4-Leaf Clover map instead of a random setup. I already know where my opponents are located, where to find the city states, and where I plan to put my first few cities. There's simply not as much need for information here. Finally, unlike the rush-heavy MP online environment, I don't think anyone is going to open with six straight units and rush me from the outset. Based on the personalities involved and the civ choices everyone grabbed, I think I can get away with an early builder gambit without being penalized for it. (And if my neighbor is planning on rushing me, hopefully I'll be able to see it coming in time and do something about it. Yes, there is C&D Demographics spycrafting in Civ6 too! )

I'm working the 4 food rice tile at my capital to start. That will cause the city to grow in 4 turns, at which time I'll grab the excellent 2/2 horses tile. This lets the capital reach size 3 very quickly as well, at which time I will purchase the plains hill tile for another 2 production tile. This is the one and only tile I will purchase in the early game, since I need the production to speed up the capital's build order. The first builder finishes around Turn 10 and improves the rice, horses, and plains hill tile; there is just enough science to pull this off, by going Animal Husbandry into Mining research. That gives the capital a 5/0 rice tile, a 2/3 horse tile, and a 1/3 plains hill tile to work, for a total of 10 food (+4 surplus) and 9 production at size 3. Naturally this also knocks out the boosts for Craftsmanship, Irrigation, and Horseback Riding in the process. I, uh, may have done some practice games before we started this PBEM.

Any other questions? I have a whole lot of other thoughts about Civ6 to parcel out as we work through the early slow turns.

[Tacitus]

I'm opening builder-first this game. I've been watching some of the MP games on Livestream for the past week, and they uniformly open with a double scout start across the board. <snip>

Any other questions? I have a whole lot of other thoughts about Civ6 to parcel out as we work through the early slow turns.

Hi Sulla. A couple of things. First of all, good luck. I'm looking forward to seeing how this game goes. Second, I wonder if the two scout openings you are seeing in the online MP games isn't a leftover of the civ5 meta, which heavily favored early exploration due to all the freebies on the map that the scout would pickup easily paying back the cost of the scout. This doesn't seem to be as much the case in 6. Third, I've only played a handful of games of civ6, and those have all been on pangea maps, so I haven't really been able to play around with ships much. Do costal cities eventually become vulnerable to naval raids as they do in civ4, or do you expect the naval side of the game to be irrelevant here?

[Sullla]

Very good questions Tacitus. I can only offer limited feedback on what's going on in the Civ6 online MP community, but I think part of the issue is that most of the serious players seem to be using the No Quitters (NQ) mod. It's a pretty serious rebalancing of the gameplay, with a long changelist designed to make Civ6 play more like Civ5. They jack up all of the tile yields (in addition to playing with Online speed) to make the games faster, they changed the tech tree around, they reintroduced the Civ5 mechanic of increasing tech/civic costs with each new city, they make each unit more expensive based on how many of the same unit you've already built (?) ... ugh. It's a totally different game and not one I have any interest in playing. Anyway, I think the scout builds are due to the fact that all units seem to have extra movement in the mod, and it's basically impossible to stop someone who's right on top of you from stealing your builders/settlers when they can zip into your territory with a 4 move scout on Turn 5 of the game or whatever. (Scouts can be built in 2 or 3 turns with these settings.) Then add in the fact that jacking up all the tile yields makes builders less important, because you're going from 2/3 tiles to 2/4 tiles, instead of from 2/1 tiles to 2/2 tiles, and it makes sense. Long story short, I don't think our game here will look too much like those games. That's why I didn't spend too much time watching them - the game settings were simply too different.

As far as naval raids go, cities are absolutely vulnerable to them as the game progresses, and not only from ships. Every land unit can embark at Shipbuilding tech (late Classical) to cross coastal tiles, and every land unit can cross ocean tiles at Cartography (early Renaissance). Cultural borders are slow to expand over water tiles, and they only provide vision one tile away. Just as in Civ4, unexpected naval attacks are an excellent way to catch another player off guard. Fortunately, you don't have to build a city on the water to build a Harbor district - my capital will be able to add one from this spot if I want, and I'm hoping to do so eventually. I want to experiment with building an Encampment (for the Great General points), Commercial, Industrial, and Harbor district at the capital, so that every other city can send a trade route there for +1 food / +5 production. Now that's how to jump-start a new settlement!

Still a very long away from trying any of this in practice, of course.

[Sullla]

Not much to do on Turn 2. I moved the warrior two tiles further east towards the center of the map. Here's a peek inside the capital:



So with nothing else from the current turn going on, let's discuss my civ selection: in a nutshell, why Rome? It's not just a tribute to my longtime online namesake Sulla. The short version is that I believe Rome is the strongest overall choice for an online MP game, one that isn't just an immediate rush-fest at least. For the longer version, keep reading.

Rome has a series of abilities that combine to make them extremely strong as a civ choice. I'll start with the strongest bonus: all Roman cities immediately start with a monument when founded. This is insanely good as an economic bonus; remember, culture now functions as a second tech tree in Civ6, and many of the policies are extremely powerful. Rome gets to those policies faster than anyone else, and then continues to hit future policies even faster, in a classic Civilization snowball effect. Take the start of the game, for example. Normal civs start out making 1.4 culture/turn, and usually it takes 15 turns to reach Code of Laws and the first policies. Rome starts the game making 3.5 culture/turn, and reaches the first policies in 6 turns. That lets Rome open up God King policy first (therefore typically claiming the first pantheon), it lets Rome reach crucial production-saving policies like Ilkum (30% faster builders) and Colonization (50% faster settlers) faster than anyone else, and it lets Rome hit the first governments before anyone else, therefore opening up even more policy options. Rome's free monuments accelerate the early game in a way that no one else can pull off, and save precious early game production on a building that every city will want eventually. Even better, Rome's ability scales perfectly with a fast expansion strategy, which is exactly what the player should be doing in a game that isn't based around sucker-punching the AI and stealing their own cities. The free monuments are simply amazing, and difficult for other civs to compete with.

Keep in mind as well that culture is the mechanic through which borders expand in Civ6. Those free monuments don't just unlock policies and governments faster, they also grab additional tiles that your cities will want to be working, without having to waste gold on purchasing tiles. (Spending gold on tile purchases is one of the more inefficient ways to spend gold in Civ6.) This is yet another snowball mechanic: cities grab resources in the second ring faster, which allows the cities to work them sooner and builders to improve them faster, and so on.

Rome also gets a free road leading to each new city as well as a trading post in each. (I think this is technically Trajan's ability and not Rome's ability; for the moment there's only one Roman leader though, so I'll keep it simple to avoid confusion.) While this is much weaker than the free monuments, it's still quite nice at making it easier to reinforce cities in the early game. With normal civs, I often find myself running inefficient trade routes from a food/production standpoint solely to create road connections. Rome has much less of a need to do this. I would suggest that this is a mid-tier ability for a civ, nice to have if not exactly worth celebrating.

Then there's the unique district that Rome has, with the Bath being an aqueduct replacement. In the earlier versions of Civ6, Rome was dinged somewhat because they had a unique district that wasn't a specialty district, and those specialty districts didn't count against the population limit in cities. Russia could build a "free" Lavra in every city, Greece would get those "free" Acropolises, and so on. The Bath didn't look too impressive by comparison. However, the winter patch for Civ6 nerfed all those specialty districts by making them count against the population requirement, and that was a signficant stealth buff for the Bath in comparison.

Aqueducts/Baths are a non-specialty district, which means that they don't count against the population requirement and can theoretically be built in every city. Explaining how the district functions will require a short diversion to explain the housing mechanic in Civ6. Housing limits growth in Civ6: each city has a housing rating, and when a city has population one less than the housing number, growth slows by -50%. When housing = population, growth slows by -75%. (Side note: this is unnecessarily confusing for no reason. I'll never understand why Firaxis made it so that having 5 housing for 4 population slows growth with that "one off" formula.) By default, a city on fresh water has 5 housing and will therefore start hitting the growth penalty at size 4. Coastal cities start with 3 housing, and non-coastal cities start with 2 housing and will have the growth penalty at size 1! What the aqueduct does is raise any non-fresh water city to 6 housing. For coastal cities, it therefore provides +3 housing and for non-coastal cities it provides +4 housing. Cities already on fresh water do receive the benefit from an aqueduct of another +2 housing, for a total of 7 housing, making them slightly better than non-fresh water cities even after the aqueduct is built, although to a far lesser degree.

The biggest problem with aqueducts is that they are fairly expensive to build and have stringent terrain requirements. Aqueducts must be placed next to the city center, and also next to either a source of fresh water or a mountain. This often means that the player must build over or waste a useful tile, not helped by the fact that borders expand so slowly in Civ6. The tiles in the center ring are often the only ones that a city has available! Then throw in the scaling district cost of the aqueduct (5/6 of the current district cost) and it's clear why they are often not worth building. In my experience, I find myself building aqueducts in non-fresh water cities, but rarely in cities already placed on fresh water. And of course most cities are placed on fresh water in Civ6, since it's such a huge advantage to do so. A lot of people have looked at this and concluded that since aqueducts aren't so hot, the Roman Bath isn't particularly great.

These people are wrong. The Roman Bath provides an additional +2 housing on top of what the normal aqueduct provides, and an additional +1 amenity for the local city as well. Furthermore, like all unique districts the cost of the Bath is half of the normal aqueduct, or less than half (5/12) of the normal district cost. This completely changes the math of the district; whereas the normal aqueduct is too expensive for its modest benefit, the Bath has almost double the benefit at half the cost. I think it's fair to say that the Bath is roughly 3x to 4x as good as a standard aqueduct, and that's a powerful benefit indeed. With the Bath, a fresh water city gets 9 housing (and a free amenity!); add a cheap granary for 11 housing. That's enough to get a city to size 10 and unlock four districts, which is about all that most cities need. Furthermore, the cheap cost of the Bath allows Rome to locate cities anywhere on the map so long as there's a mountain nearby. Even the most arid regions will supply 8 housing with the construction of a cheap Bath, again with that free amenity thrown in for kicks. In my test games, cities were knocking out the Baths in about 4-8 turns and then growing growing growing upwards in a way that simply doesn't happen normally. With every population point providing science and culture (it's 1 population = 0.7 beakers and 0.3 culture in Civ6), the Bath is yet another snowball mechanism to allow Rome to grow upwards at the same time that the civ is growing outwards with rapid expansion.

And then there's Rome's unique unit, the Legion. This is a sword replacement that has 40 strength instead of 35 strength with the tradeoff of a slightly higher production cost. That strength differential is quite substantial, as Civ6 uses a logarithmic combat formula where even minor swings in combat strength have a major impact. 10 points of difference in combat strength results in 50% more damage dealth and 50% less damage taken, so even 5 extra strength does change battles significantly. The legion is also highly useful for two other reasons: it doesn't require iron to build, and warriors can upgrade into them. Like all unique units in Civ6, the legion doesn't have a resource requirement, which is very useful given the uneven distribution of resources on Civ6's maps. In other words, not only does the legion beat other swords, the other guy might not even be able to build swords because they couldn't turn up iron. The player is always guarateed to have access to Rome's powerful unit. The fact that warriors upgrade into legions is just the cherry on top of the sundae. Rome can build (very cheap) warriors and then upgrade them into legions at a cost of 110 gold apiece. The warriors don't even cost gold/turn in maintenance while they're waiting around to be upgraded! This is essentially the new version of Civ3's warriors -> swords mass upgrade, and that very tactic won me several games against the AI back in the day. A Roman player can invest minimal resources into their army, and then bam! there are legions running around everywhere.

Furthemore, the legions can be buffed even higher than their base 40 strength without too much difficulty. I've been reading and watching some of the Civ6 MP games being played online, and the community there agrees that Rome is a monster civ, only equaled by Sumeria and Scythia for early attacks. (Those games are fast and don't involve much economy; Rome is vastly superior to Sumeria and Scythia in any game that isn't decided with early combat.) The key insight that the Civ6 MP community discovered was the power of an early Great General. The AI tends to grab them in Single Player games, and they aren't needed against the braindead AI, but against other humans they are extremely powerful. Great Generals provide +5 strength and +1 movement to units in their relevant era. The Classical era Great Generals affect units from the Classical and Medieval eras, for example, and grant this bonus to all eligible units within a range of two tiles. That bonus takes the legion up to 45 strength, and more importantly, takes them to 3 movement. One of the reasons why melee units struggle so much in Civ6 is due to the movement rules. At only 2 moves, melee units struggle to reach those archers that shoot away at them from hilltops and across rivers. But with three moves, suddenly the legions can catch up to those pesky archers, and then it's 45 strength legions against 15 (melee) strength archers. That's a one-shot kill there. Whoops.

Spoiler for Civ5 PBEM5:

A perfect recent example of this was Icabod's attack against oledavy in the latest Civ5 PBEM game. Icabod used Persia's unique civ ability of +1 movement while in a Golden Age, and with that extra movement all his melee units were able to run down and kill oledavy's composite bowmen. The bonus movement changed a modest advantage for Icabod into a complete rout. Great Generals can do the same thing in Civ6.

But we're not done yet. The Civ6 MP community also swaps governments into Oligarchy when using legions in combat, thus granting another +4 combat strength to all melee units. Now the legions are strength 49. With flanking support from other melee units (located at the Military Tradition civic that peaceful players will often ignore), they get another +5 strength. If they have enough experience to take the first promotion, legions can grab either Battlecry (+7 strength attacking other melee/ranged units) or Tortoise (+10 strength defending against ranged attacks). Good luck trying to shoot a legion with your 25 ranged strength archer when the defending legion has flanking support and that second promotion option for a total combat strength of 64. The archer will do about 5 damage, and then the legion will one-shot the archer on the return attack. In my test games against the AI, the whole thing is brutal to watch in practice. With a pair of battering rams, even walls crumble immediately. Of course humans defend much better, but if you can hit someone inexperienced with MP before they have crossbows or knights on hand... Well, it should be interesting to say the least.

Anyway, that's why Rome seems like such a strong choice for this setup. The civ had amazing economic advantages as well as a powerful unique unit. In the event that an attack looks like a bad idea, Rome can always cancel out of that plan and just keep building upwards with the Bath district in a way that only the Kongo can do otherwise. Assuming that this doesn't turn into an early rush fest, I like my chances to pull off something with Rome.

[mackoti]

thanks for sharing, I realy wait for your updates.From what you wrote Rome sounds like is OP, there are other civilization which can at least compete with it.Sound from waht you are saying stronger then Pacal of India in civ4 . like pacal of india having catpracts latter as well.

[Sullla]

Thanks mackoti! I know a lot of people at Realms Beyond are waiting to see if Civ6 is worth trying, and (for better or worse) this game is going to be watched by a lot of people. Since this is my first experience with Civ6 Multiplayer as well, this could all fall apart really easily and leave me looking foolish. Everything that I've been posting is based on theorycrafting and observation. The real test will be what happens in the upcoming turns.

I did get a chance to play another turn early this morning:



That is indeed a clock in the top right corner of the screen. This PBEM continues my long tradition of playing Civilization MP games in strange places and at strange hours of the day. (I'll always remember writing a few posts about the Apolyton Demogame on a keyboard in Sweden that lacked an apostrophe key, heh.) Anyway, so there's not a whole lot in the realm of new information on the map yet. My warrior moved two tiles further east, continuing to head towards the center of the map. I turned on the settler lens to show where my first settler is most likely going: onto the freshwater river southeast of the bananas. That's not set in stone yet, and I'm planning on doing a test game where I go for a more greedy location with my initial settler, closer to the center of the map. That would let me backfill to this spot later, and claim the stronger land over there towards the center. (There's lot of food here but little production - not that great overall.) However, settling 10 tiles away from the capital with the first settler would also be extremely risky. I'll see how it plays out in a sandbox and watch to see how much military the other players end up producing.

There was one other tidbit this turn:



This is the World Rankings screen, Civ6's equivalent of the Demographics. There's a ton of useful information to be found here, which I'll talk more about in future posts. For now, check out the Cultural victory tab: I have dropped from second place to third place in this ranking. Because I'm last in turn order, I always get ranked last in case of ties, which is why I'm last in most categories. Not in culture though, where Rome's unique ability had me in second place (tied with TheArchduke's Rome) for the first two turns. But now I dropped to third - why? The only explanation is that teh has met the city state next to his start, and it turned out to be a Cultural one. That gave him a free envoy for +2 culture/turn, essentially giving him a free monument and making him pseudo Rome for the moment.

This isn't the best news. I think having a Cultural or Scientific city state next door are the best options, since they accelerate the early turns so significantly. teh just went from 1.4 culture/turn to 3.5 culture/turn - pretty sweet deal for him. On the other hand, this does mean that teh did not head immediately for the center of the map with his warrior, which means I have a jump on at least one player at contacting the city states over there first (and scoring the free envoy) for myself.

Probably about 4 more turns until the city state to my south has a warrior wander next to my borders and we make contact. I'm eager to find out what I've gotten in the city state lottery. Crossing fingers for Scientific, Cultural, or Militaristic (the last one because the production bonus applies to builders/settlers - and that's what my early turns are going to be pumping out!) Hopefully we'll get in another turn sometime tonight.

[Dp101]

What is your plan in regards to tile improvements if all you are left with is flat land? I can never find a good solution, farms feel like garbage when the only thing that the extra pop generated would go into is more farms, and specialists as an alternative place to park population are completely worthless IMO. Interested to see your thoughts on it.

[antisocialmunky]

Hey Sullla, what are your impressions of the pacing of CIV6? From my limited experience (no time to play much), it feels like the game has a much more fleshed out mid-game compared to CIV4 atleast relatively because the devs have replaced all the super crucial worker micromanagement in the early game with a lot interesting micro decisions when you get to the point where you are customizing cities with districts and setting up trade routes.

Do you think the pacing has changed drastically? If so how and do you like the changes in pacing?

[Sullla]

More good questions to ask while we're waiting on a new turn. Only 4 turns into this thing, and teh and Yuris are already struggling to get their turns played. The PYDT software tracks how long each player has held the save file; I'll see if I can post an image of that later when we have a more representative sample.

Dp101: that's one of the biggest issues to resolve from a tile management standpoint. What do you do with a big series of flatground tiles? In Civ4, you'd farm any resources and then plant cottages on the grassland tiles. Here in Civ6, you can farm the flatground tiles and then, uh, farm them some more? There's no getting around the fact that grassland tiles are simply weaker in this game than they were in Civ4. But there are ways to make those spots useful from a tile improvement perspective, mostly with additional technology. Forests can be lumbermilled starting at Machinery tech (early medieval era), which turns grassland forests into 2/2 tiles and plains forests into 1/3 tiles. If they're next to a river, they get another point of production (2/3 or 1/4 tiles). Lumbermills then get another +1 production at Steel tech (industrial era) for 2/3 grasslands and 1/4 plains tiles, and 2/4 or 1/5 when next to a river. Now that has to be balanced against the fact that forest chops are even better in Civ6 than they are in Civ4, since they continue to scale up in value as the player discovers more techs/civics. Chopping a forest is a huge one-time production boost, but the tile underneath is usually pretty weak. It's much less of an obvious choice than in Civ4. (Eventually the player gets the option to plant forests about two thirds of the way through the game at Conservation civic. This allows any city to be productive, since every grassland tile can become a 2/3 lumbermilled forest. Think State Property workshops for a good comparison.)

There are other options on what to do with these cities if they lack forest tiles. Throwing down farms and growing to the housing cap isn't necessarily a bad idea, especially after Neighborhoods become available later in the game. A size 16 city is worth 11 beakers and 5 culture just from population, and with no maintenance costs to offset. Running specialists can be a good idea too, although they do require having the districts and associated buildings in place. Civ6 also provides alternate methods of picking up production, most directly in the form of trade routes and shared Industrial district buildings. There's no limit to how many trade routes can be run out of a city, and if the destination city has Commercial/Industrial/Harbor/Encampment districts in place, the route is worth an additional +1 production. (The other specialty districts are worth +1 food each.) I mentioned in this game how I'm hoping to construct those four districts at the capital and then run a +1 food / +5 production trade route from every other city to the capital. Factories and power plants located in Industrial districts will also share their production to any city within 6 tiles, and although the bonus no longer stacks, that's another +7 production to any nearby city. Between factories/power plants, trade routes, and lategame forest/lumbermilling, any spot on the map can be made productive in Civ6, at least eventually. Early in the game it's a different story... but then again, that's true in Civ4 as well, right? And having some areas be stronger than others is part of what makes the map interesting. There's a lot of depth to this system that I didn't see when I first started playing. Managing the trade routes is almost like running another form of tile improvements.

Antisocialmunky: I think the overall pacing of Civ6 is notably faster. While I love worker management in the classic Civ games, if you're going to go to a One Unit Per Tile system, replacing them with builders that have a limited number of insta-build charges is definitely the way to go. Changing workers into builders definitely makes the game play faster. There's also not a lot of wasted time in Civ6, as I can finish the whole tech and civic trees in about 250 turns on average. Cities seem to just barely keep up with the new infrastructure as it becomes available without running out of things to build or becoming overwhelmed by things to build. I also love the fact that I can play a full game of Civ6 in 5-10 hours - the game is noticeably faster than Civ4 overall. Right now, I am a big fan of the pacing and I'm worried that Firaxis is going to slow it down needlessly with a whole bunch of useless crap in patches/expansions. Now if only the AI knew how the play this game (which I must emphasize again it most certainly does not), it would be a worthy competitor to Civ4.

18 hours now waiting on Yuris. Is it that hard to log in and move your warrior? Come on man.