Hey, all!

I'm playing this adventure, after taking a bit of a hiatus from Civ 6. I have to admit that part of the motivation behind it was the title for the Adventure, which I quite like.

I'm up to turn ~65, with no GPs yet. I'll write a report with pictures once I have the time at home (with Dropbox's demise, it's way harder to have the pictures uploaded online and avaiable for reporting when I'm not home).

My initial idea was to focus on chopping a lot to get a lot of early cities and worry about GPs later. I'm still a bit confused when trying to use builders and when to wait for Eurekas/Inspirations or just go for the techs without them. I think it's pretty hard to fine tune this things. Once I have the pictures, I'll try to put this thoughts into more specific in-game points.

First time poster and participate in the Adventures and the Realms Beyond forum.  A little background on me, I have been a long-time lurker, finding my way here through Sullla’s website when I was looking to up my game in Civ IV. I always like the idea of variant play but never had the time or machine needed to sit down, strategizes, play, and then write-up a report. I played quite a bit of Civ IV vanilla, never got into Civ 5 (didn’t have a useful computer or the time). Just before Civ 6 came out, I built a mid-range computer to finish my doctoral work and be able to play a few video games.  I am enjoying civ 6 and have been playing it a lot. I usually play on emperor/immortal because I like to build and not much of a domination player that is required when playing deity.

So enough about me, let talk about Adventure 4, chasing great people (GP) with Mvemba. I ran a test game with him and was able to get just over 40 GP, so I think I can do a little better here.  I don’t know if this will be competitive but we will see.  My strategy will be to expand during the first 100 turns, then build upwards with district and buildings. It should be easy to get most of the great artist, writers, musician, and merchants with Mvemba’s doubled points and I will build commercial and theater districts in every city. I will also try to get as many campuses as possible for great scientists, one or two encampments and industrial districts for great generals and engineers, and a harbor (if possible) for a great admiral or two. I think amenities will be an issue, so I will probably build an entertainment district or two.
In my theater districts, I am going to build archaeology museums instead of art museums because the +2 food, +2 production, and +4 gold for artifacts also double when themed. So, each city will have +12 food, +12 production, and +24 gold once the slots are filled. Add that to the +2 food and +4 gold for each Mbanza and you get quite strong cities. The only problem will be that I won’t have a place for all of the great works, but who cares.

There will be a few wonders that I will want to chase. First, the Forbidden Place for its addition wild card slot for an extra great person card. Second, Mont St. Michel for the martyr ability. This may seem strange since Mvemba can’t found a religion but he does get an Apostle with each theater district build and does get +2 food, +2 production, and +4 gold for each relic and with 5 slots in the palace, he can have +10 food, +10 production, and +20 gold once filled. I am going to send those Apostles to die against whoever has a religion, and see the relics come flying in. Third, I will build the Colosseum for amenities. I am going to spam the Mbanzas as much as possible and will need the extra amenities as my cities grow vertical.  Lastly, I am going to try and land Big Ben near turn 250.  After about turn 150, I am going to horde my gold and with the relics, artifacts and Mbanza gold, I hopefully will have somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 by the time Big Ben finishes and doubles my treasury. Then, hopefully I reached Democracy by then and buy as many great people at half the cost on the last turn. In my test run, I was able to buy 10 GP with ~40,000 gold. There may be a few other Wonders with great work slots that I may build if possible but they will not be a priority.
My plan is to play the first 50-100 turns tonight (after the kids go to bed) and report here in 50 turn blocks (maybe less in the last 50 turns). I can’t say how detailed my reports will be (since this is my first time reporting) but I figured I would give it a shot. My initial plan will be to settle in place. I was think of moving off hill to the tile southwest of the starting tile but I think that will prevent placing a city on the other side of the southern river (two tiles south west of the oranges).  I might be able to move across the river to where the warrior is, which might give a little more space for a city by the chocolates in the east, I really don’t like placing cities with first ring tiles in other cities third ring.  I will probably move my warrior to the east to see what is on the other side of the river. Will see when I start playing.

For builds, I probably will go slinger, slinger, worker. Send the first slinger west and circle back north as the warrior will go east and circle back south. After that, if I have a close neighbor, probably build another warrior and slinger and take their capitol.  If not, I will build a settler and trader. For tech, probably mining and animal husbandry, and see what I need afterwards. For culture, I will beeline to political philosophy and classic republic. Pantheon will be Devine Spark for the extra great person points.

There is my strategy, hopefully it goes somewhat as planned.

As Catwalk doesn't seem to care anymore, I've used my own calculator to have an estimate of the treasure a player can harvest using Sprites.

Any lair containing only the following monsters, but any number of them, is counted as valid, others as invalid. This is a rough estimate - some lairs containing only valid monsters but too many might be impossible without sacrificing a large amount of sprites, while others with only a single invalid monster might be doable anyway with fewer losses.

The Cross-Community Championship over at Mafia Universe is being held again, this time in its 4th iteration. Here's the invitation post by Thingyman, the organiser of the competition:

INVITATION TO THE MAFIA CHAMPIONSHIP (SEASON 4)

Hello everyone!

I would very much like to invite your community to take part in Season 4 of the Mafia Championship.

The Mafia Championship is an annual online tournament series that pits representatives from various forum Mafia (aka Werewolf) communities against one another as they compete to determine the Internet’s greatest forum Mafia player. Each participating community democratically elects one person to represent them and become their “Champion”.

Season 1 ran in 2013-2014, while Season 2 and Season 3 ran in 2015 and 2016, respectively. As of Season 3, a total of 160 communities have been represented in the Mafia Championship, making it the largest cross-forum event on the Internet.

I hope that all this sounds very exciting to you guys

Do you accept the invite?

If your community wishes to participate, please confirm your participation to me before April 13 to ensure yourselves a spot. If you need more time than this to think about whether you wish to participate, let me know and I can extend the deadline.

If you agree to participate, the deadline for selecting your representative is April 22.

The games will take place on Mafia Universe. If it’s okay, I can link directly to the general discussion thread regarding this topic on Mafia Universe.

Important notes

You may decide yourselves how you want to elect your representative, but we highly recommend some sort of democratic process (public nominations followed by a poll usually works out well).
In addition to electing a representative, you should also name an alternate who will be asked to step in if the first choice needs to back out.
Your representative should be prepared for having to read upwards of 500 posts per 24 hours during the early stages of the game. Additionally, there’s a requirement that each player must make at least 10 posts per Game Day. Only active players should apply/participate. I repeat: Your chosen player needs to be able to promise a good amount of activity on a daily basis.
Relevant only to communities that participated last season: Season 3 Finalists are not eligible to play again this season.

Season 4 Format

The tournament structure

120 communities will participate, each sending one representative.
8 Qualifying Games will be played consisting of 15 players each. I.e. every representative plays in one Qualifying Game. 1 player will advance directly to the Finale Game from each Qualifying Game. The players themselves vote post-game to determine who is deserving of advancement. I.e. 8 of the 15 finalists will be found this way.
A Jury consisting of finalists from Season 3 will along with me discuss and vote to determine a group of 30 wildcard players who will play in 2 Semi Final Wildcard Games. From each of these two games, three players will directly advance to the Finale Game. The Jury will then decide the last finalist.
The Finale Game is played. Once it has completed, the players vote to determine who shall hold the title of Season 4 Champion.

The setup

MOUNTAINOUS
12 Vanilla Townies
3 Mafia Goons

We’re going back to basics for Season 4. Each season we’re changing it up, and for this season it’s finally time to play without any power roles or abilities at all. Pure mafia. You have only yourself and your reading/bluffing abilities to count on.

Relevant mechanics info

Day start.
Deadline Lynch w/ Option for Majority starting Day 2. I.e. when day timer runs out, person with most votes will be lynched. However, day can also be ended early (starting Day 2) if there is ever a majority of votes on one person.
If there is a tied lynch, one of the tied players will be randomly lynched.
No outside communication. I.e. you may not contact the other players outside of the thread (unless you are Mafia and wish to speak with your teammates).
Phase Lengths and Deadlines will be up to the players themselves (I’ll organize them into games with deadlines that suit their preferences).
Thread is locked during Night Phases.


Season 4 Timeline

The first Qualifying Game is currently set to start April 24th. Additional games will take place in the 1-3 months following. I will create a Doodle and find out the best times to start the various games so that preferably everyone gets to play during a time that suits them well.


Kind regards,
Thingyman

If you want to get in contact with me ASAP, you can find me on Skype (thingyman) or Discord (Thingyman#6075).

First time participating in a RB adventure, so hopefully I do a good job of reporting what's going on. Can anyone tell me how to attach photos to my post - do I have to use Imgur or something similar?

I'm not very experienced with Civ 6 yet. I've played about 4 unfinished games, 3 on Prince (using Frederick) and 1 on King, using Mvemba, in preparation for this game here. In most of these games, I play up to the early industrial era where I am ahead of the AI in just about every metric. Some observations:

1. There is very little competition for the GPs produced by the theatre square district – in most of my games I claim GAs and GWs without any civs even having any of them.

2. Biggest competition appears to be for GS, from Campus districts, and for the military GPs. Divine Spark might be more beneficial for this. I’m not sure whether the +1 culture to pastures / +1 production from floodplains that focus on early growth or Divine Spark’s bonus is valuable in the long run. GMs are also moderately competitive but I had little problem getting all the GMs because I heavily prioritized commercial hub districts.

In my trial game, I had 7 cities by turn 100 or 110, 2 of which had theatre districts, and I had no competition for GWs at all.
 
3. Getting enough slots for Great Works, even with Mvemba’s 5 palace slots, is something that needs to be focused on. Specifically, Humanism needs to be prioritized on the Culture tree.
 
With this in mind, here’s my gameplan for this adventure:
1. Expand quickly in the first 50 turns, try to establish 3 cities.
 
2. Prioritize an early campus (maybe with Divine Spark), preferably in the first 50 turns too by chopping it out. The edge over other players will likely come from grabbing more Great Scientists than my peers
 
3. Ignore the military GPs. This is mainly because I’m not interested in taking a military approach for this adventure. I’m sure that taking a military approach by beating up the other civs (whether or not the military GPs are a part of it) will be a superior strategy than just remaining peaceful, but I don’t think this fits the theme of Adventure 4. Will be more fun that way J
 
4. Theatre Square districts (and Drama and Poetry civic) do NOT need to be rushed – it’s more important to grab early Campus, and more importantly, grab land. The more cities I have, the more districts I can build. This also means that I will not be bothering with the +GPP policies in favour of going for +%production for settlers, builders, etc.

As an addendum, I will say that it could be I have not played against leaders who strongly prioritize culture and therefore it might seem like there’s no competition for the theatre square GPs. And if I’m the one designing this scenario, I’m pretty sure I’d include some civs that prioritize culture to give the player a challenge. I might play a game against Greece, this time to completion, and see how the competition for the GPs are.
 
5. Make reaching Humanism a priority to EITHER unlock Art Museums, OR prioritize going for Natural History + build the Terracotta Army. I haven’t decided which is better, being able to use the Great People you have (really seems like a huge waste to just have them sit there), or to exploit Kongo’s crazy +2 food +2 production and +4 gold. These are about as powerful as trade routes, and you can have 3 of them, that’s ridiculous.

6. Wonders to be built – I will not be going most of the early wonders until the Industrial era (except maybe Terracotta army) because I intend to prioritize expanding to grab more land rather than build wonders. Especially since the AIs are rather bad at expanding and so there are large swathes of land unclaimed even when the Renaissance rolls around.

Otherwise, I will attempt to go for Ruhr Valley (extra production never hurt), and depending on circumstances attempt to get Hermitage and Bolshoi Theatre as well. If it seems like the cultural victory is slow, and the opportunity presents itself, I will go for the Cristo/Eiffel combo too.
 
7. This is more of a reminder for myself – try to grab as many boosts as possible. I tend to speed play through most of my games and so miss critical boosts. This can definitely be optimized.
 
Will be interested to see whether my approach works out after I finish playing the game!
 
As for the start, SIP seems quite weak. Maybe 2W will be better to bring stone and the hills closer to my borders. I will move the warrior first to see what lies to his west.

I customized a map for Civ4. I made a lake by just plopping down some ocean tiles. Playing the game I can make work boats out of the city on the lake, but not any war ships. Any one know what I did wrong?

EDIT: I've completed the game now with a score of 50 points. I've attached the final save to my last post in this thread.

I still haven't been able to play games but I want to work on retorts tomorrow - mainly Famous and Inquisitor, but maybe others too.

I've already tested military retorts and they were fine - not even combining all military retorts, Life magic and the best early races seemed to threaten game balance too much.

Which leaves magical retorts, and their combinations, let's see...

Alchemy - Honestly this is more of a military retort than magical - the early game benefit is free magic weapons. While trading gold for mana early is good, it merely changes one resource into another instead of creating more of anything - yes, you can have extra mana crystals but then you don't have money to buy settlers, fighter's guilds, units, etc. I consider it a somewhat above average pick but not a direct threat to game balance. Starting sawmill reduced the risk of this greatly, as it leaves way less gold that can be transformed to early mana thanks to its massive upkeep.

Chaneller - is obviously a late game retort with close to no early benefits at the cost of 2 picks. No problem here.

Archmage - A strong retort but I don't think it's overpowered. 50% more SP equals 28% more actual casting skill which is as good as a 22% cost reduction on skill alone - but mana still has to be provided as normal. As it only provides one part of the two benefits of a real cost reduction, I believe it's worth about as much as a 11% cost reduction instead - good but comparable with Specialist and not all that much better than a 9th or 10th book (they only offer 5% but also to research and spells). I believe this part of the effect is fine. The +10 casting skill is a bit more questionable - honestly, it's a lot. At least far more than an extra 28%, so the starting benefit is greater than the long term one. And it has abuse potential in the early game if you stack it with other effects that either help fuel this increased skill, or in worst case further accelerate it. This retort might be more balanced if the starting skill bonus was lower. The ability to bypass the need of 5 whole books for the same staring casting skill is probably the greatest enabler of low book high retort strategies - if they actually had to start with the skill they deserve from books, they'd fail.
Ideally, I would want this skill bonus to be equal to (or a set fraction of) the number of books the wizard owns, but I'm quite sure I have no room to implement that, so we should most likely do a flat +5 skill, or none at all. (This would also fix the Archmage AI's problem of having more skill than starting power base, ending up constantly running on 0 mana until building power buildings.

Artificier - Early trade potential has already been balanced by giving only one free spell instead of two. No threat to early game balance whatsoever, heroes are unavailable and good artifacts are as well, not to mention their cost. At best this allows early access to the Myrror plane, for hero units only - Nothing a Life wizard cannot already do anyway by researching Planar Travel early.

Conjurer - Not overpowered on its own - yes, it's effectively a 33% bonus to skill and mana but limited to one spell type only - even if that's the most frequently used type it's still only a portion of overall spellcasting. Stacking with other cost reductions and skill bonuses is more worrysome. I'll continue this analysis in the "combo" section. The research bonus is nice for flavor and most likely not a threat to balance. I don't like the maintenance reduction. Due to early game rounding, this is a MASSIVE advantage - maintaining 9 sprites for 18 mana out of 18 income is way different than doing the same for 9. It also cuts into Chaneller territory - one retort to reduce maintenance is plenty. Not sure if any other effect needs to be added or not if the maintenance bonus is cut. An alternative solution would be to "fix" the  rounding - change it to get applied to the sum maintenance of the total army instead of to every unit, so 4 sprites cost 6 correctly instead of the current 4. The problem with this approach is inconsistent display - individual unit maintenance shown will ignore Conjurer which can be misleading.

Sage Master - Questionable - The +9 RP per turn is the exact same kind of early advantage we want to get rid of. Fortunately, research is hard to abuse in the early game, as it requires both skill and mana to cast stronger spells. Might be fine as is if mana and research skill problems are fixed.

Runemaster - Grants nothing for the early game and produces no resources either directly or indirectly. Safe!

Specialist - I believe I should dig out the discussion about nerfing this or not a few months ago, where we compared the numbers and concluded it's slightly on the strong side but not really a threat. Reducing the cost bonus to 12% might be a good idea but I would like to re-read those discussions - but I have no idea where to find them. Stacking this with books for cost reduction is a lower threat as cost reduction from books is less abundant - at least 9 books required. Stacking with Conjurer might be a risk still.

Cult Leader - Expensive buildings needed for any effect - no threat to the early game.

Astrologer- Effect grows by time elapsed - no threat to the early game.

Spellweaver - Fairly balanced I believe. Even if I accept Overland skill is more valuable than combat skill, Archmage at +28% to both is more (56) and comes with the +10 early bonus, so the skill part is unlikely to be worth more than 1 pick. The 33% power part is superior to the 33% of Mana Focusing, but that effect was aleady judged unworthy of costing an entire pick on the own (which is why the +8 mana bonus was added to it which broke the retort completely). I have a hard time seeing problems with this aside from the multiplication effect from spending the bonus power on skill. However if the "+10 skill" part of Archmage is changed, a reduction on the produced power might be fair to keep the two at the same power level. Now, this is for the generic effect, but idk about the early game. +50% skill and 33% mana at the same time is...fairy powerful for early game casting power to say the least, comparable to Archmage's +10 skill bonus or a ~30% cost reduction.


Combinations for early game potential (the number represents how much base cost worth of spells the wizard can cast per turn using only the starting books and retorts as resources) :

12 books no retorts :
Mana capcity : 24
Skill capacity : 24

Specialist+11 books
Mana Capacity : 28
Skill Capacity : 29
Specialist is a fairly powerful pick here, although it probably should be - it is meant for this sort of setup.

Conjurer+11 books
Mana Capacity : 32
Skill Capacity : 33
About 33% better ratio than 12 books but only on summons. Probably acceptable.

11 books, archmage
Mana capacity : 21
Skill capacity : 32
Looks acceptable - hard to fuel that much skill

Specialist+Conjurer+10 books
Mana production : 36
Skill capacity : 40
Looks overpowered - 50 to 66% higher capacity to summon than 12 books.

10 books, Spellweaver
Mana capacity : 26.666
Skill capacity (overland only) : 33.3333
Only marginally better than 12 books and worse in combat. I think safe.

9 books, Spellweaver Archmage
Mana capacity : 20
Skill capacity : 45
Problem is obvious, 45 skill is huge. This has already been disabled by "mutually exclusive" for late game problems - three multipliers on casting skill stacked is too much, so, yay, good job...I guess. Crude solution, but it works...

9 books, Conjurer, Specialist, Archmage
Mana capacity : 27
Skill capacity : 50.9
Massive skill potential - I dare say this is "broken as hell". If Archmage is limited to +5 skill, it's still 41 skill capacity, and at none it's 32.
Surprisingly, mana potential is massively worse than without Archmage.

8 books, Conjurer, Specialist, Spellweaver
Mana capacity : 26.666
Skill capacity : 40
Less overpowered than the Archmage variety, or equal to it if it is reduced to "+5 skill".


As a conclusion, I believe the two critical points that need change are
-The +10 bonus on Archmage should be +5 or none (used to be +5 before 1.31 MoM, lol)
-The way Conjurer, specialist, and books cost reductions stack is problematic, it should be changed somehow. If the effect was multiplicative instead of subtractive, it could improve balance, in particular for the strongest offender, 10+Specialist+Conjurer, it would change Mana capacity to 31 and Skill capacity to 34 - still high numbers but only 50% more than what 12 random books can do...and this setup requires both specialization to a single realm and focusing on summoning spells only to actually have the advantage.

Hey folks, just wanted to give you guys a heads up. I'm hosting another game over at http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/forumdispl...6-Gameroom. It's a bastard setup, but I think it will be one where people enjoy it, not just me. Head on over and take a look if you're interested, always happy to have you guys aboard.


Link to the signup sheet: http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread...N-UP-SHEET

Here goes nothing...

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