Civ 6 Solo Reports

[Bacchus]

I think the movement system is awesome. No spoilers, but have a look at some threads in PBEM2, the difference in movement points now becomes really impactful and interesting for close-quarters fighting. Not always being able to attack a unit due to lack of MP makes defensive terrain properly defensive maybe for the first time in Civ. Sure, it's a bit annoying for peacetime when it takes ages to get anywhere, but I for one am gladly willing to take this sacrifice.

Occupation I'm on the fence about, I think we need to see more games and have a better established meta. Basically, defenders have to be ready to say "ok, the costs of this war are just too large, I'd rather cede this one city and be done with it". I'm not sure whether this will ever start happening, maybe losing a city is just too much of damage that you'd rather fight to the death, it certainly requires a change in mindset away from "I will make my attacker's life hell for as long as possible", but I can see it working. If this doesn't happen, we can just make some house rules on ceding.

[LKendter]

I also posted a notice about this in the PBEM1 forum, but since that will likely get buried soon by other activity, here's another link to my write up for the first Civ6 Multiplayer game that we hosted here at Realms Beyond. It ended up running to nine parts and one of the longest reports that I've done on my website. If you weren't following along with the PBEM1 game in the forum as it was taking place, this might be a fun read... assuming you have a while.  

Very interesting read, even it if took forever to get the long 9 pages read. I understand more why I struggle with Civ6 than most here. I didn't realize how much combat went from strategic (more units on board, produce units faster, higher age units) to tactical. The series made a big shift to tactical warfare with 6 (no 5 comments, barely touched).

Reading how many policy changes told me fanatical MM (aka Civ3) is still very important in Civ6. The difference is most of Civ3 was this turn, while Civ6 is the next block of a few turns. I never thought about things like queuing up a bunch of builders, but leave them stuck with 1 turn to go waiting for the right policy to come up.

[Sullla]

What's this? A new Civ6 report on the Fall Patch, featuring the Khmer and the pursuit of a Religious victory? I call it Baray King Bad.

[T-hawk]

That felt like a Master of Orion style ending, getting the victory awarded before you're really overtaken everything but when it's going to be inevitable.

Side note: Would you consider brushing up the formatting on your site? I think my style on the later Civ 5 reports is more readable, with the body text constrained to a reasonable max-width and the images centered. Feel free to take my CSS if you want (though I do some gymnastics to constrain the text width within <p> tags while letting images go wider) or I can tweak it for you.

[Alhambram]

What's this? A new Civ6 report on the Fall Patch, featuring the Khmer and the pursuit of a Religious victory? I call it Baray King Bad.

I did read whole thing and at end you was confused about religious victory ranking by the fact that UI shows that Gilgamesh was still Protestant and not Buddhist.
In PBEM 2 it was same and this is because religious victory ranking UI do update one turn later always, bit annoying. Here is my screen of my victory with religious ranking:
   
I did convert oledavy and Woden at same turn to achieve victory, but both didn't appear upon religious ranking.

However overall rankings do update at same turn and notice that I got religious victory medallion filled up completely which indicates that I achieved it.
   

[hzhp800]

What's this? A new Civ6 report on the Fall Patch, featuring the Khmer and the pursuit of a Religious victory? I call it Baray King Bad.

Always fun to read a new report from you Sullla, thanks for writing them! You mentioned the changes from the summer patch regarding the increased settler scaling cost in your report and how they make early districts more viable. However, you didn't indicate (as far as I could tell) whether you think the increased settler costs is a good change overall. I have seen a lot of complaints that it places too hard a cap on early expansion and encourages early conquests of city-states and other players at the expense of peaceful expansion and/or normal city-state play. Some have suggested that a Realms Beyond Balance Mod should try to undo the change.

So, I am curious, what do you think of the change given your preference for wide empires with many cities (within reason), and your newfound appreciation for the variety city-states can bring to the gameplay?

[Sullla]

That's a really good question hzhp800, and something that I'm hoping to address in more detail in a future report. As a shorter response, I think that increasing the settler scaling cost was probably a good change overall, especially when combined with the two changes to districts that 1) lowered their cost by 10% across the board and 2) lowered the cost of "less common" districts by 40%. Fast expansion was a little bit too good in the earlier patch versions as compared to building an early district, with PBEM1 being a very good example of that in action. The early Campus district that Yuris built was much less valuable than the settler spamming that all the other players were engaged in during the early stages of the game. In the current patch version of Civ6, expansion is still always a net positive (barring something really weird with amenities) and more cities are always better to have. However, doing nothing but spamming a series of settlers tends to be weaker than staggering expansion in a series of stages, since districts are relatively cheap to build and they deliver significant benefits upfront. Japper tested this very well in the PBEM4 game, and I think if this had still been an earlier patch version, his strategy to get out a lot of quick settlers would have worked better.

Overall, I like where the balance on expansion has ended up more than where it was before. As much as we praise Civ4's gameplay, the metagame that's emerged in our Multiplayer events has essentially turned into expanding as fast as possible in all situations. That's only doable on the very fertile maps used in those events, but it's always bothered me that we end up with these games where everyone is rushing out to a dozen cities by Turn 100. To me, that's a setup that's overly biased towards expansion. (Random maps that aren't so fertile tend to limit expansion a bit better in Civ4.) While we don't want a situation like Civ5 where expanding beyond 4-5 cities is pointless, I don't think that the Civ3/Civ4 metagame is necessarily the solution either. At the moment, I like where Civ6 has found itself with regards to pacing expansion.

There's just one fatal flaw that undercuts this system, identified in your post: "encourages early conquests of city-states and other players at the expense of peaceful expansion and/or normal city-state play." Increasing the scaling cost of settlers tilts the playing field enormously towards aggression, so much that it's impossible for someone playing peacefully to keep pace. All of the fastest finishes in the CivFanatics Game of the Month rely on max aggression towards the AI out of the gate, and the strategy discussion over there is entirely based around rushing and sucker-punching the AI as hard as possible. Capturing cities (and settlers which definitely shouldn't be possible) is way too rewarding. Of course, this isn't exactly new to Civ6. The same incentives were also very much prevalent in Civ3 and Civ4, and the Deity Single Player crowd engaged in the same kind of shenanigans in those games as well. The key difference is that the Civ6 AI can't handle the One Unit Per Tile system, which makes it enormously easier to engage in early aggression profitably. I have no answer to this problem either. In my private games, I mostly try to avoid rushing the AI unless they start right on top of me. For any future Adventures/Epics, we'll likely continue to put rules in place to prevent an early attack from being the dominant strategy in every contest.

For Civ6 Multiplayer, I'm not concerned. This is a system that regulates itself: if players can take cities away from other players, more power to them. The defender has significant advantages and it's tough to attack without a major lead in tech or numbers. I actually don't see anything that obviously requires modding right now. There are plenty of things that could be changed, but they would only make the gameplay different, not necessarily better. Making settlers cheaper to build just makes the early game look more like Civ4 - but why does Civ6 have to play like Civ4? There's no particular reason that I can see. I'm pretty happy with the current system right now.

[Brian Shanahan]

I wouldn't be that sad over the French. They'd have done the same to you.

[Sullla]

We haven't had a writeup of a Spaceship game in a while. Let's fix that: Poland Can Into Space.

[Dark Savant]

We haven't had a writeup of a Spaceship game in a while. Let's fix that: Poland Can Into Space.

Nice writeup.  

I'm not sure bad AI is really that big a deal, as disappointing as it is.  I've always thought AI tends to be scaled back in games because typical players complain when it's too good (this became a problem around 15 years ago -- it was a big complaint about Civ 3).  It's not like you, or me, or most of the people reading this, are typical players.