Civ6 PBEM: Sullla of Rome

[Ituralde]

Congratulations on a game well played!

Loved your detailed reports from start to end and learned a lot about Civ VI in the process. Also it seems like your secondary goal of igniting interest for Civ VI has paid off as well. Finally I have some interesting PBEMs to lurk again. So success on all fronts!

[Athmos]

(...)
I will probably come up a bit short of being able to take Ulm next turn, as the legion is the only melee unit that can attack. Both crossbows can shoot of course, and the galley will allow me to put the city under formal siege so it won't heal.
(...)

Although I don't know if that would be enough to take the city in one turn, but your galley can do more than put it under siege : it also is a melee unit that can attack and take it.

edit : well, I posted that before reading everything, looks like it doesn't matter even slightly now ;-)

Congratz on the game, and thank you for the amazing reporting. I'll go have a look at the other threads now :-)

[Rowain]

Congrats Sulla and thanks for your detailed reports

[Alhambram]

Congratulations for your victory and thanks for your very informative reports! 

[Zero_1627]

congratulations! good plan and excellent execution . Now lurking PBEM2 for more fun!

[Zero_1627]

your galley can do more than put it under siege : it also is a melee unit that can attack and take it.

really?! naval units can take cities ?!

[Rowain]

your galley can do more than put it under siege : it also is a melee unit that can attack and take it.

really?! naval units can take cities ?!

Similar to land-units those that are melee-units can the others not.

[srgtb]

The great admirals that create a ship for you can be very strong if you get them at the right time and use the ship to capture some coastal cities. The ironclad has 60 strength and 5 movement. The downside is generally they're strongest if you get them before you could normally build them, but then you don't have their strategic resource and can only heal them with promotions.

[unaghy]

Well played Sullla. Enjoyed your reports, as many times before when read reports from your web site!

[Sullla]

Yuris was kind enough to end his turn so that I could have one last look around at my empire. So here we have it, the final turn report of PBEM1:



Ha, it turns out that teh completed a crossbow in his last city at the beginning of this turn. I can't say that I was expecting that, although teh's Hansas did a wonderful job of giving him strong production everywhere in his empire. If he had been given a little bit more time (and land) to develop, I think he could have given me a run for my money. If you're reading this teh, you played an excellent game. Anyway, I decided that I might as well play this final turn out as though it was a real one. I moved up my crossbows and had them fire on Ulm, then attacked with the legion:



Pretty good damage, although that crossbow popping up in the city just as I moved to attack it was a bit of bad luck. At defensive strength 28, I might have been able to capture the city this turn, although it would have required some good damage rolls. At defensive strength 35, it wasn't going to happen. Teh would have died on the next turn, but Yuris' concession allows him to survive by the narrowest of margins.



There was one war that I could wrap up. With Theology civic in hand, I had one final envoy to play around with. I fired on this sword with the city walls at Aquileia because I could, then checked to see if the horseman would do enough damage to get the kill. Since it was short of eliminating the unit, I went ahead and dropped the city state envoy into Vilnius. That gave me 4 envoys there, the same as Yuris, and brought peace in our time to the southern part of the pangaea. Vilnius was a good ally against teh earlier, and I'm glad that I was able to bury the hatchet with them on this last turn.



One final policy swap to carry out. I kept the same policies in the Military, Economic, and Diplomatic slots, only opting to change up the Wildcard ones. Professional Army was back in the mix to allow my legions to upgrade into muskets, and then for the last slot, I went ahead with Serfdom since I planned to be training more builders before reaching Humanism, my next civic. None of this really matters of course, but this is what I would have done if the game continued.



There we go, turning legions into muskets at the very discounted rate of 100 gold apiece. I had five total legions on the map, and with 460 gold in the bank, I would be able to upgrade all of them in a turn or two. (Probably would take two more turns since the muskets are more expensive than the legions in upkeep, and therefore my income dropped as I made the upgrades.) Muskets are another significant step up in power, with a strength rating of 55. This two promotion guy had Battlecry and Tortoise to further help out, plus the new Great General, so he would attack at strength 67 against other melee/ranged units, and defend against ranged attacks with a strength of 70. Just as legions mostly shrugged off archers, these muskets would have been able to walk through crossbow bolts without worrying overmuch.

I did have one other combat to resolve:



And thus the saga of the random wandering Eagle Warrior was finally put to rest. From Yuris' perspective this was a tragedy, although from my perspective it was more of a comedy.



Some final overview shots of my territory. The German cities would have come out of resistance next turn, and they would have been very powerful with all those Industrial districts (former Hansas) captured intact. By my best estimate, I would have seen my science jump up to roughly 75 beakers/turn and my culture to a mark just slightly less. Aachen in particular was a really nice city, with three districts and a library already constructed in the Campus district. Given time to construct Baths and a dozen or so turns of development, I could have turned these cities into huge powerhouses. In other words, continuing what teh was already doing when I captured them from him. He did a great job with planning the districts in this region.



On the Aztec front, there was essentially no army left to speak of. Yuris appears to have had that initial wave, and once that disappeared, that was it. Since Yuris' cities were weak in production, I don't think he had time to build another army, plus without a second iron resource he couldn't even construct more knights. (Did he have Machinery tech for crossbows? I still don't know.) This is definitely the right place to call the game, as there's no point in playing another week to watch my units walk up to Yuris' capital and take it for the outright Domination victory. With the Aztec army defeated, there really wasn't anything left to stop me. (Yuris' military power rating on the last turn was 145, down from a high of 384 a few turns earlier. If you tallied up the strength rating of all my units, those recent horse builds pushed me up to almost 800 rating. Yeah, pretty much over and done with as a contest.)

Also: my second Great General finally transferred over to the front lines this turn... and then the game ended without him getting a chance to see combat. Poor Temujin!



Former northern Rome. I feel like I didn't get a chance to develop this area properly since I had to focus on the wars against first teh and then Yuris. Mostly these cities completed their Bath districts (or nearly so) and then the first wave of builders had just completed as the time on the game ran out. One consequence of the Bath districts is that my population in these cities was growing quite fast. The builder labor was following pace, and the next set of traders was going to boost these cities further. I especially wish I'd gotten more of a chance to develop Stockholm, which would have been a very powerful city once it completed its Bath district and chopped/mined the remaining grassland hill tiles. I was able to get some development done at Arpinum, and I have to say that the city location was much better than I thought at first glance. TheArchduke was right: it was indeed a spot worth settling after all.



And here is the original core of cities with the score display. Roma was making 37 production/turn at the end of the game; I planned to have it crank out some more traders once it finished that market (which would have boosted Guilds civic). Poor Ravenna was a great population sink all game, but never completed a single district. I always had more important things for it to be working on than a district, and for this short game, that strategy worked out. I produced a lot of builders out of that location throughout the game. Arretium and Arpinum were just great cities for me throughout the game, and I was very happy with how both of them developed. Especially Arretium, which was a low-food city that I managed to grow to size 8 using my only Feudalism farming triangle of the game. Finally, Hispalis proved to be a solid city in its own right, early on producing those two galleys via a forest chop and then later completing a Commercial district, Bath, and market. Amazingly, I never quite got around to building a quarry on the stone resource - there was a builder one tile away on this last turn. Heh.



I'll close with a picture of the final "PYDT" rating, with my 500th saved image for this game. Everyone did an excellent job at keeping the save moving throughout this game, and we held a steady 2 turns per day pattern for almost two months in a row. It was a bit grueling at times, and this game did suck up a huge amount of my time, but I think it was worth it. I had a absolute blast playing this game, and I'm glad that this was entertaining for so many of the lurkers to read. I truly do appreciate the feedback and suggestions that were contributed to this thread. It was a pleasure, folks.