Thanks again to everyone for their kind words in the thread over the last 24 hours. To respond to fahbs' specific question, I do not think that "first to Great General plus swords" will be the dominant metagame at all for Civ6 Multiplayer. Anything predictable is counterable, and now that this strategy has been shown once, other players will be expecting it and be ready to counter. In truth, TheArchduke could have stopped this attack if he had anticipated it, largely by having his own legions or horsemen ready to respond. I telegraphed that an attack was coming against someone in a huge way by spending 30 or so turns slowly accumulating Great General points and saving up 400 gold for upgrades. With more Civ6 MP games in the rear view mirror, the community will know how to spot these moves coming ahead of time. Another thing that will stop this strategy from working is playing on larger maps; part of the reason this was effective was the tiny map used in this game. After 4-5 cities from everyone, the map was already full. I expect that expansion phase will go on longer in other MP games, and timing pushes will be based more around knights and crossbows than swords.
In evaluating my own game, things generally went according to plan for the bulk of the game. If you look at those strategy posts on the first page of this thread, things more or less played out the way that I hoped they would. I think that I came into this game with more experience at Civ6 than the other players (especially on this map), and I was able to implement what I wanted to do for the most part. Rather than pat myself on the back here further, I'm going to talk about what didn't go as I planned, and places where I think I could have improved on my gameplay.
* Early settling: the single worst decision that I made in this game was opting to settle the Ravenna spot before the Aquileia spot. I had a free claim on one of the most critical portions of the map, the double river valley on the western side of the continent, and I passed it up in favor of settling a closer and more conventional spot. I did this out of greed, because I was confident that I could land both locations before TheArchduke could get a single city settled. This was based on doing a lot of Demographics score tracking, and I ended up getting completely fooled when TheArchduke built a settler on the same turn that his capital grew a size. He would have beaten me to the middle of the map by a turn and locked me out of the double rivers region if he wanted; the fact that he took a spot by the bananas for Mediolanum was the biggest break in my whole game. This was a needless risk that I took and it could have torpedoed my whole game. Stupid.
* Harvesting resources: I didn't do much of this and I think it might have been something that could have improved my play. I did chop a good number of forests/jungle tiles, and that seemed to help me out a lot. I'm never quite sure when it's worthwhile to harvest resources and when it isn't. This is something that I need more practice with to get a sense of when it's a good idea and when it isn't. (In particular, harvesting some of those useless fish resources could have been really helpful.)
* Cities in dry locations: this is another place where I was proven wrong by the other players. I went into this game under the assumption that any city not placed on fresh water was fairly useless, and while that's generally true, two locations on the map did change my thinking. TheArchduke's city of Arpinum and teh's city of Frankfurt were both located in completely dry parts of the map and had the housing penalty at size 1. I thought these were essentially useless cities, and that was a mistake. Both of these were high production cities, and that made them very much worth having. A granary took both of them to 3 housing, and a pair of farms/plantations got them up to 4 housing, enough to work 3-4 tiles. And... frankly, that's all you need in Civ6 if those initial tiles are good ones, which both of these cities had. The lesson here is that if a city can work a handful of good tiles, it's worth establishing, end of story. The calculation changes depending on the size of the map and the number of good sites available, since all things being equal fresh water is still much MUCH better than no fresh water. But on a constrained map with few city locations available, these were good cities and well worth the settlers.
* City states: the city states had much more of an impact on this game than I expected. Whether it was the early envoy bonuses, Yuris conquering his nearby city state in contrast to everyone else, or the way that their units impacted the wars between the players, the city states proved to be hugely useful. I've been so critical of the city states in my writings about Civ5 (and to a lesser extent Civ6) that I have to acknowledge they really "worked" in this game. They did add to the experience of this game. Also unlike in Civ6 Single Player, the envoys were a vital resource and very important indeed. A lot of the time in Single Player it feels like, "yeah whatever another envoy, ho hum" but in this game it felt like everyone was going out of their way to grab the envoys. The whole mechanic added a lot of flavor to this game in a way I didn't expect.
* Military policies: they're really good. Full stop. In Civ6 Single Player, you get used to looking only at the Economic policies and thinking the Military ones are mostly garbage. (
See this CivFanatics thread for a good example.) But that only holds true when you're up against an AI opponent that poses little to no threat militarily. Here in Multiplayer, those Military cards were super important: the ever-important Agoge for early unit production, Limes to build city walls and Bastions to buff up their strength, Conscription to keep the nation afloat economically, and Professional Army for the upgrades. The Military policies are actually balanced quite well with the Economic ones, it's just that Civ6 Single Player almost never faces a situation where there's any military danger, and this swings the relative worth heavily in favor of the Economy ones. I was surprised at just how much I found myself wanting Military policies, and getting frustrated at the lack of more Military slots in governments like Classical Republic.
* As a corollary to this, Oligarchy government is actually pretty darn good. All four of us were running it simultaneously at one point!
Again, it only looks bad when up against a completely incompetent AI opponent. This was another surprise to me.
* Finally, this was my first chance to explore Civ6's tactical combat system in any kind of depth, and for the most part it's a darned good system. Unit positioning really matters, terrain matters, flanking/support bonuses matter, and even smaller differences in unit strength can be extremely important. The only thing holding back the entire combat engine is the horrendous Civ6 movement system, where everything takes too long to move and keeps getting stuck. Why Ed Beach insisted on this movement mechanic (which according to interviews everyone else on the design team hated and wanted removed) makes no sense to me. Without the Great General to boost the movement of all my melee units, I would never have been able to pull of the conquests that I did because my legions would have been tripping over one another the whole time. It's like the designers got 90% of this system working really well, and then flubbed the execution of the really basic and easy final 10% for absolutely no reason.
I can't figure it out.
I learned so many little things playing this game that I can't even try to list them all. I appreciate the feedback and suggestions from the readers - as you were learning from me, I was learning from you. I will be working on turning this forum thread into a report for my website over the next few weeks, as a way to remember this game and hopefully continue drawing more people in Civ6 Multiplayer. For now though, it's time to check out some of the other player threads.
