[Spoilers]C6PBEM23: Krill sidles yonder, and probably fails

[Krill]

Turn 18




Either there is a CS attacking a barb spear (and I might get an easy 40g out of this), or there is another player over there and I need to be really careful. If that camp triggered from the scout, (and the scout didn't run eg south and there is another camp, a good chance of that), then there might actually be a bunch more barbs coming and this could be rather fun. Getting to squeaky bum time with the settler, I still haven't found anywhere great for a second city. best so far is a minimum distance city claiming the marble, fish and honey and using a volcana for aqueduct. It feels bad for a pangaea map.

[Krill]

Turn 21

So lots has happened in the last four hours. Absolutely insane pace. I can't go the the gym, or prepare and eat a meal without the turn getting back to me. It's the sort of pace which starts out of a dream but becomes a nightmare, like when Homer had to eat all the donuts in hell.







I thought about it, then made a quick decision I had to attack the barb spear. I can't afford that camp to spawn anything, but also I didn't know if there was anyone over that way. I have no good city sites to the west and so the settler is probably going east. Can't cofver everything if I wait and then everything kicks off at once. So far it's paid off, I got the gold, the inspiration, teh era points. If the warrior doesn't die to a suiciding barb scout next turn it will promo heal to 66 health and I can move/heal whilst covering the settler.





Right now I'm planning to settle adjacent to the volcano and river, on the plains hill. That has inner ring maize and two third ring maizes. I need a city to build a watermill in the medium and this will do. I can shove it to size 2, maybe size 3, and just work the three forests for 8 or 10 production per turn. It will do for now, anything else in the fog is a bonus, and with the watermill it's not horrific for growth. I could even end up with a little 5 tile double triangle of farms, two maize with the watermill that would be solid for a later push to size 10.

I've stuck with the granary at MH, it's on for 8 turns. It will finish around the time I can get into agoge (I think a turn after given the extra culture from second city). I acknowledge that another builder is cheaper and generates more output in theory but by the time I want to work a fourth tile at MH I should be able to build one, and even then, the tile improvements aren't farms, it's more quarries, plus with the camp gold I can rush buy a warrior if I really need to. I don't know where that scout went, so I think barbs will come from the south, or it was from a camp to the far east.

[Krill]

Turn 25




Change of plans. Back to basics, and change of focus on which city is better to get to size 10 first.

[Krill]

Turn 27




Barbarians are coming.

[Krill]

Turn 27




More barbarians are coming. Swapping to Agoge next turn and then going ham on units. I should be fine holding the marble, then when the barbs are dead, finish the builder, turtle>repair>mine salt>hold onto last charge. The lost hammers from the tile pillages don't actually matter, I think I lose that production to rounding anyway due to Agoge.

My understanding is that you can never lose your capital to barbs, so I'm not actually sure if there is any risk to this apart from losing units if I'm not careful? I see the BW and Archery eurekas falling into my hands here.

[Krill]

Turn 32




Daily updates are pretty decent at this pace. Things change and are actually worth reporting.

I was a little shocked to see that the barbs just stood still and did nothing whilst there were no units in their vision. They didn't even move to pillage the second stone. Well I've got my builder out, the turtles are improved, and so I'm ready to repair any damage on the way to the salt mine, and the units are starting to get into place so I moved forward my starting warrior as a false advance, and the barbs moved forward.

At this point I might not get to kill one of these two barb warriors with the slinger. I hope that one will head for the marble and suicide into my healing warrior, and the oother one will probably fall to my warrior after attacking into the slinger (move to stone quarry eot, I move the slinger forward, then it suicides. If it pillages I might be able to knock it down to single fingure hp with the warrior then the slinger could finish it off. I'm building a second slinger but then I will consider if I want more military there or to crack on with the monument. MH can get a fe more warriors.

I'm reconsidering how I want to play these two cities out: Longxi (I really need a workable theme here) is the better city to grow to size 10 first if I buy those two third ring maize tiles, with a watermill (and granary) it isn't even close, it can reach 8fpt and has most of the housing from the farms. That doesn't mean I need Magnus, I just let MH build the settlers so I do have alternative options. I could put the Gov Plaze 1SW of the campus and let Longxi have Magnus, and that would let me run the trade route from MH to Longxi for more food to help out MH. That puts so much pressure on Longxi, OTOH I will have to chop a forest which gives me the watermill for free (mostly), leaving just the monument and granary to cram in before the GP and Campus

[Krill]

Turn 34




The formerly undamaged barb warrior attacked the slinger, and I set my units up to kill it if it did that. It did, and they did. Now just missing the Astrology eureka from the ancient era. which is out of my hands, and the Writing one, which I should be able to get 9Writing is already researched to just over 50%)





My reaction:




Whilst I think Civ 6 does extremely well to make players prioritise scouting, I will never not get annoyed when I fall one tile short of identifying CS locations. Someone else met Venice first. Venice blocks any other city to the NE of Long. I'm going to have to figure out how to get Venice because if someone else gets it I don't I have much usable land. And this makes me think the Antartic ocean is actually an inland sea. This is a bit of a problem, not quite sure how I intend to deal with this: I don't know if I want to risk building two galleys on an inland sea.





I think that next turn Long goes onto a monument after slinger2 (although Lilja growth to size 3 takes 3 turns with a 6 turn monument, straight monument is 1 turns faster but is down 12 food, up ~7 production, up 0.8 culture, down 3 beakers), which will move west. MH builds another warrior, because I think I'm going to need three warriors and two slingers to safely (and quickly), scout out the frozen south and clear out what I think is a barb camp in the fog, and the one to the west. I'll use the starting warrior (which is already promoted) to scout east. The builder is going to come back, quarry the third stone and then wander down to the salt. That should give the Wheel eureka T42, so I need to stop Wheel research a few turns earlier.

I'm a little torn here. I'm probably going to have to give up the two galleys (as I don't need the eureka for Shipbuilding yet) because of the risk of the wasted production and ongoing costs, which opens up MH production quue from T38. As I'm focusing on get Long to size 10, MH can afford to build settlers without Magnus provision at size 4, but I would still want the granary food to really make this work a bit better. Long needs a further 5 builder charges (6 with the forest removal), but also needs to claim the second ring fish, and two second ring plains hill forests, so that's another 106 production I need from somewhere, plus about 270 gold.

I can stick with UP after Foreign Trade is in, but I'm not sure if I want to stick with Agoge or not. I could take a turn or two for Lilja growth in MH to push to size 4 and then with the third quarry and a repair that's 2 turns warriors if I need reinforcements. I don't think I'm going to need the +5 barb combat strength card yet, and if I'm not going to build those galleys (14 is a bad number for galley production, but the salt mine lets me give up a hammer for a gold and give the better tile to Long) what other card is there? And with the Venice quest do I need to build a trader as well for the route? The builders take 8 turns, a trader would take a further 4 (decent overflow), granary a further 4 (decent overflow). And I still can't get the faith for a pantheon, not that Stone circles will help me as I'm probably in a dark age in Classical.

Once I get to Early Empire (takes about 8 turns, monument dependent so T48 change cards), I get torn again between Colonization (but could I even put MH onto a settler?) and Land Surveyors (saves me about 60 gold?) when I'm stuck bulldozing my way through State Workforce? Which brings up the problem of actually building a district. I can only get about 95 gold, and I will not quite have gotten the second, second ring tile to buy the third ring tiles at Long!

[Krill]

On Governors, now that Venice is known, I could use Reyna in Long, and run the trade route from MH to Venice. That would give me the envoy (+2g), the basic route output (+4g), and Reynas trade route gold bonus (+3g), and it would help me get the tiles I need at Long to grow to size 10. This seems a far better option, and keep the Gov plaza and Magnus in Monks Halo as originally planned. Use the GP and Ancestral Hall titles to get Magnus Provision. which is when I really need them, not right now. And once Long is set up with all the tiles, I can use that spare fourth title for Pingala and swap Reyna to a new city.

So how is this for an option. Builder quarries T37>repair T41>mine salt T42. MH goes warrior (eot37) into builder eot43 with overflow, into trader eot47-ish, into builder 4 eot52-ish. Do the trade route from Long to Venice (24 turn length rather than 40 but lose the local road). Long goes Lilja growth@3 eot36>Monument eot42>Watermill eot50>granary via chop>Campus. The builder from MH goes fish T47>chop T50 (to place Campus if possible)>farm maize T52. Builder4 then just runs to improve all three of the third ring fish/maize/maize tiles. That's 6 improved tiles including the marble usable by Long, with the waterwheel and Lilja they will be worked in short order.

Swap into Land Surveyors T48-ish, Place Reyna (in post as of T53). Then push to State Workforce, fiddling with build order at Long to get the inspiration. I might instead chop a builder at Long, and change thatbuilder in MH to a settler due around T55. For context, if I started a settler after the next warrion in MH, that would not finish until T47, T46 if I stole the extra stone quarry. I don't see any city locations that 10 turns faster helps me as much as pushing Long to size 10 hard does, but this is also a major scouting issue so I will continue to evaluate. I will not have any more information before T38 when I'd start that settler at hte earleist though.

Lurker question: Does the Reyna bonus gold on trade routes work on traders leaving the city, or do they literally have to start in another city and pass through?

[Krill]

Choice paralysis sucks.

[Krill]

Turn 35




This turn has given me a headache.

The barb warrior and slinger swapped places, which due to the new warrior in MH, and the -2CS from the floodplains meant that I got to clear them all out a bit faster than I expected. I also reminded myself of a central tenet of civ: If you aren't on the verge of everything falling apart, you aren't pushing hard enough. Safety is for losers (unless that safety is a trap for someone else, where a player tightens the screw harder and harder, but that is late game, not early game). That fourth warrior is just not necessary to clear out the west, nor do I need a second slinger in the west, and if I'm keeping Agoge then I already have a back up plan. I can make do with two warriors and a slinger with the third warrior spare as zone defence. So the eastern slinger is going to probe to the east, but I'm not sending it too far. I'm looking for players, I'm looking for a third city location.

That frees up the production queue slightly in MH, but not by much.

I couldn't decide for 30 minutes if I was going to finish the 47 hammers into a granary (it lines up with Foreign Trade, but leaves the builder late), go straight into another builder (but borders are not quite ready at Long) or a monument (speed up all civics, but the costliest option. In the end I looked at MH and figured: at size 4 with a granary it will make 4fpt, and grow to 5 in 8ish turns. I'm already planning to spend that long building stuff, and the food will probably end up lost to a settler. But I want the GP in MH, so that gives me the second and third titles for Magnus and Provision (after Reyna from EE) and MH will be able to build it in a few turns so that should not be an issue. And MH hits housing trouble at size 5 unless I build a farm, and using a charge on a farm breaks more stuff at Long than it solves at MH.

But mostly I stopped focusing on the micro and focused for a moment on the macro. I need to get cities to size 10. A monument helps me get through civics quicker but doesn't actually help getting the cities to size 10 (in fact it decreases the number of turns I have to find someone to complete Writing then build that Campus, which is problematic on many levels), it does give the option to swap policy cards but that's about efficiency: I still need to build the granary, because I need the housing to get to 10, and each food I save now is 2 production I don't need later. So I've gone with finishing the granary and then roll straight into a trader if possible.

And I still have my eye on chopping those marshes to boost MH to size 10.