Civ6 PBEM: Sullla of Rome

[Sullla]

Antisocialmunky: yes, swapping back to a previously-used government causes your civ to go into Anarchy for 2 turns. It's completely inexplicable and I have no idea why it's part of the design; in practical terms, it means that you never want to swap back to a government used earlier. The main thing that governments provide is the policy cards, with each government having different cards in some combination. The policies are the focus something like 80-90% of the time when considering governments. However, each one also has two innate bonuses, like Classical Republic giving +15% to Great Person point generation and +1 amenities to cities with a completed district. Every government gets two of these benefits. One of the two bonuses stacks up over time depending on how long you stay in the government - this is the "Legacy" bonus of that government. However, the Legacy bonus is set at too small of a rate to have any noticeable effect. Classical Republic gives +1% to Great Person generation for every 15 turns spent in the government. So if you spend 100 turns in that government, you get... 6% bonus to Great People. Whoop de doo. I like this idea, but the numbers are just set too low right now. I would double the bonus if I were working on the patching process and see if that helped.

On to Turn 51:



I finally finished Games and Recreation civic this turn. It was a pricey civic to research because I couldn't land the boost (research Construction tech) in any kind of meaningful time frame; my culture has been outpacing my research in the worst way thus far. This civic contains a couple nice items, especially the Colosseum wonder, easily one of the best in the game. It's not just the free amenities provided by the Colosseum; every city within 6 tiles also gets +2 culture as well, and that's a big deal indeed. If I can land that first Great Engineer, this would be my likely target.

Now I had the chance to swap policies, and a difficult choice to make.



There are five policies that I want here, and only three slots to run them in. (I would gladly dump Charismatic Leader from the underwhelming Diplomacy slot if I could.) Because I've already researched the cheap civics, it's going to be about 10-12 turns before I can get to the next one. I'll be stuck with my current policies for some time therefore, with no way to swap (except by spending gold and I'm not doing that). In the Economic column, I want Urban Planning for sure to help my new low-production cities. I also want Colonization for my capital's settler build, and I want Ilkum for the builders that two different cities are producing right now. In the Military category, I'd like Agoge to boost unit production on warriors for future upgrading. And finally, I'd like to keep running Strategos as well, to keep making slow but steady progress towards that Great General that I want. This was a genuinely tough choice that I've been mulling for the past few days.

Ultimately, I went with the policies you see in this screenshot. I am still first in military power for the moment, and I think that I can ride out the immediate future without needing to be in Agoge. I'm actually going to swap into Autocracy government on my next policy change, and that will open up two Military slots for Agoge and some other one-off policies like Maritime Industries. Eventually, I'll be running the Agoge/Conscription combination in those two slots. So that takes care of one policy for the moment. I definitely want Urban Planning, since it boosts everything everywhere, and Colonization saves too much production on the settler build to ignore. That left the decision between Ilkum and Strategos, and I decided that I could get by without the +30% builder bonus for the moment. This is the correct time to run Strategos, while I'm in Classical Republic and getting the +15% Great Person bonus. Another 10 turns of Strategos will put me close to that Great General, and then the Encampment district's 1 GPP/turn will be enough to finish it off and still have the Great General in time for my planned attack. Hopefully, I'll still have Stockholm as a city state ally for its suzerain bonus and can benefit from doubled Great Person points from districts, but there's no guarantee of that and I'm not counting on it.

Speaking of Stockholm, I also had enough points from Charismatic Leader policy to generate a new envoy this turn, and I dropped it into Stockholm to become the suzerain:



This means that I get the "3 envoy" bonus with Stockholm: +2 science per Campus district. Of course, I have no Campus districts at the moment. I also get the suzerain bonus, the aforementioned +1 GPP per district, which is one of the better ones in the game. It's like an even better version of the Divine Spark pantheon. Finally, I also get visibility of the city state, and it will follow me into war and peace. I can even pay the city state to take control of its units for 30 turns, which could be quite useful in a pinch. The opportunity cost for me is also very low, since I didn't really have anything else to do with that envoy anyway. Might as well take advantage of the vision and the suzerain bonus while I can, and we'll figure out what to do if someone tries to attack Stockholm. At the very least, if Yuris or someone else tries to attack Stockholm, they'll declare war on me as well and trigger the boost for Defensive Tactics civic.



I also established my first trade route this turn, running between my third and fourth cities. Unlike Civ5, in Civ6 the trade route provides these yields to the starting city, not the destination city. The food will help Aquileia grow a turn faster, and the production will help it get started on its initial builder. The other reason I wanted this trade route was tactical in nature; the trader will add a road on the copper tile and the rainforest tile west of the bananas, making movement between these cities much easier. Now I'll just need to run another trade route between my fourth and fifth cities after the fifth city is founded, and I'll have routes between all of these spots for quick movement - by Civ6 standards, anyway.

The +1 gold comes from the fact that these cities already having trading posts, part of Rome's unique ability. That would not normally be present. Yet another little benefit from being Rome. Running the trade route boosted Currency tech, which I'll finish research on next turn.



I did a little scouting with my warrior and found teh's other slinger unit up here. He's also started Commercial districts in both his second and third city, although that's no guarantee that he's actually building them. There's a good chance that teh only threw them down to lock in the cost, and has his cities working on other stuff. I certainly plan to do the same thing with my Commercial districts next turn. I'll pull my warrior back next turn; no need to get too frisky with teh up here. I thought I might see a Yuris city up here, but nope, not immediately visible. All four of his cities must be crammed into his starting peninsula, which means that Yuris is out of room to expand. I wonder what he'll do next; try to grow vertically, or try to attack someone?

Internationally, teh finished a settler this turn, which I suspect he'll send to the mirrored version of my southern coast. TheArchduke has built a slinger, giving him a power rating of 65: 2 warriors, 1 scout, and 1 slinger. Nothing dangerous, not yet. Let's see if I can continue to ride things out peacefully for the next 10-12 turns before I start building up militarily in earnest.

[antisocialmunky]

Since you are about to turn Rome from a Classical Republic into an Autocracy, here's some random off topic questions: What do you think is the most/least interesting part in Commentarii de Bello Gallico and why? How trustworthy do you think the account is with Caesar's failures especially the failed invasion of Britain? I'm curious what someone who taught history (no idea if you did anything related to the late republic/early Principate but I'd wager you atleast read it once or twice) sees the narrative. :D

[Sullla]

Now that's an interesting off-topic question! I own a copy of the Caesar's Commentaries (in Latin) that I purchased at a second-hand bookstore in Oxford over a decade ago. It's a little leather-bound pocket edition from the early 20th century, and it's one of my favorite books that I own. Unfortunately, I do not know anything beyond the most basic Latin, and I've never actually read my copy. I should also point out that my area of expertise when I was working in and teaching history was 18th century Britain and the British Empire, so my knowledge of the late classical period is more that of an amateur enthusiast than a historian. From what I understand, the Commentaries are reasonably accurate in big picture terms, but presented in such a way to cast a highly favorable light on Caesar, and written to overemphasize his role in events. Think of it as a publicist's press release that tries to highlight the good parts and glosses over the bad parts. Nonetheless, as I'm sure many of you know already, I am a huge fan of Julius Caesar and remain awed that one of antiquity's greatest military minds could also produce one of the great classic literary accounts. Exaggerated or not, it was quite a feat.

OK, back to the current game taking place. I see that Yuris has updated his thread, which means that you probably already saw that we now have contact:



There we go. I ended up spotting not one, but two Eagle Warriors at the same time this turn. One of the reasons why I was planning to become suzerain of Stockholm was in the hopes of meeting Yuris with the added vision up there in the north. Fortunately it didn't end up mattering here. Note that one of these two Eagle Warriors has a promotion already, that's the little number 1 next to the eastern unit's icon. I'm also kind of glad to see that the Eagle Warriors are spread out; that rules out the possibility of three of them racing in to attack me out of the fog, at least not immediately. More information on Yuris in a minute.

After taking this picture, I moved my warrior a tile east to get vision on the city center tile of Mainz, teh's nearby city, then moved the warrior back west to the starting tile. Having vision on at least one city of each rival is very important, as it allows you to see its defensive strength, and that's a tipoff as to what units that player has built thus far. I will discuss this further in a later post; for the moment, it's important that I have vision on one city of teh and one city of TheArchduke.



Currency tech finished this turn, which means that it was time to start throwing down Commercial districts at virtually every city. They are the one district that pretty much every city wants to build, as gold is inherently useful for virtually everything. And the trade routes they open up are great too, naturally. I placed the Commercial district at Arretium on the river tile that I purchased earlier; unfortunately you can see that it's going to take a while, even here at a city with good production. I'll be able to shave off a few turns by mining the plains hill tile and (eventually) by researching Apprenticeship tech to boost the yields from mines, but it's still going to take a while here. I will work on the Commercial district for now and probably swap back to units when I get back into Agoge policy for the unit production boost. I do want to finish this district though, both for the Great Person points and for the gold/turn bonus. Arretium also grew to size 3 this turn, and has a long way to go before hitting size 4. But there are no more good tiles to work at size 4, and it will only hit the housing cap there anyway, so I don't see the point in emphasizing growth over production. Size 3 is good enough here for a while.

I also started Commercial districts at the capital and Aquileia to lock in the costs. I held off at Ravenna for the moment; that city is so far away from building a district that I'm not sure I want a Commercial district there. I will probably still go ahead and lock in a Commercial district anyway; I have until I finish another civic before the cost scales up again. The capital remains on its settler build (6 turns remaining; next city ETA on Turn 60) and Aquileia is producing a builder for itself.



Internationally, teh researched a cheap new civic, and I guessed that it was Mysticism for the envoy. Sure enough, he pulled the same move that I did and got the 2-for-1 deal at Stockholm, picking up the +2 beakers in his capital in the process. I swear, sometimes I wonder if he's reading my spoiler thread, we've been mirroring one another so closely. It's kind of amusing how three out of the four players in this game now have an incentive in not killing off this particular city state. The one nice thing about all these envoys getting dropped in Stockholm is that it increases the defensive rating of the city. More envoys = higher defensive strength. Let's make it nice and tough for Yuris to do anything here. With a strength rating of 28 and an archer now present as well, I think this would be a tough nut for him to crack at the moment, Eagle Warriors or not.

Note that I have swapped to Archery tech after completing Currency last turn. I'm done building slingers and I want to have the ability to upgrade them to archers if I would come under attack. Of course, I don't actually WANT to upgrade my slingers into archers, because slingers cost no maintenance while archers cost 1 gold/turn in upkeep. Part of my whole plan is building warriors and slingers since they are both free to maintain, then only turning them into legions and archers when I'm actually ready for combat. But yeah, I do want Archery tech in my back pocket just in case someone tries to come after me.

TheArchduke's scout is also slowly moving out of my territory, for the curious.



Here is Yuris' diplomatic screen. He has two luxuries connected and the standard horses from the capital; the horses don't show up for me due to the horses-for-horses trade I made with TheArchduke earlier. The key information is in the city list, where Yuris didn't bother to rename the captured city state name. Lisbon is a Commercial city state in Civ6, which answers the type that he had next to his start. I would love to liberate that spot someday for the Commercial district gold bonus... but if I'm ever able to do that, I'll have already won the game, heh. I definitely think it was the correct decision for him to take the city state as opposed to keeping it around. Yuris has not started any districts yet at his three non-capital cities, which is slightly odd. (Teh has matched me and put down Commercial districts everywhere, while TheArchduke also has not started any of them. No one has actually finished a district yet.)

In the direct comparison, I have 66 score points compared to 57 for Yuris, mostly based on my lead in culture. We both have 4 cities and Yuris has 13 population to my 14 pop. However, Yuris is pretty much out of room to expand now, while I still have a decent city spot on the southern coast to grab, plus I still have my nearby city state to capture. I think the longterm situation favors me in this comparison. Yuris has exactly the military strength that I predicted, 3 Eagle Warriors for a military score of 84. I have 2 warriors and 3 slingers for a score of 85; Yuris will very likely jump ahead of me soon enough. His total lack of slingers is a little strange though. We're fairly close in science rate, with my 14.3 beakers to his 11.6 beakers, but not close at all in civics, where I make 15.8 culture to his 7.2 culture. That is the biggest difference in our games to date, and it's entirely due to me playing as the (likely overpowered) Roman civ. I get 8 culture/turn from having four free monuments, and that's the whole gap between us.

An eventful turn overall then. Everything still looks good so far.

[Sullla]

I posted this morning, and my thread is already at the bottom of this PBEM forum, the oldest one to be updated?! Seriously, I love how active this game has become, between the community members reading/lurking and the other players updating (presumably, since I can't read their threads). We haven't had this much interest in a PBEM game in some time. Too many of the Civ4 games just feel like the players are going through the motions at this point; I'm glad there's genuine interest in something new and different.

We're also absolutely flying through turns at a rate of two per day, and I'm sure that's helping too. Here's Turn 53:



In the center of the map, Yuris moved up his Eagle Warrior towards Aquileia and I moved my warrior to match. I'm pretty sure that he's just scouting, since he could have attacked my warrior if he'd wanted to do so. That said, I'm definitely glad that both Eagle Warriors can't attack my warrior at the same time; together they might be able to get the kill. Let's just avoid that possibility, shall we? Also good news: I can see via my suzerainship with Stockholm that Yuris' third Eagle Warrior is up at the top of the screen. The three of them can't combine to take down a city state or attack my city, at least not in the next few turns. Very good news indeed. Remember, the longer the game goes on, the weaker those Eagle Warriors will be in relative terms. If Yuris plans to do something with them, he should be doing it now, not wandering around individually scouting the map.

Archery tech is also finished, and that's a relief to have in my pocket too. Slingers are only 30 gold away from becoming archers, although as mentioned earlier I don't actually want to upgrade them unless forced to do so. I have one slinger inside Aquileia, another on the way over (and ready to cover the trader unit if necessary), and a third moving up from my core. The other warrior is hanging out on the hill tile and protecting my builder as it finishes the plains hill mine at Arretium.



My other builder is currently on a scouting mission. I don't need the last builder charge here until planting my next city on Turn 50, and that leaves a little time to check out what the Religious city state in the south is up to. I would dearly love to whack this city state and capture that Holy Site, which would practically guarantee me the first religion, but I lack the units to do so at the moment. If I can get some more warriors and a battering ram out, I think I have a chance to take it in 15-20 turns, before I launch my military attack around Turn 80-85. That would be ideal if at all possible. I'll have to do some simming to see if warriors + battering rams is enough to take a spot like this. If all else fails, I can always wait for legions, which will make this a cinch.

I'll mention again that my fifth city will go on the tile east of the iron, and then the goal will be capturing city states and capturing other player's cities after that.



Here's a little milestone that doesn't mean that much, but is fun to see anyway: I am ranked first in all four scoring categories. I finally equaled TheArchduke and Yuris in techs researched, and my greater beakers/turn rate pulled me into first place in the official standings. The more accurate statistic is beakers/turn, and I have a narrow lead there, with 14.3 beakers against Yuris' 12.4 beakers. I've led in Culture forever, I have a very narrow lead in military units, and I'm getting more faith (2 per turn) than TheArchduke (1 per turn) due to having that Religious city state nearby. So the Science and Domination (military) leads are narrow, and the Religious one is almost completely meaningless. I'll enjoy it while it lasts though!

One thing that I wish would appear in the Demographics: some kind of production metric. I think I'm leading by a pretty good margin there, with 14 + 6 + 8 + 3 = 31 total production/turn across my four cities (before applying modifiers). But with no Demographics information on this, it's essentially impossible to tell.



Another piece of interesting information: teh has begun running the Inspiration policy in the Wildcard slot of his Classical Republic. He's chasing after the first Great Scientist, and it's an attractive one indeed to have. Unfortunately for him, this makes me even more likely to attack teh down the road, since it would be wonderful if I could invade and steal his Campus districts after teh goes to all the trouble of building them. This goes back to my long-running dilemma: teh or TheArchduke? Teh has been playing a better game thus far, and it's more difficult logistically to invade his territory as compared to TheArchduke. However, TheArchduke is playing as Rome - Oligarchy Rome to be more specific - and that's an unattractive target to take on. If TheArchduke were playing as almost any other civ, I would go for him in a heartbeat. Instead, teh looks more likely to draw the short straw. Still a good 25-30 turns before I have to make any decisions though, and perhaps it will become more clear with time.

One thing I do know: I definitely won't be targeting Yuris for an attack. Not unless something really strange happens in the next three dozen turns!

[shinghand]

Apart from the logistical difficulties, are there any costs to invading civs that are a long way away from you?

I was thinking something along the lines of distance from capitol maintenance.

[fahbs]

They just announced the new Persia civ and it looks like it's even more OP than Rome.

Fall of Babylon: Declaring a Surprise War grants all units extra movement points. Surprise War declarations generate fewer warmonger penalties than normal.
Satrapies: Researching Political Philosophy increases trade route capacity by 1 and grants a free Trader unit. Internal trade routes generate more yields.
Pairidaeza: Improvement that generates culture and gold. Improves the appeal of adjacent tiles. Bonus yields for adjacent districts. Yields increase in later eras.
Immortal: Replaces Swordsman. Has a ranged attack, but isn't weak when defending like ranged units usually are.


That pairidaeza improvement is crazy. Culture+gold improvement that boosts adjacent tile yields and acts as a mini Eiffel tower wonder?


Sulla, huge fan of your stuff for years. What are your thoughts on siege weapons in this game? I'm starting to think they're not worth it at all when you have siege towers. It's weird because siege towers remain amazing the entire game and outdo even missile artillery, but you lose the ability to build them due to "obsolescence" after a certain point. The thing become like dark age of technology relics from WH40k.

[Sullla]

This was the first morning in some time without a new save waiting for me when I woke up. That was OK with me, since we've been flying through the turns and I don't particularly love playing half of mine at 5:50 AM. I'm sure there will be another new turn waiting tonight. In the meantime, I'll answer a few questions from the thread.

Shinghand: nope, much like in Civ5, there are no distance costs in Civ6. You can put cities anywhere on the map, as far away from your capital as you like, and there are no distance penalties. Here in a Multiplayer game though, there are strong tactical concerns about where each player can and can't place cities, plus the fresh water concerns, plus the very limited space on this Tiny sized map. But yeah, in Single Player especially there's no restriction on where to put your cities. There are no maintenance costs at all, no corruption, no per-city research and culture penalties as in Civ5. More cities are always better to have in this game. The only tradeoffs are the scaling cost of settlers/builders and the need to keep everything happy with amenities. If you can do that, the sky is the limit.

Fahbs: first of all, welcome to Realms Beyond! Great to see a first post in this thread. The Persian civ as described sounds like a strong choice for Single Player, and flat-out absurdly broken for Multiplayer. According to the CivFanatics thread (I can't watch the video until I get home), the Persian unique ability gives all units +2 movement points when a surprise war is declared. That's ridiculously overpowered. :rolleyes: Movement doesn't matter that much against the AI because it's clueless about how to play the game tactically, but against actual other human players? Broken beyond belief. How do you stop archers that can move across a river tile and still shoot due to having 4 movement points, swords that can cross a forest tile and then still attack into another forest tile? If the other poor sap's units are still stuck having to use the awful movement rules of the base game, they'll be helpless, especially against ranged units. I'm pursuing a Great General right now because the +1 movement it grants is already crazy good, and that only applies to units in the proper era, and only to units within two tiles of the Great General. +2 movement for all Persian units everywhere, timed right when a war begins, is laughably, ridiculously overpowered. Instant perma-ban for any serious MP game. If you want to see a lesser version of this in action, go read Ichabod's thread for the current Civ5 PBEM game... and that was with only +1 movement point.

The rest of the Persian abilities see to be pretty good themselves, although without exact numbers it's hard to tell by how much. I'll reserve judgment on that unique tile improvement until I can see the full yields; it sounds a little too good at first glance. I hate the notion of giving out a free trade route and trader unit at Political Philosophy, for the same reason that I hate all the freebies that Civ5 gave out: it undercuts the gameplay. Oh look, I don't have to build a Commercial district or choose to build a trader unit, they just magically appear from the skies. It's a stupid bonus that doesn't present any kind of interesting decisions. (By the way, I completely agree that Rome's free monuments are equally stupid. Think how much more planning I would have to do if I was forced to decide when to invest in culture by building them.) Depending on what "internal trade routes produce more yields" means, this could be either a good ability or another stupidly overpowered one.

I don't want to sidetrack this thread with the old downloadable content discussion again, but I'll simply state that I detest the way modern gaming has evolved in this area. The designers have every incentive possible to make the downloadable content extras overpowered nonsense (wrecking game balance), the presence of the extra content splits the playbase and creates all sorts of unnecessary save file incompatibility, and I find selling off pieces of an unfinished product to be morally distateful. I'm happier pretending that the DLC civs simply don't exist and playing the base game. There, let's move back to the actual PBEM game at hand and speak no more of that tripe.

Back to the question from fahbs: siege weapons themselves work just fine. They are excellent against city walls and mostly useless against anything else, exactly how you would expect. The problem is that battering rams and siege towers are way too strong, exactly as fahbs mentioned, and that undercuts the reason for siege units existing. Firaxis would be better served cutting these support units from the game entirely and forcing players to rely on siege units to capture heavily defended cities. Since that's not going to happen, we're stuck in a situation where a couple melee units with battering rams can make all siege units useless, and you might as well play the game that way.

Civ6 has such excellent mechanics overall that the areas with poor balancing like this really stand out. They would have benefitted enormously from having a larger pool of community testers working on their game. (We had close to 50 people from the wider Civ community helping out on Civ4; from the credits, it looks like Civ6 had less than 10 people.) I'll never understand why Firaxis chose to cut off the pool of free expert testers that they had a decade ago. Civ6 is still a good game, but think how much better it would be with a fixed interface and more logical balancing... A missed opportunity for sure.

[fahbs]

It's weird that the AI never tries using rams and siege towers, considering they don't fall under 1UPT nor the "no move+fire" restriction for siege weapons (I swear the AI has no idea the restriction is there, and just keeps moving its siege weapons unable to ever fire).

I have never, ever seen the AI capture a walled city.

[Sullla]

Yep, that seems to be the critical failure for the AI, the presence of city walls. They can take cities pretty well in the early game, but the minute those walls go up, they are completely helpless. This is obviously not helped by the midgame civic that effectively puts walls in every city on the map - a really poor idea that should be stripped out of the game. Some of the community AI mods seem to deliver much better performance; as I said before, I plan to look into them when the patching process dies down.

Back to the game at hand. Apparently Yuris and I just missed one another, and he played the turn about 30 minutes after I left for work. The game therefore sat with me for about 12 hours today, the first time that I was dinged with the "over 6 hours" penalty:



It's pretty amazing that this never happened previously. Dumb luck I guess. There's nothing I can do if the turn passes to me in the middle of my work day, since I'm not exactly lugging my gaming laptop into a federal office building. Everyone has been really good about playing their turns quickly, and you can see that we're all under 5 hours on average turn time. Still, I did like having that zero next to my name in the slowpoke category. Ah well.



Turn 54 was another quiet turn. We all seem to be having a party in the middle of the map right now, although fortunately no one is doing anything threatening. I moved my warrior into Aquileia and covered my trader with a slinger unit to make sure TheArchduke's scout doesn't get any crazy ideas. That road from Aquileia to Arretium is getting close to finished, and that will help my unit logistics a little bit. The builder at Arretium also finished a mine on the plains hill tile:



Now this is quite nice for a size 3 city. 8.5 production/turn already and more to come later on with Apprenticeship tech and more hill mines. If I'm really lucky, an upcoming border expansion will grab the other floodplains tile, which would be amazing. Another 4/1 tile (with a farm) would be great to let this city grow and solve its only real issue of having low food. The tile currently listed by the tile picker would be quite nice too, as I could chop down the rainforest and put a farm here for a decent 3/0 tile. Down the road, I want that tile and the two floodplains for a Feudalism farming triangle, which will add +1 food to all three tiles (yields of 5/1, 5/1, and 4/0 respectively - very nice). I'd also settle for the desert hill tile too. The only thing I don't want is another rainforest tile or another plains tile - I already have plenty of those that I'm not using. The banana resource would be great, but it's out in the third ring so that's simply not happening.

After taking this picture, I decided to swap back to Masonry tech. I'm going to need that shortly to start city walls in Aquileia, and I think I might be better served by working on a battering ram here in Arretium instead of the very pricey Commercial district. Now is an excellent time to train a battering ram since I'm not in Agoge policy for a boost to warriors. (Agoge only applies to melee and ranged units, and will never apply to battering rams.) I need to sit down tomorrow and sim out how hard it is to capture a city state with warriors + battering rams. If it's doable, then I should make the swap at Arretium and prepare to go after Yerevan sooner rather than later. If not, we wait for legions and I finish the Commercial district first.



Here's a compilation screenshot of the upcoming tech tree. I can finish the Masonry/Horseback Riding combo in 4 total turns with research overflow, and so it doesn't matter too much which one I pursue first. I'm thinking I should finish Masonry first, because clearly I'm not delaying Masonry until after Apprenticeship tech (my next big research target) is done. I also need to grab Sailing tech once I settle my next city, which will be an extremely cheap 1.5 turn project, and I also need Iron Working for legions, Shipbuilding (the "14 turns" under the interface at the top) to embark units, and Engineering to construct my Bath districts. That's a long list! At least I'll be able to boost every single one of these techs to help knock them out.

The other thing helping me is that I'm opening up a pretty sizable gap now in research power. I hit 15 beakers/turn today, and although Yuris is keeping pace pretty well at 12.4 beakers/turn, teh and TheArchduke are not. They have 10.8 beakers/turn and 9.8 beakers/turn respectively right now. Don't be fooled by the small numbers, that's a serious gap. This is not Civ4 where the raw research rate is getting balanced out by higher maintenance costs. I'm making almost 50% more beakers each turn, full stop, no tradeoffs. It's a nice position to be in, and I have another good city still to be settled in 6 more turns.

Internationally, Yuris finally finished the uber-expensive State Workforce civic, and he will start on Political Philosophy next. At his current civics research pace, it should take 7-8 turns to reach it and establish his first government. Teh built a third slinger to match me, although he only has 1 warrior to my 2 warriors. I'm sure that he's going to finish Archery tech shortly and wanted to get the third slinger done ahead of time. Like me, he also built this slinger when not running Agoge policy (since he has the +2 Great Scientist points policy in the Wildcard slot, and Classical Republic has no Military slots). TheArchduke... still has not connected any luxury resources yet. I'm going to hook up a second spices resource soon, and I might see if he's willing to pay some minor gold/turn for it. If he was playing any civ other than Rome, I would so be attacking him in 30 turns. I still might do it if he lacks legions on Turn 80... We shall see.

[fahbs]

Do you find there's any difference in timing ("I need X by X turn") between singleplayer and multiplayer games? If so, what?