[Spoilers] The games they are a changin' - Ichabod Civ 6 PBEM 3 as England

[Ichabod]

Archer on hills can shoot over forest/jungle or hills, but they can't shoot over forested/jungled hills. Since the 3 tiles 2 south of Yerevan are hills, we can shoot it with 3 archers with no problem.

You are right on the harvesting/settler buying thing, the gold indeed seems to not be worth it (heck, clearing a camp gives that amount). I'm softening to the idea of mining that copper too. The Wheel Eureka isn't very easy to come by (right now, it's the only tile we can see), and that plus Craftsmanship Eureka really add on the culture saving (and the hammer savings, when you consider faster agoge). Heavy Chariots indeed are good units, especially considering the knight upgrade to come later (knights are very easy to reach on the tech tree and likely a very good "rush" unit).

I'm eager to see what we find to the East, since a good city spot with a good tile to improve might change things. I think, like I feel is very common in Civ 6, it'll be a matter of timing. Perhaps "wasting" that builder charge on a suboptimal tile might be the best answer, since we'll be getting the returns from it with the hammers saved by using Agoge and Ilkum earlier. In that case, we need to think if we value the Wheel Eureka and the copper gold over what we'd gain by just mining a random hill tile. 

Man it'd be so much easier if that copper tile was plains! 

[Ichabod]

The good news is that I renamed the city. Changing of the Guards is one of my favorite Dylan songs, and I think it's English enough. Besides, it symbolizes the change to Civ 6.

The bad news is that the tile picker chose the copper over the stone, which means we'll be on a tough spot once the city grows to size 2. Also, it changes Pindicator's micro. I think we should buy the stone tile once we have enough gold for it. It'll be 8 turns until the next culture tile acquisiton, which means losing 6 food from not working the stone. Considering we won't be losing the culture, that's 50 gold for 6 food + further tile expansion in a Capital we greatly need to expand borders. I antecipate we'll be buying tiles in the Capital sooner or later, so lets go with the buy that helps the early game development (though by doing that we are basically turning our "bought tile choice" into a random one, since we can't know where the tile picker will go next and we know it'll go to the stone now).

The question is: what would be a better use of this gold? Saving for a builder? If we know about it, we can compare the possible gains.



We found some Coast, which open up some settling possibilities. 1W of the warrior seems the best plant from what we revealed so far, but it's far from a plant that helps the snowball. It brings 2 duplicate luxuries and a new one (all on second ring), but no food and low housing hurts. Well... Thinking about it, low food and low housing synergizes a bit, so there's that.  

Right now, I'm favouring getting God of the Forge and getting some units going (likely with Agoge too, which means using the 3 builder charges). The reason is that I think we'll need a lot of scouting. Our immediate surroundings seem pretty poor so far, so we need a lot of map knowledge to make better decisions and further our options. I have to backtrack the warrior now, since getting barbed in the Capital would hurt, but we really need to know what else is there on that jungle to the northwest, for example. The land we'll backtrack with the warrior now seems to be a safe backfill, but it's not looking very promising so far, we need to see what's further beyond.

I'm excited to get the scout going next turn.

[pindicator]

Ugh, I think you're right about buying that tile. Unfortunately we won't even have the needed gold to buy the tile for a turn we hit size 2. We'll only be at 45g that turn.  Yuck, that really is awful luck that the copper tile got picked over the stone.

Let me try to pin down if God of the Forge is still bugged. I'll dig into that when I get home. (Unless a lurker knows?) I think it's one of the stronger choices for us - between scouting and conquering. I'm also starting to warm in God of the Open Sky, even if it is just that 1 culture tile at the capital. And of course we might see something better before t15.

[pindicator]

I'm reasonably confident that the God of the Forge bug has been fixed.

Per this reddit thread ( https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/5b...sly_cheap/ ) the cause of the bug was in the file Base/Assets/Gameplay/Data/Modifiers.xml file.  On line 757 of the current version the modifier for the entry MODIFIER_PLAYER_CITIES_ADJUST_MILITARY_UNITS_PRODUCTION had an attribute of CollectionType that was incorrectly set to COLLECTION_ALL_CITIES.  You can open up your current Civ6 XML files and see that it has been corrected to COLLECTION_PLAYER_CITIES

But no, I could not find any mention of it in the changelogs that have been released.

[Ichabod]

I tried testing it on a hotseat game, but the interface really makes it difficult. The % bonus from the pantheon does not appear on the city tab, where the total production per turn is listed (even though some other % bonuses do show there).

Ok, it's really not that hard to test properly, and I'll do it when I have a little time to spare, before we have to make any meaningful choice. The lacking interface just makes it non-trivial.

Anyway, I agree about God of the Open Sky, it seems like a very powerful pantheon. If you consider the culture per turn values we are seeing in the MP games here, getting something like 5 culture from that pantheon is already a huge bonus. But considering we have only one pastureable tile so far, it's a little less appealing.

[pindicator]

So at risk of being unconventional, I've been wondering about religion, and if we want to get one. I wouldn't say we should get one early -- but we have 2 spots at our capital that border 3 mountains, which makes me wonder if we might consider putting down a holy site and grabbing a religion not necessarily to push for a religious victory, but more to take advantage of economic benefits that come later in the game when you have one.

I'd still want to conquer Yerevan either way.

[Ichabod]

So, a turn with very good news! Without further ado:



Another first to CS, this time the scientific Geneva. The quest, as shown, is also pretty easy, the send a TR one. Geneva's suzerainity is +15% science if not at war, which can be meaningful, I think. It's easy to be countered, but, especially early game, I think we can manage to have it active.

Since we have 2 CS per player, I already got my fair share.   Everything after that is just gravy!

Interesting to note that, if we had settle in place, we'd probably have met Geneva earlier. Well, you win some, you lose some. In the win department, the scout already started to pay off, at least a bit. With only the warrior, depending on what Geneva's warrior did, we could go a long time without metting the CS.



The area explored by the warrior also improved a bit. We see a fish resource, which goes well with the cheap harbours. Perhaps we have more land to the southwest than I previously imagined, but I still think we need to retreat the warrior to the Capital still. Three Petra hills could make for an interesting site.



Also, our food problems in the Capital became only gold/culture problems, because once our borders expand, we'll have plenty. A farm triangle in those wheats will give all the food we need, especially considering a watermill. It seems our Capital is a late game monster, so investing in it might pay off handsomely. Saving some gold to mass buy tiles with Land Surveyors might be a good idea.


Since we are backtracking the warrior, I decided to go worker now. A bit risky, but I'm confident the land makes barb spawns difficult. We have 2 CS guards and barbs coming from the south have a tough terrain to go through.

And here's my crazy idea for the turn: how about buying the 1/3 tile instead of the 2/2? This means a faster worker (I think, haven't done any math), and it means we buy a tile that will be useful and not very likely to be expanded into (the stone is a lock for the next expansion). The total yields are the same, in the end. I wonder how many turns we save on the worker by going this route. I have like 10 years of Civ experience, but it's very hard to calculate that in Civ 6, cosidering the decimals (we currently have a 5% bonus, that shows as 0.3 on the total production and 0.2 on the production tooltip), the overflow that's not shown and the city interface as a whole. I'll do some back of the envelope calculations after we see the initial prod next turn.

Considering we want hammers for the fast settler, it might be a good choice. What do you think, Pindicator.

No new continents in sight, no city spots in sight either. There's nowhere to settle between us and Geneva, so our second city will be pretty distant from the Capital, it seems. I think we need to investigate near Yerevan, since the fogged area to the west doesn't look very promising, water wise.

[pindicator]

Geneva!?  You didn't even mention the best part:  the Suzerain bonus is +15% science when you're at peace!  

This start is looking better and better - like you said, we should be really well off for later in the game.  Just got to figure out how to get there.  And I think we absolutely have to invest in an early campus now!  Speaking of which, we don't need to harvest the copper; we can put the campus on the tundra hill between the copper and stone.

Since we are backtracking the warrior, I decided to go worker now. A bit risky, but I'm confident the land makes barb spawns difficult. We have 2 CS guards and barbs coming from the south have a tough terrain to go through.

Agree with both of these choices.  We'll have to get something out west to scout more in the future.  We could potentially have a good Petra location out there.  Something to keep in mind...

And here's my crazy idea for the turn: how about buying the 1/3 tile instead of the 2/2? This means a faster worker (I think, haven't done any math), and it means we buy a tile that will be useful and not very likely to be expanded into (the stone is a lock for the next expansion). The total yields are the same, in the end. I wonder how many turns we save on the worker by going this route. I have like 10 years of Civ experience, but it's very hard to calculate that in Civ 6, cosidering the decimals (we currently have a 5% bonus, that shows as 0.3 on the total production and 0.2 on the production tooltip), the overflow that's not shown and the city interface as a whole. I'll do some back of the envelope calculations after we see the initial prod next turn.

Considering we want hammers for the fast settler, it might be a good choice. What do you think, Pindicator.

Well, guess I'll do the math then  

So what I've gathered from the tile picker algorithm, is it has the following priorities:

-Bonus tiles
-Tile Yields (total yields regardless of type)
-Some kind bias for 2nd ring over 3rd ring.

But I've seen bonus tiles with less yield be picked over a regular tile with more yield (i.e. 2/1 fish seafood picked over a 2/2 jungle hill plains).  I can't think of a time where I've witnessed it pick a non-bonus tile over a bonus tile.  So I'm 100% confident that the next tile selected will be the stone, and then after that the forested plains hill.  That said, if we buy the forested plains hill instead of the stone, we will get the builder done a turn faster (at the cost of 5 food).  On turn 14 culture will also get the stone and we'll switch over to it

Side by side comparison:

event	1/3 hill	stone
builder	14	15
slinger	18	19
grow to 3	23	21
settler	25	25

So while the hammers come out exactly even in the end, you get an extra 2.2 food, 1.4 science, and 0.6 culture by buying the Stone tile instead of the plains forest hill tile.

No new continents in sight, no city spots in sight either. There's nowhere to settle between us and Geneva, so our second city will be pretty distant from the Capital, it seems. I think we need to investigate near Yerevan, since the fogged area to the west doesn't look very promising, water wise.

I think 2nd city is probably going to go between Geneva and Yerevan.  Let's move the scout to scout that area out next.

[Ichabod]

So at risk of being unconventional, I've been wondering about religion, and if we want to get one. I wouldn't say we should get one early -- but we have 2 spots at our capital that border 3 mountains, which makes me wonder if we might consider putting down a holy site and grabbing a religion not necessarily to push for a religious victory, but more to take advantage of economic benefits that come later in the game when you have one.

I'd still want to conquer Yerevan either way.

What makes me hesitant about going for a Religion is the competition. We have 3 Civs that have some sort of religious advantage, so we have to expect they'll be going that route. We can't expect to have our religion expand very far when we consider we'll likely have 3 other religions pestering ours (I'm assuming we have 4 religions total to be founded, but might very well be 3 with our settings).

Even with the fast pantheon and the religious CS, we don't have an advantage on the religious race, since it's based on GPPs and who gets the district up first. We'd have to go the +1GPP per district one to get it, I think (in that case, though, I think we have it on lock, and that pantheon is pretty good too). Or try for Stonehenge, considering we have stone and decent production. But then we'd be forgoing one of the biggest religion for us to go for a religion, the great Holy Site tiles.

But it's not without its merits, if we go for one. There are some pretty powerful, low faith investment beliefs, like the +10 strength near a city with your religion. We could even mix a scientific/religious approach, by going for Jesuit Education and buying the Campus buildings with faith. It's worth thinking about, and we have time for it.

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I can't argue against math, so buying the 2/2 tile it is. Next turn I'll work the 1/2 tile, because I think 1 prod is better than 2 gold. I'll also swap away from AH into Mining for a turn, so that the tile buy doesn't become more expensive. Scout wise, I'm thinking of going to the marble tile near Geneva next turn, so we have a wider look at the east before exploring what's between Yerevan and Geneva.

By the way, if we manage to keep Geneva hidden from the others, no one will know they have to declare war at us to make us lose our 15% bonus. So, let's surround Geneva with our cities.

[pindicator]

Even with the fast pantheon and the religious CS, we don't have an advantage on the religious race, since it's based on GPPs and who gets the district up first. We'd have to go the +1GPP per district one to get it, I think (in that case, though, I think we have it on lock, and that pantheon is pretty good too). Or try for Stonehenge, considering we have stone and decent production. But then we'd be forgoing one of the biggest religion for us to go for a religion, the great Holy Site tiles.

But it's not without its merits, if we go for one. There are some pretty powerful, low faith investment beliefs, like the +10 strength near a city with your religion. We could even mix a scientific/religious approach, by going for Jesuit Education and buying the Campus buildings with faith. It's worth thinking about, and we have time for it.

This was exactly the line I was thinking of for using religion, as a kind of civ4-like economic investment in your own cities and not as a tool for winning the game in itself.
And if someone else does decide to go for a religious victory we'd be in a better spot to defend against it. I also can't shake the feeling that we're ignoring 1/5 of the game's resources if we just decide not to use faith at all.

Another religious aside: I didn't realize there was an apostle upgrade that converts barbarians. You wouldn't be able to really use it until the mid game, but that seems potentially very strong, if also very hit and miss in how random barbarian spawns are. I'll have to try out it in a single player game.

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Smart idea with delaying AH. And surrounding Geneva will make it easier to defend even if we can't hide it from the world. We could potentially get suzerain status on it very quick when we want. Just need a trade route and an envoy.