Civilization VI

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

I've been thinking to do a "World Series of Civ," where I play the best of seven games at a certain level, probably King for me, with random civs and no restarts. Just deal with what I get and try to hack out four wins before the AI beats me four times.

ubrakto wrote:

I've played one game at emperor when we had the GWJ Civ game thread going.

Humm. This is another idea too?

It was fun while it lasted, but it didn't last that long. Memory is fuzzy, but I think participation started dropping around game 3-4 and it was over around game 6? Even with the game speed set to quick and giving a month to a game, life happens or folks get burned out and want to move on to something else (which I completely get).

ubrakto wrote:
Godzilla Blitz wrote:

I've been thinking to do a "World Series of Civ," where I play the best of seven games at a certain level, probably King for me, with random civs and no restarts. Just deal with what I get and try to hack out four wins before the AI beats me four times.

ubrakto wrote:

I've played one game at emperor when we had the GWJ Civ game thread going.

Humm. This is another idea too?

It was fun while it lasted, but it didn't last that long. Memory is fuzzy, but I think participation started dropping around game 3-4 and it was over around game 6? Even with the game speed set to quick and giving a month to a game, life happens or folks get burned out and want to move on to something else (which I completely get).

I really enjoyed doing those games and talking about the experience but I dropped off when we were still doing a game a week. I couldn't keep that pace. Then they tried doing the Civ fanatics challenge which I think was at emperor or deity and I didn't feel like playing at that difficulty yet.

Ah, okay. That makes sense.

Was it easy to set up? I would be up for doing one game like that, if anyone is interested. I'm curious how other people play.

Here's the thread if you want to check out how it worked and played out: https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/1300529

I forgot it started out at a game a week. Firmly middle-aged, and my memory is already shot.

I got back to my Cree game last night and finally experienced an emergency. it couldn't have worked out better. Pretty firmly locked in to my region of the map, I decided it was time to take Russia's two cities to my south (Peter's only two in that area of the continent, one of which was his capitol). I hadn't built up much military so I'd settled into getting two cities into solid unit-production work and had units starting to pump out. (Mostly knights, field cannon, and a couple bombards.)

I'd been in a dark age, but as my army grew I hit the changeover to the next age right as I was primed to go so. I got the golden age and picked up the perk where you can declare war with minimal penalty. Out of the blue, I see Shaka pounding Peter's capitol. So I hold off and sure enough he takes it. A turn later, an emergency goes out for which I'm the only participant. I already have my units well-positioned to go get it, the city is only just starting to recover, and he only has three units left over that haven't fully healed. Total cakewalk. I get Peter's capitol with no warmongering penalty, Shaka is across the ocean and can't keep sending more units (I also had ship patrolling the seas for them), and I got solo claim of the 10k gold prize.

Not a bad turn of events!

After the iOS version updated yesterday, I decided to try another game on my iPad. When I started up the game, it had forgotten that I paid for the full version. The "Buy It Now" feature has a "Restore Purchase" button, which did nothing when I used it. Sent a note to Aspyr support and kept trying that "Restore Purchase" button. After a few minutes, it worked and I was able to start a new game.

But of course the game had already made me look like a PEBCAK idiot to Aspyr support. Er, I guess that'd be a PEBCAT (touchscreen) for an iPad.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Ah, okay. That makes sense.

Was it easy to set up? I would be up for doing one game like that, if anyone is interested. I'm curious how other people play.

It's pretty easy to set up. Create a game, save right at the beginning of Turn 1 - don't do anything else, then make the save game available for download. I used Google Drive. then we had everyone post up a screen shot of their victory screen and their score.

The only gotcha is to make sure that whomever is making the save game file doesn't have any mods activated and that only the desired subset of DLC is active.

I don't have the time to run the game, but I would participate if someone else took up the baton.

I'll do it! I'll do it!

A Rise and Fall game, right? I'll turn off all my purchased DLC and pick one of the new leaders. Is Prince difficulty okay?

If it works out, we can do more, but spaced out enough so everyone can participate.

If my research is correct, the following leaders should be available to anyone with the base game + Rise & Fall:

American - Roosevelt
Arabian - Saladin
Aztec - Montezuma (was preorder bonus, now free DLC)
Brazilian - Pedro II
Chinese - Qin Shi Huang
Cree - Poundmaker (R&F)
Dutch - Wilhelmina (R&F)
Egyptian - Cleopatra
English - Victoria
French - Catherine de Medici
Georgian - Tamar (R&F)
German - Frederick Barbarossa
Greek - Pericles
Greek - Gorgo
Indian - Gandhi
Indian - Chandragupta (R&F)
Japanese - Hojo Tokimune
Kongolese - Mvemba a Nzinga
Korean - Sondeok (R&F)
Mapuche - Lautaro (R&F)
Mongolian - Genghis Khan (R&F)
Norwegian - Harald Haradrada
Roman - Trajan
Russian - Peter
Scottish - Robert the Bruce (R&F)
Scythian - Tomyris
Spanish - Philip II
Sumerian - Gilgamesh
Zulu - Shaka (R&F)

The following are DLC and will not be included:

Australian - John Curtin (and good riddance, because he is a pain in the butt with his government hate)
Indonesian - Gitarja
Khmer - Jayavarman VII
Macedonian - Alexander (I am gonna miss him...)
Nubian - Amanitore
Persian - Cyrus
Polish - Jadwiga
Goodjer - The Game King

Awesome! This week has been super stressful and I'm looking forward to some Civ this weekend. I'm pretty sure I'll play this game. Thanks for picking it up.

Count me in!

I'll participate as well. I'm still only on my second game (of any Civ6, I got it when I got R&F) but I'm enjoying it. I may play on a lower difficulty and just have an asterisk next to my score I still haven't quite grokked districts

Districts are hexes within the city limits that you dedicate to a purpose - trade and markets, or religion, or industry, for example - and they can have special buildings built within them (in some cases) to enhance that purpose (a religious district may have a Temple added, say, or a military district may build an infantry barracks). Often districts will provide bonuses to other adjacent districts that affect their resource production for the city, and they can be affected by nearby terrain as well. So they are a sort of development mini-game.

Here's a new topic with the deets!

Goodjers Rise & Fall (part 1?)

Please post updates there, but spoiler tag anything that might reveal map layout or enemy positions.

Robear wrote:

Districts are hexes within the city limits that you dedicate to a purpose - trade and markets, or religion, or industry, for example - and they can have special buildings built within them (in some cases) to enhance that purpose (a religious district may have a Temple added, say, or a military district may build an infantry barracks). Often districts will provide bonuses to other adjacent districts that affect their resource production for the city, and they can be affected by nearby terrain as well. So they are a sort of development mini-game.

Yeah I get the concept mechanically, it just hasn't clicked in the execution yet. Like should every city have every building like in past Civs? When is it appropriate to build a district on top of a bonus resource? And then the mini-game aspect of it is almost too much. If I try to plan and min/max the adjacency bonuses I'll never get another turn in!

Where's Tboon when we need him?

I am Civ-averse these days. Sorry, despite wanting desperately to like CivV and CivVI I just don't. Part Civ moving in ways I don't care for and part EU4 to blame, I think.

I still like to follow along with people talking about it though.

Kyekye wrote:
Robear wrote:

Districts are hexes within the city limits that you dedicate to a purpose - trade and markets, or religion, or industry, for example - and they can have special buildings built within them (in some cases) to enhance that purpose (a religious district may have a Temple added, say, or a military district may build an infantry barracks). Often districts will provide bonuses to other adjacent districts that affect their resource production for the city, and they can be affected by nearby terrain as well. So they are a sort of development mini-game.

Yeah I get the concept mechanically, it just hasn't clicked in the execution yet. Like should every city have every building like in past Civs? When is it appropriate to build a district on top of a bonus resource? And then the mini-game aspect of it is almost too much. If I try to plan and min/max the adjacency bonuses I'll never get another turn in!

I think of districts as placeholders for buildings of that type, so they somewhat force you to plan ahead for what type of city you want to build. City population limits how many districts you can make, so you often have to wait for growth in order to add districts later in the game.

As far as min-maxing, a rough yet effective approach is building things with adjacency bonuses in triangles and diamonds. So try to clump three or four farms together, and three or four districts/city-centers together. That's not always possible, of course, given geography, but it's a start.

As for building districts on top of bonus tiles, I've avoided it because it removes the bonus, or so they tell me when I consider building on one. I'm not 100% sure this is a good approach, but I don't want to lose those bonus resources and whatnot when there are usually plenty of building spaces available.

Your top concern when building districts is global output and local adjacency bonuses. Any city near a river is prime for Commercial districts because you can get the +2 adjacency bonus from the river. If the city has a tile with lots of mountains around it, that's a Campus district.

Aside from adjacencies, you'll also want to think about just global output. If you don't have any Campuses, your science will be horrible, so try to have 2 in your Civ before Medieval and then make up the output difference by prioritising libraries or building other districts around them. The new Government Plaza district can allow you to make up a lack of Mountains.

Theater districts usually come in later for larger cities, but an early one can help you climb up the Civics tech tree very quickly and get you gains in early acquisition of key government types, if you're Russia and have the Great People.

Those are the main district types you'll want in all your Civs. Of course, Holy Sites output Faith (but can be non-essential), and Military Encampments are great for making units.

I try to get a campus in nearly all cities. Then everything else depends on the win conditition goal.
One thing I am never sure about is when it is optimal to build new cities. Considering it slows down your existing ones. Especially when to make city 2 and 3.

Shadout wrote:

I try to get a campus in nearly all cities. Then everything else depends on the win conditition goal.
One thing I am never sure about is when it is optimal to build new cities. Considering it slows down your existing ones. Especially when to make city 2 and 3.

I don't know if it's a good strategy, but I try get reliable settler output pretty early. It does stunt early growth (I will usually just use one city for it--usually my capital), but I look at it as a loss leader so that I keep pace with AI expansion (in terms of territory) and then try to make up the ground through the medieval and renaissance ages.

Shadout wrote:

I try to get a campus in nearly all cities. Then everything else depends on the win conditition goal.
One thing I am never sure about is when it is optimal to build new cities. Considering it slows down your existing ones. Especially when to make city 2 and 3.

If playing a continents map, I usually build scout, slinger, builder in my first city unless I start near the tundra in which case I build slinger, slinger, builder. The scout is to help my warrior find a natural wonder, new continent, city-states and tribal villages for those early needed inspirations/eurekas. The slinger is to help the warrior defend against barbs and trigger the archery eureka. The builder is to get my city growing and producing faster and to hit the craftsmanship inspiration on time. I drop the scout and build the extra slinger if in the tundra because there are fewer directions to explore and more likelihood of barbarian activity as tundra barbs almost always need to come towards you because they are at the edge of the screen whereas other barbs may get pulled to another player or city state.

Once I’ve made those three builds I assess the situation and determine how to immediately go for a second city. If I’ve found an enemy city close by, I’ll pump out more units and try to take it. Bonus points if I can steal one of their settlers for a third city in the process. If I haven’t found an enemy city close enough to take in a relatively quick war, I’ll produce a settler and get my second city going peacefully. On high difficulties I find this more peaceful route necessary as the AI starts with enough extra stuff, that you often need 2 or 3 of your own cities to produce enough military to start taking theirs.

I rarely actually go for a domination win, usually opting for one of the other victory conditions, but I find that even going for one of the peaceful victories it is much easier to start with an early war with the nonexistent warmonger penalties to set yourself up for success early. Once I eliminate my closest opponent, I usually settle in for peaceful play and don’t fight much after that unless necessary to defend myself or to hamper an AI that looks to be running away with things. During this peaceful expansion, I’ll generally use the yellow cards to produce a wave of settlers at a discount and then a wave of builders at a discount.

Started a game as Seondeok and was up too late getting that going. I was assailed on all sides by barbarians, so it was hard to take out the many camps that sprung up around me. I went into a dark age as soon as the game hit the Classical era. Managed to turn it around into a Heroic Age though. I've built three of my own cities, and one of the Aztec's cities converted to my side. Norway also built a city in my territory, which is about to flip to my side as well. I'm hoping to build another city on my continent, but I'm not sure what the loyalty situation will be.

Since Norway's in the game, and already declared ineffectual war on me once, I spent some time building up a Navy. This seems to have placated Harald.

Anyway, going for that sweet sweet Science victory. I need to beef up my production capabilities, but I've got time.

My Goodjers Rise & Fall game is going pretty well!

(plug, plug)

Won my Seondeok game tonight. Actually won while in a dark age, so that was an extra achievement I wasn't actively trying to get. Got a few random espionage achievements as well. By the end of the game, everyone was friendly with me, and I had Alliances with all but one other civ. I don't think there were any emergencies declared. Norway and Tamar were two physically large powers who kept trading cities back and forth, which was kind of fun to watch. Their border was a line of red on the minimap by the end as there were three separate free cities causing trouble for both sides.

I ended up failing to really optimize my production, but a few rejiggered trade routes, policies, and a judicious use of a Great Scientist enabled me to pull ahead at the end.

I went back to my 4th game, with Poland on Prince level. We were pretty much back into the pack when I left off last, but we had momentum and a good number of cities to work with. I built and built and built for a bit, and then once again Spain launched a sneak attack on us. Damn!

I levied troops from a nearby City State and used them to decimate the Spanish attack. From there I went on the offensive, surrounding Madrid and cutting off another city. I wasn't having any luck taking the cities though. Throwing troops against the city walls was pretty much just killing us off. I resorted to Google, came up with a better plan involving battering rams, catapults, and siege towers. Things went much better with those units helping out, and we soon had Madrid and another Spanish city in hand. We settled for peace, confident that Spain would never again have the military might to threaten us.

Back to peace, I spent the longest time just cranking up industry, science, and commerce. We pulled away from the rest of the civs, but just when I thought the game was going to settle into a peaceful race to the finish, France and Arabia declared war on us.

Arabia was on a distant continent, but France shared the eastern side of our continent, so I upgraded troops and sent them off to Paris. Oddly, France had little to no army stopping us. We basically marched uncontested to the walls of Paris. Although our ground troops sucked because of cruddy strategic resource options (no iron, niter, or oil), our artillery pummeled their walls and in short order Paris fell. We drove on, taking a couple more cities with the same strategy. At some point in this Spain joined the war against us, but their three paltry cities never threatened us.

At the point where I ended last night, I was churning my way through war torn France. I want to take a bit more ground, as they have oil reserves on their eastern edge.

On the whole, things seem pretty much decided in this game, as long as I watch out for religious victory from other civs. I don't see how anyone can match us militarily or technologically, and we've just got so many cities now. I think I'll go for a domination victory to get more practice with modern war units.

Still having a super fun time with this, but I think it's time for me to move up to King. The only glaring negative in all this is how inept the enemy has been at war, even considering it's Prince level.

The enemy is inept at war on any difficulty, they just get bigger and bigger bonuses to compensate.

Mr Crinkle wrote:

The enemy is inept at war on any difficulty, they just get bigger and bigger bonuses to compensate.

That's been true of every Civ since the first one though. They've just gotten a little better at rushing you with that initial wave of units. After that, they kind of forget that they're in a war at all.

4th game all done. Domination victory around 1940 or so. It got to be a slog at the end, but Poland now rules the world. I think I was constantly at war for the last 150 turns or so, and I piled up quite a war weariness penalty by the end. I definitely learned a lot about fighting in the game. I hope that'll serve me well at the next level. Some of the combinations you can set up to roll over cities are pretty fun.

I did have an odd situation where I was on friendly terms with Australia, no formal war, but our troops were fighting each other. I ended up eliminating them from the game without ever going to war against them. I didn't even have the option in diplomacy. Not sure what happened there.

Kyekye wrote:
Mr Crinkle wrote:

The enemy is inept at war on any difficulty, they just get bigger and bigger bonuses to compensate.

That's been true of every Civ since the first one though. They've just gotten a little better at rushing you with that initial wave of units. After that, they kind of forget that they're in a war at all.

I thought Civ 2 was pretty good at combat at the King level, and either 3 or 4 struck me as better too. Maybe it will feel a bit more urgent at King level, as the AI production advantages kick in.

Anyway, I'm going to play the group game first, then try to move up to King.

Combat in the early Civs was plagued by the Death Ball though. The AI wasn't all that competent. It would just stack 10 musketmen in a city and call it a day. At least when you wore them down though they were smart enough to buy a new unit so you couldn't walk into a city. And they always had that money available, didn't they?

Nah. I distinctly recall abusing the AI in 4 by moving around my troops so it would never attack a city - its troops would waste time just going around and around. And that's not even accounting its occasionally horrible unit choices that were easily to dismantle. Civ3 AI was hopeless at war once Warlords came around. It could never get its head around Armies so once you had one it was an auto-win on nearly any difficulty setting.

And yes, in every iteration, once the initial wave was done, they'd kind of trickle sorry paltry reinforcement to your area to be slaughtered at your leisure.