6otM184 AAR

[EdTice]

I checked your save and my immediate question is why are the resources not developed? There are around 26 sea resources not having a fishing boat on them. Sorry for being nosey

Unfamiliarity. Unfamiliarity with naval civs and also not having as much experience playing on king. The expanded answer is that I'm used to playing on higher levels where I don't develop sea resources if I don't have enough navy to keep them from being pillaged by barbarians or an aggressive neighbor. In fact, my general play is to avoid having many coastal cities since defending them can be so resource intensive especially during the mid-game when the AI is way ahead on research and even the barbarians are an era ahead.

Obviously on king by turn 50, I'm ahead of the AI in every aspect, but I'm just not used to it. I'm working on another playthrough but I still don't expect to be sub-300 turns. I'll post it when I finish. Again mistakes due to not being used to the difficulty level. I notice the person who won in 185 turns didn't bother with a religion. If I try another time, I won't either. No point of founding a religion that I'm not going spread because I want to use all of my early fait for units. I probably could have spread my religion later on for some extra culture although I could also see accidentally winning a religious victory.

I didn't try to conquer any cities with just galleys because it's not something I would expect to be able to do. But on king, the AI doesn't have walls until pretty darn late and you can actually take cities that way. I'm not surprised that the best entry so far (185 turns) probably didn't build a single district just took over the AI.

But I'm also not good at taking over AI cities. I'm going to go back and look at some of the winning maps. In the current attempt (not yet attached), I have 25 cities / 20 campuses but the only really good cities are ones that I settled. One strategy I've never used (but will in the future) is to promote Moksha all the way instead of Liang so you can faith-buy districts but I might consider that when playing high-faith civs like Gitarja. I also usually build the Intelligence Agency which works great because siphoning funds and stealing technology catches me up to the AI fast. But on king, the AI has no commercial hubs from which to siphon and by the time I have spies, I'm so far ahead in tech that there's nothing to steal. But I probably can't do both of these things because there wouldn't be enough faith. On king, I question whether I should even bother to build the government plaza buildings beyond the audience chamber although I guess they are useful for the governors.

I guess that's an overly long answer to your question. But the summary is that I'm just not yet good enough to recalibrate my play to different AI levels.

 

[EdTice]

SV Turn 304 Replay

185 SV

Spoiler t185 :

View attachment 699585

A pretty barren start, however Georgia had some juicy real estate right behind the corner. After settling one additional city below the capital, I conquered her lands with 3 wariors of my own accompanied by 3 warriors of Vatican City, which I levied ASAP with Amani. Afterwards, instead of building any more settlers, I went hard into Galleys, hoping to find some easy targets on better land. I eventually stumbled upon France, and conquered their costal cities, soon to be followed with buying some land units in order to get the landlocked cities.

I continued my conquests, until there was almost no one left. All the conquered cities built Harbours and Campuses, in that order. As always with island maps, the biggest annoyence were the barbarians, who required a lot of micromanagement to get around.

I have spotted Chinguetti early on, so I went for a Holy Site as my first district. After additionaly securing Mogadishu and Kumasi suz bonuses, my invulnerable trade routes provided me with tons of cash, faith and culture.
From the turn 140 onwards, it was just a matter of optimizing the rest of the tech tree to get almost solely 1-turn tech researches until the end. The final tech tree was great, requiring only the bottom techs to get to Offworld Mission.

Thanks for the game!

What did you research first? How did you conquer China? I notice that you have no naval units in the Indian Ocean. Had you just explored well enough to know not to put any naval units there? It's unfortunate that there doesn't seem to be a way to get a canal by ShenDu for much better naval mobility. Not that it matters since you conquered everyone already!

 

[shoshonte]

Unfamiliarity. Unfamiliarity with naval civs and also not having as much experience playing on king. The expanded answer is that I'm used to playing on higher levels where I don't develop sea resources if I don't have enough navy to keep them from being pillaged by barbarians or an aggressive neighbor. In fact, my general play is to avoid having many coastal cities since defending them can be so resource intensive especially during the mid-game when the AI is way ahead on research and even the barbarians are an era ahead.

Obviously on king by turn 50, I'm ahead of the AI in every aspect, but I'm just not used to it. I'm working on another playthrough but I still don't expect to be sub-300 turns. I'll post it when I finish. Again mistakes due to not being used to the difficulty level. I notice the person who won in 185 turns didn't bother with a religion. If I try another time, I won't either. No point of founding a religion that I'm not going spread because I want to use all of my early fait for units. I probably could have spread my religion later on for some extra culture although I could also see accidentally winning a religious victory.

I didn't try to conquer any cities with just galleys because it's not something I would expect to be able to do. But on king, the AI doesn't have walls until pretty darn late and you can actually take cities that way. I'm not surprised that the best entry so far (185 turns) probably didn't build a single district just took over the AI.

But I'm also not good at taking over AI cities. I'm going to go back and look at some of the winning maps. In the current attempt (not yet attached), I have 25 cities / 20 campuses but the only really good cities are ones that I settled. One strategy I've never used (but will in the future) is to promote Moksha all the way instead of Liang so you can faith-buy districts but I might consider that when playing high-faith civs like Gitarja. I also usually build the Intelligence Agency which works great because siphoning funds and stealing technology catches me up to the AI fast. But on king, the AI has no commercial hubs from which to siphon and by the time I have spies, I'm so far ahead in tech that there's nothing to steal. But I probably can't do both of these things because there wouldn't be enough faith. On king, I question whether I should even bother to build the government plaza buildings beyond the audience chamber although I guess they are useful for the governors.

I guess that's an overly long answer to your question. But the summary is that I'm just not yet good enough to recalibrate my play to different AI levels.

I feel this, I'm currently playing through 183 and it has taken some tremendous effort to maintain all of my fishing boats due to leaving one barbarian camp to the northeast of my Capital until late Renaissance

I definitely think hooking up the resources were worth it though, I think for next time I prioritize my Navy earlier for sure especially since I can use them to pillage the Dutch to my north.

 

[Chrumo]

I notice the person who won in 185 turns didn't bother with a religion
[...]
I'm not surprised that the best entry so far (185 turns) probably didn't build a single district just took over the AI.

I actually got a religion (called 'Cats'), and thanks to Vatican City suzerain bonus, paired with some strategic GP usage, I actually managed to spread it to most of my cities. I went for Jesuit Education, which allowed me to sometimes spend my Faith on Campus buildings, as well as some Culture from the founder bonus. I got it mostly for the Chinguetti trade routes though, as these are absurdly strong if you manage to get a lot of followers in your city.
Due to the quality of the land given to us, at the start there was really no better investment than a couple of warriors and galleys - aside from a single decent Holy Site. But after getting the basic conquest force, Harbours were definitely going up everywhere

What did you research first? How did you conquer China? I notice that you have no naval units in the Indian Ocean. Had you just explored well enough to know not to put any naval units there? It's unfortunate that there doesn't seem to be a way to get a canal by ShenDu for much better naval mobility. Not that it matters since you conquered everyone already!

I have actually made some bad calls with early research, which could be summarized as being overall indecisive. I kind of didn't have a solid plan for any early districts nor units past the galleys I already had access to. Ultimately tried to get Harbours and Industries as fast as I can, and then pivot towards stronger naval units. I have even delayed useful techs like Animal Husbandry for more than usual, which was a pretty big mistake as there were some nice Horse tiles present (and Horsemen could have been an even easier way to conquer Georgia).

China conquest was pretty late in the game, and the barbarians in the Indian Ocean were untouchable until that point. I have made the conquest by placing a city by the Indian Ocean, and buying a Privateer or two there (or perhaps a Caravel as well). This took care of the Chinese city, and the Privateer coastal raid ability can wipe out barb camps straight from sea, so I used it to get rid of barbs there. After that, beside garrisoning them in the nearby cities for +1 Amenity (a strong policy card!), there was no use for them, so I most likely deleted them to save up on maintanance cost.

On a side note, there is an important concept regarding naval maps and barbarians - there are two types of barbarian encampments that can spawn, one type spawns land units and another one spawns ships. The map always requires a certain amount of barb camps present, which means if you wipe out one, another one will pop somewhere on the map. Since the type (land/naval) of a shoreline barbarian encampment is random, it is beneficial to hunt down all the naval barb camps with your Privateers, and leave the land-unit barb camps in peace. This should eventually lead to no pirate ships on the map, which is the biggest threat to your fishing boats and trade routes. Although the latter can be also protected by simply suzing Mogadishu.

 

[kcd_swede]

I played, I thought I could finish in time, but since I didn't I lost interest as I was in the final stages way ahead of every opponent in everything but had forgotten about gaining in the civics tree so it would be a long boring slog from there. Probably would have gotten the science VC in 1750 or later, despite owning everything. Not too bad for the first Civ6 game I played in over a year... at least that's how I can feel ok about my performance.

 

[leif erikson]

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