Civ 6 Sumeria Deity Tips and Tricks!

[CivLifeRyoutube]

Sumeria is another one of those OG civs that seem to have lost its shine after countless expansions. Despite the fact that there are better domination civs (like Gran Colombia) and better science civs (like the Mayans), Gilgamesh is still the best at what he is built for... ANCIENT ERA WARFARE!



If you liked this guide check out my Sumeria playthrough:

Civ Ability: Capturing a Barbarian Outpost also grants a Tribal Village reward. Levying city-state units costs 50% less Gold Gold.

A pretty strong opening ability, at least for the early game. Capturing barbarian outposts is something you should do anyway but the fact you also get a tribal village means you should be taking out encampments all game long. While the effects scale poorly (like getting just 80 faith in the modern era) early on this gives you a massive advantage allowing you to use your army to give you great bonuses like Eureka's, builders, and even early pantheons!


The second part of this ability is the 50% reduction in levying city states. This is also really nice although I find myself personally never levying city state units at all (too afraid that the enemy ai might flip the city state to their side and I lose all my units I payed for).


Leader Ability: May declare war on any civilization at war with an ally without warmonger penalties. When at war with a common enemy, Sumerian and allied units share pillage rewards and combat experience if within 5 tiles of each other. Earn Alliance Points per-turn if both civilizations are at war with the same foe. Heroes & Legends only: 25% Production increase when claiming Heroes, and Heroes have 20% more Lifespan



Despite the wall of text this ability is fairly simple with four parts:

1. You can declare war with an allies and you get no warmonger penalty (although you get grievances)
   
   
2. You share pillage an experience rewards
   
   
3. You gain alliance points per turn if you have an ally in the war with you
   
   
4. Heroes and Legends have increased lifespan and you gain production boost building them.

This ability isn't really that great for a number of reasons: First Even without a warmonger penalty you still get grievances and warmonger penalties with everyone else. Even though in my playthrough I joined a war with my ally he ended up denouncing me a few turns later which means the warmonger penalty negation was kind of useless.

If your in multiplayer the sharing of rewards part is great but in my games the AI usually just doesn't bring many units until the fighting is almost over so even though it is a decent ability it rarely happens in games.

Alliance points generation is really good and I strongly recommend you try this out. Leaving one civ alive isolated from the world so you can stay at war with them with allies lets you build up alliance points much faster then normal allowing you to get those juicy level 4 alliances.

For heroes and legends Sumeria has a decisive edge and considering that heroes are broken having a production increase and longer lifespan is absolutely insane and you can single handedly win wars with just 2 heroes and some 3 archers.

This ability combined together is just meh, but in some instances it can be really strong and rewarding to be at war and bring a few allies along the way.



UU: Sumerian unique Ancient era unit. Stronger than all other starting units. No penalties against anti-cavalry units. 4 Movement if this unit starts in open terrain.

What a unit........ The war cart is one of the best units in the entire game for 3 reasons:

1. Spears are useless against it so it doesn't have a real weakness
   
   
2. it is the strongest and fastest starting unit meaning: until horseback riding (approx. 40-50 turns away) you have the strongest military unit and can easily destroy anyone who stands in your path (without walls of course)
   
   
3. It can be built immediately, so you can have 3-4 of these units by turn 25-30 and have taken out the first civ within 40-50 turns. Giving you a big window to take out simultaneous civs and establishing the biggest empire in the game and a free win.

The war cart should be spammed early on with maybe one slinger in between before taking out your closest neighbors. In my series I was on the edge of the map and I was STILL able to completely wipe out 2 civs with war carts very fast giving me so much room to work with.



UI: The Ziggurat is a unique improvement that gives you 2 science, 1 culture (if beside a river) and another 1 culture (natural history civic)

This is an underrated UI as it is the only UI to give you science. Spamming these means you can have a massive science lead early on in the game and you can go for a knight rush by the classical era if your fast enough. The problem with these is that there are only so many you can build. They have to be on open terrain so that takes out hills. And you need farms in order to grow not to mention luxury and strategic resources that might be on those tiles, so while it is one of the best improvements in the game. The fact that spamming it is not very viable lowers its ceiling making it a nice science/culture booster, but not good enough to build your entire game around.



Basic Strategy:

the strategy is simple: build war carts (3-4) build some slingers (2-3) and research archery. If you can fit in a settler in there do it but right now you need to rush. Early on loyalty pressure is fairly weak and cities are no stronger then 25 combat strength (your war carts are 30) so you can blitz your nearest neighbor and not have to worry about a rebellion.

After this what you do is up to you, you should look for another civ to take out but if you can't find one then it is best to turtle up and focus on either science or culture. At this point Diplomatic (negative favour) and religious (you shouldn't found a religion) are off the table so Science, Culture, and Domination are the best options you have. You can focus on science then transition to domination or you can focus on science fully, or you can focus on culture. Either way with 2-3 civs taken out you should be well on your way to victory no matter what path you choose!

Conclusion

That will conclude this guide of Sumeria, an OG civ that can still hang with the best of them in this age of Civ power creep (looking at you Babylon and Gran Colombia) as one of the strongest early civs in the entire game, and no doubt the strongest ancient era military in the game!

 

[kotpeter]

How come Ziggurat's the only UI that gives science? What about Spanish UI?

 

[KingPiggyXXI]

I think they meant that the Ziggurat is the only spammable UI that can grant science. The Mission can get you science, but it's restricted to tiles next to Campuses and Holy Sites, which means that you're not really going to be able to build them everywhere. Even more so when you're building Campuses and Holy Sites next to mountains and other sources of adjaciency. Overall, you won't be having very many places to build Missions.

The science bonus from Cultural Heritage comes fairly late - it's useful for Missions you already have, but at that point, it won't really be worth it to spam Missions for the science.

Also, Missions are unlocked in the Renaissance Era, which is way later than the Ziggurats that you unlock at the start of the game. Not only that, but it's unlocked at Exploration. If you choose to bring Spain down a religious route, you want to be researching the bottom part of the civics tree to get Reformed Church. As such, the top part of the civics and Exploration will be unlocked even later.

Finally, the Mission has fairly low Science yields. In order to match the Ziggurat that you can build on any flat land tile, the Mission needs to be next to two Campuses or Holy Sites in order to get similar science yields. Even then, it doesn't even get you any Culture.