[NFP] [discussion] Major flaws of Civ VI - part 1: City combat strength and defense

[Socrates99]

it is as if the devs dont want us to take cities , they are hard to capture if walled , and unhappy if they are far away from your other cities and of course you pay diplomatic penalties ( very severe i know ). However if you just go the pillage route , which is my go to strategy in multiplayer , just train 3-4 light cavalry and level them with barbs and city states and go on a rampage in a territory , you really dont need to conquer a city to defeat a player , if you pillage everything in sight and they cannot repair it till they defeated you will win anyway also the pillaging rewards are great. Surprising number of players tend to agree with most of you here that they dont need much of a defence since they have walls and stuff. I keep giggling when they figure out that i wont attack their cities and lose my army to capture cities but just pillage them to the stone age.

Yeah, I think it is designed that way. Making it difficult throttles early domination games. It's still totally possible to take cities with planning. Really, infantry and rams/towers work pretty well. Its just slow. It speeds up with bombards but goes into overdrive with flight where you get air units and balloons that let you shred cities from a safe distance.

What else happens at flight? Tourism explodes. Science civs are beelining space techs. Other industrial techs and events are speeding up other VCs like railroads making religious units travel faster, diplo point events like world games and World's Fair begin. It's designed to make VCs occur near the same time. At least that's what they're going for anyway.

 

[ThunderLizard2]

Agree with OP's points. i UPT is an utter failure. I see HumanKind's combat system as promising a much better experience than the past decade of Civ V and VI. Civ IV BTS combat was way better and more challenging. Still firing up an Earth18 Civ match.

 

[Equilin]

the AI built more units.

because V had no production sinks (districts, increasing costs)

 

[Socrates99]

because V had no production sinks (districts, increasing costs)

That could be the reason but there's always established cities that aren't constructing districts and gold is way more plentiful in VI so I don't know if that's the actual problem.

 

[Abaxial]

As I wrote in another thread, on current showing the city centre seem to be empty except for maybe a palace. All the temples, schools, theatres, government buildings, etc are outside the walls in their own districts. Logically, either your city walls should extend round all the districts (with the proviso that they must be contiguous) or all the districts should be scrunched together into a "tactical hex display" within any strategic hex - which eliminates gigantic cities spreading over a whole landmass.

 

[TigerBulkRate]

This thread kind of confuses me. There's a whole lot of talk about nerfing walls, but I don't understand how this will make the game any challenging or better. In fact, it will make it much, much easier as any hit to the AI's defensive's strength will make stamping them even easier than it already is. To the various people who say warfare "grinds to a halt" after walls go up: with great respect, I don't believe you're doing it right. Beating walls is very possible, you just need to plan properly. First, great generals are absolutely mandatory, which is how it should be for a domination game. They allow your siege to fire the same turn they move, including moving onto a hill for better line of site. Getting in a couple shots before the city has time to respond makes all the difference. Second, you need to plan the whole thing out. Don't move in your units willy-nilly like the AI does, arrange it so that 2-3 siege units are moving in and firing on the same turn. Third, make use of siege support units. Battering rams won't stay good long, but siege towers are often useful for quite some time, and can let 2/3 upgraded swordsmen/musketmen make short work of a city. In a good domination game (Deity only, natch) I'll only use air units to take maybe the last civ, or often not at all.

No, I think walls are fine. I much prefer the suggestion I saw earlier to just give the AI (but not the player) a flat +25 CS boost against districts. That would let AIs have an easier time conquering each other, as well as being more threatening to the player, without making them a joke which removing or heavily nerfing walls would absolutely do. Walls aren't here to protect us from the AI, they're here to protect the AI from us.

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

This thread kind of confuses me. There's a whole lot of talk about nerfing walls, but I don't understand how this will make the game any challenging or better. In fact, it will make it much, much easier as any hit to the AI's defensive's strength will make stamping them even easier than it already is. To the various people who say warfare "grinds to a halt" after walls go up: with great respect, I don't believe you're doing it right. Beating walls is very possible, you just need to plan properly. First, great generals are absolutely mandatory, which is how it should be for a domination game. They allow your siege to fire the same turn they move, including moving onto a hill for better line of site. Getting in a couple shots before the city has time to respond makes all the difference. Second, you need to plan the whole thing out. Don't move in your units willy-nilly like the AI does, arrange it so that 2-3 siege units are moving in and firing on the same turn. Third, make use of siege support units. Battering rams won't stay good long, but siege towers are often useful for quite some time, and can let 2/3 upgraded swordsmen/musketmen make short work of a city. In a good domination game (Deity only, natch) I'll only use air units to take maybe the last civ, or often not at all.

No, I think walls are fine. I much prefer the suggestion I saw earlier to just give the AI (but not the player) a flat +25 CS boost against districts. That would let AIs have an easier time conquering each other, as well as being more threatening to the player, without making them a joke which removing or heavily nerfing walls would absolutely do. Walls aren't here to protect us from the AI, they're here to protect the AI from us.

I will assume that you are talking about Deity here, and assuming that we're talking about a regular start here (no ridiculous tile yields or other immediate strong advantages, no very flat lands with few forests/rainforests, and not playing something OP like Byzantium/Gran Colombia/Sumeria, abusing broken mechanics from the new NFP modes, or otherwise restarting the game until you get a desired good position to play from).
Based on these assumptions, I respectfully disagree with this.

In some games, you are forced to go on the offensive early as you're quickly getting boxed in.
Especially when your neighbour is going heavy on tech (which these days is more common than not), you are left with only one good option to break out of the encirclement and get the ball rolling - an Ancient Era rush.
In such a scenario, you need to be very quick about getting enough warriors and archers out to conquer at least one city, before the enemy gets walls up.
This window is so short on Deity that you don't have time to build encampments, as you need to get a base of 2-3 cities up and spam units from those.
You will also not reach the Battering Ram/Catapult techs before the AI has produced said walls, leaving your units in a position where they are unable to take down the walled city.
Failing such a rush is more or less a lost game, since the AI is snowballing ahead while you usually can't catch up from there on anymore.

For instance, I remember one game where I tried to do a delayed rush with Alexander against Korea (foregoing the Warrior/Archer rush), in favour of rushing Hetairoi and Hypaspists with Rams/Siege Towers built off of Encampments and Campuses until I had the unit tech for Hetairoi/Hypaspist.
Even though I had planned out the rush as good as I could, Korea was snowballing so hard that she had Coursers, Crossbowmen (and a bit later) Knights(!), as well as walls out by the time my units arrived (including about triple my science per turn at that point).
Needless to say, Battering rams/Siege towers did not cut it against such resistance.
Heck, I've even played around with some restarts to test out the difference between walls and no walls, and a rush that failed and lost me one game (because walls came up in the last moment), would be a similarly easily won game if I could shave off 1 more turn before the walls went up and conquered said city.
The next game for instance I played as Alexander and again spawned near Korea, but this time I Ancient era warrior/archer rushed her before her walls came up, and got her crippled down enough to break her with delayed Hetairoi/Hypaspists (foregoing Encampments completely in favour of more Ancient era units).
The bottom line here is, you cannot wait for too long in order to attack the AI, otherwise you can find yourself completely boxed in and unable to catch up to an out of control snowballing AI.

Other than that, yes I can and do win frequent domination games on Deity (my last 2 games were domination), but the Ancient Walls are too much of a game changer on Deity.
In the Ancient Era/Classical Era, you are still falling further behind on tech and production compared to the AI, and you need to do something about it before that lead gets too big.
Ancient Walls are just too much of a crutch for the AI, and it doesn't help that they get said walls up before you get the tools to deal with them (they do have a tech lead after all), and by then the game can be lost if you're boxed in without the tools to break out.

As for "moving in units simultaneously" to get early shots off (and the city sieged), that's basic knowledge which I always use.
But let me be clear on this - this advice doesn't always work.
If you face off against a city placed in Rainforest/Forests and lots of hills (which does happen regularly), you can't shoot from an elevated position and sometimes have to move Catapults right next to the city to even get a shot off, which by the time you do get there, has cost you 2 turns where the defender could freely shoot/attack back at you, and this too frequently often costs you so much that you can't keep your army up before it gets chopped down.

As for an extra combat bonus for the AI against walls, I'm against it.
Civ 5 proved that you don't need the crutch that is civ 6 walls, and still not have it "too easy" when going Domination.
Add in a baseline ranged strike for all cities irrespective of walls (like civ 5), and have walls give extra hp and combat strength, but no hidden combat strength modifiers vs melee units (again like civ 5).

 

[SammyKhalifa]

i UPT is an utter failure.

of course you do

 

[Socrates99]

I will assume that you are talking about Deity here, and assuming that we're talking about a regular start here (no ridiculous tile yields or other immediate strong advantages, no very flat lands with few forests/rainforests, and not playing something OP like Byzantium/Gran Colombia/Sumeria, abusing broken mechanics from the new NFP modes, or otherwise restarting the game until you get a desired good position to play from).
Based on these assumptions, I respectfully disagree with this.

In some games, you are forced to go on the offensive early as you're quickly getting boxed in.
Especially when your neighbour is going heavy on tech (which these days is more common than not), you are left with only one good option to break out of the encirclement and get the ball rolling - an Ancient Era rush.
In such a scenario, you need to be very quick about getting enough warriors and archers out to conquer at least one city, before the enemy gets walls up.
This window is so short on Deity that you don't have time to build encampments, as you need to get a base of 2-3 cities up and spam units from those.
You will also not reach the Battering Ram/Catapult techs before the AI has produced said walls, leaving your units in a position where they are unable to take down the walled city.
Failing such a rush is more or less a lost game, since the AI is snowballing ahead while you usually can't catch up from there on anymore.

For instance, I remember one game where I tried to do a delayed rush with Alexander against Korea (foregoing the Warrior/Archer rush), in favour of rushing Hetairoi and Hypaspists with Rams/Siege Towers built off of Encampments and Campuses until I had the unit tech for Hetairoi/Hypaspist.
Even though I had planned out the rush as good as I could, Korea was snowballing so hard that she had Coursers, Crossbowmen (and a bit later) Knights(!), as well as walls out by the time my units arrived (including about triple my science per turn at that point).
Needless to say, Battering rams/Siege towers did not cut it against such resistance.
Heck, I've even played around with some restarts to test out the difference between walls and no walls, and a rush that failed and lost me one game (because walls came up in the last moment), would be a similarly easily won game if I could shave off 1 more turn before the walls went up and conquered said city.
The next game for instance I played as Alexander and again spawned near Korea, but this time I Ancient era warrior/archer rushed her before her walls came up, and got her crippled down enough to break her with delayed Hetairoi/Hypaspists (foregoing Encampments completely in favour of more Ancient era units).
The bottom line here is, you cannot wait for too long in order to attack the AI, otherwise you can find yourself completely boxed in and unable to catch up to an out of control snowballing AI.

Other than that, yes I can and do win frequent domination games on Deity (my last 2 games were domination), but the Ancient Walls are too much of a game changer on Deity.
In the Ancient Era/Classical Era, you are still falling further behind on tech and production compared to the AI, and you need to do something about it before that lead gets too big.
Ancient Walls are just too much of a crutch for the AI, and it doesn't help that they get said walls up before you get the tools to deal with them (they do have a tech lead after all), and by then the game can be lost if you're boxed in without the tools to break out.

As for "moving in units simultaneously" to get early shots off (and the city sieged), that's basic knowledge which I always use.
But let me be clear on this - this advice doesn't always work.
If you face off against a city placed in Rainforest/Forests and lots of hills (which does happen regularly), you can't shoot from an elevated position and sometimes have to move Catapults right next to the city to even get a shot off, which by the time you do get there, has cost you 2 turns where the defender could freely shoot/attack back at you, and this too frequently often costs you so much that you can't keep your army up before it gets chopped down.

As for an extra combat bonus for the AI against walls, I'm against it.
Civ 5 proved that you don't need the crutch that is civ 6 walls, and still not have it "too easy" when going Domination.
Add in a baseline ranged strike for all cities irrespective of walls (like civ 5), and have walls give extra hp and combat strength, but no hidden combat strength modifiers vs melee units (again like civ 5).

It is deity for a reason. Masonry isnt exactly a deep tech and you only need one ram per city you're sieging. That essentially removes that hidden bonus people are complaining about. It's not that difficult. Only thing I dont like about it is masonry isn't on a good part of the tree for dom.

Generally on deity I wouldn't expect to take any of the AI's first 3 cities without having to crack walls. They'll be developed enough to crank out walls before you can get to them. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to rush a later settled city with warriors and archers before walls are built. I do admit zerging isnt a decision you can shift to on the fly. Usually you have to have that in mind pretty early.

Most of the time I see people complaining about deity being too easy. This is one of the few threads where people are admitting it's hard. Its supposed to be isnt it?

 

[kaspergm]

Heck, I've even played around with some restarts to test out the difference between walls and no walls, and a rush that failed and lost me one game (because walls came up in the last moment), would be a similarly easily won game if I could shave off 1 more turn before the walls went up and conquered said city.

Perhaps slightly off-topic, but the fact that you can build walls in a city while it's under attack is obnoxious and feels like a bug/oversight given that you can't repair walls while the city is under attack.

This thread kind of confuses me. There's a whole lot of talk about nerfing walls, but I don't understand how this will make the game any challenging or better. In fact, it will make it much, much easier as any hit to the AI's defensive's strength will make stamping them even easier than it already is.

Let me try to explain a bit of my motivation for my points in the OP: First of all, I'm not suggestion some small band-aid fix to Civ6 here. I'm talking about a larger scale game design. It's quite obvious that just taking Civ6 and nerfing walls in isolation will result in just what you say: Make the game much easier for the player.

What I call for is a more general shift from unit vs. city to unit vs. unit combat. Making cities weaker needs to be balanced by units playing a much larger role in military and defense of an empire. Now I'm also very aware that such a change is easier said than done. It's quite obvious why (or at least one of the reasons why) they opted for strong city defense in Civ6, and that's to help the otherwise rather incapable AI to survive.

So in other words, if defense shifts from passive city defense to active unit defense, this puts larger demand on the AI's ability to handle its units and apply them defensively, which is something Civ6 AI seems literally incapable of (the option to fortify a unit rather than either attacking or retreating seems completely absent in the AI's list of options, which iinm. might be a change going back to early Civ5 where this was made to prevent AI (particularly city state) units from making permanent road blocks.

 

[Socrates99]

Perhaps slightly off-topic, but the fact that you can build walls in a city while it's under attack is obnoxious and feels like a bug/oversight given that you can't repair walls while the city is under attack.


Let me try to explain a bit of my motivation for my points in the OP: First of all, I'm not suggestion some small band-aid fix to Civ6 here. I'm talking about a larger scale game design. It's quite obvious that just taking Civ6 and nerfing walls in isolation will result in just what you say: Make the game much easier for the player.

What I call for is a more general shift from unit vs. city to unit vs. unit combat. Making cities weaker needs to be balanced by units playing a much larger role in military and defense of an empire. Now I'm also very aware that such a change is easier said than done. It's quite obvious why (or at least one of the reasons why) they opted for strong city defense in Civ6, and that's to help the otherwise rather incapable AI to survive.

So in other words, if defense shifts from passive city defense to active unit defense, this puts larger demand on the AI's ability to handle its units and apply them defensively, which is something Civ6 AI seems literally incapable of (the option to fortify a unit rather than either attacking or retreating seems completely absent in the AI's list of options, which iinm. might be a change going back to early Civ5 where this was made to prevent AI (particularly city state) units from making permanent road blocks.

I dont think Civ Vs AI was any better at handling units. They just produced more and replaced losses quicker. That's what made them a little more challenging. I'd be happy with a nerf to walls if the AI cranked out Civ V numbers.

 

[vortical42]

Something else just occurred to me that I don't think I've seen anyone mention. Part of what makes walls frustrating in civ 6 is their binary nature. Either the city has walls or it doesn't and the amount of damage you do doesn't feel like progression since you have to punch all the way through before it matters. What I would love to see is each hex of a city get an independent wall value.

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

It is deity for a reason. Masonry isnt exactly a deep tech and you only need one ram per city you're sieging. That essentially removes that hidden bonus people are complaining about. It's not that difficult. Only thing I dont like about it is masonry isn't on a good part of the tree for dom.

Generally on deity I wouldn't expect to take any of the AI's first 3 cities without having to crack walls. They'll be developed enough to crank out walls before you can get to them. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to rush a later settled city with warriors and archers before walls are built. I do admit zerging isnt a decision you can shift to on the fly. Usually you have to have that in mind pretty early.

Most of the time I see people complaining about deity being too easy. This is one of the few threads where people are admitting it's hard. Its supposed to be isnt it?

The problem is that Masonry isn't available to the player in due time before the walls hit, unless you want to sacrifice archer tech (generally a bad idea) and also spend precious turns on a builder to eureka boost Masonry (can be a bad idea depending on circumstance).
In some cases you can recover from a failed Ancient era rush if you take the cookie-cutter techs of Archery and Writing and went into some infrastructure buildup after you got enough units, but if you go directly for Masonry you are 100% fully committed to that rush, with extremely risky returns (for instance, if the AI happens to have core cities surrounded by rough terrain, plenty of units and strong science behind it).

The problem with rushing a "later settled city" (which I take to mean a fresh city with 1-2 pop) is that you will usually lose it immediately on loyalty, with no real way to hold it (even with a governor), and for very little benefit since you aren't taking a core city with developed infrastructure.

Deity is overall pretty easy, but when people say that Deity is "easy", they usually mean that the mid- to late-game is easy when you have a solid established base to work off of.
The early game has always been the hardest part, as that's the point where you are way behind from turn 1, and about to get even further behind.
Current civ 6 walls are imo the main reason that the early game becomes unneccessarily hard, and gives the AI a crutch to prolong its lead into the early mid-game.
It just feels very gimmicky, and personally I'd rather see the AI getting incremental boosts to yields for each era past the early game (to have their power stay relevant for longer), instead of having that artificial stopgap measure that is Ancient Walls.
Beat the first cities (ideally before they get said walls), and you're on the way to getting a comfortable game.
Be just a bit too late, and you're in for a horrible experience.

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

So in other words, if defense shifts from passive city defense to active unit defense, this puts larger demand on the AI's ability to handle its units and apply them defensively, which is something Civ6 AI seems literally incapable of (the option to fortify a unit rather than either attacking or retreating seems completely absent in the AI's list of options, which iinm. might be a change going back to early Civ5 where this was made to prevent AI (particularly city state) units from making permanent road blocks.

I'd actually like to see a return to the civ 5 model where the AI generally had a lot more units.
I hadn't really thought about how few units the AI has in civ 6 compared to civ 5, until I played Byzantium.
As Byzantium you really want a lot of units to kill to spread your religion in the local area, but often I find that there are just too few AI units around to attack, so I often have to resort to Missionaries.
Sure, the AI can have a lot of units at times, but not nearly enough of what you could often see in civ 5.
Anyone remembers the carpets of doom of vanilla Germany Landsknechts that would often roam about to swallow whatever they came across?
You just don't see anything like that in civ 6, and I kind of think that's a shame.

 

[TigerBulkRate]

I will assume that you are talking about Deity here, and assuming that we're talking about a regular start here (no ridiculous tile yields or other immediate strong advantages, no very flat lands with few forests/rainforests, and not playing something OP like Byzantium/Gran Colombia/Sumeria, abusing broken mechanics from the new NFP modes, or otherwise restarting the game until you get a desired good position to play from).
Based on these assumptions, I respectfully disagree with this.

In some games, you are forced to go on the offensive early as you're quickly getting boxed in.
Especially when your neighbour is going heavy on tech (which these days is more common than not), you are left with only one good option to break out of the encirclement and get the ball rolling - an Ancient Era rush.
In such a scenario, you need to be very quick about getting enough warriors and archers out to conquer at least one city, before the enemy gets walls up.
This window is so short on Deity that you don't have time to build encampments, as you need to get a base of 2-3 cities up and spam units from those.
You will also not reach the Battering Ram/Catapult techs before the AI has produced said walls, leaving your units in a position where they are unable to take down the walled city.
Failing such a rush is more or less a lost game, since the AI is snowballing ahead while you usually can't catch up from there on anymore.

For instance, I remember one game where I tried to do a delayed rush with Alexander against Korea (foregoing the Warrior/Archer rush), in favour of rushing Hetairoi and Hypaspists with Rams/Siege Towers built off of Encampments and Campuses until I had the unit tech for Hetairoi/Hypaspist.
Even though I had planned out the rush as good as I could, Korea was snowballing so hard that she had Coursers, Crossbowmen (and a bit later) Knights(!), as well as walls out by the time my units arrived (including about triple my science per turn at that point).
Needless to say, Battering rams/Siege towers did not cut it against such resistance.
Heck, I've even played around with some restarts to test out the difference between walls and no walls, and a rush that failed and lost me one game (because walls came up in the last moment), would be a similarly easily won game if I could shave off 1 more turn before the walls went up and conquered said city.
The next game for instance I played as Alexander and again spawned near Korea, but this time I Ancient era warrior/archer rushed her before her walls came up, and got her crippled down enough to break her with delayed Hetairoi/Hypaspists (foregoing Encampments completely in favour of more Ancient era units).
The bottom line here is, you cannot wait for too long in order to attack the AI, otherwise you can find yourself completely boxed in and unable to catch up to an out of control snowballing AI.

Other than that, yes I can and do win frequent domination games on Deity (my last 2 games were domination), but the Ancient Walls are too much of a game changer on Deity.
In the Ancient Era/Classical Era, you are still falling further behind on tech and production compared to the AI, and you need to do something about it before that lead gets too big.
Ancient Walls are just too much of a crutch for the AI, and it doesn't help that they get said walls up before you get the tools to deal with them (they do have a tech lead after all), and by then the game can be lost if you're boxed in without the tools to break out.

As for "moving in units simultaneously" to get early shots off (and the city sieged), that's basic knowledge which I always use.
But let me be clear on this - this advice doesn't always work.
If you face off against a city placed in Rainforest/Forests and lots of hills (which does happen regularly), you can't shoot from an elevated position and sometimes have to move Catapults right next to the city to even get a shot off, which by the time you do get there, has cost you 2 turns where the defender could freely shoot/attack back at you, and this too frequently often costs you so much that you can't keep your army up before it gets chopped down.

As for an extra combat bonus for the AI against walls, I'm against it.
Civ 5 proved that you don't need the crutch that is civ 6 walls, and still not have it "too easy" when going Domination.
Add in a baseline ranged strike for all cities irrespective of walls (like civ 5), and have walls give extra hp and combat strength, but no hidden combat strength modifiers vs melee units (again like civ 5).

Thanks for the detailed response, good to hear your thoughts. I do disagree on a couple of things. One, you mention building encampments: honestly, I would not really build more than one ever in a domination game, they're just not worth it. You're much better off using the strategos card to get your opening great general, it's more reliable and can let you build a critical few extra units rather than wasting precious production on things that can't attack. Great generals are actually not usually hotly contested by the AI, if you patch in the card the moment you get it you can get one pretty much every time without an early encampment.

I get what you're saying about problems with LoS on siege, but again, you need to plan this out. There are almost always at least a few places you'll be able to shoot from a tile away, you just need to carefully consider LoS and plan out exactly where your siege units are going to go, with blocking routes to them so the AI can't interfere. Yes, there can be cities that have geography that makes them very difficult to take: narrow mountain passes and that sort of thing. Honestly though, I think that's great, it feels very flavorful and historical, and I enjoy the challenge.

Also, you do need to pick early wars with care. Korea is one of the strongest AI civs in the game, attacking them early is usually going to suck. If your start is so penned in that your only choice is to attack Korea early, then yeah, you might be in for a rough game, but almost every game will give you at least some choice in who to attack first, letting you avoid the Koreas of the world until you have the proper tools to deal with them. Also worth noting that Alexander is certainly one of the weakest domination civs, trying to take of the weaker civs against a top 3 is always going to be a dicey proposition.

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

Thanks for the detailed response, good to hear your thoughts. I do disagree on a couple of things. One, you mention building encampments: honestly, I would not really build more than one ever in a domination game, they're just not worth it. You're much better off using the strategos card to get your opening great general, it's more reliable and can let you build a critical few extra units rather than wasting precious production on things that can't attack. Great generals are actually not usually hotly contested by the AI, if you patch in the card the moment you get it you can get one pretty much every time without an early encampment.

I get what you're saying about problems with LoS on siege, but again, you need to plan this out. There are almost always at least a few places you'll be able to shoot from a tile away, you just need to carefully consider LoS and plan out exactly where your siege units are going to go, with blocking routes to them so the AI can't interfere. Yes, there can be cities that have geography that makes them very difficult to take: narrow mountain passes and that sort of thing. Honestly though, I think that's great, it feels very flavorful and historical, and I enjoy the challenge.

Also, you do need to pick early wars with care. Korea is one of the strongest AI civs in the game, attacking them early is usually going to suck. If your start is so penned in that your only choice is to attack Korea early, then yeah, you might be in for a rough game, but almost every game will give you at least some choice in who to attack first, letting you avoid the Koreas of the world until you have the proper tools to deal with them. Also worth noting that Alexander is certainly one of the weakest domination civs, trying to take of the weaker civs against a top 3 is always going to be a dicey proposition.

Don't get me wrong, I hardly if ever build Encampments myself (played Zulu recently for the first time, even then I didn't bother apart from one token Ikanda.
I do have different experiences than you it seems with Great Generals though, in my games there's always at least one AI that goes somewhat heavily into Encampments and sits at about 4-6 GG points per turn, making my single Encampment (or Strategos card) unable to compete, so usually I forego Encampments (and Strategos) completely in favour of more units (I use the wildcard slot for unit production cards, Urban planning etc., squeezing out every drop I can as fast as possible if I go for the rush).

I don't mind hard to take cities in most cases, with two exceptions:
Early "must die" city that is boxing me in and possibly pushing negative loyalty on me), or a later "gate" city that prevents my units from advancing any further (no real way around it).

The easiest way I found to deal with Korea is just that, Ancient Era rush.
The Korea AI tends to prioritize building Seowons (and Libraries) pretty highly, which by itself is a bad thing if she's allowed to get them up and reap the benefits, but also makes her relatively weaker to an Ancient Era rush as she's comparatively less likely to build units.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like Alexander and think he's pretty bad, my point was just that going for a delayed rush (which he is actually quite good at) doesn't work in most cases once the walls come up.
Which leaves me with two main options - Ancient Era rush, or peaceful (greedy) expansion transitioning into mid-game domination.
The walls are a binary defence mechanism, and therefore the most sound response strategies tend to become equally binary (rush or greedy play).
For me it just becomes very stale after a while, as I feel it takes away flexibility in the game as the approaches get very limited.

 

[CoconutTank]

I liked the movement model back in Civ 5, when the terrain penalty would not outright stop a unit from moving onto it. It meant that, for example, a unit with 1 movement left could still move onto a hill and stop there. I think a lot of the anguish about movement since Civ 6's release is probably related to that change.

As someone that almost plays elimination exclusively, I've learned how to deal with walls, but also agree that walls are way too powerful and defining in what civs can and can't do militarily. Either do a very early rush before walls are up, or fight semi-early with a combination of Great Generals and early unique ranged unit if one has them, or wait till late game for bombers and balloons. Catapults and Bombards basically need to get the first hit in, and even then they're still likely to lose to cities, which is baffling. Battering Rams and Siege Towers only help melee units, which are very terrain dependent in what they can actually achieve. The best option usually is to put the city under siege so that it stops healing, but again, very terrain dependent.

There are plenty of changes that I'd like to see, but for a small change, I'd like to see the Civ 5 movement system in place and see how much that helps. Melee and anti-cav units getting instantly hobbled by rough terrain makes them so unappealing.

 

[Linklite]

I found Alexander, in human hands at least, pretty good. The constant eurekas and inspirations really pushes hom along, even if his main other strength is zero weariness.

 

[jehtro777]

Domination is tedious indeed.
What I dislike the most about it is the pacing - ancient era rush as fast as you can during that short window before the AI gets walls, then continue slowly forward with siege units, until it basically halts in the Medieval/Renaissance, followied by a mindless insta-win once you hit Industrial.
I often don't finish my games once I've gotten to Advanced Flight, because it's so obvious that I'll be winning easily within the next 20-30 turns from there on, and I might as well just start a new game at that point instead of pressing "next turn" with my brain turned off until I win.
Which is a real shame, since earlier versions of civ (civ 5) still had you fighting to deserve the win at that point as the AI had plenty of sources of AA.
True story here: I've never built a single biplane/fighter/jet fighter in civ 6 ever, hardly any late game sea units, and I've played this game way beyond 1000 hours by now.
There has never been any need against the civ 6 AI, which makes the game really lose a lot of depth in the late game.
The AI overly relies on the crutch that is walls, and utterly fails to defend itself once anti-wall tools like Bombers appear.

Domination is a brutal victory path. I'm super proud of every time I've watched the giant red orc take someone out at the end of a game.

 

[Linklite]

I liked the movement model back in Civ 5, when the terrain penalty would not outright stop a unit from moving onto it. It meant that, for example, a unit with 1 movement left could still move onto a hill and stop there. I think a lot of the anguish about movement since Civ 6's release is probably related to that change...

Honestly for me, it's pathfinding. I send a force of three units and they have to pass by a CS on the way. A stray unit happens to cross their projected path in 15 turns, and my units are all bewildered. One suggests going 30 turns out of their way to get around it. It's chaos, over a single unit that was in their path and would have moved by the time they get there.

Or trying to get multiple units through a 1 or 2 hex pass - you have to move them individually, in the right order, one move at a time.

I don't know the solution, but it will probably add a good week onto my life expectancy due to reduced stress.