Calyxx
Warlord
I've now played (and won) 4 full games of Civ VI, all in the prince - emperor range. I think I am now familiar enough with the game to start attempting to play better, and the best place to start optimizing is the early game.
My current game - terrain, neighbor, and barbarian depending - is to quickly build up a force of 4-6 slingers, hopefully with a builder thrown in after either 1 or 2 slingers are completed. I use the slingers to hit the eureka for Archery, upgrade them to Archers, and then along with 1-2 warriors go conquer my nearest neighbor. This can be made much more difficult depending on the spawn rate of barbarian camps (which sometimes seems like it occurs every 3-4 turns) and whether or not those barbarian camps spawn horsemen, which can be a huge pain.
Despite the barbarians, this phase of the game tends to go fairly smoothly, and from what I can tell from these forums is a fairly typical opening. At this point, I generally have my capital plus 1-2 cities from my neighbor, and if I am really lucky another city from a captured settler. However, I likely only have 3 improved tiles around my capital and maybe a captured worker, with no districts, no monument, and no granary.
Taking out my neighbor gives me a bit of room to expand, and I try to fill the available space using the +50% settler production policy while frantically defending against what is often a huge number of barbarians with my small army of Archers. Eventually, things stabilize, I switch to the policy for workers, and improve my land and then start building districts. I start with a commercial district, and begin trying to get trade routes going. I will usually build a harbor district if available, and an industrial district in nearly every city. I tend to ignore the entertainment district until much later.
My main problem with this is that there is an incredible amount to do and very little time in which to do it. Currently the ancient and classical eras seem to fly by, and all of a sudden I'm in the medieval still trying to build ancient infrastructure. I'd appreciate critique of my approach or specific things to watch out for.
More specifically, I would appreciate average benchmarks to measure against. Events like:
My current game - terrain, neighbor, and barbarian depending - is to quickly build up a force of 4-6 slingers, hopefully with a builder thrown in after either 1 or 2 slingers are completed. I use the slingers to hit the eureka for Archery, upgrade them to Archers, and then along with 1-2 warriors go conquer my nearest neighbor. This can be made much more difficult depending on the spawn rate of barbarian camps (which sometimes seems like it occurs every 3-4 turns) and whether or not those barbarian camps spawn horsemen, which can be a huge pain.
Despite the barbarians, this phase of the game tends to go fairly smoothly, and from what I can tell from these forums is a fairly typical opening. At this point, I generally have my capital plus 1-2 cities from my neighbor, and if I am really lucky another city from a captured settler. However, I likely only have 3 improved tiles around my capital and maybe a captured worker, with no districts, no monument, and no granary.
Taking out my neighbor gives me a bit of room to expand, and I try to fill the available space using the +50% settler production policy while frantically defending against what is often a huge number of barbarians with my small army of Archers. Eventually, things stabilize, I switch to the policy for workers, and improve my land and then start building districts. I start with a commercial district, and begin trying to get trade routes going. I will usually build a harbor district if available, and an industrial district in nearly every city. I tend to ignore the entertainment district until much later.
My main problem with this is that there is an incredible amount to do and very little time in which to do it. Currently the ancient and classical eras seem to fly by, and all of a sudden I'm in the medieval still trying to build ancient infrastructure. I'd appreciate critique of my approach or specific things to watch out for.
More specifically, I would appreciate average benchmarks to measure against. Events like:
- What turn marks the end of your closest neighbor?
- What turn do you generally enter the classical/medieval/renaissance eras?
- What turn do you generally switch to your first government?
- What turn do you generally stop expanding?
- What turn do you start your first district, and what is it?
- When do your first cultural/science districts go up?
