[R&F] Era Score: What Gives It And How Much?
- Thread starter Ivan Hunger
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shaglio
The Prince of Dorkness
It takes a lot of gall to go against the only existing religion.
SammyKhalifa
Deity
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Big number. That's quite a buff to scouts and water exploring.
That's odd, doesn't sound right to me.
Ondolindë
Emperor
@Ivan Hunger , just wanted to thank you for starting this. It is indeed helpful.
kryat
King
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Maybe we just haven’t seen the era score for founding the first religion yet.
PibbZ
Paladin
Not sure if this post is being updated anymore, but here it goes:
Promoting a unit to level 4 will give +1 Era Score. Can be earned multiple times.
Training/Promoting the worlds first Armada gives +2 Era Score
Completing a religion you founded by adding the 4th belief gives +3 Era Score.
Growing a city to 15 population gives +1 Era Score
Growing a city to 20 population gives +1 Era Score
Meeting all the civilizations in the game gives +3 Era Score
Launching an inquisition gives +1 Era Score
Converting another holy city to your religion gives +4 Era Score
Building the first aircraft unit in the game gives +6 Era Score
Promoting a unit to level 4 will give +1 Era Score. Can be earned multiple times.
Training/Promoting the worlds first Armada gives +2 Era Score
Completing a religion you founded by adding the 4th belief gives +3 Era Score.
Growing a city to 15 population gives +1 Era Score
Growing a city to 20 population gives +1 Era Score
Meeting all the civilizations in the game gives +3 Era Score
Launching an inquisition gives +1 Era Score
Converting another holy city to your religion gives +4 Era Score
Building the first aircraft unit in the game gives +6 Era Score
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Vandlys
Emperor
I got an era score for settling near the AI today too ; ) The Dutch bureaucrats were very interested in my newly founded Mongolian city, the message said. I think you might get it when you settle a city in a zone of influence of another empire, but I'm not sure.
PhilBowles
Deity
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There's +1 era score from settling a desert city, +2 from settling your first city on another continent, and +3 from settling a natural wonder. I got +6 from a single city that way.
The game's been a free goodie fest from the start, far moreso than Civ V (eurekas and inspirations have exactly the same issue that they're things you do anyway and get free bonuses for), but the era system takes more work than it appears at first glance. You do get these bonuses for what you'd do anyway, but the rate at which you need them to progress means that the order in which you do things is of more relevance than it was previously - at least insofar as it matters whether you're in Age X. From experience being in first a normal, then a golden, and now entering a dark age I get the sense it's yet another Civ VI system that turns out to be less important than it looks, and working towards it won't be that significant.
Era length seems to be pretty standardised - it's around 40 turns whatever the difficulty. I still had a lot of trouble finding post-medieval sources of era score once I had all the basics (uniques, religion, settled cities, cleared villages and camps, first suzerain) in place, and being in a Golden Age I couldn't get era score from dedications, hence falling into a Dark Age as the Renaissance dawned (I earned about 6 era score in that entire era).
There's no such thing as 'overflow'. Era score is a purely additive resource, like culture. If you need 11 to get out of the Ancient Era in a Normal Age and get to 20, and you need 33 to hit a Normal Age leaving the Classical Era, you simply need 13 points rather than the 22 you would if you entered the Classical Era with exactly 11 points.
The game's been a free goodie fest from the start, far moreso than Civ V (eurekas and inspirations have exactly the same issue that they're things you do anyway and get free bonuses for), but the era system takes more work than it appears at first glance. You do get these bonuses for what you'd do anyway, but the rate at which you need them to progress means that the order in which you do things is of more relevance than it was previously - at least insofar as it matters whether you're in Age X. From experience being in first a normal, then a golden, and now entering a dark age I get the sense it's yet another Civ VI system that turns out to be less important than it looks, and working towards it won't be that significant.
Era length seems to be pretty standardised - it's around 40 turns whatever the difficulty. I still had a lot of trouble finding post-medieval sources of era score once I had all the basics (uniques, religion, settled cities, cleared villages and camps, first suzerain) in place, and being in a Golden Age I couldn't get era score from dedications, hence falling into a Dark Age as the Renaissance dawned (I earned about 6 era score in that entire era).
There's no such thing as 'overflow'. Era score is a purely additive resource, like culture. If you need 11 to get out of the Ancient Era in a Normal Age and get to 20, and you need 33 to hit a Normal Age leaving the Classical Era, you simply need 13 points rather than the 22 you would if you entered the Classical Era with exactly 11 points.
Cagarustus
Prince
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+5 era score for wiping out a civilization.
I believe you get +3 for clearing a barb camp that is within 6 tiles of a city... not sure if its repeatable per city, I think its only doable once for each city.
Also, people aren't saying whether or not the scores are repeatable. Please indicate if they are.
Also, people aren't saying whether or not the scores are repeatable. Please indicate if they are.
Japper007
Prince
No not even close, in civ 5 I get free goodies for doing literally nothing, like when I settle my capital I get a free settler in about 30 turns because I have sat on my ass enough to get the required culture to unlock that policy in liberty. Then I have to dit around doing jack-all for another 20 to get a free worker...
Tradition is even worse, oh look here is free infrastructure for your core cities! Even though you once again did nothing.
Did I mention that you even slow the aqcuisition of these free goodies by actively playing? If I settle more cities so I can get more monuments to grab policies faster, I instead get stabbed with a nonsensical 15% increase to policy cost, which make these new monuments look like a Red Queens race (running running just to stay in place!)
Now some Eurekas are a bit like this, but most of them require me to actually *build* or *do* something or at least explore the map.
SammyKhalifa
Deity
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And it's way better than the micro of previous civs, hammer overflow and all that (though there is still some of that in 6 too). I can see some of the complaints about Civ 6, but I can't see "immersion" as being a legitimate one. Especially with the expansion (and granted I've only played about 1/2 a game) but to me it's the most dynamic of them all.
PhilBowles
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Much as you sit around freely accumulating techs and civics in Civ VI, really, and getting free bonuses from policy cards from doing nothing...
The core structural problem of Civ VI is that it combines the 'you can always change what you're doing to adapt' approach of Civ IV with the 'never any drawback' take on policies etc. of Civ V. You get the flexibility in civics, for instance, of Civ IV, with none of the trade-offs imposed by either that game or the 'either-or' approach of Civ V. Everything's free bonuses, everything can be changed at a whim, nothing demands effort or meaningful trade-offs. Era score, alliances and emergencies - all essentially free resources in one form or another - aren't anything conceptually different from what the game's been doing to this point.
This just suggests you're offended by the idea of having to make strategic trade-offs - on the one hand you moan about getting things for free, yet here you complain about not getting all the benefits that accrue from having an extra city - extra production slots, extra resource building availability, faster population growth - for free, as they are in Civ VI with its essentially unfettered expansion. It's much like complaining about settling cities in Civ IV because their "nonsensical" maintenance cost outstrips the funds they provide you with before they've been established for a while.
The Civ V implementation of these tradeoffs was hardly optimal, and its balance was sufficiently poor that you could feel railroaded into specific lines of play, but complaining about the underlying concept is precisely why we end up with "everything you want, without effort, FOR FREE!" games like Civ VI. If that's the sort of game you enjoy playing, good for you, but it's bizarre to then turn around and complain about that very trait - let alone in a game that, while not wholly innocent of the charge, isn't as guilty of it as Civ VI.
All things you'd be building, doing or exploring anyway, exactly the objection raised in the post I replied to about era score. You even have the option of simply switching techs/civics halfway through until you get you free science and culture (to the extent that UI mods specifically alert you when it's time to switch), so you aren't even prompted to do anything in a particularly optimal order - something that, to its credit, does seem to be promoted by era score.
Yes, a few eurekas require you to build an ironclad or forts you otherwise wouldn't, but by far the majority reward just playing the game naturally - improving resources, obtaining great people, building districts, killing barbarians, growing cities, establishing trade routes, meeting civs and city-states, even getting a pantheon happens naturally in most games without a religion focus.
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pgm123
Emperor
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The +1 for goodie huts alone makes the scout worth it. I went scout first in one game and ended up in a Classical Golden Age. I went builder first (also I was on a frozen island) in a second game and ended up in a dark age. I might re-try the no-scout strategy again and hope a better map will help me.
PhilBowles
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That's an interesting take. My own perspective is that the already-favoured slinger-first builds are optimal because barbarian camps provide more era score than villages and are more reliably obtainable in quantity, so you want to be able to go on the offensive ASAP.
The caveat to that being that I fell five points short of entering a Classical Golden Age, but I only had three villages available - I don't think picking up a couple more that might have been taken before I got to them would have offset the +6 I got from clearing camps in the Ancient Era.
Everything has trade-offs, opportunity cost IS a thing. Using policies optimally requires planning.
There are diminishing returns with city settling (cities require investment in the form of settlers, improvements, troops to take or defend them).
I understand people who came to the game with V tend to expect 5-6 cities empire to work as well or better than 10 or 15 cities empire, and civ 6 doesn't match these expectations (matter of taste I guess, V never worked for me, I can't love a 4X/"Empire building" game that punishes me for building an empire) but that doesn't mean there's no strategy, planning or thinking in it.
PhilBowles
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This might be more in evidence if using policies optimally was required and poor decisions couldn't be reversed at any time - even in the event (so unlikely it's never yet happened to me) that you find a need to change between civics, you can do so for a nominal gold investment.
Partly that's a consequence of the game's low difficulty rather than a feature of the design, but the simple fact that policies aren't situationally powerful enough and so most are largely interchangeable at most game stages is a design problem. I gave an example in another thread where I went for a space victory on Immortal, fuelling production with trade routes, without ever registering the existence of the most powerful policy that suits that strategy - e-Commerce - until I was building my final module. Never mind planning ahead - 300 hours in I don't even need to recall what the individual policies do, while to reach the same level, or even Emperor, in Civ V I'd need to have pretty much full recollection of every available tech and policy option on top of planning when and where to execute each. In Civ IV I'd need that level of detail to succeed on Prince (okay, maybe a slight exaggeration - but at least on King).
That can be said of every Civ game, yet every other entry has had a meaningful constraint on expansion. The advantage of having extra cities drastically outweighs these minor costs - the production slots rapidly make up for those expended to settle and defend the city, and typically the resource output from your cities combined simply allows you to bypass the production system at need and buy many of these as time goes on. You less have diminishing returns than a bell curve, where the cost of settling increases early but becomes negligible past a certain point. Civ Vi mitigates these costs even further - troops aren't necessary for more than one or two core cities due to AI target selection, and improvements have reduced importance overall.
It's not a Civ V issue. Civ IV had maintenance and earlier games had corruption - amenities don't accomplish the same thing, by design. Amenities reward settling lots of cities and punish growing those cities only after a point when they're as productive as they need to be, when an expansion constraint needs to generate a cost for actually expanding. I've rarely if ever reached a point where the gameplay effects of controlling amenities are more significant than doing so just to avoid annoying popups.
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