Oh, if you are surprise-war immune then by all means you should go ahead and expand.... there's definitely no reason to wait.
From King to Emperor - ouch
- Thread starter Horizons
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Yep. Pretty much impossible to win on Emperor if you don't get a great start and you have AI neighbours that can threaten you (i.e. no protective mountains). You get swamped with units and they have crossbowmen early. They will Suzerign any city-states close to you and those city-states will turn into units factories instanteously when you go to war. If you have no crossbowmen in time, you lose. Simple as that!
So literally all of the game's difficulty consists in finding ingeious ways to overcome the AI's ENORMOUS starting advantages, and IF you survive that you can then go into autopilot. But the initial AI advantages are so HUGE you have to make every single turn in the opening game as efficient as possible. But I still think it's impossible to win under certain circumstances (mainly poor start location).
So literally all of the game's difficulty consists in finding ingeious ways to overcome the AI's ENORMOUS starting advantages, and IF you survive that you can then go into autopilot. But the initial AI advantages are so HUGE you have to make every single turn in the opening game as efficient as possible. But I still think it's impossible to win under certain circumstances (mainly poor start location).
aguliondew
Prince
You do not need a great start to win on emperor. If you play on deity yes but emperor has a lot of leeway. Just remember this is a 4x game explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. In the higher level you have to expand early and have a army otherwise the AI will think that you are a easy target. You can lose a city to early aggression and still be fine. Just adapt to your situation. No nearby civ expand to 4-5 cities early. If their is a nearby civ expand once, then build a army to conquer it before walls are up.
If you are in a bad spot you have to play bold and exploit whatever advantages you get. A levied city-states army can help against early aggression so you can save up gold for that. The worst spots I have had were in-between 2 aggressive civ I conquered the one that did not get walls or on a peninsula with desert in the nearest 3 city locations so you forward expanded on the nearby civ. In emperor you should be behind during the early era but around turn 100-150 you should be equal to or better the your neighboring civs. I never lost on emperor after conquering a nearby civ so be aggressive when you can.
If you are in a bad spot you have to play bold and exploit whatever advantages you get. A levied city-states army can help against early aggression so you can save up gold for that. The worst spots I have had were in-between 2 aggressive civ I conquered the one that did not get walls or on a peninsula with desert in the nearest 3 city locations so you forward expanded on the nearby civ. In emperor you should be behind during the early era but around turn 100-150 you should be equal to or better the your neighboring civs. I never lost on emperor after conquering a nearby civ so be aggressive when you can.
i_imperator
Imperator
After a number of reloads, I won that map. I decided to build a second warrior and to buy another warrior as soon as I could, I also noticed that Georgia's scout had found the camp to the north and was pushing for it, I allowed her to deal with that barb camp to the north while focusing on my expansion and district discounts. Ended up with a T290 peaceful Science win. Not the fastest time but i'm happy I was able to beat it.
i_imperator
Imperator
You should watch the game mechanic's most recent Test of time challenge game as Alexander. He was in a very bad spot with Mapuche running away with the game and a tech advantage and a +10% additional combat strength. Mapuche had Giant Death Robots when GM had calvery. He ended up coming back from it and winning the game. He easily could've given up too in the early game because he was in such a bad spot on deity but he didn't. It was very enjoyable to see him come back and win it.
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The start is more than just a few first builds. My general approach is to
1. Get a scout as it is the fastest way to stop barb scouts finding you
2. Get a builder if you can improve 3 tiles, any 3 tiles but ideally hills, mining is a great starting tech because it does not just allow building, it allows an emergency chop for a fast warrior for an army defence.
3 if time allows a settler is great for many reasons. Mainly it just works so well for extra growth, production, early empire inspiration but also if you do lose your cap, you have a backup.
4. This is the key bit... at this stage timing wise you should now be near getting craftsmanship which means agoge and the right time to build an army for proper offence and defence. You need an absolute minimum of 3 slingers/archers for the machinery inspiration and 2 warriors for musket inspiration. Ideally 8 (including scout) for the mercenaries inspiration. You get the idea, it is not just about getting an army, it is about getting eurekas and inspirations, you want to avoid getting many without an inspiration or eureka. At least 80% you want to get this way. Only after you have a real army to defend and attack do you go back to more settlers.
5. Learn to defend. This also seems to be key. When defending they will attack you, so do not attack them, fortify heal in defensive ground. Use archers in clumps to pick off single units in one turn so they do not promote heal. Support and flanking helps when you choose military tradition. Even a peaceful player needs to know how to defend well and seems to be a mistake some make, to attack when defending. You can but at the right time only.
knighterrant81
Warlord
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Spoiler :
Most to all games on Emperor are winnable. I had a game as the Dutch where I started with Harold ridiculously close (like 5 tiles away) and land locked with tundra and desert around me. I managed to burn down all of Harold's other cities, capture his Capital, settle all of his land, and I was still in a winning position (I got bored).
Horizons, I think you are not listening to what people are telling you in this thread. You may not be ready for Emperor and that's fine. The early game is by far the most important, and if you fall behind, then yeah, it is hard. Its the 3rd highest difficulty. Just don't make up things that are not true as excuses or get salty about it. The jump from King to Emperor is pretty huge, and you're going to have to unlearn some bad habits. That's really all it is.
Honestly, I find that Emperor is the level that best showcases this game. It is challenging (yes, particularly the early game, but that is what Civ has been since the very beginning - tough at the start but smooth sailing if you build up an early lead), but you are still able to do some off-the-wall stuff and it is still possible to come from behind to win.
Loaded up another game, missed a close-by barb camp and got hammered into submission by an endless stream of horsemen.
High difficulty + bad start = lose the game
More than likely. I tried not building districts in the early game as advised, and ended up horribly behind in science. People have said 'you will lose' if you start with two scouts, and if that's the case then it's not really much of a game - it's more of a strict routine you must follow otherwise = you lose.
I'm trying to see if there's any actual 'fun' left in this game. Or if having fun and being challenged are mutually incompatible in Civ.
This is what's left to me after disasters and barbs. My mistake here was to try and get an early religion. As you can see I was punished very heavily for that, stupid me! Here comes the AI to finish me off
So to win at higher difficulties, you have to follow a checklist of approved early builds otherwise = you lose.
So basically I could only win before because the AI had a bug. Now it doesn't produce catapults that it doesn't use, I can't win any more.
High difficulty + bad start = lose the game
More than likely. I tried not building districts in the early game as advised, and ended up horribly behind in science. People have said 'you will lose' if you start with two scouts, and if that's the case then it's not really much of a game - it's more of a strict routine you must follow otherwise = you lose.
I'm trying to see if there's any actual 'fun' left in this game. Or if having fun and being challenged are mutually incompatible in Civ.
This is what's left to me after disasters and barbs. My mistake here was to try and get an early religion. As you can see I was punished very heavily for that, stupid me! Here comes the AI to finish me off
So to win at higher difficulties, you have to follow a checklist of approved early builds otherwise = you lose.
So basically I could only win before because the AI had a bug. Now it doesn't produce catapults that it doesn't use, I can't win any more.
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Archon_Wing
Vote for me or die
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Just stick to King. Higher difficulties aren't meant for everyone and winning on higher difficulties is overrated. You can always try fractal maps to add more variety.
I don't really see the point to playing something that makes you miserable. And given how this thread has gone, I think you should probably just let it go.
I don't really see the point to playing something that makes you miserable. And given how this thread has gone, I think you should probably just let it go.
GAGA Extrem
Emperor
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This is pretty much my approach as well.
I have a pretty good chance to win on Emperor if I try, but given that I am a peaceful builder type, CIV6 really isn't all that fun for me when the early game just boils down to fending off constant warrior rushes by the nearest neighbor and getting boxed in by everybody else. So these days I play on King, but I limit myself to 4 cities and a non-optimal, non-exploitative playstile.
knighterrant81
Warlord
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No, most maps are winnable, especially on Emperor.
It is going to take several games to figure it out. Be patient. It isn't as if there's some magical formula. The first 20 turns or so can feel a little scripted - that's because they are so important. After that you can branch out a bit more.
Take another game - say, Overwatch, which I have been playing a bunch. Maybe playing Genji is fun for you. But Genji is not meta, and perhaps you like playing Genji all on his own and you aren't working as a team. You are going to die a lot and not win many games. Most video games, in fact, punish you for doing things incorrectly. Choosing a higher difficulty level means you are basically asking the game to punish your mistakes more. You can have fun in Civ in different ways - by making and fixing mistakes at a high difficulty level, or by playing at a lower difficulty level and having more freedom to do what you like. But don't complain that the game is restrictive because you can't do whatever you like at high difficulty levels - that's just being salty.
Building two Scouts at the start will not lose you the game. It will put you behind though. You are delaying your first builder and likely your first Settler in order to gamble on getting a big payoff through CS's and goodie huts. Scouts will not be able to defend you from barbs or early AI aggression. There are no early Inspirations or Eurekas directly related to Scouts (although they can help find stuff that does give you boosts). You might hit the jackpot, but you are more likely to just lose them to barbs or get stuck in AI lands or just not find much. You'll have wasted turns and production when its really really important not to waste turns and production. Therefore, building two Scouts at the start is basically putting all your eggs in a really shoddy basket.
Here's another way to think about it. In Music Theory courses (I'm a music teacher), you'll often hear students grumble that they don't want to follow all of these rules the teacher lays out - they want to be creative! The common response is something like "you have to learn the rules first in order to break them." Famous composers break those rules all the time - but they do it purposefully and with a goal in mind, backed up by years of experience. Learning a higher difficulty in Civ is like that. You have to learn the good habits and best practices - and it may feel a little restrictive. You'll have to put "having fun" (in the sense of doing something different and unique) to the side for awhile. Ignore religion. Focus on "optimal" builds. Once you have a few games under your belt, you can try different approaches. For instance, I could comfortably win on Emperor, but not with Religion. So, I tried using Religion, and I lost, a bunch. Eventually, I found a formula that wouldn't put me so far behind, and now I can do decently in a game even if I take a Religion.
Its a different kind of fun. See my earlier comments. Choosing a higher difficulty means your mistakes are going to be punished. Learning to play a higher difficulty means having fun by improving your play and fixing mistakes. If your definition of fun is "do whatever" then yeah, that's not going to work out for you.
This is what's left to me after disasters and barbs. My mistake here was to try and get an early religion. As you can see I was punished very heavily for that, stupid me! Here comes the AI to finish me off
You are going to have to learn how to get a Religion without leaving yourself defenseless, aren't you then? We're here to tell you that it is entirely possible to do so. We will give you suggestions on how to do so. You have to have the right attitude - in order to succeed where you have failed in the past you are going to have to do things differently.
No that's a recipe for hundreds of restarted maps. Don't learn build orders, learn the fundamental principles of the game so that you can adapt to different situations.
I've been thinking about adopting exactly this approach. For exactly the reasons you describe.
Thank you for posting this. I've been thinking about just not playing Civ VI since the things you have to do to win on Emperor and above are things that just do not appeal to me. But you have motivated me to just ignore the ability to select a domination type leader and go for 4 good cities on King.
LMT
Warlord
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The one thing that makes Civ 6 always enjoyable for me is to ignore how many turns it takes me to win. I just looked at mu HOF today and most of my wins are sometime in the mid-300s (turns).
Mahi
Prince
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Loaded up another game, missed a close-by barb camp and got hammered into submission by an endless stream of horsemen.
High difficulty + bad start = lose the game
More than likely. I tried not building districts in the early game as advised, and ended up horribly behind in science. People have said 'you will lose' if you start with two scouts, and if that's the case then it's not really much of a game - it's more of a strict routine you must follow otherwise = you lose.
I'm trying to see if there's any actual 'fun' left in this game. Or if having fun and being challenged are mutually incompatible in Civ.
This is what's left to me after disasters and barbs. My mistake here was to try and get an early religion. As you can see I was punished very heavily for that, stupid me! Here comes the AI to finish me off
So to win at higher difficulties, you have to follow a checklist of approved early builds otherwise = you lose.
So basically I could only win before because the AI had a bug. Now it doesn't produce catapults that it doesn't use, I can't win any more.
By coincidence I wanted to check this forum to decide if I wanted to play the game again and saw your post and it is so relatable to me that it sounds to me nothing changed since I decided to take a break from the game.
I created a post before the break where I complained about the game being boring from emporer and up due to the strict start routine the difficulty forces you to do. The ironic part about that is that the game not only becomes boring, but also easy because the fixed start most often causes you to win the game by default, since you take over enemy cities fairly early in the game the rest of the game is just an automatic snowball effect from there once you captured the land you need.
Honestly where is the fun in that? In my perspective civ 6 seems to the worst version since it takes away the most fun part of the game. Don't get me wrong I think it should still be a difficulty setting for this, as the old deity games were. The step up to emporer is so ridiculous that when you know how to beat it on that level you could almost go straight to deity from there.
knighterrant81
Warlord
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You can win the game at Emperor pretty regularly without ever invading someone. It is definitely more difficult, but it is doable. Doing it with 4 cities (like you could in Civ V) is really really difficult. That is probably the only knock on the design of this game I have - you can go peacefully wide, or you can go wide conquest, but forget playing tall (although there are some Civs that can kind of pull it off so I wouldn't write this off completely at Emperor). Like most of the balance issues in this game, the problem stems from the District system. If you need a particular District for victory (like Campuses or Theater Squares) then you have to build more cities so you can build more of that District. It also gives coastal cities a disadvantage - you have precious few spaces to place and maximize your Districts.
As long as Civ is a game about snowballing an early lead and increasing difficulty through giving the AI bonuses (as opposed to making them play better, for instance) then the early game will always be super important, and become more important as you ratchet up the difficulty. HOWEVER:
You can totally win on Emperor as:
- A coastal Civ
- A religious Civ
- A peaceful Civ
- A small Civ (it is definitely harder, though)
- A warlike Civ (more difficult than it has been in the past because Crossbows are OP and they taught the AI how to actually kinda defend itself)
The step up in difficulty is because the AI gets another Settler. On a standard size map, that is 7 extra cities to contend with early, 7 more spaces that get taken up before you can do anything about it. If you are getting rushed down, the solution is simple. Build 7 units and a Scout early and the AI will leave you alone.
The early game will always be about expansion and building up a solid military whether you want to go peaceful or warlike. If you don't like playing that way then yeah, you should stick to King.
This is also always viable. Deity+ players need a metric to measure to improve their play, and the turn number mechanism fits nicely. It does mean ignoring a lot of game mechanics and playing rather unintuitively at times. You can totally play without worrying about your turn number. The AI is in no danger of winning before turn 300. However, if you want to IMPROVE, I'd recommend adopting at least some of the strategies these Deity+ players use, or at least learning why those strategies work.
EgonSpengler
Deity
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Yeah, Barbarian horsemen are a pain.
I play at Emperor, and I almost never found a Religion.
Just looking at the screenshot above, going back to King might be the thing to do. No shame in that. "Difficulty" settings in Civ VI are kind of a misnomer. They're not just about how challenging the game is, they're about what kind of game you want to play. The reason I don't play at Immortal or Deity isn't because I can't do it, it's because the game changes in ways I don't want, most of the time.
Yep, I have no choice but to go back to King.
Tried a game emphasizing military and not building districts early, as advised. (Pretty much had to anyway, got hemmed in by Russia in the BCs - hence my neighbours hating me for all time even though I didn't raze the cities I captured)
Take a look at this. Totally impossible to beat this, China is on the other end of the earth. I have no earthly idea what's going on here but it's pretty depressing.
Tried a game emphasizing military and not building districts early, as advised. (Pretty much had to anyway, got hemmed in by Russia in the BCs - hence my neighbours hating me for all time even though I didn't raze the cities I captured)
Take a look at this. Totally impossible to beat this, China is on the other end of the earth. I have no earthly idea what's going on here but it's pretty depressing.
Archon_Wing
Vote for me or die
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Wow, that's actually pretty impressive on China's part.
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@T247?
@Horizons you should have campus, your science is lagging severely.
It is one of the most important things to do.
knighterrant81
Warlord
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First of all, after turn 200 you should easily have at least 10 cities, 15 or more is very easy to do. I've seen your maps several times in this thread. You. Do. Not. Build. Enough. Cities. No more goofing around - force yourself to build 10 cities before turn 100 in every game you play or restart. You've got bad habits and you need to hold yourself to strict schedules to break them. Once you build that many cities by force of habit, you'll learn the rhythm of the game and not have to hold to strict schedules. But for now, you've got to ditch whatever it is you're doing instead of building cities in the early game.
Waiting to build a District - understand what this means. It means waiting until maybe turn 60 or 70 instead of building them at turn 30. Not waiting until turn 200+. Break the bad habits. If you don't have two Campuses by turn 80, restart.
Maybe here's a different way of thinking about it. One thing that helped clean up my district timings (as in, not doing them too early but also not doing them too late) was trying to hit all the Eurekas and Inspirations for those districts. I don't do that anymore, but it might be another good schedule for you to follow to help you break your bad habits.
I have a hard time looking at your minimap and even telling which Civ you are playing because the player should own most of their own continent by turn 240.
I'm kind of curious actually. I'd love to know what you are actually doing from, say turn 20 to turn 100. You aren't building Districts. You aren't building cities. What are you building?
Waiting to build a District - understand what this means. It means waiting until maybe turn 60 or 70 instead of building them at turn 30. Not waiting until turn 200+. Break the bad habits. If you don't have two Campuses by turn 80, restart.
Maybe here's a different way of thinking about it. One thing that helped clean up my district timings (as in, not doing them too early but also not doing them too late) was trying to hit all the Eurekas and Inspirations for those districts. I don't do that anymore, but it might be another good schedule for you to follow to help you break your bad habits.
I have a hard time looking at your minimap and even telling which Civ you are playing because the player should own most of their own continent by turn 240.
I'm kind of curious actually. I'd love to know what you are actually doing from, say turn 20 to turn 100. You aren't building Districts. You aren't building cities. What are you building?
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