Still not clicking for me. Tried a military-first approach as Arabia
Hey bro - grats on the win. I read this thread and I think there are some basics that my friends who play king don't know.
Most of the game isn't viable at higher difficulties. The things I'm saying below aren't set in stone but are just a list of things that will work that you can focus on while becoming nerdy enough to understand what is/is not viable.
This is also the gamey version. You'll get good enough that you can roll emperor from any start with any civ on any map setting.
General Ideas
- ignore religion - you'll know when you're good enough to spread the word of "Peanut Butter Sandwiches On Fridays" (naming religions being the best part of religious games)
- for conquest, slow the game speed down and possibly choose an older, dryer world so there are less hills and forests to obstruct armies
- if the civ you want to play gets bonuses from resources, set resources to abundant and maybe starting position to legendary
- in general, tailor the map to your civ
- if you don't want to fight, send a delegation on the turn you contact a civ and get open borders (both sides) and/or any trade available. Civ relationships accumulate but they start at 0 so you'll always be able to open with these 2 on the first turn you encounter someone. Likewise, be nice in the opening exchange, it does have a modifier attached to it.
- the "island plates" map type will often give you an island to yourself
Chopping & Improvements
Say you have a forest on flat terrain and you chop it in the early turns for 60 production.
It gives 1 production per turn so that's 60 turns worth of production you've front-loaded.
For example - if you chopped to build the pyramids, additional value you're getting:
- you get a 4 build builder out of it which is worth 133% the build cost of a normal builder with 3 charges so you should deduct this cost from the cost of pyramids
- you can run the chop through Magnus, the 10% bonus from Autocracy and a 15% ancient wonder policy for 75% bonus or 105 production total
- if you get a government plaza and ancestral hall early, your new cities will get a free builder with 4 charges so you can deduct the value of the extra build (33% of a worker) from the cost of pyramids
If the forest is on a grassland hills then it gives 2 food and 2 production (the fabled early game 4 yield tile). You don't chop these because, in reality, your city is probably only going to use 4 tiles for most of the part of the game that matters.
This is because the food required for population growth increases at each level so food has diminishing returns and is most important in the first 2 tiles.
If you aim to build just enough workers to give each of your cities 2 good tiles and chop the rest, you'll do well.
Sidenote: only build farms in triangles or on special resources - and a whole farm triangle is usually overkill for an individual city so build them where 2 cities can split the tiles.
You want to build most of your improvements after feudalism which gives your workers 2 extra builds. If your cities don't have decent 3 and 4 yield unimproved tiles, *some* early workers to shore things up and get resources is usually a thing. Spread them out and take note of whether a city actually has enough population to work the tile.
Juggling
Civ 6's core tension is that spatial progress in terms of cities, improvements & conquest comes at the expense of temporal (time) progress in terms of technologies and culture.
When people are telling you to not build districts, they're telling you to exclusively invest in spatial progress early. For a very simple reason - a tile you start working in turn 20 is worth much more over the course of a game than a tile you start working in turn 100.
However, there's a giant bloody caveat they're not explaining!
This is only possible because they hit the early game eurekas and inspirations! And nobody mentioned that!
For example, Scout > Slinger > Worker > Settler > buy Worker can get you every eureka and inspiration in the first 2 levels of tech and civics, RNG permitting (2/3rds is unlucky).
Anyway, juggling is my name for leaving things partially complete (mostly techs and civics) so that we can trigger a bonus - not sure what the proper name is.
If you partially research techs and civics to the point where just their boost is left, they'll pop when the boost comes through. It's a way of giving yourself the most opportunity to advance temporally while focusing on expansion or conquest.
And the reason juggling is so important is because it is the only mechanic in the game where spatial progress benefits temporal progress. Everything else is one at the expense of the other.
The technique also applies to build orders, settlers, workers etc etc. It's basically just like a timing attack in any other game except that you can pause and switch to something else while waiting for things to line up.
Early Game Econ
Plains hills - it's the only tile in the game that gives your city tile (the city itself) 2 production. When you found your city and have a 1 or 2 production first tile to work, this amounts to a 50% (3 total) or 33% (4 total) production buff for the first 10 turns (i.e. massive). This applies to all cities btw - you'll see people aiming for plains/hills for the same reasons as the early food tiles I mentioned above.
There are early eurekas for building a quarry, farm, mine and pasture on resources (not on a normal tile).
Because of the above, when pushing a new difficulty, I highly recommend re-rolling your start until you have a plains hills tile on a river with 2 tiles that can grant a eureka.
God King (+1 gold/+1 faith per turn) is your first economic policy until you found your pantheon (just Google pantheons - there are heaps of guides).
Then +1 production in all cities until it goes obsolete much later in the game.
Time your first trader to fulfill a CS quest at the same time as you have the green policy which gives a free 2nd envoy.
Your first techs should be the ones that allow you to get the worker eurekas mentioned above.
From there, prioritising a campus if you have a good spot is fairly normal. If you're going for a science victory on emperor, you can sometimes get 2 early campuses with libraries and get Hypatia (killed by Christians), who will insta-build a library in a third campus and buff libraries in general. If you pull this off with Korea, ggwp.
Considering you can now get a free settler from your pantheon at about the same time as your first built settler for a 3 city opener, this is probably an extremely easy way to win with Korea.
An alternative is water wheels (for me personally at least). My rationale is that they give you half a good tile (+1 food/+1 prod) without using a population (and a eureka). This will mainly make your city grow faster and I've recently learnt population doesn't matter so I'm not sure if they're actually good. You've got a lot of room to play with on emperor so if you like them, build them.
Slingers and Surviving the Barbs
1st slinger kill = eureka => 3 archers = eureka (for crossbowmen even) => 2 crossbowmen = eureka => 2 field cannons = inspiration
And all of these are for techs & civics you'll want to get every game. No other promotion class comes close AFAIK.
The upgrade cost from slingers to archers is way lower than normal because otherwise no-one would ever build slingers (Civ 5).
So you should build 3 slingers (I usually buy 1 because they're also cheap to buy), kill a barbarian, upgrade them to archers for practically no money and that's the whole barb early game.
There are also 2 eurekas for the spearman class so I often build 1 spearman as well. If it makes sense, you can use the 100% production bonus to naval units policy to build 2 galleys to go and find city states (as well as for the eureka). If you can afford to upgrade them later on, there's a valuable eureka for them as well.
I've had *many* games where this is my whole army, including when the game first released and the AI was guaranteed to swarm you with it's free units every game (actually the reason I started doing this).
You generally wait until you've researched the mercenaries civic to upgrade to crossbowmen as this is expensive. It gives a policy that reduces upgrade costs by 50% and is on the way to Exploration which gives the best tier 2 government.
On emperor you should be able to prevent any barb camp from popping.
You do this by intially circling your city with your warrior & scout, blocking any barb scouts you encounter rather than attacking them.
If you obstruct them they will generally go and explore in a different direction for 10 turns or so (they will come back though, so be ready for that).
Beating Deity with Rush
(I'm just mentioning this because so many people suggested rush.)
Early wars with a decent civ are so OP that you should honestly try Immortal or Deity.
The people recommending warrior rush strats are either playing multiplayer (from what I've read) or missing the fact that you can just levy a city state for early game warriors. The problem with building warriors yourself is that you can't afford to upgrade them till much later so your war will stall out hard.
So, pick Alexander, do the opening I described but only spend money on upgrading archers. Save for levying otherwise.
Rush encampment, barracks and horseback riding for Hetairoi. If you don't get horses and iron, reroll.
If you save your envoys and use the green policy that makes your first envoy count as 2, you will be able to suzerain a city state super early. If it's a military city state, even better.
Then you just go to war with whoever is next to the city state, levy and choose oligarchy for the +4 to warriors. Just sit behind the expendable warriors with your archers and grind the AI's army and economy down to the point where they can't buy units anymore (whenever I've done it, I've taken a couple of cities before they get their first swordsmen out as well).
Having a ram/seige tower with any force taking a city is important. When taking cities with walls, archers are really just there to soak fire and cycle out to heal. If you get a shot off with them, you're doing well. If you want catapults to work, it's a good idea to have archers along so that the city shoots the archers and the catapults stay at full health. Not at all necessary with Alexander though since hypaspists are so fantastic against cities.
You want more hypaspists (which take cities) than hetairoi (which mop up and generate great generals). These will come online about when you're feeling like warriors are actually a bit s**t and thanking your lucky stars you didn't build all those corpses yourself
You should get declared on by a 2nd civ shortly after generating the grievances from conquering the first etc etc.
You get free tech from building units in your barracks and various free things from conquering cities.
And no war weariness. Expect some of your conquests to rebel but it's easy to take them back and you usually have units healing to the rear that can do this.
It's so much easier than any other deity victory type I've tried. The downside is that, once you've conquered 2 civs, you're so far ahead that it ruins the rest of the game which is why this is a boring way to play. Great at the start but I've only actually finished the game like this once and it was super boring.
My general pattern of play is to have an idea, play it on emperor to see if it works then try to win immortal with it. Deity is fun with OP strats but I usually don't win.
Well, I didn't realise I was this engaged with Civ. Bear in mind that I've only just passed 400 hours on steam but I do play very quickly based on what I've read here.
For youtubers, Quill18 is just a nice guy and Marbozir is the best strategy gamer I've seen so far (his accent is pretty authentic too
). I find the super popular youtubers are generally the worst when it comes to many games.
I've learnt a lot from the users Victoria and Sostratus since starting here a couple of days ago. They seem very legit.
