Is an early war Worth it just to pillage tiles ?

hongyu20

Chieftain
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Jan 14, 2017
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Pillaging a mine or quarry gives 25 science and culture respectively , which can translate up to a tech or civic in the ancient era . On the higher difficulties , the AI always improve tiles early on due to their bonuses .
So is waging an early war , even if there is no builder or settler to capture , worth it if you can pillage a few improvements ?
 
Any war is profitable IMHO. If you can't take cities, pillage the districts and improvements and get some free stuff from the peace treaty. And on side note, the AI can't handle amenities so he will soon have barbarians running amock his countryside.
 
Pillaging a mine or quarry gives 25 science and culture respectively , which can translate up to a tech or civic in the ancient era . On the higher difficulties , the AI always improve tiles early on due to their bonuses .
So is waging an early war , even if there is no builder or settler to capture , worth it if you can pillage a few improvements ?

Pillage all tiles except districts, then take the city, then send a worker to repair for free.... Repeat

The only issue is this may sometimes speed up the tech and civics advance too much. So need to be careful.
 
Not cheating, and not quite bug exploitation either, but IMO super early war to steal settlers, builders, and pillage isn't really in the spirit of the game. I just never do it as a self-imposed rule.
 
Not cheating, and not quite bug exploitation either, but IMO super early war to steal settlers, builders, and pillage isn't really in the spirit of the game. I just never do it as a self-imposed rule.

Really? I kind of thought the hefty warmonger penalties for taking cities meant that was how war should work if you wanted a little war without too much penalty. It actually makes me want to port Civ V's Denmark to Civ VI.
 
Not cheating, and not quite bug exploitation either, but IMO super early war to steal settlers, builders, and pillage isn't really in the spirit of the game. I just never do it as a self-imposed rule.
Early rush is a key strategy in basically any strategy games. This is supposed to be a high risk high reward strategy. You find this not in the spirit probably because the risk of super early wars in civ6 is just not high enough to the point it is actually an exploitation IMHO.

From a historical perspective, starting wars to get slaves and pillage for wealth and foods is in fact an integral part of empire building, which in a sense follows the rules of jungle. After all, this is Civilizations, not Sim city.
 
Many times I have gone in early and pillaged those mines. The AI does like their farmland though so often its not a great science puller.
What it is for me is a significant slowdown on their growth. I use it in passive agressive games, they declare on me , I turtle and kill their army then just waste their land and maybe take1 key amenity , production or strategic city as the WM penalty will not be too high. Horseman, knights, caravels and pirates are great for this.
 
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From a historical perspective, starting wars to get slaves and pillage for wealth and foods is in fact an integral part of empire building, which in a sense follows the rules of jungle. After all, this is Civilizations, not Sim city.

I hear that. I didn't really mean to say I was against the idea of early rush or early war, as much as I just feel with how the AI operates it doesn't feel so much like a battle. You just swoop in with a warrior, take a settler or builder, and then just leave. There isn't really so much gameplay in that process, you're just getting a free unit or two that you weren't really meant to have. I would feel better about it if the AI protected settlers and workers better, and repaired pillaged tiles more frequently.
 
I hear that. I didn't really mean to say I was against the idea of early rush or early war, as much as I just feel with how the AI operates it doesn't feel so much like a battle. You just swoop in with a warrior, take a settler or builder, and then just leave. There isn't really so much gameplay in that process, you're just getting a free unit or two that you weren't really meant to have. I would feel better about it if the AI protected settlers and workers better, and repaired pillaged tiles more frequently.
That is why I said the risk of super early war is too low now. Imagine if the AI has a decent chance to pull off an effective counterattack or there is a bigger impact on the diplomacy, then players may need to think twice before the attack.
 
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They can't really increase the risk without improving combat AI which will never compete with a human mind on such a complex and more importantly random map. What they need to do is reduce the reward to make it reasonably comparable if a bit greater than the opportunity cost for waging early war. Right now it's just absurd how much you get out of an early war even if you only capture even a single city/settler. Its basically like bumping the difficulty down by two levels.

Edit: on second thought, maybe if they implemented a supply system, like your non-recon units slowly lose strength the longer they are outside your borders, that would add some risk to invading. I could see that annoying a lot of people though.
 
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They can't really increase the risk without improving combat AI which will never compete with a human mind on such a complex and more importantly random map. What they need to do is reduce the reward to make it reasonably comparable if a bit greater than the opportunity cost for waging early war. Right now it's just absurd how much you get out of an early war even if you only capture even a single city/settler. Its basically like bumping the difficulty down by two levels.

I can't remember which but I know in at least one previous version of civ if you capture a settler you merely get a worker. You could also reduce the build count to 1 on stolen workers. But like chopping outside borders or deleting units for gold, I wouldn't mind stealing units to just be totally eliminated so there's no room at all for abuse. I realize that this takes a feature away from the game, and again, I agree it makes sense from a historical perspective to take slaves and pillage early on, but IMO its broken enough that I think gameplay has to trump flavor in this instance.
 
It was Civ V. It'd be a good mechanic to come back, but maybe that would buff China and especially Aztecs even more. Not that it isn't hard to balance.

I'd also like Great People to be destroyed if a military unit rolls over it. Right now many are used as invincible uber-Scouts.
 
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