My mid-game slog trouble

wgabrie

Chieftain
Joined
Feb 28, 2007
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5
I'm somewhat new to civ 6, I have all the expansion content, and I'm playing on the Prince difficulty level. I have just finished clearing my continent of a rival civilization and some city-states that had prospered on good land. This has brought the classical era to a close.

Now, I don't need to study the tactics of the Medieval Era because there is no one that I need to attack or defend against. I own my entire starting continent. My thought is that the next step is to skip that age and rush for the naval tech to get past the ocean and explore the world.

But that's where I get slogged down. The technology I need to cross the ocean is Cartography, and that advances the world to the Renaissance Era. I quickly fall behind the unmet AI players, who quickly jump ahead in all victory categories, and I'm not sure what the next step is to continue from my strong start.
 

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You'll probably get much more detailed responses to this but the quick answer is to build campuses with the buildings. Look for spots with high adjacency (usually next to mountains) and build them first. Then put your envoys into science city-states to get their bonuses.

Also look at the tech tree and see if you can cut down the longer turn times by building or doing something to get the 50% boost.

The fact you have conquered your continent means you probably have way more cities and citizens than your rivals, so thats a huge boost already.

In your rush to get ocean travel, don't forget you'll also need techs to upgrade your units.
 
Yes on prince you need to start paying attention to tech/civic boosts to avoid falling behind, also you shouldn’t have conquered city states since you will need their bonus at least for first half of game. Nobody else alive on your continent also means there’s nothing you can pillage for science/culture. Even keeping one city alive and just constantly repair and pillage or train units on it would’ve been helpful.
 
Your empire is quite unproductive. You have 51 production across your empire in turn 121. As comparison I loaded up an old save I had from one of my games. Its from turn 117 and my capital alone has already 23 while my whole empire has 103. There are several reasons for that.
The territory around your capital is not the best for getting hammers and there is nothing you can do about that apart from rolling another map.
But some of your cities are at or even over your housing cap but you still work tiles with food instead of tiles with prod. So dont get me wrong, food is very important especially in small cities but it is kind of waisted when you are at your housing cap and your growth is just 25% because of that. Ironically the one city that needs food the most (Walata) does not work enough to keep growing.
Also you work some unimproved tiles. You unlocked watermills but didnt place one of them. You also have lots of hills where you could place mines. And speaking of mines you didnt unlock apprenticeship yet which would net all your mines one production more. On the other hand there are some tiles which are improved which you dont even work (it could have been the AI that improved them though).
Your policy cards could also be optimated. For example you run +2 gold per trade route while only having one of them and also a stable income in general. Instead you could use +1 production per city for example which would be nearly 12% more production in your empire. In general 1 production is worth between 2 and 4 gold (depending if you use cards when you spend it).
You took over 4 cities on your continent. Thats good. But you neglected your own settling while you did so which might again be caused by your low production in general. Nevertheless you should have gone for more settlers even with the plan for war in mind. Not only would you have had more cities to build units with but you would also avoid loyalty issues with the first conquered cities if some of your own are next to them.
Your build districts are even worse afaik you build 2 yourself and another 2 are on the way. Even if you count in the 3 you conquered thats just 7 in total. Thats why your stats are so low and its again caused by low production across your empire. In the comparison game I loaded up I already had 11 and 4 more on the way.
You also should have taken another pantheon since you get exactly 0 value from yours since the two holy sites you build/are building (btw it does not make much sense to build a holy site that takes 26 turns to build) are not next to a river. Idk which ones were gone when you picked yours but nearly every other one would have been better.

I guess there are other things that could be improved for example regarding the war you fought but they are not as important as more production and more settlers.

But you know what the good news is? This game is by no means lost you have all the chances to win it. I cheated a little to see the AIs stats and they are not that much higher than yours if at all. You still got the biggest empire in the game (by a small margine) and lots of space to expand it peacefully for a while. Thats what I would focus on instead of trying to cross the ocean asap. There is not too much you can earn by doing that anyway. Maybe you could sell some luxuries but then again the prince AI does not have the money to pay much anyway. Since you dont have districts you wont profit from cs in the near future and you cant send traders to their cities as well. Your army is also not well prepared to start the next war oversea at this point so that shouldnt be something you think about for a while.
Again your biggest problem is the low production. And I think you can nearly double that in around 10 turns if you start to work on it right away so you can build all the districts you want afterwards to go for every victory you like.
 
Discovering a Renaissance technology itself will not advance the game era BTW. Eras progress based on elapsed time (40-60 turns per era on standard speed) and overall technical progress of all of the civs in the game (the more technologies everybody discovers, the faster the eras advance). I have not loaded your save, but the reply above seems reasonable.
 
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