Hello everybody. First post here, long time lurking (since the amazing Civ3´s War Academy). And now that I’ve conquered deity, thanks to the excellent help to be found over here, it is time to explore more creative versions of the game.
I’ve searched and read everywhere and I cannot find anything of substance about One City Challenges, games in which you found your first city and never build nor capture another one (another set of rules limited it to not ending a turn with a second city, capturing and trading immediately was OK). Most of us have played this at some point, right? And they used to be popular in this forum, somewhat popular at least.
Why the silence? Civ6 has made OCC very difficult, but that has never stopped anyone here.
Obvious difficulties:
Other Civs can sprawl at will and in Civ6 your first city no longer has special economic status, it is virtually just an ordinary city with cheaper city state boni.
Barbarians won’t leave you to build in peace.
Tech can no longer be traded. City size no longer translates directly into beakers. Thus, you might start ahead in tech, at least in lower levels, but as you reach a beaker limit which is kind of hard limit for a single city, you’ll eventually fall behind. Veeery late in the game, you can steal tech, well, half of techs, but you can only have so many spies operating.
Eurekas and their culture equivalent are often taxing for a single city to achieve.
Culture and money also have caps of sorts, although with city states and trade, money can maybe somehow be sorted out.
The biggest bummer of all, of course, is that everything occupies a hex. You want to grow your single city, you want to build lots of districts on it, you want to build lots of wonders in it to work as multipliers (not half as good as those multipliers used to be)… but there are not enough hexes. If you build districts and wonders, you are limited to about 20 hexes for production. If you want 30 pop, it will be a very dull 30 pop city.
There is a last, more subtle, bummer hidden in the rule set: you cannot raze an original capital. If you conquer it, you have to keep it, breaking the one city rule, meaning that you cannot completely take away enemies… I’ll return to this later.
So does anyone have experience with OCC in Civ6? What levels have you managed to win, which victory conditions? Any interesting tricks, strategies (without the obvious exploits that also apply elsewhere).
I’ll confess to having played only one OCC in Civ6, when I wanted to try a “fast” game, hoping to learn something new along the way. Standard speed, Prince difficulty, tiny world (4 civs), everything standard.
It was before starting to read this Civ6 forum, with a limited understanding of the rules and mechanics, so I did lots of mistakes. Still, it started well enough, with a solid large city, a healthy tech and civic lead by turn 100, good exploration of the world and still a poor understanding of how little science and culture a single city can provide in Civ6. So I was still confident in my science victory, somehow I’d stay ahead… but the peaceful plans would have to give way to a military, since the enemy would come knocking with up to date units. Around that point the lead stalled, then started to shrink, and by turn 200, it was no more. They had 5-6 cities to my single one and my city could not grow much more, my military could not grow much more, tech could not grow fast enough, culture neither… it looked like a sure, slow defeat.
Then the light bulb struck, OCC is after all playable and winnable in Civ6 at a decent level of difficulty. It started as an extension of the defensive military plan, if I was going to lose, I’d try a last hurray with my military (it wasn’t the most refined military either), I’d attack until it was expended, learn in the process and move on to normal games. So off I went with all my units, to discover that in Civ6, the opponent civs suck at military, even in Prince level. My group could stand their armies, slowly wear them off, then slowly raze city after city, moving to whichever rival was looking like it could become a runaway. “Soon” (hundreds of turns carefully micromanaging the maneuvering of 10+ units back and forth across two continents, did I mention it was going to be a “fast” game?), only their capitals were left standing. It turns out that even then it doesn’t have to become a level fight! You can pillage around their capitals to paralyze them and, oh surprise, they are unable to recover, as at some point they get engulfed in a sea of barbarians!
So, slugging to a score victory by year 2050 it was, a victory by a large margin after all!
I made lots of mistakes, and surely other victory types would have been possible, not least by realizing this strategy earlier when the enemies were smaller. I think I could pull it up in a standard map, and probably one difficulty level up from prince in a standard map, two in a small map, but maybe not much more. Anyways, this is the first I heard about this type of strategy for OCC. Not growing better than them, but instead keeping them smaller than you!
So I am curious about what some god-like players over here can make of it. Would this still work in a standard map with 8 civs? Can one move and raze fast enough to slow them all? How many bands of units are needed? Which unit mix, considering the very special mission? Up to what level? Can one do it without barbarians? I’d put up a monument for anyone capable of winning an exploit-free OCC in Civ6 in deity, especially now that the opposing civs build up somewhat of a military after the patches. Maybe by going religious, actually?
Are there any other practical OCC strategies at fair or higher difficulty levels?
Do tell, because playing like this takes dozens of hours per game. Not you old school OCC!
I’ve searched and read everywhere and I cannot find anything of substance about One City Challenges, games in which you found your first city and never build nor capture another one (another set of rules limited it to not ending a turn with a second city, capturing and trading immediately was OK). Most of us have played this at some point, right? And they used to be popular in this forum, somewhat popular at least.
Why the silence? Civ6 has made OCC very difficult, but that has never stopped anyone here.
Obvious difficulties:
Other Civs can sprawl at will and in Civ6 your first city no longer has special economic status, it is virtually just an ordinary city with cheaper city state boni.
Barbarians won’t leave you to build in peace.
Tech can no longer be traded. City size no longer translates directly into beakers. Thus, you might start ahead in tech, at least in lower levels, but as you reach a beaker limit which is kind of hard limit for a single city, you’ll eventually fall behind. Veeery late in the game, you can steal tech, well, half of techs, but you can only have so many spies operating.
Eurekas and their culture equivalent are often taxing for a single city to achieve.
Culture and money also have caps of sorts, although with city states and trade, money can maybe somehow be sorted out.
The biggest bummer of all, of course, is that everything occupies a hex. You want to grow your single city, you want to build lots of districts on it, you want to build lots of wonders in it to work as multipliers (not half as good as those multipliers used to be)… but there are not enough hexes. If you build districts and wonders, you are limited to about 20 hexes for production. If you want 30 pop, it will be a very dull 30 pop city.
There is a last, more subtle, bummer hidden in the rule set: you cannot raze an original capital. If you conquer it, you have to keep it, breaking the one city rule, meaning that you cannot completely take away enemies… I’ll return to this later.
So does anyone have experience with OCC in Civ6? What levels have you managed to win, which victory conditions? Any interesting tricks, strategies (without the obvious exploits that also apply elsewhere).
I’ll confess to having played only one OCC in Civ6, when I wanted to try a “fast” game, hoping to learn something new along the way. Standard speed, Prince difficulty, tiny world (4 civs), everything standard.
It was before starting to read this Civ6 forum, with a limited understanding of the rules and mechanics, so I did lots of mistakes. Still, it started well enough, with a solid large city, a healthy tech and civic lead by turn 100, good exploration of the world and still a poor understanding of how little science and culture a single city can provide in Civ6. So I was still confident in my science victory, somehow I’d stay ahead… but the peaceful plans would have to give way to a military, since the enemy would come knocking with up to date units. Around that point the lead stalled, then started to shrink, and by turn 200, it was no more. They had 5-6 cities to my single one and my city could not grow much more, my military could not grow much more, tech could not grow fast enough, culture neither… it looked like a sure, slow defeat.
Then the light bulb struck, OCC is after all playable and winnable in Civ6 at a decent level of difficulty. It started as an extension of the defensive military plan, if I was going to lose, I’d try a last hurray with my military (it wasn’t the most refined military either), I’d attack until it was expended, learn in the process and move on to normal games. So off I went with all my units, to discover that in Civ6, the opponent civs suck at military, even in Prince level. My group could stand their armies, slowly wear them off, then slowly raze city after city, moving to whichever rival was looking like it could become a runaway. “Soon” (hundreds of turns carefully micromanaging the maneuvering of 10+ units back and forth across two continents, did I mention it was going to be a “fast” game?), only their capitals were left standing. It turns out that even then it doesn’t have to become a level fight! You can pillage around their capitals to paralyze them and, oh surprise, they are unable to recover, as at some point they get engulfed in a sea of barbarians!
So, slugging to a score victory by year 2050 it was, a victory by a large margin after all!
I made lots of mistakes, and surely other victory types would have been possible, not least by realizing this strategy earlier when the enemies were smaller. I think I could pull it up in a standard map, and probably one difficulty level up from prince in a standard map, two in a small map, but maybe not much more. Anyways, this is the first I heard about this type of strategy for OCC. Not growing better than them, but instead keeping them smaller than you!
So I am curious about what some god-like players over here can make of it. Would this still work in a standard map with 8 civs? Can one move and raze fast enough to slow them all? How many bands of units are needed? Which unit mix, considering the very special mission? Up to what level? Can one do it without barbarians? I’d put up a monument for anyone capable of winning an exploit-free OCC in Civ6 in deity, especially now that the opposing civs build up somewhat of a military after the patches. Maybe by going religious, actually?
Are there any other practical OCC strategies at fair or higher difficulty levels?
Do tell, because playing like this takes dozens of hours per game. Not you old school OCC!
