I'm in minority of players who like to play 'optimally', without fooling around, roleplaying, etc.
Probably after few first 'test' games I will start to play in this way, so my question:
With one week to release, do anyone have any thoughts for possible optimal strategies for fastest finish times in Civ6?
I almost haven't watched any yt videos, or read previews, so right now I have only this thoughts:
- better have more cities than in Civ5
- ranged units still seem to be OP, so domination on Pangea with CBs and XBs
Any thoughts?
It's a bit too early to be honest. That forum will explose at release but right now.... we have youtube videos where almost nobody is playing optimally and it is very hard to test theories or the impact of some better coordination without testing it ourselves.
We also don't know what deity looks like at all.
That said there are indeed a few things that come up from this. What I say is mostly from a science victory perspective :
There are no similar mechanics to tradition. Meaning we can forget about making small empires to snowball to the end game. There are a few reasons :
1. No small empire policies etc. The most a small empire gets is cheaper districts but the advantage of this is doubtful considering you don't need to fill all your cities with a ton of districts. GPP points from districts scale with empire size so it's only natural to have some penalty for size due to the way higher production.
2. Housing is a hard limiter to growth. Sources of housing are plenty but you need to spend time building stuff to increase it. So far one of the earliest skills player will have to develop is to manage this house cap to make sure the food yields are not wasted (and there is a lot of food with hills no longer removing food yields). It's something that is as nasty localy as unhappiness in civ5 but in a more sneaky way. When I see players spending 40 turns house capped and shruging it off it means players still don't understand how poor play that is.
Making settlers (decrease pop) will help and later a good management of growth/buildings will be the key to success.
3. Science needs for late game techs is low compared to civ5. The reason is the absence of % modifiers to science meaning 150 science is good enough to tech end game techs in 12 turns. It matters because pop still give science (and culture) at the rate of 0.7 per pop. This means a huge chunk of science comes from population WITHOUT BUILDINGS. And without tech penalties it makes trying to get science from both growth and expansion the main way for teching. The other way to get science is from campuses and a few other bonuses.
4. Capturing cities let you keep a lot of it. The loss of pop, getting its districts and no courthouses make captured city a very good prospect for mid/late game addition to the empire.
Speaking of conquest we will have to see how the AI fights at higher difficulties but yes currently archers and crossbows have good capture potential. On the low difficulty presented in let's play you can safely win in very few turns with these.
Besides that, a lot of it will come from the synchronisation a player can achieve between eurekas, policies and making things useful for the empire.
Also right now trade is completely broken/buggy so here's hoping they'll fix it but if they fail to do that a lot of finishing fast will have to do with abusing trade.
For other victories :
-Domination will be your usual rushes with range units afaik. We'll see how higher AI defends.
-Culture is still a bit of a mistery to me but a lot of it still depends on your tech rate.
-Religion is about faith spam and will likely also be in the faster victories.
