Quick Questions and Answers

General Advices - If you only want counterplay advice for CV skip below:
As Zdarg pointed out, 350 - 425 turns is too much, rather than failing to prevent them from winning, you fail to win fast. As such it's hard to give specific advices since winning fast enough covers a lot and is based on what victory you're going for. For example, If you're going for Science Victory, the specific advices would be to spam cities, build Campus first, run Natural Philosophy and Rationalism cards, aim for wonders like Great Library and Oxford University. It's possible even these recommendations are not optimal so you would have to wait for someone who is actually decent at the game, which I am not, to give you something better.

However, I play Settler quite a lot when I want to mess around with stuff, so in my noobness I do feel like I can ironically give some advices for start. You will likely develop your own way different from mine, though, and it's highly likely none of this works beyond that difficulty, so some might probably argue it is best to not get bad customs that won't work.

On Settler If you don't go for Religion I would recommend making one tall city 10+ population. In that city get Pingala (the Governor) with all Promotions, Apadana (requires it to be Capital City, but If you can't make this all in there all you'll lose is Envoy dominance which isn't too bad), Kilwa Kisiwani (once again, If you have no coast not too bad to lose this), Oxford University, Broadway and Oracle. Anywhere else (If you can, still go for Capital) aim for Big Ben, Potala Palace and Forbidden City, though missing one of these won't be bad, it just makes things easier. Likewise, Casa de Contractión makes things faster even If you don't use 80% of its benefits, the 3 Governor Titles are good on their own.

The Potala Ben City tio give you +1 Economic, Diplomatic and Wildcard cards, which gives you huge bonuses. It doesn't matter in what city they are. Same for Casa. The others though are best stacked in one city with Pingala that grows high. Pingala will give you +1 Science and Culture per Pop, Apadana gives 2 Envoys for each Wonder built (build Oracle first, then Apadana for maximal effect, though AI doesn't focus on Oracle so you may pull out Apadana and then Oracle to cover each Wonder with 2 Envoys), this gives you dominance over City-States, If you are Souzerain of City-States, Kilwa gives great benefits to its city.

Kilwa's tooltip is confusing but it should allegedly work this way: If you are Souzerain of Scientific City-State this city gets +15% Science. If you are Souzerain of 2 or more Scientific City-States, each city gets +15% Science and this city gets additional +15% Science to what it already had. Combine Pingala (+15%), Broadway/Oxford (+20%), Kilwa with Souzeracy over 2 Scientific and Cultural City-States (+30%) and you may achieve something like 65% Science and Culture boost in the city. That alone gives you dominance of Technologies and Civics. With steps written below (the cards, plus Apadana plus Kilwa), you will also have diplomatic dominance. As such, you will mostly dictate the game, barring Religion and should be able to experiment with anything and win fast enough.

As for Government, go Classical Rep -> Merchant Rep -> Communism, as for cards, God King until you get Pnatheon, then Urban Planning until you get Corveé (for wonders), maintain Corveé. At first Government go for Increased Influence. If you haven't met any City State by that point, go for +1 Envoy at first Envoy into Increased Influence when you met at least half or more CSs. Go for Natural Philosophy, Rationalism, Aesthetics, Merchant Confederation when it comes to other cards. Harbor big amount of Gold and keep trying buying Great Works from others with generous offers. If they can accept offer, try lowering the Gold you give them to find the lowest they go. If you have useless tile adjacent to River, use it for Hermitage and then Orságh.

Once again, these advices are general paths to dominate Settler difficulty for testing stuff and winning fast enough. In higher difficulty, you can't focus so all over the place I suppose and you must wait for someone better to give better advice.

Counterplay:
So If all you want to know is how to practically prevent someone from winning CV - large amounts of Culture, taking Tourism If you can and winning fast enough. Spies don't do as much against CV unless you have good empowermnets and trust their stealing.

Culture Victory, when simplified, works like this (or at least I assume so): Each civ accumulates Lifetime Culture. Each civ accumulates Lifetime Tourism towards each other. This is mostly the same number except for specific modifiers like +25% Tourism towards civ you have Trade Route to etc. In order to win, your Lifetime Tourism must be higher than Lifetime Culture of each civ.

Let's imagine a game where Poland has all the time from the start 10 Culture per Turn. From Turn 10 onwards, you keep at all times 20 Tourism per Turn towards them. At Turn 10 Poland = 100 Culture; You = 0 Tourism. At Turn 15 Poland = 150 Culture; You = 100 Tourism. At Turn 20 Poland = 200 Culture; You = 200 Tourism. At Turn 21 Poland = 210 Culture; You = 220 Tourism. Do this with all other civs and you won.

To prevent that most reliably you must simply keep your Culture high. Less reliably, you must try to buy their Great Works which lowers their Tourism. They may try to ibvade you with Rock Bands. There's a card which gives you - Amenities but prevent them from entering your civ. From that point on it's just about winning sooner than they do.

EDIT: After all this is written though, I realized neither of us asked what Game Speed you're playing on, maybe it's not that late in the game relative to that?

 

Ironically, I was indeed Poland last night. I've won a science victory easily (Cree) & a cultural victory easily (Sweden). But last night I wasn't quite sure what direction I wanted to go, so around turn 150 I decided to go for score since I already has about 10 cities growing fast, one of which I took from Spain. I guess my problem is how it's possible to get a score victory if the games don't ever go to the end, even on Settler.

Great analysis, BTW. Also, I play on standard speed (500 turns).

 

Ah. Score victory. That's interesting question.
To get a score victory, you probably need to turn off all other victory types in game setup.
Or to reduce every opponent to one city, to stay in war with them permanently and permanently disrupt all their land with war units.
If you don't do either, you probably can't prevent a science victory, because you never have enough spies to ruin all their space districts, unless on very small maps, like duel.
However, you can prevent a culture victory, even against Greece, by producing huge amounts of culture and tourism yourself. Just have more cities than them, have a fully developed culture district in each, build seaside and ski resorts wherever it's possible and spend all your faith on rock bands.

 

I wanted to give you a quick answer.

Instead I wrote an entire guide (get on my level, Jeppetto):

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-basics-of-winning-in-civilization-vi.653968/

Then again, I've never been very good at short answers.

One note regarding score victory, if you don't feel up to reading that entire thing: Don't expect score victory to ever happen. It's mostly a backup for situations where no other victory occurs for some reason.

 

Yeah as I was writing the essay I though to myself 'He probably just needed one sentence simple answer like get more culture but alas I am already two paragraphs in', lol.

 

Rationalism gives +50% science from buildings in campuses with at least +3 adjacency. If I have a campus with +2 adjacency and have the Natural Philosophy civic in (+100% campus district adjacency), raising it to +4, do I get the rationalism bonus? Or is it only the base value that counts?

 

Thanks! The posts on these forums have been phenomenal.

I've had about 613 questions since I got the game for Christmas, and I've been able to answer about 610 of them on my own by searching around here.

 

From what I know of other interactions between adjacencies, I would think that yes, you would, but I don't know for sure. In this case, it might be best to simply try it out. Even if it doesn't work, those two policy cards are both very good by themselves.

If you have any more, feel free to ask!

 

Is it possible to make the game remember your last settings like in civ 5? I forget to change the difficulty every time and the AI are too easy too beat at prince.

 

Single player => Create game => Advanced setup => Save configuration

 

Thank you very much, I missed that option

 

how to make endless growth of borders? Is there any mod or need to change files?

 

If you don't find specific mod and don't mind messing with files in Base -> Assets -> Gameplay -> Data -> GlobalParameters.xml there's PLOT_INFLUENCE_MAX_ACQUIRE_DISTANCE entry that you can try setting on extremly high number. Never tested it that way tho, only decreasing it to 2.

 

Thank you. And how to make workers process all the cells within the city limits, not just within a three-cell radius?

 

Last time I asked this I was told it's hard-programmed so you can't change it. There's also this thread: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/increase-workable-tile-radius.611402/
But maybe something changed in two years or few months. I doubt tho.

 

Thank you.

 

Quick question about religious conversion and grievances:

1) If I convert an ally's city and refuse to agree to stop, that causes grievances. Will I accrue more grievances as I continue to convert their cities or is it just a one-time grievance penalty?

or...

2) If I do continue to convert their cities, will my grievances stay the same over time or will they lessen (even though I'm continuing to convert their cities)?

 

1: each next city that you convert will add extra grievances
2: all grievances, so also the ones caused by converting religion, lessen over time as long as you are not at war with someone

 

Thank you!

 

Situation: I have a ton of luxury resources that are giving me plenty of food, but there aren't a lot of good places for farms/farm triangles. I am researching the feudalism and still need two farms to boost it. Do I buy a builder and force a few farms in where I don't need them to save 5 turns or do I let it research on its own and save production cost for builders down the line?