Sluggish starts...

[Linklite]

I'm struggling with what feels like slow starts. I read somewhere that they aimed to have 10 cities by turn 100, but I can never get even close to that...I think the best I've had is 6, and that was in ideal an situation. If I have wars, it takes much longer.

I was wondering, what does your early development look like, what would you consider "slow", "normal" and "fast"? Just so I can judge whether I'm setting realistic expectations, or if I'm just really slow.

What tips do you have to get things moving faster? What focuses and build orders do you go for? What milestones do you set?

Looking forward to the responses.

 

[AntSou]

What does "qp by turn 100" mean? Did you press q instead of 1 and p instead of 0?

What difficulty are you in? Map size?

Spamming settlers isn't particularly hard, though I usually don't stress it once I'm at around 6 to 8.

On Standard speed I'll get my first Settler fairly early, usually second or third pic, unless something pretty bad happens. Most of the rest you can then spam by having any combination of Magnus/Ancestors Hall/ Policy card which speeds settler production by 50%.

A quick way to get tons of settlers is to choose the Golden Age dedication which lets you buy civilian units with faith.

On higher difficulties (particularly Deity) it may be easier rather than harder to get a lot of early cities. AI often miscalculates its strength, declares surprise war on you, throws all its catapults against your walled cities, then you just have to basically walk in and capture theirs. Bam, you just tripled your size.

 

[Linklite]

What does "qp by turn 100" mean? Did you press q instead of 1 and p instead of 0?

What difficulty are you in? Map size?

Spamming settlers isn't particularly hard, though I usually don't stress it once I'm at around 6 to 8.

On Standard speed I'll get my first Settler fairly early, usually second or third pic, unless something pretty bad happens. Most of the rest you can then spam by having any combination of Magnus/Ancestors Hall/ Policy card which speeds settler production by 50%.

A quick way to get tons of settlers is to choose the Golden Age dedication which lets you buy civilian units with faith.

On higher difficulties (particularly Deity) it may be easier rather than harder to get a lot of early cities. AI often miscalculates its strength, declares surprise war on you, throws all its catapults against your walled cities, then you just have to basically walk in and capture theirs. Bam, you just tripled your size.

Sorry, I was on my tablet, and typing on that thing is terrible. Dealing with my child meant I didn't check before posting! I've corrected the post now, but yes, 10 cities by 100.

I keep the preset speed which is standard, I believe. I'm not very good, so I keep it on the easier settings. Makes sense what you said, that Deity is more likely to attack without
prep so it opens them up. In terms of map size, I either go for TSL Earth which dictates the size (standard, I think?) Or if I'm going for generated maps, usually I go for one of the largest, probably huge.

 

[CrabHelmet]

My build order tends to be Warrior -> Warrior -> Settler on Deity these days - I worked out I don't get enough tribal villages to justify going Scout rather than Warrior first, and Barbarians are so aggressive the extra Warrior has made a real difference. Usually I'll immediately follow up the Settler with a second Settler. Then I tend to pause a bit until Magnus.

 

[Basajaun]

Sometimes the terrain is against you and you spawn in a poor corner with no city states in sight to help you with early progress... Its an aggresive settling approach, unlocking and building government plaza as soon as possible with the ancestral hall (50%+ settler prod. in that city), the use of the +50% settler prod. card and using Magnus to boost the value of chopping by another 50%. Usually you begin building the first settler as soon as the capital reaches 2 pop, even interrupting any other build you might have in progress.

Something like: Scout/Slinger/Builder (depending if you have resources you can improve immediately), then 1 Settler, or 2 if its a particularly productive start, sneak in a warrior or slinger, a builder if you havent built one yet, and another settler or monument, depending on the lands and neighbors you have discovered. By that time you should have unlocked the government plaza, so you build it as soon as possible, and the ancestral hall after that, which will give any new city a free builder, helping you accelerate the process like this:
Setlle, use the builder to chop for example some tile with rainforest or food tile that you are planning to replace with a district (forcing it to grow), and another feature like woods to get instant production towards another settler in that same city.

To avoid getting declared war by the ai (because that much aggresive settling and hardly any military is going to piss them off for sure) check relations with ai and sell/gift resources you might not need yet in the first turns. Like some amenity when your city is new enough that the bonus yields from it barely make a difference. If you manage to befriend them, you have 30 turns to finish settling you last "first" cities of the early game, and prepare for war or develop infrastructure depending on how your relations have developed.

Or... settle 3 cities, build military, go to war and take a neighbor or two.

Personally I prefer the first approach, although I admit I rarely use magnus for the chop bonus, usually just for the settler not reducing pop.

 

[AntSou]

Sorry, I was on my tablet, and typing on that thing is terrible. Dealing with my child meant I didn't check before posting! I've corrected the post now, but yes, 10 cities by 100.

I keep the preset speed which is standard, I believe. I'm not very good, so I keep it on the easier settings. Makes sense what you said, that Deity is more likely to attack without
prep so it opens them up. In terms of map size, I either go for TSL Earth which dictates the size (standard, I think?) Or if I'm going for generated maps, usually I go for one of the largest, probably huge.

Are you winning games? I would only worry about this if you're struggling.

So:

- 1 Settler preferably as 2nd to 4th choice. This should be manageable most of the time. Occasionally you'll get assaulted by Barbarians, and Horsemen are particularly dangerous. If it isn't safe, don't build the Settler. It will just sit in your capital unable to move.

- Early Empire, which is one of the two Civics which lead to Political Philosophy, unlocks a Policy card which cuts Settler build speed by 50%. State Workforce, which is the other Civic leading to Political Philosophy, unlocks the Government Plaza. You can use this to give Magnus the Provision promotion, which means you don't lose Population when building Settlers in that city. Sometimes you might want to go with Pingala first. On very rare occasions maybe even one of the other Governors. Point is, Magnus is pretty good, but don't stress it, especially on lower difficulties.

So 50% discount from the Policy Card AND/OR Ancestrals Hall in the Government Plaza can speed up Settler production considerably. Later, if you have a lot of Faith output, you can use the Golden Age dedication to maniacally spam settlers.

Again, I wouldn't worry too much unless you're losing. But those are the main tools for quick Settlers early on...

Also you can just take cities from other Civs/City-States. It's super effective.

 

[Hans Castorp]

I think it you are playing on the easier difficulties you can afford to relax a bit more, as it is rare for the AI to be anywhere near that many cities by turn 100. With 10 cities at turn 100 on anything below king you would wipe the floor with them in double-quick time. On TSL standard, it is very easy to get a Classical golden age if you start in Europe, Asia or Africa, because the goody huts and wonders are abundant, and you generally know where to look. It is slightly trickier, but still doable in the Americas - somewhat harder for island starts. But a classical Monumentality golden age and a decent faith pantheon/ holy site will set you up quite nicely for settlers.

Of course, if you want to cheat, there are a few ways to bag 1 or 2 free settlers at the start on TSL, by setting up duplicate civs, or picking near neighbours. England, India, Egypt, Arabia, France, Netherlands and Germany can all benefit from this, but the most ridiculous has to be Pericles, since you can start with Alexander and Gorgo right next to you, with both of them easily captured in turns 1-2. Above King, they have too many settlers to catch, but so long as they only have one settler and you declare war before settling your capital, they are yours for the taking... With that start you can have twenty cities by turn 100 if you want, though you may feel bad for doing it...

 

[Deadly Dog]

Certain pantheons (if Religious Settlements is unavailable), in the right conditions, can help you set up a settler factory. Goddess of the Hunt is particularly sweet if you have 3-4 camps you can work. I made it work for Kupe choosing God of the Sea, though it was a very rare start that I had 5 turtle reefs in my capital.
With latest patch volcanic soil tiles are great. Any early city that can grow and provide cogs is a good choice for the GP and Ancestral hall.

 

[Alashiya]

This is by far the weakest point of my game one Id like to rectify

Currently, I'm using the following (on King Level)

Science: Pottery > Writing
Civics: Code of Laws > Foreign trade > Early Empire > State Workforce > Political Philosopy
Build Order: Scout > Worker > Slinger> Archer asap

If left to my own devices I tend to avoid warmongering unless defensive and go for a Scientific / Diplomatic style of play

 

[Archon_Wing]

m struggling with what feels like slow starts. I read somewhere that they aimed to have 10 cities by turn 100, but I can never get even close to that...I think the best I've had is 6, and that was in ideal an situation. If I have wars, it takes much longer.

Benchmarks are for ideal situations; it is the upper limit of what you can expect, but as you've observed, it's not always possible. If you have 10 cities @ turn 100 on normal size/speed, you've already won the game, regardless of difficulty level assuming you can hold the cities.

You generally really want that min +2 food/+2 production tiles to work in your capital at the start and sell your first luxury to whatever AI you meet (this gets easier as difficulty increases because more gold. Get 3 cities with minimal army to boost early Empire (sometimes 2 works), and then get Political Philosophy/Ancestral Hall to spam out the rest. Reaching Political Philosophy is key here, though from experience getting more than 3 cities before it doesn't seem to help much; better players may disagree.

If you're ending up with 6 cities after conquest, that's probably because you're playing on a lower difficulty level and can't inflate your stats. That's just the nature of the game itself; higher level AI has more (and better) cities to take. It's also possible your wars are inefficient (not chopping out or upgrading units, and hardbuilding them so it's too slow)

 

[Vizurok]

This is by far the weakest point of my game one Id like to rectify

Currently, I'm using the following (on King Level)

Science: Pottery > Writing
Civics: Code of Laws > Foreign trade > Early Empire > State Workforce > Political Philosopy
Build Order: Scout > Worker > Slinger> Archer asap

If left to my own devices I tend to avoid warmongering unless defensive and go for a Scientific / Diplomatic style of play

Civics do not really provide you with leg room, so getting to PP as soon is possible is the only viable way to go. You should try to focus on getting the maximum out of the boosts which means that you should definitely switch civics when necessary. Ideally, you should be able to get all Ancient Era boosts and reach PP by turn 55 - 60.

The Pottery - Writing line is just fine, it allows for an early Campus for extra Science and the State Workforce boost. However, you should consider mixing in Mining, especially if there are mineable resources in the vicinity.

The most critical issue for me seems to be your build order: if you get a Builder by turn 10, it's unlikely that you can use it efficiently as you won't have the techs for improvements. Obviously, you can create farms but apart from the Irrigation Eureka, you should not waste Builder chargers for 1 extra food per tile. I would suggest to simply substitute the Builder with a Settler - getting a very early second city definitely quickstarts your expansion. You can use your Scout to continue exploration and use your initial Warrior for defending the Settler. (Quite often, you won't get to Pop level 2 when you finish your Scout - do start something else [for example the Slinger], and switch to Settler after the city has grown).

Obviously, neither of these suggestions are much more than a general rule of thumb, but I think that following these ideas could considerately help you in the early game.

 

[Linklite]

Thanks everyone for your input, I'll adapt my style to try the things suggested!

Are you winning games? I would only worry about this if you're struggling.

Depends on how you define struggling, I guess. I win the majority of the time, mostly because I like to play the long game (just my personality, I like to play to build my civilisation, which happens to lend itself to winning in the long run). Its not that I'm losing per se, but I'd like to play higher difficulties, but feel like this should be a cakewalk, when it isn't. It's possible that I'm just overestimating the difference in difficulty, but I just want to improve my game, so I don't just get whipped when I turn up the difficulty.

It's also possible your wars are inefficient (not chopping out or upgrading units, and hardbuilding them so it's too slow)

This is part of it. Partly I don't like chopping because it feels like I'm losing out on resources in the long run, although I'm coming around. I'm trying to build by buying with gold, but by the time I get Commercials set up, and I have enough gold to buy stuff, it's already quite a way into the game. Maybe I just need to chop a lot more.

 

[Alashiya]

Civics do not really provide you with leg room, so getting to PP as soon is possible is the only viable way to go. You should try to focus on getting the maximum out of the boosts which means that you should definitely switch civics when necessary. Ideally, you should be able to get all Ancient Era boosts and reach PP by turn 55 - 60.

The Pottery - Writing line is just fine, it allows for an early Campus for extra Science and the State Workforce boost. However, you should consider mixing in Mining, especially if there are mineable resources in the vicinity.

The most critical issue for me seems to be your build order: if you get a Builder by turn 10, it's unlikely that you can use it efficiently as you won't have the techs for improvements. Obviously, you can create farms but apart from the Irrigation Eureka, you should not waste Builder chargers for 1 extra food per tile. I would suggest to simply substitute the Builder with a Settler - getting a very early second city definitely quickstarts your expansion. You can use your Scout to continue exploration and use your initial Warrior for defending the Settler. (Quite often, you won't get to Pop level 2 when you finish your Scout - do start something else [for example the Slinger], and switch to Settler after the city has grown). - thanks I'm taking this on board!

Obviously, neither of these suggestions are much more than a general rule of thumb, but I think that following these ideas could considerately help you in the early game.

mines a kind of generic initial list not civ specific (so Canada would have a different research order to Phoenicia)

 

[Basajaun]

This is part of it. Partly I don't like chopping because it feels like I'm losing out on resources in the long run, although I'm coming around. I'm trying to build by buying with gold, but by the time I get Commercials set up, and I have enough gold to buy stuff, it's already quite a way into the game. Maybe I just need to chop a lot more.

Dont loose sleep over it. Higher difficulties just limit your choices the higher you go. If you enjoy playing Prince because it lets you build and relax, thats fine. I can beat deity if I want to, but I feel like I am forced to deviate too much from my usual gamestyle (which is pretty much like your "build a pretty empire" approach), and stick to King in most of my games, and build whatever I want.
However I must say, that using the same approach, playing the Maya, and apocalypse mode, have taught me to be better at my kind of game. Any city they found/conquer is housing capped from the start, which is compensated with 1 housing farms forcing a massive use of builders. Double down for apocalypse mode because your tiles and buildings are getting wrecked by disasters all the time.

I would worry more about paying attention to your policy cards and trying to make an efficient use out of them. As in; pick the builder production bonus card, make 1 builder in every city that isnt busy with something critical. Or use the military prod card to boost the trainig of 5 units simultaneously, instead of having a single city spitting all your military which would take much longer.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

first, I have done a write up for fast expansion which you can check out here:

Civ VI early game guide for the Decidedly Average (feedback welcome!)

What does "qp by turn 100" mean? Did you press q instead of 1 and p instead of 0?

What difficulty are you in? Map size?

Spamming settlers isn't particularly hard, though I usually don't stress it once I'm at around 6 to 8.

Idk dude I think it's pretty hard. Took me around 100 hours of training to consistently have 20 cities by T100. I still can't consistently capture a neighbor before t50, even tho it works in most games. 10 cities by t100 of course isn't that difficult, but still not all players can do it, it's by no means ezpz for a new player.

I'm struggling with what feels like slow starts. I read somewhere that they aimed to have 10 cities by turn 100, but I can never get even close to that...I think the best I've had is 6, and that was in ideal an situation. If I have wars, it takes much longer.

I was wondering, what does your early development look like, what would you consider "slow", "normal" and "fast"? Just so I can judge whether I'm setting realistic expectations, or if I'm just really slow.

What tips do you have to get things moving faster? What focuses and build orders do you go for? What milestones do you set?

Looking forward to the responses.

Early scouting is key. You need to know your land in order to decide who you want to forward settle, where you want to close, which spots you want to reserve. A single scout/warrior can block an enemy settler forever (or just take him).

Settler should be your 2nd or 3rd build. You want 3 cities as soon as humanly possible, so they can grow to 2 pop until you have Early Empire. You want to get maximum use out of your +50% settler policy card, so build settlers in all 3 beginning cities. If you can get the settler pantheon even better.

Use Magnus and the policy card and provision together for maximum efficiency chops in your capital. The fastest expansion is Early Empire rush. Ancestral Hall is quite strong, too, but will delay expansion significantly.

10 cities by t100 is not really ideal, I'd say 20 cities by t100 is, but it depends on many factors. I've managed more than 20 in games where I conquered 1 neighbor. Having 15 well developed cities is much better than having 20 mediocre cities, imho. By t100 you want some of your cities to be well developed already, because you want to be making decent science/culture per turn.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

To get 9 settlers, you need to invest a total of 1800 production or its equivalent in gold or faith. To get 19 settlers it jump all way to 6650 production or 3.7 times more expensive to get 19 settlers than getting 9 settlers.

In terms of production you need 18 production per turn to build 9 settlers in 100 turns and 65,5 to build 19 settlers in 100 turns. So yes getting 20 cities in 100 turns, Assuming they must be built by us is much harder than getting 10 cities.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

To get 9 settlers, you need to invest a total of 1800 production or its equivalent in gold or faith. To get 19 settlers it jump all way to 6650 production or 3.7 times more expensive to get 19 settlers than getting 9 settlers.

In terms of production you need 18 production per turn to build 9 settlers in 100 turns and 65,5 to build 19 settlers in 100 turns. So yes getting 20 cities in 100 turns, Assuming they must be built by us is much harder than getting 10 cities.

Exactly, you make an excellent argument. For the same reason, I have found, it is strictly not worth to build much more than 20 settlers. If you want more than 20 cities, you should conquer, loyalty flip, or steal settlers. Settler production cost escalates very fast and positive modifiers only do so much for ya.

Most ideal is to conquer 5 or 6 cities, steal 1 or 2 settlers and build the remaining 14-12 settlers with the policy card and magnus chops. Of course that is not always possible. It needs to be clearly stated that building/buing settlers is just not worth at a certain point, building military is strictly better.

That being said, settling 20 cities (without conquering or stealing settlers) is not impossible even on standard maps.

A more realistic goal however would be to settle 10 cities by t100 and get at least 5 cities through other means. This way your production is used much better!

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Here you can see the price of each settler up to 20th: 80 + 110 + 140 + 170 + 200 + 230 + 260 + 290 + 320 + 350 + 380 + 410 + 440 + 470 + 500 + 530 + 560 + 590 + 620 + 650 = 7300

 

[AntSou]

Idk dude I think it's pretty hard. Took me around 100 hours of training to consistently have 20 cities by T100. I still can't consistently capture a neighbor before t50, even tho it works in most games. 10 cities by t100 of course isn't that difficult, but still not all players can do it, it's by no means ezpz for a new player.

Literally nobody out of a 1% is trying to get 20 cities within 100 turns. I know I haven't ever bothered with it. He's playing on easier difficulties, standard to huge maps, and only aiming for 10 cities. It's perfectly achievable.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Literally nobody out of a 1% is trying to get 20 cities within 100 turns. I know I haven't ever bothered with it. He's playing on easier difficulties, standard to huge maps, and only aiming for 10 cities. It's perfectly achievable.

But "achievable" doesn't mean easy. 30 cities by t100 is also achievable. My point was that even 10 cities by t100 might not be "easy" for a newer player, (as OP states clearly, he struggles with it) and telling them "that's super easy" isn't really helpful, y'know?

Here you can see the price of each settler up to 20th: 80 + 110 + 140 + 170 + 200 + 230 + 260 + 290 + 320 + 350 + 380 + 410 + 440 + 470 + 500 + 530 + 560 + 590 + 620 + 650 = 7300

Thank you. I think after you build your 15th settler the cost gets really bad (because production in your cities does not grow in a linear fashion, there is a mid-game slump of production until you get to Industrialization imho.