[The Return to Nibiru] Diety turn <100 Science challenge

vans163

Chieftain
Joined
Oct 22, 2016
Messages
57
What do we know of this mysterious race that inhabited the Earth many tens of centuries ago? Historic records and carvings shows strange hieroglyphs of non-human looking beings that were very dangerous. Some old dug up texts detail the mysterious sicknesses that plagued entire villages and large glowing orange balls in the sky that could decimate mountains. Came, annihilated and gone were they. Right around the return of Nibiru in 200 B.C.

Rules are..
Win a Science Victory before turn 100

All default map settings. No Advanced Setup.

Map size: Small
Speed: Standard
Difficulty: Diety
Leader: Any
Map: Any, Pangaea probably is best.

Release for 64bit Windows.
Version of CivilizationVI.exe 1.0.0.26 (221715), md5 741f0427612f6065251b581e4ad3ff95
GameCore_Base_FinalRelease.dll, md5 3a586ab50518fb45aa116eb456cf86ae
Database_Win64_FinalRelease.dll, md5 c8e3d6c3aff5230c8582a5c5e1f31383
(In case anyone wants to try this challenge in the distant future)

Other rules include anything goes except for game mechanic changing mods (that stop achievements), memory editing and debug commands like reveal map.
You can obviously preview the map before playing it by using reveal all. Otherwise this challenge will be significantly more time consuming then it already is.

Final win must be the turn the project completes. So if it is turn 99 and you need to end turn to complete the last piece of the project, this is a turn 100 win.

Honourable mentions would be a win before the last return of Nibiru which would be before 200 BC.


Here is a map I completed on turn 99. I have the entire game streamed and its without constant reloading to get lucky. Do not want to spoil the challenge for others though.

Its one of the first maps I rolled, after trying to roll a better map in vain, went back to trying this one again.

Some tips..
A perfect start is imperative, by turn 36 you should be ready to chop horsemen, every extra turn wasted here fighting barbs or etc will remove 1 or more turns from your final time.

An ideal map will probably have a grassland woods/+hill spice or fox in the capital (the posted map does not). This can shave quite a few turns off the early game, snowballing catastrophically into late game.
An ideal map will probably have 2 science city states, close neighbours and a total of 2 horses within second city range.
 

Attachments

  • Diety-Try1-2-Turn99-425BC-WIN!.Civ6Save
    966.3 KB · Views: 424
  • Diety-Try1-Turn1.Civ6Save
    285.8 KB · Views: 344
Last edited:
Congrats! Sounds crazy to me to win before T100 :)
Is it possible to watch this game (you mentioned you streamed it) somewhere? Youtube?
 
Congrats! Sounds crazy to me to win before T100 :)
Is it possible to watch this game (you mentioned you streamed it) somewhere? Youtube?

It will be a huge spoiler to the puzzle, I think next week I can upload it thought, to give some others a chance to try this challenge that I thought was very interesting.

Also I need to edit the video as a few times I went afk for a few hours without stopping the recording.
 
This thread is pretty much the capstone for any future discussion about civ6 difficulty.

Impressive work getting your time to sub-100 though.
 
This certainly seems true of the Science Victory. The Culture Victory for one doesn't seem as straightforward from what I've heard of the potential issues with it.
 
You conquered pretty much everything, you built horsemen with the broken social politics for the +100% for cogs and sold it, you bought workers, you chopped everything to build districts, you bought all buildings, you bought every great personalities you needed for spacerace victory.

Pretty damn good
 
You need 59 technologies to win a science victory.
So 1.7 turns for a technology? How?
 
"reveal all" is a feature of a Civ VI debugger, as I understand it, that can be attached to the game to provide internal game information that players can't normally see. Use of a debugger for setting a record such as this one would be a violation of this challange. The OP did not use a debugger and neither should any one else competing in this challenge. The rules of this challenge in post #1 are quite clear.
 
by turn 36 you should be ready to chop horsemen, every extra turn wasted here fighting barbs or etc will remove 1 or more turns from your final time.
If the goal is the fastest science victory, all exploits allowed, then you probably picked the wrong bug to exploit.

I gave it a shot with Germany. No mods, no reloads, deity, normal speed, random AI, all normal settings (barbs enabled and so on), standard sized map (sorry, didn't see you said small map), just playing normally with whatever the game mechanics allow me to do. No map preview either, played the first map that gave me an early relic.

I'm not sure if I'll play it out to the end since this is pretty ridiculous (though somehow also quite funny :lol:), but here's my situation turn 30, 2840 BC:
Spoiler :

-33 cities
-14 campuses with libraries and universities, obviously boosted by Hypatia and Newton. The rest of the cities should have their campuses up in a couple of turns.
-About 10 commercial hubs built and 2 completed hansas. All cities have these placed, should be completed everywhere pretty soon.
-317 science/turn, 113 culture/turn. Culture should be closer to 150, but I made a really stupid mistake and picked the wrong pantheon...

The plan was to play everything peacefully, but Roosevelt disagreed and declared on me a couple of turns ago, so he is dead by now. Other than that I've only been fighting barbs.

Industrialization is there mainly to show where I'm at in the tech tree, will tech something else in between and 1 turn it next turn with the eureka. I have a few settlers out, but should probably buy a bunch more immediately. Maybe 10-15 cities more would be okay. I really don't need the commercial hubs, not sure why I built them... Once campuses and Hansas are up, I'd mainly build the research grants for more science. I suppose it could be possible to one turn every tech from here on, which would result in about a t77 victory.
 
Last edited:
I'm guessing either the trade bug lets you get way more GPT than the AI is willing to offer... or it's being combined with the subsidized trading. The subsidized trading exploit works by:

  • Give the AI a lot of GPT
  • Now that the AI has a lot of GPT, you can trade to have it give you a lot of GPT
  • Find a way to cancel the original GPT deal

IIRC, in Civ 4 you could cancel the original deal by making bundling it with a resource. If you remove access to the resource so that you can no longer give it in trade, the deal gets cancelled.

(disclaimer: I don't know if this trick actually works in Civ 6; I'm just speculating)
 
Last edited:
Yup, trade bug it is. If you have any object to sell, such as a relic, then as soon as you meet an AI you can get infinite gold. You can do a lot of things with infinite gold.

Subsidizing is very different in Civ VI, as it appears the AI isn't actually paying the money you receive in trade deals. If I gift an AI 5000 gold/turn, then I can trade for that 5000 gold/turn over and over again. And even if I do this 10 times so that they pay me 50000 gold/turn, the AI's gold reserves keep increasing by 5000 gold every turn.

I played a few turns more. Turn 37 I just got my research labs up, I'm above 1100 science/turn and this is before enlightenment. I think I overdid it a bit... Culture is at about 300/turn. I could raise culture a lot buy chopping theater squares and buying every Great Artist in the game, but I wouldn't want to trigger an accidental cultural victory. Since it's only t37, not many tourists are needed. Not that it really matters, my science is already so high that no tech will take longer than 1 turn.

The new estimate for victory would be sometimes around t70. It depends a bit on a few mechanics I'm not yet quite sure about how they work. I'd say this exploit could possibly get you even a t60 science victory, if you didn't make all the mistakes I've made and also met the first AI a bit earlier. I didn't meet the first AI until t10.
 
Yup, trade bug it is. If you have any object to sell, such as a relic, then as soon as you meet an AI you can get infinite gold. You can do a lot of things with infinite gold.

Subsidizing is very different in Civ VI, as it appears the AI isn't actually paying the money you receive in trade deals. If I gift an AI 5000 gold/turn, then I can trade for that 5000 gold/turn over and over again. And even if I do this 10 times so that they pay me 50000 gold/turn, the AI's gold reserves keep increasing by 5000 gold every turn.

I played a few turns more. Turn 37 I just got my research labs up, I'm above 1100 science/turn and this is before enlightenment. I think I overdid it a bit... Culture is at about 300/turn. I could raise culture a lot buy chopping theater squares and buying every Great Artist in the game, but I wouldn't want to trigger an accidental cultural victory. Since it's only t37, not many tourists are needed. Not that it really matters, my science is already so high that no tech will take longer than 1 turn.

The new estimate for victory would be sometimes around t70. It depends a bit on a few mechanics I'm not yet quite sure about how they work. I'd say this exploit could possibly get you even a t60 science victory, if you didn't make all the mistakes I've made and also met the first AI a bit earlier. I didn't meet the first AI until t10.

Damn amazing!

About the science, you use the GS (total of 3) that pop for beakers, they can complete a max of 4 techs each. Trick is to en-queue the techs in the techtree b4 the pop. So you get 12 techs off the table via 3 scientists. Then 2 more with oxford depending on luck and early game. 4 techs (archery, astrology, celestial navigation, pikemantech) are useless towards science win, if oxford pop them you kinda lose out.

And spot on about the chop overflow for districts + sell the dying from combat horsemen to buy obelisks + settlers + builders. Ignore housing/food completely , grow to size 2, chop a marsh/fish/wheat to grow to pop 4.

I found pivotal point is how fast you can hit entertainment/drama and then civil service (huge culture boost +1 per district) and then ofc once you hit enlightenment it should be endgame. If I had culture city states id probably build all theaters + work the ampitheare. In that game I had all science so I went pure campuses asap then theathre were i could (+4 science for +3 envoys to two science states). I think the key benchmark is how fast can you hit entertainment (coloseum +16-18 culture if it hits many cities) then civil service. Great artists this early are too expensive even on a horse economy.

Posting a replay seems redundant now as elitetroops came in way ahead! Ask them for replay.


If you can get infinite gold once meeting first civ, and it involves tons of clicking, I should make that a mod. So it hopefully prevents someone from carpal tunnel.

I think I can think of a good way to get a faster time, itl involve using germany or greece (for culture) buy war units every turn send them all ways. Youl be limited here by how slow your warunits + settlers + workers are moving lol.

Sumeria with warcarts might be a candidate if it means you can shave off 5-10 turns b4 conquering your first neighbor.
 
Last edited:
About the science, you use the GS (total of 3) that pop for beakers, they can complete a max of 4 techs each. Trick is to en-queue the techs in the techtree b4 the pop. So you get 12 techs off the table via 3 scientists. Then 2 more with oxford depending on luck and early game. 4 techs (archery, astrology, celestial navigation, pikemantech) are useless towards science win, if oxford pop them you kinda lose out.
Thanks! This was the part I was unsure of. I was hoping that I could get even more techs than that, but if it's only 4, it'll delay the victory date a bit. Unfortunately I used Galileo early to get to edu and also the natural wonder guy for 3 techs at some point later. I realized this mistake when it became clear that I don't need to beeline any key techs at all. Once you get to a certain point, which you can get very fast with infinite gold, you don't need to beeline any techs. The most important part is to keep teching one tech/turn, doesn't matter much in what direction you are heading. The only bottleneck is the one tech/turn restriction. All those scientists that give many techs should definitely be used for max number of techs.

I'm now thinking that it could be a good idea to use them quite early (with infinite gold you can buy them whenever), because this increases chop yields. The most efficient form of production is chopping mounted units and using the overflow to build whatever you want to build, but this doesn't really become efficient until chop yields are high enough to make up for the production wasted on the heavy chariot.

Getting the amounts of gold requires a bit of clicking at first, since they don't have that much to trade when you meet. Basically you sell them the relic for everything they've got, then buy it back much cheaper, and repeat. When I first met Trajan he had 16 gpt to offer and always sold the relic back for 1 gold. But once you've sold it a couple of times, you can gift the AI more gpt, which increases what you get with every trade. Pretty fast you can get to 500-1000 gpt trades, and you don't need that much early as there's a limited amount of stuff to buy. Unless, of course, you want all the great people immediately.

You don't really need war units. You can buy the cities from the AI. If you have enough gpt available for trade (500-3000 depending on the city), they'll sell you their cities for as low as 1 gpt. Put one of their cities on the table, ask what they want for it, reduce the amount until they don't accept it anymore, ask what would make the deal more equitable and they give you some ridiculously low price. Or just pay them the high price they ask for and trade the relic to them a few times to get your money back with interest. Fast scouting units are good to meet all the AI as fast as possible and get their free deity bonus cities. You can't buy the capitals, but once you've bought the rest of their cities, you can buy units in those to take out the capitals, if you wish.

Other than that, it's basically mass settler buying early. I think 30-40 cities is good. As soon as a city is settled, buy a builder, monument, granary and watermill if available. I'm now thinking keep buying one builder/turn in every city, except when they reach pop 2 you buy a settler. Chop the campuses as fast as possible. I was saving a bit of forests, but this was totally unnecessary. You don't need any other districts than campuses, and you need them fast to get to 1 tech/turn. There's plenty of time to get Industrial zones up in time for spaceport build. Except that you could also just chop that.

I must admit, vans163, that when I first read about your t99 win I thought you were abusing the trading exploit as well. However, now when I see how powerful it is, I can tell you weren't. That makes your result far more impressive! Very well done! :goodjob:
 
Last edited:
Thanks! This was the part I was unsure of. I was hoping that I could get even more techs than that, but if it's only 4, it'll delay the victory date a bit. Unfortunately I used Galileo early to get to edu and also the natural wonder guy for 3 techs at some point later. I realized this mistake when it became clear that I don't need to beeline any key techs at all. Once you get to a certain point, which you can get very fast with infinite gold, you don't need to beeline any techs. The most important part is to keep teching one tech/turn, doesn't matter much in what direction you are heading. The only bottleneck is the one tech/turn restriction. All those scientists that give many techs should definitely be used for max number of techs.

Exactly, I find you should beeline education, Appreticeship is imba as well, with +2 sci uni and +3 sci uni GS's thiel make TONS of science before enlightenment. At the point you complete Education if you eureka every tech, you should be able to do 1 tech per turn. This is the hardest part of the game I found. A small mistake here and missing a eureka on time is -1 turns from final time. If the cities work 2 mines (4 hammer mines), I find the overflow hammers can build 1 horseman a turn and eventually a free district.

I'm now thinking that it could be a good idea to use them quite early (with infinite gold you can buy them whenever), because this increases chop yields. The most efficient form of production is chopping mounted units and using the overflow to build whatever you want to build, but this doesn't really become efficient until chop yields are high enough to make up for the production wasted on the heavy chariot.

I found if you wait until the unit has like 78/80 hammers then chop, you get that extra much needed overflow. Later on its useless, but early on it makes a huge difference. Also the God of the Forge pantheon is key I find (25% hammers to units), the way the % stacks seems to make that 25% seem as good as another 100% towards overflow. At least it feels significant.

Getting the amounts of gold requires a bit of clicking at first, since they don't have that much to trade when you meet. Basically you sell them the relic for everything they've got, then buy it back much cheaper, and repeat. When I first met Trajan he had 16 gpt to offer and always sold the relic back for 1 gold. But once you've sold it a couple of times, you can gift the AI more gpt, which increases what you get with every trade. Pretty fast you can get to 500-1000 gpt trades, and you don't need that much early as there's a limited amount of stuff to buy. Unless, of course, you want all the great people immediately.

How do you get a relic to begin with? One game I had a relic, somehow I got it, no idea how. Guessing relic can be substituted with great work of art?

You don't really need war units. You can buy the cities from the AI. If you have enough gpt available for trade (500-3000 depending on the city), they'll sell you their cities for as low as 1 gpt. Put one of their cities on the table, ask what they want for it, reduce the amount until they don't accept it anymore, ask what would make the deal more equitable and they give you some ridiculously low price. Or just pay them the high price they ask for and trade the relic to them a few times to get your money back with interest. Fast scouting units are good to meet all the AI as fast as possible and get their free deity bonus cities. You can't buy the capitals, but once you've bought the rest of their cities, you can buy units in those to take out the capitals, if you wish.

This is really interesting, then the goal becomes meet AI asap.

Other than that, it's basically mass settler buying early. I think 30-40 cities is good. As soon as a city is settled, buy a builder, monument, granary and watermill if available. I'm now thinking keep buying one builder/turn in every city, except when they reach pop 2 you buy a settler. Chop the campuses as fast as possible. I was saving a bit of forests, but this was totally unnecessary. You don't need any other districts than campuses, and you need them fast to get to 1 tech/turn. There's plenty of time to get Industrial zones up in time for spaceport build. Except that you could also just chop that.

You don't need industrial zones. 100% hammer scientist, 100% hammer engineer, 3k hammer scientist now completes 3 projects lol. You just need culture ASAP to get enlightment (and all policy b4 enlightgment that boost culture to get enlightment faster), with a few policy for +1 envoy if needed here and there. Maybe with 40+ cities you can skip enlightenment actually. Then you don't need culture at all! Since you can easily eureka all tech renaissance and above (random eureka scientist does not eureka an already eurekad tech, so you should plan these). Making you need like.. 750~ science tops to do 1 tech per turn.

Keep a few forest around to chop oxford/etc. I would buy 1 builder a turn just to save the 4+ turns itl take the builder to walk to the forest lol. If gold is infinite I would buy 1 builder per tile to improve/chop, then just sleep the builder until time was right.

I find sometimes something weird happens and you lose all your beaker overflow.

The key breakpoint I find is how quickly can you pop 1 tech per turn.

Is it science/tech that increases chops or amount of cities + districts?
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom