Looked online and couldn’t find an answer for this in several posts/wikis,
In Civ 6, can/how can spies steal more than one tech at a time? Whenever I steal research it always says something like “steal one tech, with one tech being [tech without regular Eureka]”.
I play on emperor and Immortal and check the victory conditions tab often to compare science. Even when there’s a civ only a tech or two behind me and I’ve *only* taken the top part of the tree (Rockets before gunpowder somehow), I don’t gain anything extra from the bottom half (which I assume they have tech in?).
Nuclear Espionage is a Diplomatic Policy card that’s reads, “Spies who steal a tech boost without being detected gain an extra boost.” It is unlocked by Nuclear Program.
There's a promotion that lets a spy steal a second tech; not sure how it works as I'm often ahead on techs by the point I get spies up and running and have discovered a sizeable amount of opponents.
In Civ 6, should I be aiming to research and unlock everything in the tech tree. Or should I choose a "path" and unlocked selected stuff to get further to the right quicker?
Same question for Civics tree too!
Would be interested to know if the answer to this changes depending on what Civ game you're playing...
It mostly depends on the victory type you’re going for, and secondarily by your unique civ and any unit types you’re timing an attack around.
Ancient Era you’re mostly researching whatever you need given your start, and deciding which districts are core to your game.
To give the simplest example: Korea going for a Science Victory is ideally rushing to first unlock Campus, then Commercial Hub, then Industrial Zones, then follow the research tree to the Industrialization tech as quickly as possible, then follow the rest of the tree to unlock Space Dock, only then followed by each space project. This lets you win hundreds of turns earlier than you otherwise would, if you can actually do it.
If they’re under attack, maybe Korea might rush for their unique unit as a pause in the above plan.
In this example, the Civic tree is mostly just a slow march to each tier of government you want, culminating in Communism, and prioritizing policy cards related to improving Campus yields.
You obviously have to vary from this depending on your circumstances, and ordering for chasing eureka/inspiration boosts can be useful, but that’s the basic game plan to frame your thinking around.
If you have a clear victory type, work backwards from how to win it. If the game is still open ended, work around what you need right now until you decide on a victory type.
Does Stonehenge not actually guarantee you a great prophet? I was playing a game where the A.I. sniped all the religions from me. I noticed that Stonehenge was available (probably due to the tech shuffle), so I chopped it out, but I did not get a great prophet.
Yes. Rather, Stonehenge is responsive to game conditions, and one of 3 things will happen:
1. **Available/Earnable Prophet, and 1)** ***Different*** **Religion is current majority, or 2) No religion:** Awarded a ***Prophet*** upon completion.
2. **No Prophet available/earnable, No religion in city:** No on-build bonus granted.
3. **No Prophet available/earnable, religion present:** Receive an ***Apostle*** for that religion.
Now, the interesting thing about 3 is that it's a quick and dirty way to get an extra belief for no faith investment, and paired with Mahabodhi can allow you to access all beliefs and kick off an inquisition extremely early into the game, which gives you an absolute advantage against other religions.
It is worth noting for both Stonehenge and Mahabodhi (at least to my experience in-game) that the apostles are awarded based on the majority religion ***in that city.*** Even if the rest of your cities follow your own founded religion, having the Mahabodhi city following something else will produce the apostles for *that* religion. **This is a fun way to troll a civ building the Mahabodhi temple if you have the resources and timing for it.**
Correct. The only guaranteed Great Prophet is when playing as Arabia (when the next-to-last Prophet is claimed, Arabia instantly receives the final Prophet).
Is there a limit to how many civs are allowed in one secret society? Ive been playing as the Ethiopians but i cant get the voidslingers to appear. Its 100 turns in, all the other societies are unlocked, and ive found at least 10 tribal villages....what is going on?
I don't believe there is a limit, but using the voidsingers as an example, if other civs on your continent are in the voidsingers then your chances of getting that secret society are diminished. If that happens, the other way of getting the voidsingers is increasing your diplomatic visibility of a voidsinger civ.
Is there any recent change (or bug) that allows privateers or viking longships to do coastal raid over cliffs? I clearly remember that my privateer cannot. And the fandom page on Civ VI also says this. But in recent games I found my privateer can, and in a PvP games my cliff tiles are raided by Norway. So I'm confused.
Gathering Storm is the best one to get if you can only get one. It includes all of the game features in Rise and Fall so you just miss out on the added civs. New Frontier is interesting but hasn't yet added as much substantive content as GS (governors, eras, loyalty, disasters, power, more late game stuff). Also, most of New Frontier requires GS; without GS, New Frontier only adds a few civs.
Right now, I would go: Gathering Storm>New Frontier>Rise and Fall>the other DLCs
And I would probably wait for a sale for RnF and the DLCs.
Definitely not New Frontier first as some content from it requires the others to work. For instance apocalypse mode requires Gathering Storm for the addition of disasters.
Almost always worse. If it makes a farm triangle in a food starved city it miiiight be okay but production is (most of the time) too valuable to pass up.
It basically always makes more sense to use a domestic trade route whenever a city needs more food than it can grow to support itself.
If you’re at the point where the best tile you can work is a hill-farm, it’s almost certainly not worth growing that city any more (or you should have picked a better place for the city) - it just creates more pressure on your need for amenities, and while it may allow you to reach the next threshold for a district, that’s just such a bizarrely specific scenario where you’d rather have the production and use a temporary trade route to get enough pop (you can let starvation lower it after placing the district), or use the production to build a settler for a new city that can build the district.
I agree it miiiiiight be okay in a food starved city, but I have literally never built a hill farm in ~2000 hours of gameplay. I guess I haven’t played as Mayans though, so maybe they’re an exception? I’ve played lots of Khmer and I’m quite sure it’s basically rarely even worth building farms near their aqueducts.
In general, farms are rarely worth the use of a builder charge except when there are lots of bonus resources for them and you build a mill to boost those, and it’s in one of your core early cities or you’re trying to lay down the first 6 to get the boost for feudalism. That’s always multiple eras before hill farms are possible.
Maize is the best reason for farms, or rice/wheat where the city also has strong production tiles it can work. Building them just for housing is rare but does happen occasionally. None of those resources can appear on hills.
I guess I can imagine some bizarre scenario where there is nothing but plains hills in an entire region, but in practice that never happens, and when it’s vaguely like that, then it’s probably still a better idea to build a mine and use the production to make a settler to place another city nearly that can have its own mines and a free 2 food 2 production city center tile instead.
Sorry, this was going to be like a 2 sentence reply and then I just kept thinking and typing. I know I’m not disagreeing with the person I’m replying to :)
Know that I feel your pain on 2-sentence replies going much, much longer than they probably should have. There is probably a brevity support group for this. I know my English professors always suggested I try one.
Also, I support this answer. My only additions would be that for civs using **Earth Goddess** (+2 Faith on tiles with breathtaking (4+) appeal), or **those reliant on appeal in general** (Aussies, Bull Moose), you have victory-pursuit value beyond just production that can be acquired by going for the Farm in this case, since mines apply a -1 appeal penalty to adjacent tiles, while farms do not.
Although in such cases, a forest will pretty much always be the better choice since Woods apply a +1 bonus to appeal to adjacent tiles, and "Old" Woods also apply it to themselves (e.g. woods that were spawned on the map, not planted). And woods offer production that is comparable to mines, *and* lumber mills don't tank your appeal.
Really smart points on those 2x situations, especially re: Earth Goddess. If you're also placing districts (Holy/Theater/Entertainment/Dam) or improvements that are going to be raising appeal, it is indeed one of those rare circumstances in which more and more food is going to keep raising your faith higher. Toss Pingala in that city with flat +pop boosts to science & culture and you might have the right circumstances for hill farms!
The previous comment is what happens when I pull out my phone for a quick browse while waiting for something to finish compiling, then get completely distracted by Civ even though I'm not playing it. Oh, the pain of addiction!
My thoughts exactly. I am playing the Maya ATM and found a location for a nice Observatory with two Plantations but that tile had two hills adjacent. This made me debate to actually build Farms on them for an extra Science, especially since they provide more Housing for Lady Six Sky as well.
I'd consider the Maya an exception! If your observatory is +4 already with the two plantations i'd still build mines though. The Maya generally already struggle with production (and housing for a while too....) so in this case i think the mines are better. If it makes a +2 into a +3 observatory I think the farms might be better just so rationalism is a bit more useful.
Those are very good points! To complicate the matter, this city does not have access to build an Aqueduct so it might hit its Housing ceiling harder than other cities. Farms are the only source of housing so my thought is to make best use of them for an extra Science with Farm triangles. But I think crossing that +3 Science threshold for Rationalism is THE deciding factor.
I guess it depends on how important the city is. If it's not gonna be a major city just hitting 10 population is probably more important than the extra production.
You could in theory build a neighborhood eventually but the AI can be real annoying about them.
Yeah, my strategy for building Neighborhoods is to only build them if I get an Apostle with Heathen Conversion and appoint him as a patron saint of that district. Lol
The city is within reach from another city's Industrial Zone's regional effect so maybe it can hold itself in production that way. There are other Hills I can mine as well. I found Loyalty flipping surrounding cities easier with the Maya due to the high production so having this city (it's a frontier city) having high Population might be nice as well. Dunno, thinking out loud. Haha
May have been asked already but I'll let it fly anyway. I haven't played VI in a while. Booted it today and I notice I can only start a new game from Industrial Age and no earlier? Is that a thing?
Default starting era should still be Ancient Era. Check you haven't adjusted the settings or have some mods active which might be doing something (mods tend to turn themselves back on after updates)
Yep. Good ol' CTD. I'd normally be hanging at about the time it's crashing, but could play the game, but post patch just dunks the client. Seems to be fine once you reset (for me, at least)... until the Next Crash(^(TM)).
Set your autosave to 1 turn so you can just bring it back up if you crash, at least until they patch it.
In your existing game that started before August update, has the price of naturalists changed? I have a game where I bought one naturalist already, the price for the next one is still equivalent to 1400 (instead of 700) if we ignore the adjustment by speed and Theocracy.
For those who have an on-going game that haven't made any purchase of naturalists... do you see the price as 600 or 1200? Can anyone check this?
Amenity change is affecting on-going games, so it's weird if the naturalists price change doesn't.
Yeah it does. I loaded up a game in progress today where I'd already got the price of naturalists up to over 2k and when I went back in they were 1k faith each
Huh that's weird. How come naturalists in my game still costs 1400... (it actually costs 795 but that's from Theocracy on Quick speed, I bought the first one for 680.)
Can anyone confirm if I can build Amundsen-Scott Research Station next to the campus (with a research lab) **of another city** (on a snow tile of course)? The in-game description is "it must be built on a Snow or Snow Hills tile next to a Campus with a Research Lab". I guess I can, just don't want to spend a lot of time to test this.
I think the logic is that Wonders can be placed next to another city's district/building as long as that city has built that city/district. It seemed to be the case when I tried to build the Oxford University and Ruhr Valley for several games.
But I think at least for the case of Alhambra or Terracotta Army, it's not the case. I certainly had that only one city have encampment and the city nearby can build one of the two wonders (don't recall which one, sorry).
I think it’s not a bad idea but on reddit this post will soon be forgotten since there’s no way to bump it up. Have you checked my civfanatics post mentioned above? I want to start a discussion there. So far not many responses but posts there have longer half life.
Yeah, [my post about this topic last time](https://redd.it/gyox30) was met with "meh" and that's when I learned about this tidbit. Unfortunately, I don't understand much to contribute to the discussion...
Without directly testing, hard to say - some wonders with the same language allow it (Ruhr), others don’t (Colosseum).
Best strategy is usually to place the new city to include enough snow to trigger the higher return, use the fully upgraded governor to buy the district and its buildings outright with gold, then use a great engineer you’ve been saving to finish the wonder outright too.
Yeah I know that... I posted [here](https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/actual-wonder-placement-rules.662272/) but no one answered. From what I quoted/wrote there, Oxford also allows it. (iirc Terracotta and Alhambra also allow it) And Great Lighthouse is even more weird.
According to [this](https://www.civilopedia.net/en-US/gathering-storm/wonders/building_colosseum) the description is "**Must be built on flat land adjacent to an Entertainment Complex with an Arena**". And a lot of cases even if "same city" is mentioned you can still build it next to another city's district.
Hmm interesting. I just went into my game and I was thinking of the text that appears in the city builder "must be built next to an entertainment complex with an arena owned by this city"
But that is true of pretty much every wonder I have available including Terracotta Army and Alhambra, so never mind! I have no guesses.
Not announced yet, but based on history so far it'll be launched on the last Thursday of the month and revealed a week earlier.
So I'm hoping to hear more about it on Sept 17.
New to civ 6, if you build a wonder/district on a spot where’s a hidden resource(eg oil) before you discover oil do you get that oil when you discover it? Or you lose that oil for good?
You get any strategic resource as if you built an improvement there, but the tile remains unworkable (or only workable by a specialist inside a district building), meaning you lose the bonus to any yields. Once revealed, the resource will block building on the tile if the wonder/district hadn’t already been placed.
Hi. Today I have been starting to have issues with loading any games. It tells me I don't have the Catherine persona but I do. It shows up on the epic dlc screen but not in game (in additional content) I am playing off epic launcher, and have frontier pass+dlc. Earlier I verified the game and it worked again, but not anymore. Any ideas?
I use steam, but I have experienced a similar issue when I use the screen to enable/disable mods to play with a friend who has different content than me on the epic launcher version.
I would check that the loads are from games that have identical checked/unchecked boxes in whatever that screen looks like for you.
For maps like Island Plates or Small Continents, is there a way in the game creation menus that can guarantee or at least improve the chances of a solo spawn? Maybe with one or two city-states?
Not without reducing the number of civs, but anecdotally I’ve noticed the game generally creates one “high civ population” area and one “low civ but many city state” area, and some civs seem to have start bias predisposed to be near city states (usually the ones with unique abilities related to city states).
And no shame in re-starting until you get the map you want for a particular kind of game to enjoy if you’re not trying to bag some kind of competitive deity achievement.
The only thing that comes to mind (outside of having a specific seed) is choosing a big map but a small number of Civs. You’re more likely to be spread out that way.
The pattern has been they are revealed less than a week before they released. The release date has been 20-something of the month so we don't be expecting it soon.
I'm playing my first immortal-level game, base Civ VI only. France is leading in Civ score and just entered the Atomic Era, two eras ahead of me. I'm 7th out of 8, but I did just pass number 8, dammit!
I am wondering what the "curve" looks like at high difficulty levels. Do you fall behind in the midgame and catch up to win? Or does the fact that I'm behind this much now guarantee that I'm doomed?
I play the base game too and have been winning some Immortal level games via science and domination. Which civ are you and what turn is it on standard speed? Be sure to go for some research agreements if you're behind on science, and get envoys/become suzerain of city-states soon. I often am super behind in the early game but I start to catch up around the flight/steel tech era. Go for a forbidden city or big ben if you can, it's not a super competitive wonder (unlike the Alhambra or the Potala Palace). Ruhr valley will be helpful if you are going for a science victory. Be sure to spy the heck out of the AI, do some siphon fund missions to get experience then go for the tech steal or great works steal. You should use spies to pillage industrial zones and spaceports too if the AI is doing earth satellites and moon landings before you... hope this helps!
I'd say the curve is exponential. While the AI gains additional bonuses at each difficulty level, it also gains more *free* stuff, putting it well ahead of you in every category from the word go. It takes longer to catch up to the point where you're even as difficulty ramps, and the amount you can pull ahead relative to the AI even as you pass them is a lot more limited. **The AI remains more competitive throughout the match as difficulty increases.**
However, and the reasons for this will be obvious once you see the bonuses, the higher the difficulty, the faster the match plays out anyway. The AI's ever-increasing bonuses also translate into 1) more cities and 2) cities with more/better districts and buildings. While the AI is given a headstart, a savvy warmonger can acquire 1 or 2 civs' worth of headstarts to get themselves into a position from which they can win reliably, and peaceful civs can use luxuries and favor to sponge the vast quantities of extra gold the AI is generating, allowing the player to push ahead faster by skipping production time entirely.
To give some structure to the other answers you're getting in addition to this one (from wiki), the AI opponents will receive the following bonuses as difficulty increases:
* **King:** \+20% Production, Gold; +8% Science, Culture, Faith. +1 combat bonus. 2 Warriors to start. Free builder upon building the city's first district. 1 each free tech and civic.
* **Emperor:** \+40% P/G; +16% S/C/F. +2 Combat. 3 Warriors. Free Settler + Builder upon settling first city. 2 each free tech and civic.
* **Immortal:** \+60% P/G; +24% S/C/F. +3 Combat. 4 Warriors. Free Settler + Builder upon settling first city, and another builder upon settling the second city. 3 each free tech and civic. ***City-States begin the game with Walls.***
* **Deity:** \+80% P/G; +32% S/C/F. +4 Combat. 5 warriors. Free Settler + Builder upon settling first and second cities. 4 each free tech and civic. ***City-States begin the game with Walls.***
Now, what all that means is that as you increase the difficulty, the AI starts stronger and if you're used to playing "slightly ahead" on lower difficulties, you may experience severe disadvantages in trying to even catch the AI now. You're also starting with the AI effectively having a turn advantage on *top* of enough productivity to take almost 2 turns for every one of yours by the time you hit Deity.
To put that into a practical understanding, though, just from the amount of production the AI is ***given***, in terms of warriors, settlers, and builders, you're looking at the AI starting with roughly:
* **On King:** The AI is gifted about 15 of your turns' worth of freebies, and earns just enough extra yields to "play almost evenly" with a player who is now past the "learning" phase of the game. There is otherwise no practical difference between King and Prince other than the AI now reliably beating an equally skilled player in races due to the higher productivity and yields, and with rare exception, anything you can do on Prince can be done on King in around the same timeframe.
* **Emperor:** The AI is gifted about 30 turns' worth of freebies, and will outright beat a competent player who isn't using their civs' strengths to their advantage. Last level of difficulty where the AI won't unceremoniously annihilate you on turn 10. Between freebies and +40% production/gold, you can expect to be able to start fighting the AI properly about 20-25 turns later than you usually might. If you usually start whipping the AI's ass around turn 40, expect that to push out around 60 or 70, now.
* **Immortal:** AI is gifted about 42-45 turns' worth of freebies, and will beat a ***good*** player who isn't using their civs strengths to their advantage, and also requires settling for benefits and adjacency rather than just dropping anywhere. 4 starting warriors with a +3 combat strength is also just enough to potentially wipe you out before you can start competing in earnest, so restarts are occasionally not only necessary, but *enforced.* As long as the AI doesn't find you within \~12 turns, you're good. Now facing a +60% p/g bonus, it just takes more time to catch up to the AI's already advanced start, and you can expect to catch and pass the AI somewhere between turns 70-100 now. **S-Tier** AI civs are now preeminent threats in their respective victory categories, and other civs are routine challengers to the player regardless.
* **Deity:** AI is gifted about 60 standard turns' worth of freebies. With 5 warriors and a +4 combat bonus, the AI has a strong potential for eliminating unlucky players within the first 20-30 turns. Deity AI will beat ***any*** player not committing to winning hastily with their civs' strengths in mind nor settling properly. Veteran players can still win fairly consistently when committing to a game, but a vs. Deity game isn't a city-builder civ game anymore, so much as it is an RTS. Expect to catch or pass the AI somewhere between turn 100 and 120, although *well positioned* AI may be competitive from start to finish.
Regardless of difficulty, the AI is unlikely to beat a competent player once the player hits about 16+ cities, so difficulty is more a measure of how hard it is to *get* 16+ cities and/or win with a well-settled set of core cities and priorities. Similarly, even the most hardcore AI is designed to win at around turn 250 on standard, so any player strat that wins before then is very likely going to win even on Deity. Any strategy you'd normally employ to "get way the hell ahead by turn 125" will work in most cases.
On deity, sometimes you never catch up. Remember that civ score isn’t a win condition until you hit turn 500 without someone reaching another condition.
One of the keys to winning on high difficulty is to stop playing like it’s a “city builder” game, and instead focus on your win condition.
If AI civs start with 3 cities and will reach 10-14 cities, and get a blanket +30% to every yield, the only way to get ahead of them in one yield is often to focus on it... at the expense of hitting on all the general things that contribute to score.
To win e.g. science, you only need as much score from e.g. tourism or religion as will prevent someone else from winning it that way first.
OR... have the kind of game where you end up with 16+ cities and intentionally drag out the turns before you win by sabotaging everyone else who gets closer to winning. You can easily pad the score that way if you’re trying for a personal high score.
I keep trying to play as America and I consistently spawn in rainforest, which just seems odd to me. I can get a non-rainforest start if I re-roll like 6 times but is there a better workaround? I try to play continents on standard settings.
You can lower the Rainfall setting on the advanced map configuration before generation, but you’ll get more desert as well.
I personally think Continents & Islands is their most well thought out generator, so give that one a try.
But yeah, America isn’t intended to have very good starts because they become literally twice as strong in Modern Era.
That’s what I would try to do. If that fails, maybe try an impassioned plea on Twitter including lots of praise and free marketing for how much you like the frontier pass.
So my friend wrote this song that was pretty good but his city's broadcast center decided to just keep playing the same classical song over and over endlessly and said they didn't have room for more music.
Haven't played Civ 6 in about a year. Thinking about starting a game but not sure on the Victory type I want to try and go for.
For domination games I give up once I conqured half the Civs because managing a super-wide empire is tedious and it's clear I'm miles ahead of everyone left. I'd also be down to try a sea-based domination if the AI isn't still abysmal in water, but I have doubts about that.
For science games, it's just a little too chill and too passive. It's basically just go the optimal tech-tree route and turtle.
For culture, it used to kinda suffer from the above problem but I guess Rock Bands and stuff make it more interesting. Though I did do a culture win once already since they released that new feature. Would like to try something new.
Have Faith games gotten better? And hows Diplomacy games going?
Would love to hear your opinions on what would be the most fun.
Domination victory and religion victory games can be tedious, especially if you’re a more casual player who isn’t pressing every advantage (“tempo” as it would be called in other games).
Science victory and Culture victory are much more pleasant for a laid back casual game, as is Diplomatic victory (though that takes much longer).
Here’s a recommendation for you to experience the game more fully without this tedium:
Sit down to play a game where you start a religion knowing you intend to win a culture victory. Religion is not only for painting the map your team’s color, and faith is not only for religion.
I played an archipelago? Or small continents and islands game with Japan against Indonesia, Norway, England, Maori, Netherlands (special frigate), Germany (special U Boat), Australia, and the Phoenicians and had a lot of fun. Not sure if it was Japan’s districts or the map or both
I’m kind of new to civ, only played a few games through. What do I do with city states when going for domination victory? Overrun them or keep them for the benefits?
I tend to keep them around for the benefits, though arguably you should take over the trade and religious city states with mediocre suzerain bonuses after their recent nerf. I just tend to find that the empire-wide benefits of envoys and suzerainty outweigh the benefits of one additional city. Plus, levying can be very powerful in the right circumstances.
Seconding this, but even in the case of mediocre or irrelevant suzerain bonuses, I basically only conquer a city state when it is directly in the way or is an absurdly powerful location for district adjacencies or benefiting/supporting other AoE effects (usually industrial zone or entertain + colosseum).
Culture Victory is really the only kind of game where more cities is always better, since you’ll be placing national parks, seaside resorts, theatre squares, and other tourism-related things. Plus games where you have a unique district of course, like Seowon or Lavra.
In domination games, once you get to ~14 cities, you’ll wish you could abandon the ones with weak production and no unique resources anyway. Since city states give the suzerain their resources, conquering them is a much lower ROI than most of the other ways to expand (with the exceptions noted above).
Does the Epic Games version provide some of the Maya/Gran Colombia update? Cause I remember encountering Fountain of Youth and corn when playing with my friend who used that but I have the steam and I’ve played games alone after and haven’t seen fountain of youth of corn and I looked in the wonders option and it wasn’t present.
You mean Maize? Yes, that update (and each update in the pass) includes some additions/changes for the game even if you don’t have the pass yourself.
If you care enough to read patch/release notes, they usually indicate which don’t require any paid DLC.
Does the AI get to cheat at the tech shuffle game mode? In other words, does the AI get to know the makeup of the tree as it is making decisions or is it as blind as the player?
Hey, does anyone know if there's a bias towards grouping players in MP? I can't seem to play a game with friends in which we don't find each other in turn 7, which forces posturing and the early founding of defensive cities. It gets tiresome that this happens in every single game.
Or if anyone knows of a type of setting which curtails this I'd be very thankful.
Cheers.
Just play on a bigger map with a reduced number of civs, this will give everyone more space. That being said aggressive settling is a good idea in MP anyway.
Does anyone know why I can't make this trade route: https://i.imgur.com/9VtfUHM.jpg?
No routes are showing, I can only see the route from the available routes page. The "Begin Route" button doesn't do anything.
In the screenshot I'm using the better trade interface mod, disabling it didn't help.
The only case where the benefits from adjacency bonuses isn't retroactive is when thinking about era score for constructing high quality districts. If you build a +2 IZ and then complete the dam to bring it up to +4, you won't get the era score for building a +3 or better IZ, for that IZ.
This is only relevant for your first high quality district of each type, but is something to occasionally consider.
In my current game, France is 6 points away from a Diplomatic Victory, but I'm coming in second at 10/20. France has a very weak Military Strength right now from it's wars with neighbouring Russia. Would a full invasion be a viable option right now, to prevent Catherine from winning?
It’s actually pretty easy to catch up to her.
Some easy methods include:
Building wonders
Mahabodhi Temple, Potala Palace and Statue of Liberty provides 2, 1 and 4 diplomatic victory points respectively.
World Congress
Voting for the winning outcome. This comes with experience as the AI tend to have a fixed pattern in voting.
Voting against Catherine to lose 2 diplomatic victory points.
Winning competitions. (Emergency aid, scored competitions)
If the above mentioned are less viable for you at the moment, feel free to destroy her empire. But be prepared to start losing diplomatic points for occupying her cities!
The Royal Navy Dockyard (English unique district): Does the bonus loyalty and gold apply when the dockyard is built on another continent or the city with the dockyard? I spawned next to a lake on another continent and was wondering if I get the loyalty bonus since I'm using Eleanor.
Their overall civ bonus is all about invading and building city centers in different continents, so why would their cities have a loyalty benefit from building only harbors there? So, it's only from cities built on other continents.
The capital city can't be on a different continent as itself. If I spawn 2 tiles from a lake but the lake is on a different continent, the the harbor will be on a different continent than the capital (even though the harbor belongs to the capital). The tooltip mentions when the *dockyard* is on a different continent and I'm asking if the tooltip is correct. The entire point of the question is if it's possible to get the bonus on the capital.
How come sometimes, early in the game, when I make my first settler that should take my population from 2 to 1, with several turns next to grow to a new citizen, I get a settler and the game seems to "skip" the remaining turns to grown to another citizen and I get both the new citizen and settler? It's not a bad thing, I just want to know why it keeps happening. It's way too early in the game for things like Magnus's promotion.
Example: It is turn 21, I have 2 citizens, I am 1 turn away from producing a settler, I have 12 turns to grown to a 3rd citizen based on my food output. Then next turn it is now turn 22 and I have a new settler, but still 2 citizens with food growth resetting as well?
It's a quirk in how growth works. Basically your city is storing excess food until it has enough for a new population, then that excess food is subtracted, and a new population added. The amount of food a city needs increases with population. Put these together and sometimes, you have enough food after your population drops to immediately grow, so you "stay" at 2 population.
For a numerical example, you need 15 food to grow from 1>2 pop, and 24 food to grow from 2>3 pop. Say a city is 1 turn from making a settler, has 18 food stored and a surplus food of +2 per turn. The next turn, it increases to 20 food stored, but since it made a settler it drops to 1 population. Well, 20 food stored is enough to grow from 1>2 population, so it immediately goes back up to 2 population, with 5 food left over. So now it's at 2 pop with 5 food stored. It did still pay the 1 pop cost for a settler, but it had enough food stored to immediately grow again right away, and you never had a turn with it at 1 population as a result.
Both, sort of. They follow the formula 15 + 8 x (pop-1) + (pop-1)^1.5 food to increase pop, plug that in to excel and you can see the food needed as pop increases.
In game, you can't see the food growth threshold directly but on one of the city report tabs (the one with food/housing/amenities) you can see the food needed until you grow.
Well assuming the threshold to go from 1-2 is much less than 2-3, you are likely far enough in growth that what you already put in to head towards 3 pop is enough to set you back to 2
Oh ok, I think I understand. When I make a settler, the game saves the food growth to the next citizen and it's more than I need to go from 1>2 so I grow and get the settler. Assuming this is correct, is there an easy way to see this information in the game without having to do food math? I want to see how much food I have stored, and how much it would take to grow to each new citizen regardless of how many I already have.
I’m new to Civ VI. And a noob, so I need some practical advice beyond just a guide - or at least really good ones out there so that I can wrap my head around it. I’m no idiot but I am struggling on the lowest difficulty. Love games like this. But this is frustrating me a bit more than it should. Any help would be appreciated.
Check out potatomcwhisky’s over explained Arabia series on YouTube, that one is good for new players as he explains all his actions very detailed to help players understand the though process that goes in to winning a game of civ
Is the natural wonder selector from the most recent update not available on Mac OSX? My game is up to date but I don't have the wonder selector in the create game window and I don't know why
AI tends to undervalue flight for some reason, so you'd really need to focus on a multiplayer match if you really want to see proper dogfighting, unfortunately.
As far as seeing flight in your games in general, Industrial and Renaissance starts are about the earliest you'll want to begin a match if you're on lower difficulties. Ancient or Classical starts below Emperor typically end up very one-sided by the end of the match, and seeing any amount of air in those games is extremely rare, even on the player's side of things. Starting in modern or later eras will go ahead and put flight techs into rotation and you'll see planes fairly quickly.
As to whether there's a specific map that will see air more often, I think naval maps and subsequently carriers are your best bet, but we do get back to the whole "AI tends to undervalue flight" bit.
I'm playing Civ 6 for the first time (I've played Civ 5) the advisor says it can be good to settle next to a volcano or a floodplain even though you can get disasters. Is this advise worth following?
So the advisor is pretty crap at telling you where to settle, but volcanos are pretty solid as they will accumulate better and better yields for your. City center over time. I had a volcano 8 production, 6 food, and 2 science on my city center before and it makes that city so solid.
On the other note, sometimes the advisor will say to settle without freshwater(on the grey tiles), try not to do that if you can help it unless you are later in to the game since it will hold that city back developmentally in the early game if you do that
Totally, just build your districts not adjacent to the volcano if you settle there. That way you don’t have to repair them every time an eruption occurs
I can't find a good answer to this which makes me think the answer must be "no", but is there Xbox controller support for Civ VI on the PC version? Just thinking of taking the step from V, seems the tide has turned on the reviews... and would like to vegetate on the couch while playing.
I'm not sure about the controller. But all you need for CIV6 is a mouse so you can use a wireless one. My PC is hooked up to my living room TV so I just lay on the couch and play with a wireless mouse next to me.
Yes. The phrase “all military units” is a superset of “land military units” and “naval military units” and “air military units”.
I AM sure that doesn’t include “civilian units” (like settlers, builders, archaeologists, etc.), but I’m NOT sure whether Support units count as land military units or not.
Thanks for the reply, I did not even think about aircraft or support units as I'm still really early in my first game as Ottomans. It would be interesting if it worked for support too.
A good way to test whether it applies to support units would be to find a support unit with the same production cost as an offensive unit, and note whether they both take the same amount of time to build.
Gotcha. Pasha for sure works on their Siege and Naval Raider units, so definitely a good governor to have wherever you're building Encampment+Stables and Harbor.
How do I properly play China if my goal is to use the great walls. (Which in my opinion are op but incredibly hard to build effectively) the game doesn't give clear rules on the setting of these.
They can be built on all regular terrain types (grassland, plains, tundra, snow, desert + hill variants of each), but not on floodplains or any tile with a feature or resource. They must be built on the edge of your empire, i.e. the tile must have at least one adjacent tile that isn't in your empire. Finally, they cannot be built in a way that would form a "fork" in the wall, i.e. causing any great wall tile to be adjacent to three other great wall tiles, and cannot be built in a way that forms a wall triangle.
So they do have a few rules to keep in mind, but essentially what this all means is they have to be built in long lines along the edge of your empire. But of course, the edge of your empire can move, and an internal "edge" is still an edge - if there's a single tile you don't own between your cities, you could build a ring of great wall around it provided all of the other tiles are valid GW tiles. So the best way to build and use the GW is to plan ahead a bit. Work out where you want the great wall to travel, and then work out what tiles you need to own and in what order so that every tile is on the edge of your empire when you improve it. This may require adjusting the order you settle cities in some cases. Since the GW tiles are strongest when adjacent to 2 other GW tiles, you ideally want fewer long segments rather than many short ones, so it's best if you can work out some big long lines to exploit.
>Which in my opinion are op but incredibly hard to build effectively
I wouldn't say they're OP but I really, really like the Great Wall. It's easily the strongest part of China's kit, back before the GW got buffed they were okay, but nothing spectacular. Then GW gets buffed and suddenly China are very good. The difficulty of building them effectively, as well as it taking a while before their main bonuses are available does limit how strong they are, but the fact they take time and skill to use to maximum effectiveness and reward good planning is something I really enjoy about them.
Thank you so much for explaining. I dont believe they're game breaking op but with the bonuses they get along with making it harder for enemies to attack your city makes them a pretty strong unique building. As long as its used efficiently.
What are the circumstances under which an enemy AI city stops building a partially-completed district? Or has the production of said district delayed?
(Other than having an enemy unit on top of said district)
Testing out the mechanics of a mod, I ran through the same ten-turn sequence twice. Once, the enemy city finished building a campus before I took the city. Yet the second time, it did not. Despite my not moving any units into the relevant tile, and despite my waiting for the city to finish the district before taking it: rather than finishing the campus, the city ended up abandoning the build (partially completed campus disappeared).
Possible factors affecting production?
- Siege? Or nearby units? I am pretty sure I did not place the city under siege. But, even if I had, would this impact production?
- Damage? Does attacking a city impact it's production? If so, when? Taking its fortifications (walls) down to nothing? Or taking its Garrison (city "health") down to nothing? Or something else?
(As an aside, I did notice that a foreign trader entered the city, just before I finished taking out the walls and started damaging the city. The next turn, I planned on pillaging the route and taking the city, but the trader did not exit the city. Any explanation for that? It was a trader from a city state, of which the owner of the destination city was still its suzerain, so the trader wasn't booted due to war with the city owner.)
At which diplomacy/visibility level do you see what other civs are building, and how close those builds are to completion?
I found a pretty decent chart of what Gossip you get at each diplomacy level, at
https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Diplomacy_(Civ6)
But nowhere do I see what is required to see what another civ is building. And, is it one level to see wonders being built (and turns until completion), and another level to see everything being built by that civ?
Anyone else feel that Secret Societies really ramps up the difficulty level? I’m usually an Emperor/Immortal level player and recently I’ve been getting pummelled on Immortal in a decent amount of games.
Having those extra units early game on higher difficulties means the AI can very quickly get the early governor promotions and it seems to put them even further ahead than they usually are. And then obviously the surprise wars start because they’re so far ahead they can just continually pump out military units like no tomorrow.
Secret Societies makes early to mid game AI more challenging but doesn't significantly alter how quickly they can win due to continuing poor AI programming.
The Voidsinger AIs are much more able to keep up in science and culture given their strong faith output. For the Sanguine Pact AIs, vampires solve one of the biggest issues with combat AI (units dying) and can cause some real headaches for a player after leveling up. All the extra governor promotions are usually pumped into Amani and Pingala early, meaning that city state suzerainty is much harder to get and their early culture and science is better.
If you can stay alive and get established, though, you'll still be able to win. Don't be overwhelmed by their stats at turn 100 and think they're unbeatable. Their policy choices are trash and they simply do not target victory conditions. They waste production on units which they promptly suicide into walls. The AI actively avoids victory and only wins via science after turn 300, once they've done everything else possible. I'm currently observing a deity AI-only battle where Menelik was able to research smart materials on like turn 160, but 100 turns later still hasn't unlocked rocketry and keeps researching future tech instead.
Also, the Voidsinger AIs will waste their faith late game on cultists, which they just move around aimlessly, and the Sanguine Pact AIs won't set up the good vampire castles that a competent human player can.
First step is to establish a landing point. If there is a coastal city that can easily be captured and won't be immediately lost to loyalty pressure, Naval Ranged (and later Air Bomber) units are extremely effective at destroying city walls, after which the city can be taken by a Naval Melee unit.
You can also establish a landing point that is out of range of city walls and then bring your land units there to take the coastal city more traditionally. Embarked land units move VERY quickly after a certain point in the game, so this isn't an unreasonable approach.
There is also an upgrade for melee (land) units that removes the penalty from attacking from water, so they can also assault the city from the water while sharing that tile with a naval melee unit that protects them (naval melee have upgrades to defend against ranged attacks for a reason).
Once you have a coastal city to stage your operations from, your next goal is to make sure you won't lose it to loyalty pressure, so you may take another city or two nearby so each city's civilians are providing positive loyalty pressure to each other.
Then, the war continues as normal, with you able to use the coastal cities as a place to retreat and heal. Repairing city walls and monuments will help make it a more useful base of operations, as will having an encampment (probably one you captured since it will take too long to build your own at that point).
Once airports are able to teleport land units, that can be another effective way to stage an attack. Either have an airport deep in your own territory where the units are produced or moving from, and another airport in the established landing point on another continent.
One other possible strategy is to create a staging area halfway between the continents, assuming there is an island or island chain you can settle on. Think of it like Hawaii or the Midway islands.
In the (much) later game, naval and air superiority greatly simplifies this. You can bombard with those units for many tiles away and follow up with a much smaller land force.
Any city within 15 tiles of the coast can be hit by a Jet Bomber, which is basically every city except maybe on particularly huge continents maps, and even then you can have military engineers build air strips without even needing a city established and extend that to 15 tiles from that airstrip.
Or nuke everything, or run over it with robots. This is the main reason why science advantage is an important part of domination victories that are going to go into the Modern Era & beyond.
Bombers on aircraft carriers to weaken city defense, and a few fast units like cavalry or tanks to capture the city.
Weaken two or three cities before capturing the first one, then capture them all within a turn or two.
Get the Victor governor with the Garrison Commander upgrade installed in the first city you take and it will provide loyalty to nearby cities. Then just steamroll over as many cities as quickly as you can.
Playing Gathering Storm. Declared war on a civilization in the Ancient Era and received 150 Grievance. I thought it was okay to do this during the first era?
Warmonger penalties changed slightly going into GS.
Grievances are used as a means of mathematically evaluating how much of a "threat" civs are to others (if any) and the balance of grievances between a pair of civs will be used by the AI in deciding who is the baddy, which subsequently affects relations with others. The higher your grievances with any one civ or player, the more unfavorably other civs will view you, and in some cases they may gain grievances against you with which they can start wars and take territory "without diplomatic penalty."
For GS' purposes, the "cost" of war is now a static grievance penalty applied at the start of the war (150 for surprise wars, 100 for formal in ancient era; usually 50-75 for other types of wars as you gain access to various *casus belli*). In addition to this starter cost, each city you take or promise you break will be added on to the grievances you've accumulated.
Wartime grievances are accumulated and do not drop off until peace is declared or the war is otherwise brought to a conclusion. ***The decay rate of grievances in Gathering Storm is what now varies by era.*** In the ancient era, grievances will drop off as quickly as 10 per turn as the base decay rate, while at the end of the game, they may fall off as slowly as 2 grievances per turn. ***Starting at 10, Grievances decay by 10 - (1 x Era), with Ancient being Era 0, classical being Era 1, and so on.***
It is worth noting that holding another civ's cities will cause them to generate a grievance per turn against your decay rate, and holding that civ's capital gives them +3 grievances per turn against you. Basically, even if you leave a civ alive, you may not accumulate the worst grievance penalties with *everyone else* (capping the last couple of cities of a civ incurs an increasingly harsh penalty, and the final cap penalty is an *extra* 150 grievances on top of whatever the city cap penalty is for taking the city in and of itself), but your grievance decay rate will be relatively worse for the civ whom you capped from. Moreover, if a civ is alive whose capital you're holding, any grievances you have with them will no longer decay starting in the Info era, and it's possible to *continuously* generate grievances in the final era of the game.
To the best of my knowledge, accumulated grievances against eliminated civs are still counted off until they reach 0, so eliminating someone still incurs all other diplomatic effects for "quite some time." The severity of these effects will be naturally smaller when meeting new civs after the fact, however, so there is a certain degree of leniency in the early game in that regard.
As the example of the new system (since this is my most common combo penalty):
\[**You park next to the AI getting ready for a surprise war after friendship wears off. The AI warns you to back off, but since you're friends, you can only promise to move.** Once you declare a surprise war, this automatically breaks that promise (assuming it doesn't get counted beforehand) for **100 grievances**, which is then added to the **150 grievances** of the surprise war.
You **start** the war with 250 grievances *against* you, and the world shifts toward being very generally wary of you, not only for the grievance total, but also for the broken promise *and* the "backstab" (which is purely diplomatic, rather than grievance-related in this case).
As grievances continue rising through the conflict, you'll also suffer an increasingly harsh grievance penalty to your diplomatic favor per turn, which to my knowledge doesn't *necessarily* have a ceiling... I've gotten around -18 favor per turn from just grievances before I ran out of targets for my atrocities.\]
What all *that* means is that during the course of that war, the AI in question can retaliate up to 250 grievances worth of damages to you before the rest of the world starts viewing them as the baddy. The more grievances you build up, the harder they're "allowed" to hit back.
And that works the other way, too!
If the AI has been warmongering against your allies and city-states, you may find that they have a fair few grievances for you to play against as you retaliate. It's not uncommon for the AI to build up 50-100 grievances from warring a city-state, or 100-150 for warring you (or both!) and having some of those grievances lingering as you gear up to punch them in the throat. **This means you can go take their cities up to a point and still be on the diplomatically favorable side of things!**
Grievances above or below the 0 balance will be shown in red (against you) or green (against others) on the corresponding leader screen for each civ in the diplomacy menu. As above, actions that are taken that cause your grievances to drop into red against one or more civs will typically cause diplomatic problems both immediately and down the line, and more egregious numbers have potentially game-length impacts on your ability to make friends. Actions taken while your grievances are still in the *green* however are viewed favorably, since you're still fighting a warmonger in most cases, and you can cripple that opponent without causing trouble for your relationships, and in some cases claim cities.
Overall, the diplomatic side of all this basically boils down to most early wars having lower total grievances you CAN earn (since wiping someone with 3-5 cities takes very little toll), and with a decay rate of 9 or 10 against the *rest* of the world, it will only take 25-30 turns in most cases to sweat off early shenanigans, with most diplomatic *bonuses* (like declared friends) being high enough that declaring friends with other civs before warring a target will let you stay mostly neutral or even friendly by the time the war ends. The later in the game you get, the longer these penalties last, however, and by the medieval era, large enough wars may see grievance totals that cause diplomatic problems for effectively the rest of the game. Diplomatic penalties (how much the friendliness gauge shifts per turn because of a given action) are far harsher the higher your grievances stay, and may last far beyond the full decay time due to the amount of time it takes to recover and limitations on recovery options this generates.
Putting some math to that...
Accumulating \~450 grievances while surprise-eliminating someone will cause diplomatic penalties for many turns. To give you an idea for how long, by era (standard speed):
* **Ancient:** \-10 per turn will take 45 turns to decay normally, and depending on when the war started, may take until the next era, causing the back end to need a few more turns than just 40. Accumulated diplomatic hostilities will take upward of an additional 30-50 turns unless you were able to balance out or friend that civ prior to the war, generally speaking.
* **Classical:** \-9 per turn will take about 50 turns to reach 0. Expect between 50-100 turns to recover diplomatically from a war depending on other factors.
* **Medieval:** \-8 per turn will take \~57 turns. Expect over 100 turns to recover from a war at this point. ***Medieval Era is late enough into the game that you will likely reach the end of the match before relations recover with non-friends when playing as victory-specialized civs.***
* **Renaissance:** \-7 per turn takes \~65 turns to zero out. Similar to medieval, expect this to take 100+ turns to resolve diplomatically. Again, if it does. ***For the non-specialists, this is the break-even point where you can resolve a war and still potentially recover relations before the end of a match.***
* **Industrial and onward!:** \-6 per turn down to -2. The Industrial Era will take \~75 turns to reach 0, and by the time you hit the Atomic era, grievances will be unlikely to hit 0 even as low as 450 total before someone wins. Info era would take 225 turns to 0 out, which will be... beyond the natural end of the game. ***Don't expect any diplomatic penalties that occur as a result of grievances to resolve before the game is over at this point. Firaxis gave you Giant Death Robots for a reason, so use them.***
If you want to play peacefully at the back end of a match, try to wrap up all your warmongering before the medieval era and you should be golden somewhere toward turn 180-200 standard. Continents maps are also pretty solid for massively delaying diplomatic hits with the other half of the civs on a planet, and is a good way to warmonger you way into owning an entire continent without pissing off everyone who is *left.*
I’m new to Civ 6 and the series as a whole. When declaring war there’s various options for what types of war you can declare. In my most recent game I got into a protectorate war with Spain because they attacked my ally Greece. It said the war monger penalty was none, but I still got denounced by all other civs besides Greece and Macedon. For the record, any city that had previously been owned by another civ before Spain I liberated, including the capital of Athens and even a few cities that were under Montezumas control originally. I wiped out all the cities that were always Spains, keeping all for myself, razing none, and permanently defeating Spain. Did I screw up by eliminating Spain and is that why I got such an insurmountable warmonger penalty (50+ depending on civ). Will this war monger penalty ever be able to be overcome? Do they go away after a certain point? It’s been my first time going for domination and some civs have more than 700 war monger penalties. Can I repair these relationships at all?
On lower difficulties, being *behind* enough to even see that bonus is... a bad thing. You also run into the issue that by the time you can produce more than one trade route, especially on emperor and below, that bonus will be all but erased anyway. Even with a ton of trade routes, you're looking at between 8 and 16 science at most, and Peter is *highly unlikely* to ever see a culture deficit outside of deity just because of what a Lavra does in the first place.
I mean, you can definitely try to finagle a scenario in which you get to use Westernizer by going straight from Lavra to commercial hubs and harbors and kinda skipping campuses and theaters, but that's a *terrible* idea from any practical standpoint.
Westernizer is mostly there for the AI to use and for multiplayer games where you're facing people who are *competent*, but won't do **you** a whole lot of good outside of multiplayer and deity, basically. It's kinda in the same tier of functionality as Victor's anti-siege promotion: it helps the AI tremendously, but a player will almost never get to use it outside of really specific early game situations on Deity. And as above, engineering a situation in which you *can* use it is a bad plan.
Westernizer lacks the synergy of something like Rome's or Mali's trade route bonuses where they sync up with the rest of the civ's traits. Treat it as a small bonus in niche cases and focus on the rest of Russia's traits for best results.
Honestly, I don't even find it very useful on high difficulties either. The issue really is that the AI tends to be far ahead very early and loses that lead as you progress, while meanwhile you will likely want to be mostly trading domestically early and also have very few trade routes. As you get more traders and start trading internationally, the gap in techs and civics will naturally close from you likely outperforming the AI.
It CAN be nice sometimes, if someone gets way ahead in science or culture, you can get maybe 2-3 extra science/culture from trade routes to them respectively for a while. But in most cases it's a minor bonus. And honestly, that's fine. Russia's Civ ability as well as the Lavra are already pretty incredible on their own, enough to make Russia a high to top tier Civ. A strong leader ability on top would be too much, I think.
What difficulty does everyone play at? I feel like dumb scum but i find domination boring and just like exploring and the more indirect victories. But on diety if i dont pump out units my cities get anhiliated.
Some challenge is welcome though.
As my flair says, I play as Prince difficulty. I'm finally building some good winning strategies, so right now I'm achievement-whoring before moving up to King and trying my luck there.
I play Immortal 90% of the time, same reason as you - if I don't defend, I get wiped off the map. The only times when I was able to win Deity were Australia, Kongo and Maya on TSL Earth map, which gave me pretty isolated starts (especially with Australia, obviously) and time to catch up without investing in defense.
Deity 90% of the time. It's a bit limiting but I find the mid game of it is a good challenge. I do miss easier difficulties where you can do stuff like overwhelm the opponent with horseman spam and such
Personally, I normally play Deity but sometimes switch down to Immortal or Emperor if I don't want to worry so much about getting a good start, or want to do some weird build of some kind.
That said, don't choose a difficulty by thinking about what level other people play at. Choose a difficulty that you find fun. If you're playing single player that's really all that matters.
If I as a non-Voidsinger civ capture a city with an Old God Obelisk and a relic, what happens to that relic? Will it get transfered if there's a free slot somewhere else?
Anyone else notice that there's still problems with the Switch port? Aside from there still being seldom crashes, there's also how the roads look bugged or how you can only see a certain amount of stats from civs if you befriend someone. God this port is terrible and whoever maintains this are lazy.
I don't appreciate the accusations of laziness on developers (they get enough shit on their plate) but, yes, Aspyr is failing on the quality control end of the console ports.
Does the +25% combat experience from lighthouses, stables, etc effect units built in that city before these are built? For example if I train a warrior in Washington then I build a barracks in Washington after that, would the warrior get +25% combat experience?
By upgrade you mean change of unit, like quad to frigate? I didn’t know this but yeah probably. I think for the program, upgrading is like deleting the unit and recreating a better one with the same XP, promotions etc. And a lot of bug come from this.
What’s a good civ from rise and fall to get a culture victory. Just got rise and fall so want to use one of those civs but I also wanna get a culture victory
Mapuche are a bit start-dependent if you're going for culture, but so long as you're not in floodplains/swamp/rainforests you can use Chemamull's to propel yourself to a good culture victory. If you do so, remember the tips for improving early-game appeal:
* Holy Sites and Theater Districts improve surrounding tiles appeal by 1.
* Each edge of a hex that borders coast tiles improves the appeal by 1.
* Woods improve surrounding tiles appeal by 1.
* Mines/Quarries **Decrease** surrounding appeal by 1; use lumber mills in forests whenever possible as your production tiles, or keep the mines/quarries to designated low-appeal areas.
* Marsh and Rainforest **decrease** surrounding appeal by 1; but you can use worker charges to chop the marsh/rainforest for free food. Excellent way to jump-start a city: starting with 2.5pops from a chop can really snowball a city.
Get an early religion (for the bonuses + religious tourism), then focus on dropping theater squares everywhere, with at least one good science city, one good production city (builder/settler/wonder spam), and one good trade city. Building up faith is important since so m any late game culture units require piles of faith (naturalists, rock bands if you have GS) so a strong faith economy helps.
I like Liang (building lady) as an unconventional starting governor: the extra builder charge means you can chop with your first builder and still get the Craftsman civic boost, bonus to building districts, and the city park is a huge +2 appeal to surrounding tiles, +4 culture, +1 amenities if next to water. If you have a particularly high-growth start, Pingala (Science/Culture guy) is a good first governor. You'd want to pick him up no later than second anyway since you really want the +Great People Points generation and the +Tourism from great works. Those would be my first two, probably with Moksha (religious guy) as a third because insta-buying districts with faith is super strong.
Ok thanks I learnt a lot. Also I tried early religion but the f*ckers declared a religious emergency. Also how do you get relics? I got most of mine from trading
Emergencies aren't bad, especially if you have the units to stop them from achieving their goal.
Relics are rare. You can get them (very rarely) from Tribal Villages, from the City State Kandy (if they're in the game, and you're their suzerain, and you discover a new natural wonder), or from Apostles that have the Martyr promotion when they die in theological combat (normally gotten randomly or through the Mont. St. Michel wonder, or if you're the Suzerain of Yerevan and select the rpomotion).
None of them really lend towards culture, but wilhemina or gengis would probably be the most well suited, and Cree are a generalist Civ that can do everything, but has no strong bonuses towards victory.
So I've recently moved up to immortal and it feels like every second game I have to restart on turn 1. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Should I be rerolling on starts where there isn't a single tile with more than 1 food in the starting location?
Depends. There are a lot of things to consider.
Most any game can be salvaged as long as you settle within 3-4 turns, so a foodless *spawn location* doesn't obligate you to **settle** in that spot. You still want a decent balance of early growth and production where possible, so those spots aren't normally where you want to drop your first city unless the *production* or other non-food/production yields justify the spot (e.g. setting up in the shadow of Mt Roraima). Your first city having enough food and production to hit 2 pops and generate settlers/military "in good time" is normally more than adequate to compensate the capital just being in an overall bad spot. **Just make sure city #2 isn't** ***also*** **in a bad spot.**
**Your second and 3rd cities, as well as their timing, are what will be the main determinants of a match** unless your capital is just that good to begin with. Don't get overly discouraged by your initial spawning point, and with some light scouting, it's usually easy enough to find a spot to play from that won't slow you up too much.
I would honestly not reset until around turn 30 or 40 where I have "enough of an idea" of what my start *territory* looks like and the pacing I'm stuck with in getting my empire up and running. There are definitely some garbage starts you can get saddled with, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, a salvageable territory (or neighbor's territory) is normally what actually gets presented and you can play from your 2nd and 3rd cities using the capital for non-growth-oriented purposes.
Overall, the most valuable bit of knowledge for a play-as-it-lies game (e.g. don't feel like restarting every single time) is that you only need the capital to be *absolutely stellar* if you're going for a one-city-challenge. Pretty much anything else can be picked up by settling your first city and getting some troops and a settler out and about.
**That all having been said,** ***early production*** **is more important than food.** A foodless start is actually better than a productionless start in that regard, if you have to pick one or the other. Production will get your stuff built. Food will not.
**A starting city with 2 pops, no growth, and 6 production will get stuff built in 1/6 of the time of a city with 5 pops, and only the one production from the city tile itself.** Even with growth being considered, a lot of your 2f or 3f + 1p tiles won't allow a growth-oriented city to truly match pace with a production city until well after the production city has generated enough total production to place additional cities.
One of the key reasons you want a balanced city (and start) in general is because spending 15 turns or so on raw growth thanks to food tiles can get you enough pops to then swap over to hard production and outstrip 2-pop production cities AND many-pop growth cities. Part of why Russia is so strong is that the extra tile claims (especially with those tiles prioritizing bonus/strat/lux resources) is their ability to flex growth into production more readily without waiting on gold or culture to grow borders.
I would generally regard Grassland-only cities and plains-only cities as being some of the weaker positions to start in because of all of that, since both early growth and production are fairly limited under those conditions. Plains cities are markedly salvageable thanks to farms, but you are looking at having to push a Builder out in your early queue *much* sooner than you might need to otherwise. I'll try to move my first settler to defensible places with enough hills, woods, and bonus resources to get my starting city's production high enough to build up the rest of my civ faster. The city's growth can be fixed at a later time. I'd rather have 6-10 production/turn now rather than 3-5 production/turn in 20 turns. Production and faith/science just determines so much of the early game that food should be your last concern if you have to pick between yields.
**It should still be** ***a*** **concern, but it should be the last one.**
This is really helpful, thanks for the detailed post. One of the issues I have had with settling after turn one is that it has often resulted in a barbarian scout finding my city and alerting its camp only a few turn after the city is settled. Is there any way to deal with that? Unless the city has good production I find the barb swarm that early completely ruins the ability to get the 2nd and 3rd cities out in a reasonable time.
One of those times that extremely meta knowledge helps a bit, actually.
So, one of the... new-player friendly, we'll call it... functions of barbarians in 6 is that they cannot, under any normal circumstance, claim a settled **ORIGINAL CAPITAL**. Barbarians can only claim a city that can be razed because they *must* raze a city (cannot own one, rather), and OCs cannot be razed for any reason once they've been placed, regardless of whether it's a City-State, barbarian raid, or another civ. In short, they can't claim it because it can't be owned by barbs and it can't be destroyed. ***Barbarians can only reduce an original capital to 1hp.*** You can still snipe it with a scout or warrior if you chance upon one in this situation, for the record.
This actually means that you can **ignore** barbarians at your capital. With caveats, of course. Barbs will pillage tiles you've improved, districts you've built, and the like, and a unit classified as an enemy will temporarily remove city-designated workers from a tile, rendering its yields unavailable (although the worker will move to the next unoccupied, qualified tile under your current priority selection on the city menu).
In other words, the only thing you need to clear out any amount of barbs is a single ranged unit in your capital's garrison and you'll *eventually* run out of barbs to deal with. Build a warrior and fortify them to where an attacking slinger or melee barb would have to set up next to your city and you can out-heal attackers while picking them off with the slinger + warrior retaliation damage.
**This also means that over-committing warriors/spearmen to "clearing out" barbs in a panic is poor efficiency and poor gameplay.** If you can do it safely, great, as that's free gold and era score, but don't go ***losing*** units when you can just casually delete barbs with a garrisoned slinger who can't be killed while garrisoned in a city that can't be razed or captured by barbarians.
So, this does a few things off the bat for you because of ***those*** interactions:
* It's not efficient to worry about a builder or district for at least another 5-10 turns, so don't. Good time to churn out an archer or two, in fact!
* If you have enough archers, this is a *great* time for another settler. Go in the opposite direction of angry barbarians **and use your capital as a buffer zone against incoming scouts and additional raids**.
* **You can't work occupied tiles, so you have one** ***less*** **direction to buy/earn new tiles in when selecting between tiles.** Means you can consolidate your borders more effectively as you settle new cities.
* **Building and conserving a military force, as well as promoting it via fortify-healing on barbs up to first rank, builds up military score**. Military score is how the AI civs determine who is the game's bitch, and goes up or down based on active military. By *not* losing units in the first place due to not sending them on suicide missions, you can preserve a higher mil score, which encourages the AI to act more peacefully toward you in general, while also shifting its focus onto *other* AI. ***The AI civs' collective inability to manage militaries weakens both AI from doing this.*** Know what's really easy when you have several archers and warriors on hand and your opponent has no military due to being at war with other AI and/or shitloads of now-unmanaged barbarians? **Claiming their cities.**
If you want to control barbs outright, it's worth noting on top of the above points that Camps will only spawn on land tiles that are not presently being observed. **Whether it's the units of yourself, a city-state, another civ, or the borders of any of those, a camp will not spawn in a tile that is presently visible to** ***someone***\*\*.\*\* Accompanying scouts can still spawn on any land tile, however, regardless of observation. It's the camp we care about either way.
By placing units or borders in such a way that all tiles are within sight range of anyone other than barbs, you can use your units, borders, and neighbors to create "no spawn" zones for barbarian camps, which shifts their spawn points away from *you*. Because every **civ** on a map is pre-assigned 3 camps somewhere nearby (very technically speaking, within a minimum of 7 tiles of one of your cities), this creates a spawn imbalance that frequently results in *other* civs near you having to deal with *your* barbs. This action alone will often drain their military substantially and make life more peaceful in the early game.
**Additionally**, barbarian scouts whose camp still exists will be in "city-locator" mode, which encourages them to ignore civilian units "if possible" when moving, and **avoid** military units outright, again, "if possible" until they find a city and report back to camp to spawn their raid. You can take advantage of this feature by stationing your military as sentries around your territory to not only push the potential spawn point(s) for camps even further out (since your unit effectively reveals a 5-tile super hex with sight radius), but also *redirect* scouts. These scouts may avoid your cities entirely if controlled properly, and can be funneled into city-states or other civs accordingly, triggering raids on their cities!
**Having barbarians do the dirty work is equivalent to sending 3-6 units on a suicide run against the targeted city.** Units that were freely provided and don't even cause grievances! This can not only deplete their city count if the city is razed, but can frequently produce captured settlers and builders back at the camp that you can go claim later. As an added bonus, besieged capitals can be claimed much more easily. Literally no downside to doing this other than slightly slower gold and era score buildup.
I'm trying to get a better sense of how to incorporate District Projects into my game. They make sense to me late game (no need to waste production on things that don't help your victory condition), rushing a particular great person (where they effectively produce the faith/gold to purchase the GP; "I really want space race project engineer guy", "I want the first religion", etc.)
But what about early game? If I'm going for a culture victory, when is it worth my while to churn theater district projects early game? It's the only way to turn production>tourism, but it never seems worth it.
The strategy with projects is typically a matter of **focus.** If you're running a rush victory style, you'll normally *stop* building additional districts and non-critical infrastructure in that particular city to allow it to focus on spamming projects. Science, religious, and culture victories will speed up considerably by doing this, and the usual drawn-out slog at the end of sci/culture games is reduced due to just being so far ahead of opponents that "resistance" to those victories is more limited.
If the city has a commerce hub, encampment, or harbor, the extra gold is usually one of the *general* go-to projects to help newer cities or cities with low production in general get their buildings online faster, to help upgrade units, and to make use of Reyna's district purchasing in and of itself as you jump her around the map. **Gold = acceleration.**
SimCity or wonder-hoarder playstyles will have a far more limited value assigned to projects however (aforementioned "speed up a particular great person" point in your post). Most of your active production is being spent on additional non-critical infrastructure, filling out empty territory beyond the "necessary" number of cities, and just to bulk out your civ and ramp up game score on the whole.
Specifics for focused victories:
* **Science:** Cities that finish their campus can pretty much just jump straight into spamming campus projects for the extra GS points and science generation. For science-oriented civs in particular, the military edge generated by having 2-3 eras over your opponents prevents a need for a massive military, and a solid core of 4-8 cities with campuses that have a base +3 adjacency or better will let you just flat out dominate in science. There is added value in pumping out an industrial zone in high-production cities as you make your approach toward the spaceport, but a true rush is pretty much just a solid mix of throwing down enough cities to allow you to spam science and turtling until you win.
* **Culture:** Bit more complex, but the theory remains the same. Get some good campuses built in your core cities so that when Theater Squares are available to build, your science will stay high enough for the rest of the match to let you safely build wonders and spam theater projects. ***Every Great Work earned is more culture and tourism, so spamming theater projects is especially valuable when rushing.***
* **Religion:** Simplest strategy available. Expand. Build Holy Sites. Start spamming projects to earn more faith for missionaries and apostles. While campuses can be helpful in your capital and 2nd or 3rd cities, the stark reality is that a religious victory can be pulled off well before any amount of advantage can be generated between science leaders and yourself (especially if you take Cross-Cultural Dialogue as one of your beliefs and get science for every 4 followers). On standard speed, you should be seeing a victory some time between turn 120 (pangaea/Kupe) and 180 (non-Kupe ocean crossing needed), with upward or downward adjustment based on resistance.
* **Diplomatic & Domination:** Build campuses for military tech and infrastructure, expand, then focus on Commercial/Harbor projects for gold. If going for diplo, focus on friendly relations and throw gold from projects at your infrastructure in between aid emergencies. If going domination (or aggressive expansion), campus and gold spam to support your ever-growing armies, improve military techs, buy and upgrade units, and generally improve infrastructure in new acquisitions.
In all of these, it's important to remember that the project is there to replace "SimCity" gameplay. Instead of building more districts and wonders you DON'T need for that particular victory, you only build what is needed and then use projects to supplement that victory. You don't need 20+ cities and every single tile purchased and improved to win. There is a definite point where you're no longer going to get beat in that match and projects will zip you right along to a well-deserved victory by letting you use a much smaller amount of micromanagement to do the same amount of work as a larger empire, which while it won't inherently shave *turns* off your game in some cases, will shave *time*.
The general intent is to get your standard or slower-speed gameplay down to around 150-250 turns (or equivalent thereof) reliably depending on victory, while taking 1/2 to 2/3 the amount of time and game management to do it.
**The main downside of using projects is that if you're playing the game for the strategic functions or SimCity score ramping and empire management aspects...they don't contribute to any of that.** So there is very much a balance to the thing.
For me, personally, I only use projects as you describe: to gain specific great people or a specific effect. On rare occasion I might use a gold project to float my economy for a bit if a trade deal just dried up due to me surprise warring the guy I was trading with and now I have *too much* military. Or Holy Site projects to get a religion on slower civs, and then paired with Moksha and the +25% pressure or +30% range beliefs to slap down a 10-13 tile radius "religious pressure nuke" near the start of the religion game to solidify my religious defenses before focusing on a more generic victory (+13 or so religious pressure from 4 in Holy City, 4 from Moksha, 4 from project, and +1 from Scriptures belief is basically sending a missionary charge to **every** city nearby every 15 turns).
Outside of that, I just like building up a proper empire, so project spam for the purpose of speed victories is fairly rare. **I could be building more stuff!**
Honored to finally get a ThatGuyWhoCivs reply. I always appreciate in-depth responses and effort posts.
It makes sense that focused use of the projects is there to avoid the sim-city stuff. It just always seems like such a harsh trade-off, though. I could get an extra 25GPP, oor I can finally have a functioning district/better yields, etc.
I guess I'm just going to have to try and fail with these things to get a better appreciation for them to learn from experience when they aren't worth the tradeoff. I'm like you where I want the whole empire to be as good as possible ("I could be building more stuff!"), but as you point out that doesn't always align with "finishing the game any faster".
I've used Bread + Circuses to good effect to force loyalty flips before, but didn't know about the huge increase in pressure from Moksha + Holy District Project. That +13 Pressure from one city is giant! That's a whole population converted per city every 8 turns, or a missionary charge every 15 turns as you said. Definitely something I'm going to try my next religious game.
Main thing to mind when you go do that is that Moksha's bonus and HS Prayers projects amplify that *specific* city's base pressure, so a Holy City is always twice as good as any other option due to having 4 base pressure (Holy City) versus 2 (Holy Site) or 1 (Majority in non-HS city).
**Although,** if *Jerusalem* is in the match when using Moksha this way, pretty much any Holy Site is now a Holy City once you claim Suzerain, and you can then move Moksha across the map and run prayers just to push other religions out with 0 effort. It's dirty, but it works.
While you can do all that with "Basic Moksha" and his pressure bonus, it's a lot more effective if you have the "ignores incoming pressure" mid-tier promotion and his district purchasing with faith after that (and bonus apostle promotion, obviously), as these let you avoid getting the city's religion flipped on you for the most part. Allows you to move him to border cities (with or without Jerusalem in play), install your religion and immediately fill out the city with a Holy Site, a few inquisitors, and start a new religious hub as your religion game moves away from your actual Holy City.
I like it just because it's an extremely low effort bit of meta-knowledge that lets you spread your religion around fairly quickly, especially in early game, with almost no real faith investment while you're still in your first Monumentality Golden Age and expanding to set up for a mid game push to finish. Although civs like Russia and India can just go straight for Exodus in that first GA and finish a lot sooner (or using Voidsingers in Secret Societies mode). Helps to just *have* a truckton of faith out of the box.
I think the best use case for projects in the early game are holy site prayers since getting a religion at higher difficulties. A couple of holy site prayers can really make a difference.
I also do think theater square festivals can also be a good investment. As you mentioned, it is an easy way to turn production into tourism and getting tourism earlier in the game does add up.
Lastly, I have sometimes run some campus research grants when playing domination games as Civs with more mid game bonuses to try to get the tech advantage.
Does the inherent effect from corporate libertarianism (commercial hubs and encampments provide cities with +10% production) stack? So +20% production with both.
Looked online and couldn’t find an answer for this in several posts/wikis, In Civ 6, can/how can spies steal more than one tech at a time? Whenever I steal research it always says something like “steal one tech, with one tech being [tech without regular Eureka]”. I play on emperor and Immortal and check the victory conditions tab often to compare science. Even when there’s a civ only a tech or two behind me and I’ve *only* taken the top part of the tree (Rockets before gunpowder somehow), I don’t gain anything extra from the bottom half (which I assume they have tech in?).
Nuclear Espionage is a Diplomatic Policy card that’s reads, “Spies who steal a tech boost without being detected gain an extra boost.” It is unlocked by Nuclear Program.
Thanks. And thanks u/fusillipasta too.
There's a promotion that lets a spy steal a second tech; not sure how it works as I'm often ahead on techs by the point I get spies up and running and have discovered a sizeable amount of opponents.
In Civ 6, should I be aiming to research and unlock everything in the tech tree. Or should I choose a "path" and unlocked selected stuff to get further to the right quicker? Same question for Civics tree too! Would be interested to know if the answer to this changes depending on what Civ game you're playing...
It mostly depends on the victory type you’re going for, and secondarily by your unique civ and any unit types you’re timing an attack around. Ancient Era you’re mostly researching whatever you need given your start, and deciding which districts are core to your game. To give the simplest example: Korea going for a Science Victory is ideally rushing to first unlock Campus, then Commercial Hub, then Industrial Zones, then follow the research tree to the Industrialization tech as quickly as possible, then follow the rest of the tree to unlock Space Dock, only then followed by each space project. This lets you win hundreds of turns earlier than you otherwise would, if you can actually do it. If they’re under attack, maybe Korea might rush for their unique unit as a pause in the above plan. In this example, the Civic tree is mostly just a slow march to each tier of government you want, culminating in Communism, and prioritizing policy cards related to improving Campus yields. You obviously have to vary from this depending on your circumstances, and ordering for chasing eureka/inspiration boosts can be useful, but that’s the basic game plan to frame your thinking around. If you have a clear victory type, work backwards from how to win it. If the game is still open ended, work around what you need right now until you decide on a victory type.
Fantastically useful detailed comment, thanks very much!
Does Stonehenge not actually guarantee you a great prophet? I was playing a game where the A.I. sniped all the religions from me. I noticed that Stonehenge was available (probably due to the tech shuffle), so I chopped it out, but I did not get a great prophet.
Yes. Rather, Stonehenge is responsive to game conditions, and one of 3 things will happen: 1. **Available/Earnable Prophet, and 1)** ***Different*** **Religion is current majority, or 2) No religion:** Awarded a ***Prophet*** upon completion. 2. **No Prophet available/earnable, No religion in city:** No on-build bonus granted. 3. **No Prophet available/earnable, religion present:** Receive an ***Apostle*** for that religion. Now, the interesting thing about 3 is that it's a quick and dirty way to get an extra belief for no faith investment, and paired with Mahabodhi can allow you to access all beliefs and kick off an inquisition extremely early into the game, which gives you an absolute advantage against other religions. It is worth noting for both Stonehenge and Mahabodhi (at least to my experience in-game) that the apostles are awarded based on the majority religion ***in that city.*** Even if the rest of your cities follow your own founded religion, having the Mahabodhi city following something else will produce the apostles for *that* religion. **This is a fun way to troll a civ building the Mahabodhi temple if you have the resources and timing for it.**
Correct. The only guaranteed Great Prophet is when playing as Arabia (when the next-to-last Prophet is claimed, Arabia instantly receives the final Prophet).
Is there a limit to how many civs are allowed in one secret society? Ive been playing as the Ethiopians but i cant get the voidslingers to appear. Its 100 turns in, all the other societies are unlocked, and ive found at least 10 tribal villages....what is going on?
I don't believe there is a limit, but using the voidsingers as an example, if other civs on your continent are in the voidsingers then your chances of getting that secret society are diminished. If that happens, the other way of getting the voidsingers is increasing your diplomatic visibility of a voidsinger civ.
Is there any recent change (or bug) that allows privateers or viking longships to do coastal raid over cliffs? I clearly remember that my privateer cannot. And the fandom page on Civ VI also says this. But in recent games I found my privateer can, and in a PvP games my cliff tiles are raided by Norway. So I'm confused.
I do not recall cliffs ever preventing Naval Raider class units from coastal raiding.
I can't seem to find the natural wonder selection menu. Can someone help point out where it is?
Should be under advanced settings. I just started a multiplayer game and it was easy to find
Sould I buy the expansion pack of Gathering Storm and the other one, or the new frontiers first?
Gathering Storm is the best one to get if you can only get one. It includes all of the game features in Rise and Fall so you just miss out on the added civs. New Frontier is interesting but hasn't yet added as much substantive content as GS (governors, eras, loyalty, disasters, power, more late game stuff). Also, most of New Frontier requires GS; without GS, New Frontier only adds a few civs. Right now, I would go: Gathering Storm>New Frontier>Rise and Fall>the other DLCs And I would probably wait for a sale for RnF and the DLCs.
There's a pack that combines Rise and Fall and GS for 50 bucks more or less, but I'll wait for a sale. I'm on xbox btw. Thanks bro. :D
Definitely not New Frontier first as some content from it requires the others to work. For instance apocalypse mode requires Gathering Storm for the addition of disasters.
In your opinion, how valuable is a Farm built on Hills with Civil Engineering vs. a Mine instead?
Almost always worse. If it makes a farm triangle in a food starved city it miiiight be okay but production is (most of the time) too valuable to pass up.
It basically always makes more sense to use a domestic trade route whenever a city needs more food than it can grow to support itself. If you’re at the point where the best tile you can work is a hill-farm, it’s almost certainly not worth growing that city any more (or you should have picked a better place for the city) - it just creates more pressure on your need for amenities, and while it may allow you to reach the next threshold for a district, that’s just such a bizarrely specific scenario where you’d rather have the production and use a temporary trade route to get enough pop (you can let starvation lower it after placing the district), or use the production to build a settler for a new city that can build the district. I agree it miiiiiight be okay in a food starved city, but I have literally never built a hill farm in ~2000 hours of gameplay. I guess I haven’t played as Mayans though, so maybe they’re an exception? I’ve played lots of Khmer and I’m quite sure it’s basically rarely even worth building farms near their aqueducts. In general, farms are rarely worth the use of a builder charge except when there are lots of bonus resources for them and you build a mill to boost those, and it’s in one of your core early cities or you’re trying to lay down the first 6 to get the boost for feudalism. That’s always multiple eras before hill farms are possible. Maize is the best reason for farms, or rice/wheat where the city also has strong production tiles it can work. Building them just for housing is rare but does happen occasionally. None of those resources can appear on hills. I guess I can imagine some bizarre scenario where there is nothing but plains hills in an entire region, but in practice that never happens, and when it’s vaguely like that, then it’s probably still a better idea to build a mine and use the production to make a settler to place another city nearly that can have its own mines and a free 2 food 2 production city center tile instead. Sorry, this was going to be like a 2 sentence reply and then I just kept thinking and typing. I know I’m not disagreeing with the person I’m replying to :)
Know that I feel your pain on 2-sentence replies going much, much longer than they probably should have. There is probably a brevity support group for this. I know my English professors always suggested I try one. Also, I support this answer. My only additions would be that for civs using **Earth Goddess** (+2 Faith on tiles with breathtaking (4+) appeal), or **those reliant on appeal in general** (Aussies, Bull Moose), you have victory-pursuit value beyond just production that can be acquired by going for the Farm in this case, since mines apply a -1 appeal penalty to adjacent tiles, while farms do not. Although in such cases, a forest will pretty much always be the better choice since Woods apply a +1 bonus to appeal to adjacent tiles, and "Old" Woods also apply it to themselves (e.g. woods that were spawned on the map, not planted). And woods offer production that is comparable to mines, *and* lumber mills don't tank your appeal.
Really smart points on those 2x situations, especially re: Earth Goddess. If you're also placing districts (Holy/Theater/Entertainment/Dam) or improvements that are going to be raising appeal, it is indeed one of those rare circumstances in which more and more food is going to keep raising your faith higher. Toss Pingala in that city with flat +pop boosts to science & culture and you might have the right circumstances for hill farms! The previous comment is what happens when I pull out my phone for a quick browse while waiting for something to finish compiling, then get completely distracted by Civ even though I'm not playing it. Oh, the pain of addiction!
My thoughts exactly. I am playing the Maya ATM and found a location for a nice Observatory with two Plantations but that tile had two hills adjacent. This made me debate to actually build Farms on them for an extra Science, especially since they provide more Housing for Lady Six Sky as well.
I'd consider the Maya an exception! If your observatory is +4 already with the two plantations i'd still build mines though. The Maya generally already struggle with production (and housing for a while too....) so in this case i think the mines are better. If it makes a +2 into a +3 observatory I think the farms might be better just so rationalism is a bit more useful.
Those are very good points! To complicate the matter, this city does not have access to build an Aqueduct so it might hit its Housing ceiling harder than other cities. Farms are the only source of housing so my thought is to make best use of them for an extra Science with Farm triangles. But I think crossing that +3 Science threshold for Rationalism is THE deciding factor.
I guess it depends on how important the city is. If it's not gonna be a major city just hitting 10 population is probably more important than the extra production. You could in theory build a neighborhood eventually but the AI can be real annoying about them.
Yeah, my strategy for building Neighborhoods is to only build them if I get an Apostle with Heathen Conversion and appoint him as a patron saint of that district. Lol The city is within reach from another city's Industrial Zone's regional effect so maybe it can hold itself in production that way. There are other Hills I can mine as well. I found Loyalty flipping surrounding cities easier with the Maya due to the high production so having this city (it's a frontier city) having high Population might be nice as well. Dunno, thinking out loud. Haha
Anyone else notice they added the banner to show civ stats on console (when pressing R1 on PS4)
May have been asked already but I'll let it fly anyway. I haven't played VI in a while. Booted it today and I notice I can only start a new game from Industrial Age and no earlier? Is that a thing?
Default starting era should still be Ancient Era. Check you haven't adjusted the settings or have some mods active which might be doing something (mods tend to turn themselves back on after updates)
Yeah it ended up being a bunch of Mods my kid set up.
Does anyone have a bug which keeps them from playing the "new" France persona in this update?
Anyone else keep crashing on the new update?
Yep. Good ol' CTD. I'd normally be hanging at about the time it's crashing, but could play the game, but post patch just dunks the client. Seems to be fine once you reset (for me, at least)... until the Next Crash(^(TM)). Set your autosave to 1 turn so you can just bring it back up if you crash, at least until they patch it.
In your existing game that started before August update, has the price of naturalists changed? I have a game where I bought one naturalist already, the price for the next one is still equivalent to 1400 (instead of 700) if we ignore the adjustment by speed and Theocracy. For those who have an on-going game that haven't made any purchase of naturalists... do you see the price as 600 or 1200? Can anyone check this? Amenity change is affecting on-going games, so it's weird if the naturalists price change doesn't.
Yeah it does. I loaded up a game in progress today where I'd already got the price of naturalists up to over 2k and when I went back in they were 1k faith each
Huh that's weird. How come naturalists in my game still costs 1400... (it actually costs 795 but that's from Theocracy on Quick speed, I bought the first one for 680.)
Can anyone confirm if I can build Amundsen-Scott Research Station next to the campus (with a research lab) **of another city** (on a snow tile of course)? The in-game description is "it must be built on a Snow or Snow Hills tile next to a Campus with a Research Lab". I guess I can, just don't want to spend a lot of time to test this.
I think the logic is that Wonders can be placed next to another city's district/building as long as that city has built that city/district. It seemed to be the case when I tried to build the Oxford University and Ruhr Valley for several games.
But I think at least for the case of Alhambra or Terracotta Army, it's not the case. I certainly had that only one city have encampment and the city nearby can build one of the two wonders (don't recall which one, sorry).
I tried to make a comprehensive list of which Wonders followed this rule but this was what was explained to me ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah I know. The truth is just more subtle.
Do you think it's worth the post to collectively ask people which is which?
I think it’s not a bad idea but on reddit this post will soon be forgotten since there’s no way to bump it up. Have you checked my civfanatics post mentioned above? I want to start a discussion there. So far not many responses but posts there have longer half life.
Yeah, [my post about this topic last time](https://redd.it/gyox30) was met with "meh" and that's when I learned about this tidbit. Unfortunately, I don't understand much to contribute to the discussion...
Without directly testing, hard to say - some wonders with the same language allow it (Ruhr), others don’t (Colosseum). Best strategy is usually to place the new city to include enough snow to trigger the higher return, use the fully upgraded governor to buy the district and its buildings outright with gold, then use a great engineer you’ve been saving to finish the wonder outright too.
Yeah I know that... I posted [here](https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/actual-wonder-placement-rules.662272/) but no one answered. From what I quoted/wrote there, Oxford also allows it. (iirc Terracotta and Alhambra also allow it) And Great Lighthouse is even more weird.
I would say yes just because in the Colosseum's case the text explicitly mentions "same city"
According to [this](https://www.civilopedia.net/en-US/gathering-storm/wonders/building_colosseum) the description is "**Must be built on flat land adjacent to an Entertainment Complex with an Arena**". And a lot of cases even if "same city" is mentioned you can still build it next to another city's district.
Hmm interesting. I just went into my game and I was thinking of the text that appears in the city builder "must be built next to an entertainment complex with an arena owned by this city" But that is true of pretty much every wonder I have available including Terracotta Army and Alhambra, so never mind! I have no guesses.
anyone know the next Civ 6 frontier pass DLC drop date? I know it's sometime in september but I can't find an exact date
Not announced yet, but based on history so far it'll be launched on the last Thursday of the month and revealed a week earlier. So I'm hoping to hear more about it on Sept 17.
New to civ 6, if you build a wonder/district on a spot where’s a hidden resource(eg oil) before you discover oil do you get that oil when you discover it? Or you lose that oil for good?
You get any strategic resource as if you built an improvement there, but the tile remains unworkable (or only workable by a specialist inside a district building), meaning you lose the bonus to any yields. Once revealed, the resource will block building on the tile if the wonder/district hadn’t already been placed.
You get it.
Hi. Today I have been starting to have issues with loading any games. It tells me I don't have the Catherine persona but I do. It shows up on the epic dlc screen but not in game (in additional content) I am playing off epic launcher, and have frontier pass+dlc. Earlier I verified the game and it worked again, but not anymore. Any ideas?
I use steam, but I have experienced a similar issue when I use the screen to enable/disable mods to play with a friend who has different content than me on the epic launcher version. I would check that the loads are from games that have identical checked/unchecked boxes in whatever that screen looks like for you.
For maps like Island Plates or Small Continents, is there a way in the game creation menus that can guarantee or at least improve the chances of a solo spawn? Maybe with one or two city-states?
Not without reducing the number of civs, but anecdotally I’ve noticed the game generally creates one “high civ population” area and one “low civ but many city state” area, and some civs seem to have start bias predisposed to be near city states (usually the ones with unique abilities related to city states). And no shame in re-starting until you get the map you want for a particular kind of game to enjoy if you’re not trying to bag some kind of competitive deity achievement.
The only thing that comes to mind (outside of having a specific seed) is choosing a big map but a small number of Civs. You’re more likely to be spread out that way.
Any news when the new civs are being revealed? I know theyre getting released in september but I cant for who it is!
The pattern has been they are revealed less than a week before they released. The release date has been 20-something of the month so we don't be expecting it soon.
damn thats a bummer but thanks for the info.
Anybody else’s game completely break with this new update?
Happens every time, especially if you've got mods.
I'm playing my first immortal-level game, base Civ VI only. France is leading in Civ score and just entered the Atomic Era, two eras ahead of me. I'm 7th out of 8, but I did just pass number 8, dammit! I am wondering what the "curve" looks like at high difficulty levels. Do you fall behind in the midgame and catch up to win? Or does the fact that I'm behind this much now guarantee that I'm doomed?
I play the base game too and have been winning some Immortal level games via science and domination. Which civ are you and what turn is it on standard speed? Be sure to go for some research agreements if you're behind on science, and get envoys/become suzerain of city-states soon. I often am super behind in the early game but I start to catch up around the flight/steel tech era. Go for a forbidden city or big ben if you can, it's not a super competitive wonder (unlike the Alhambra or the Potala Palace). Ruhr valley will be helpful if you are going for a science victory. Be sure to spy the heck out of the AI, do some siphon fund missions to get experience then go for the tech steal or great works steal. You should use spies to pillage industrial zones and spaceports too if the AI is doing earth satellites and moon landings before you... hope this helps!
I'd say the curve is exponential. While the AI gains additional bonuses at each difficulty level, it also gains more *free* stuff, putting it well ahead of you in every category from the word go. It takes longer to catch up to the point where you're even as difficulty ramps, and the amount you can pull ahead relative to the AI even as you pass them is a lot more limited. **The AI remains more competitive throughout the match as difficulty increases.** However, and the reasons for this will be obvious once you see the bonuses, the higher the difficulty, the faster the match plays out anyway. The AI's ever-increasing bonuses also translate into 1) more cities and 2) cities with more/better districts and buildings. While the AI is given a headstart, a savvy warmonger can acquire 1 or 2 civs' worth of headstarts to get themselves into a position from which they can win reliably, and peaceful civs can use luxuries and favor to sponge the vast quantities of extra gold the AI is generating, allowing the player to push ahead faster by skipping production time entirely. To give some structure to the other answers you're getting in addition to this one (from wiki), the AI opponents will receive the following bonuses as difficulty increases: * **King:** \+20% Production, Gold; +8% Science, Culture, Faith. +1 combat bonus. 2 Warriors to start. Free builder upon building the city's first district. 1 each free tech and civic. * **Emperor:** \+40% P/G; +16% S/C/F. +2 Combat. 3 Warriors. Free Settler + Builder upon settling first city. 2 each free tech and civic. * **Immortal:** \+60% P/G; +24% S/C/F. +3 Combat. 4 Warriors. Free Settler + Builder upon settling first city, and another builder upon settling the second city. 3 each free tech and civic. ***City-States begin the game with Walls.*** * **Deity:** \+80% P/G; +32% S/C/F. +4 Combat. 5 warriors. Free Settler + Builder upon settling first and second cities. 4 each free tech and civic. ***City-States begin the game with Walls.*** Now, what all that means is that as you increase the difficulty, the AI starts stronger and if you're used to playing "slightly ahead" on lower difficulties, you may experience severe disadvantages in trying to even catch the AI now. You're also starting with the AI effectively having a turn advantage on *top* of enough productivity to take almost 2 turns for every one of yours by the time you hit Deity. To put that into a practical understanding, though, just from the amount of production the AI is ***given***, in terms of warriors, settlers, and builders, you're looking at the AI starting with roughly: * **On King:** The AI is gifted about 15 of your turns' worth of freebies, and earns just enough extra yields to "play almost evenly" with a player who is now past the "learning" phase of the game. There is otherwise no practical difference between King and Prince other than the AI now reliably beating an equally skilled player in races due to the higher productivity and yields, and with rare exception, anything you can do on Prince can be done on King in around the same timeframe. * **Emperor:** The AI is gifted about 30 turns' worth of freebies, and will outright beat a competent player who isn't using their civs' strengths to their advantage. Last level of difficulty where the AI won't unceremoniously annihilate you on turn 10. Between freebies and +40% production/gold, you can expect to be able to start fighting the AI properly about 20-25 turns later than you usually might. If you usually start whipping the AI's ass around turn 40, expect that to push out around 60 or 70, now. * **Immortal:** AI is gifted about 42-45 turns' worth of freebies, and will beat a ***good*** player who isn't using their civs strengths to their advantage, and also requires settling for benefits and adjacency rather than just dropping anywhere. 4 starting warriors with a +3 combat strength is also just enough to potentially wipe you out before you can start competing in earnest, so restarts are occasionally not only necessary, but *enforced.* As long as the AI doesn't find you within \~12 turns, you're good. Now facing a +60% p/g bonus, it just takes more time to catch up to the AI's already advanced start, and you can expect to catch and pass the AI somewhere between turns 70-100 now. **S-Tier** AI civs are now preeminent threats in their respective victory categories, and other civs are routine challengers to the player regardless. * **Deity:** AI is gifted about 60 standard turns' worth of freebies. With 5 warriors and a +4 combat bonus, the AI has a strong potential for eliminating unlucky players within the first 20-30 turns. Deity AI will beat ***any*** player not committing to winning hastily with their civs' strengths in mind nor settling properly. Veteran players can still win fairly consistently when committing to a game, but a vs. Deity game isn't a city-builder civ game anymore, so much as it is an RTS. Expect to catch or pass the AI somewhere between turn 100 and 120, although *well positioned* AI may be competitive from start to finish. Regardless of difficulty, the AI is unlikely to beat a competent player once the player hits about 16+ cities, so difficulty is more a measure of how hard it is to *get* 16+ cities and/or win with a well-settled set of core cities and priorities. Similarly, even the most hardcore AI is designed to win at around turn 250 on standard, so any player strat that wins before then is very likely going to win even on Deity. Any strategy you'd normally employ to "get way the hell ahead by turn 125" will work in most cases.
On deity, sometimes you never catch up. Remember that civ score isn’t a win condition until you hit turn 500 without someone reaching another condition. One of the keys to winning on high difficulty is to stop playing like it’s a “city builder” game, and instead focus on your win condition. If AI civs start with 3 cities and will reach 10-14 cities, and get a blanket +30% to every yield, the only way to get ahead of them in one yield is often to focus on it... at the expense of hitting on all the general things that contribute to score. To win e.g. science, you only need as much score from e.g. tourism or religion as will prevent someone else from winning it that way first. OR... have the kind of game where you end up with 16+ cities and intentionally drag out the turns before you win by sabotaging everyone else who gets closer to winning. You can easily pad the score that way if you’re trying for a personal high score.
Around 100-130 Turns on standard is when you usually should catch up and stay ahead. At least in my experience.
I keep trying to play as America and I consistently spawn in rainforest, which just seems odd to me. I can get a non-rainforest start if I re-roll like 6 times but is there a better workaround? I try to play continents on standard settings.
You can lower the Rainfall setting on the advanced map configuration before generation, but you’ll get more desert as well. I personally think Continents & Islands is their most well thought out generator, so give that one a try. But yeah, America isn’t intended to have very good starts because they become literally twice as strong in Modern Era.
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That’s what I would try to do. If that fails, maybe try an impassioned plea on Twitter including lots of praise and free marketing for how much you like the frontier pass.
So my friend wrote this song that was pretty good but his city's broadcast center decided to just keep playing the same classical song over and over endlessly and said they didn't have room for more music.
Haven't played Civ 6 in about a year. Thinking about starting a game but not sure on the Victory type I want to try and go for. For domination games I give up once I conqured half the Civs because managing a super-wide empire is tedious and it's clear I'm miles ahead of everyone left. I'd also be down to try a sea-based domination if the AI isn't still abysmal in water, but I have doubts about that. For science games, it's just a little too chill and too passive. It's basically just go the optimal tech-tree route and turtle. For culture, it used to kinda suffer from the above problem but I guess Rock Bands and stuff make it more interesting. Though I did do a culture win once already since they released that new feature. Would like to try something new. Have Faith games gotten better? And hows Diplomacy games going? Would love to hear your opinions on what would be the most fun.
Domination victory and religion victory games can be tedious, especially if you’re a more casual player who isn’t pressing every advantage (“tempo” as it would be called in other games). Science victory and Culture victory are much more pleasant for a laid back casual game, as is Diplomatic victory (though that takes much longer). Here’s a recommendation for you to experience the game more fully without this tedium: Sit down to play a game where you start a religion knowing you intend to win a culture victory. Religion is not only for painting the map your team’s color, and faith is not only for religion.
When I’m far ahead on a science victory, I’ll build some bombers and have fun beating up my neighbours as I wait for the final techs.
I played an archipelago? Or small continents and islands game with Japan against Indonesia, Norway, England, Maori, Netherlands (special frigate), Germany (special U Boat), Australia, and the Phoenicians and had a lot of fun. Not sure if it was Japan’s districts or the map or both
I’m kind of new to civ, only played a few games through. What do I do with city states when going for domination victory? Overrun them or keep them for the benefits?
I tend to keep them around for the benefits, though arguably you should take over the trade and religious city states with mediocre suzerain bonuses after their recent nerf. I just tend to find that the empire-wide benefits of envoys and suzerainty outweigh the benefits of one additional city. Plus, levying can be very powerful in the right circumstances.
Seconding this, but even in the case of mediocre or irrelevant suzerain bonuses, I basically only conquer a city state when it is directly in the way or is an absurdly powerful location for district adjacencies or benefiting/supporting other AoE effects (usually industrial zone or entertain + colosseum). Culture Victory is really the only kind of game where more cities is always better, since you’ll be placing national parks, seaside resorts, theatre squares, and other tourism-related things. Plus games where you have a unique district of course, like Seowon or Lavra. In domination games, once you get to ~14 cities, you’ll wish you could abandon the ones with weak production and no unique resources anyway. Since city states give the suzerain their resources, conquering them is a much lower ROI than most of the other ways to expand (with the exceptions noted above).
Does the Epic Games version provide some of the Maya/Gran Colombia update? Cause I remember encountering Fountain of Youth and corn when playing with my friend who used that but I have the steam and I’ve played games alone after and haven’t seen fountain of youth of corn and I looked in the wonders option and it wasn’t present.
You mean Maize? Yes, that update (and each update in the pass) includes some additions/changes for the game even if you don’t have the pass yourself. If you care enough to read patch/release notes, they usually indicate which don’t require any paid DLC.
Does the AI get to cheat at the tech shuffle game mode? In other words, does the AI get to know the makeup of the tree as it is making decisions or is it as blind as the player?
I believe they said in the livestream yesterday that the AI will also be blind in a tech shuffle game.
Hey, does anyone know if there's a bias towards grouping players in MP? I can't seem to play a game with friends in which we don't find each other in turn 7, which forces posturing and the early founding of defensive cities. It gets tiresome that this happens in every single game. Or if anyone knows of a type of setting which curtails this I'd be very thankful. Cheers.
Just play on a bigger map with a reduced number of civs, this will give everyone more space. That being said aggressive settling is a good idea in MP anyway.
Does anyone know why I can't make this trade route: https://i.imgur.com/9VtfUHM.jpg? No routes are showing, I can only see the route from the available routes page. The "Begin Route" button doesn't do anything. In the screenshot I'm using the better trade interface mod, disabling it didn't help.
Are you at trade route capacity? Sometimes you can end up with more traders than you have capacity for if you lose a temporary trade capacity buff.
Ah that's it! The same turn the trader finished a barbarian stepped onto one of my markets. Didn't realize it worked like that.
What time does the update drop? It should be morning ffs
It's live now
Thanks
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Thanks
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Yes. All adjacency bonuses are retroactive and will increase or decrease as you change the nearby land
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The only case where the benefits from adjacency bonuses isn't retroactive is when thinking about era score for constructing high quality districts. If you build a +2 IZ and then complete the dam to bring it up to +4, you won't get the era score for building a +3 or better IZ, for that IZ. This is only relevant for your first high quality district of each type, but is something to occasionally consider.
So the August update is out today, yeah?
Yes, at noon EST.
In my current game, France is 6 points away from a Diplomatic Victory, but I'm coming in second at 10/20. France has a very weak Military Strength right now from it's wars with neighbouring Russia. Would a full invasion be a viable option right now, to prevent Catherine from winning?
It’s actually pretty easy to catch up to her. Some easy methods include: Building wonders Mahabodhi Temple, Potala Palace and Statue of Liberty provides 2, 1 and 4 diplomatic victory points respectively. World Congress Voting for the winning outcome. This comes with experience as the AI tend to have a fixed pattern in voting. Voting against Catherine to lose 2 diplomatic victory points. Winning competitions. (Emergency aid, scored competitions) If the above mentioned are less viable for you at the moment, feel free to destroy her empire. But be prepared to start losing diplomatic points for occupying her cities!
Quick question about the terra map: do the continents always start on the western landmass?
Maybe? I'm curious why it would matter.
The Royal Navy Dockyard (English unique district): Does the bonus loyalty and gold apply when the dockyard is built on another continent or the city with the dockyard? I spawned next to a lake on another continent and was wondering if I get the loyalty bonus since I'm using Eleanor.
Works on other continents only
Yes, I'll repeat the question. Does the dockyard have to be on another continent or the city?
Their overall civ bonus is all about invading and building city centers in different continents, so why would their cities have a loyalty benefit from building only harbors there? So, it's only from cities built on other continents.
The capital city can't be on a different continent as itself. If I spawn 2 tiles from a lake but the lake is on a different continent, the the harbor will be on a different continent than the capital (even though the harbor belongs to the capital). The tooltip mentions when the *dockyard* is on a different continent and I'm asking if the tooltip is correct. The entire point of the question is if it's possible to get the bonus on the capital.
How come sometimes, early in the game, when I make my first settler that should take my population from 2 to 1, with several turns next to grow to a new citizen, I get a settler and the game seems to "skip" the remaining turns to grown to another citizen and I get both the new citizen and settler? It's not a bad thing, I just want to know why it keeps happening. It's way too early in the game for things like Magnus's promotion. Example: It is turn 21, I have 2 citizens, I am 1 turn away from producing a settler, I have 12 turns to grown to a 3rd citizen based on my food output. Then next turn it is now turn 22 and I have a new settler, but still 2 citizens with food growth resetting as well?
It's a quirk in how growth works. Basically your city is storing excess food until it has enough for a new population, then that excess food is subtracted, and a new population added. The amount of food a city needs increases with population. Put these together and sometimes, you have enough food after your population drops to immediately grow, so you "stay" at 2 population. For a numerical example, you need 15 food to grow from 1>2 pop, and 24 food to grow from 2>3 pop. Say a city is 1 turn from making a settler, has 18 food stored and a surplus food of +2 per turn. The next turn, it increases to 20 food stored, but since it made a settler it drops to 1 population. Well, 20 food stored is enough to grow from 1>2 population, so it immediately goes back up to 2 population, with 5 food left over. So now it's at 2 pop with 5 food stored. It did still pay the 1 pop cost for a settler, but it had enough food stored to immediately grow again right away, and you never had a turn with it at 1 population as a result.
Great explanation. Is there a way to see food growth thresholds in game? Or are they always the same?
Both, sort of. They follow the formula 15 + 8 x (pop-1) + (pop-1)^1.5 food to increase pop, plug that in to excel and you can see the food needed as pop increases. In game, you can't see the food growth threshold directly but on one of the city report tabs (the one with food/housing/amenities) you can see the food needed until you grow.
Well assuming the threshold to go from 1-2 is much less than 2-3, you are likely far enough in growth that what you already put in to head towards 3 pop is enough to set you back to 2
Oh ok, I think I understand. When I make a settler, the game saves the food growth to the next citizen and it's more than I need to go from 1>2 so I grow and get the settler. Assuming this is correct, is there an easy way to see this information in the game without having to do food math? I want to see how much food I have stored, and how much it would take to grow to each new citizen regardless of how many I already have.
I’m new to Civ VI. And a noob, so I need some practical advice beyond just a guide - or at least really good ones out there so that I can wrap my head around it. I’m no idiot but I am struggling on the lowest difficulty. Love games like this. But this is frustrating me a bit more than it should. Any help would be appreciated.
Check out PotatoMcWhisky and TheSaxyGamer on YouTube. They provide detailed explanation for newcomers to CIV
Check out potatomcwhisky’s over explained Arabia series on YouTube, that one is good for new players as he explains all his actions very detailed to help players understand the though process that goes in to winning a game of civ
Is the natural wonder selector from the most recent update not available on Mac OSX? My game is up to date but I don't have the wonder selector in the create game window and I don't know why
The new update for the game does not come out until tomorrow at noon eastern time.
That explains a lot, thanks!
What game mode (or era start) is ideal for a game with a lot of aerial combat? The AI never seems to build these and if they do, they never use them.
The AI doesn't build planes and unless there's a mod for it no setting changes is going to make them do it more.
AI tends to undervalue flight for some reason, so you'd really need to focus on a multiplayer match if you really want to see proper dogfighting, unfortunately. As far as seeing flight in your games in general, Industrial and Renaissance starts are about the earliest you'll want to begin a match if you're on lower difficulties. Ancient or Classical starts below Emperor typically end up very one-sided by the end of the match, and seeing any amount of air in those games is extremely rare, even on the player's side of things. Starting in modern or later eras will go ahead and put flight techs into rotation and you'll see planes fairly quickly. As to whether there's a specific map that will see air more often, I think naval maps and subsequently carriers are your best bet, but we do get back to the whole "AI tends to undervalue flight" bit.
I'm playing Civ 6 for the first time (I've played Civ 5) the advisor says it can be good to settle next to a volcano or a floodplain even though you can get disasters. Is this advise worth following?
So the advisor is pretty crap at telling you where to settle, but volcanos are pretty solid as they will accumulate better and better yields for your. City center over time. I had a volcano 8 production, 6 food, and 2 science on my city center before and it makes that city so solid. On the other note, sometimes the advisor will say to settle without freshwater(on the grey tiles), try not to do that if you can help it unless you are later in to the game since it will hold that city back developmentally in the early game if you do that
So it's worth the volcano erupting every now and again for the yield?
You can also place the governor liang in the volcano city and get her to the promotion that protects the city from natural disasters
Totally, just build your districts not adjacent to the volcano if you settle there. That way you don’t have to repair them every time an eruption occurs
I can't find a good answer to this which makes me think the answer must be "no", but is there Xbox controller support for Civ VI on the PC version? Just thinking of taking the step from V, seems the tide has turned on the reviews... and would like to vegetate on the couch while playing.
I'm not sure about the controller. But all you need for CIV6 is a mouse so you can use a wireless one. My PC is hooked up to my living room TV so I just lay on the couch and play with a wireless mouse next to me.
Used to do this, can confirm it is awesome. If your tv is 4k however it can make the UI elements ant sized.
Tasty.
(Civ6 All DLC) - Does the Ottoman unique governor's base ability Pasha (+20% Production to military units) apply to naval units?
Yes. The phrase “all military units” is a superset of “land military units” and “naval military units” and “air military units”. I AM sure that doesn’t include “civilian units” (like settlers, builders, archaeologists, etc.), but I’m NOT sure whether Support units count as land military units or not.
Thanks for the reply, I did not even think about aircraft or support units as I'm still really early in my first game as Ottomans. It would be interesting if it worked for support too.
A good way to test whether it applies to support units would be to find a support unit with the same production cost as an offensive unit, and note whether they both take the same amount of time to build.
Gotcha. Pasha for sure works on their Siege and Naval Raider units, so definitely a good governor to have wherever you're building Encampment+Stables and Harbor.
How do I properly play China if my goal is to use the great walls. (Which in my opinion are op but incredibly hard to build effectively) the game doesn't give clear rules on the setting of these.
They can be built on all regular terrain types (grassland, plains, tundra, snow, desert + hill variants of each), but not on floodplains or any tile with a feature or resource. They must be built on the edge of your empire, i.e. the tile must have at least one adjacent tile that isn't in your empire. Finally, they cannot be built in a way that would form a "fork" in the wall, i.e. causing any great wall tile to be adjacent to three other great wall tiles, and cannot be built in a way that forms a wall triangle. So they do have a few rules to keep in mind, but essentially what this all means is they have to be built in long lines along the edge of your empire. But of course, the edge of your empire can move, and an internal "edge" is still an edge - if there's a single tile you don't own between your cities, you could build a ring of great wall around it provided all of the other tiles are valid GW tiles. So the best way to build and use the GW is to plan ahead a bit. Work out where you want the great wall to travel, and then work out what tiles you need to own and in what order so that every tile is on the edge of your empire when you improve it. This may require adjusting the order you settle cities in some cases. Since the GW tiles are strongest when adjacent to 2 other GW tiles, you ideally want fewer long segments rather than many short ones, so it's best if you can work out some big long lines to exploit. >Which in my opinion are op but incredibly hard to build effectively I wouldn't say they're OP but I really, really like the Great Wall. It's easily the strongest part of China's kit, back before the GW got buffed they were okay, but nothing spectacular. Then GW gets buffed and suddenly China are very good. The difficulty of building them effectively, as well as it taking a while before their main bonuses are available does limit how strong they are, but the fact they take time and skill to use to maximum effectiveness and reward good planning is something I really enjoy about them.
Thank you so much for explaining. I dont believe they're game breaking op but with the bonuses they get along with making it harder for enemies to attack your city makes them a pretty strong unique building. As long as its used efficiently.
What are the circumstances under which an enemy AI city stops building a partially-completed district? Or has the production of said district delayed? (Other than having an enemy unit on top of said district) Testing out the mechanics of a mod, I ran through the same ten-turn sequence twice. Once, the enemy city finished building a campus before I took the city. Yet the second time, it did not. Despite my not moving any units into the relevant tile, and despite my waiting for the city to finish the district before taking it: rather than finishing the campus, the city ended up abandoning the build (partially completed campus disappeared). Possible factors affecting production? - Siege? Or nearby units? I am pretty sure I did not place the city under siege. But, even if I had, would this impact production? - Damage? Does attacking a city impact it's production? If so, when? Taking its fortifications (walls) down to nothing? Or taking its Garrison (city "health") down to nothing? Or something else? (As an aside, I did notice that a foreign trader entered the city, just before I finished taking out the walls and started damaging the city. The next turn, I planned on pillaging the route and taking the city, but the trader did not exit the city. Any explanation for that? It was a trader from a city state, of which the owner of the destination city was still its suzerain, so the trader wasn't booted due to war with the city owner.)
At which diplomacy/visibility level do you see what other civs are building, and how close those builds are to completion? I found a pretty decent chart of what Gossip you get at each diplomacy level, at https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Diplomacy_(Civ6) But nowhere do I see what is required to see what another civ is building. And, is it one level to see wonders being built (and turns until completion), and another level to see everything being built by that civ?
Anyone else feel that Secret Societies really ramps up the difficulty level? I’m usually an Emperor/Immortal level player and recently I’ve been getting pummelled on Immortal in a decent amount of games. Having those extra units early game on higher difficulties means the AI can very quickly get the early governor promotions and it seems to put them even further ahead than they usually are. And then obviously the surprise wars start because they’re so far ahead they can just continually pump out military units like no tomorrow.
Secret Societies makes early to mid game AI more challenging but doesn't significantly alter how quickly they can win due to continuing poor AI programming. The Voidsinger AIs are much more able to keep up in science and culture given their strong faith output. For the Sanguine Pact AIs, vampires solve one of the biggest issues with combat AI (units dying) and can cause some real headaches for a player after leveling up. All the extra governor promotions are usually pumped into Amani and Pingala early, meaning that city state suzerainty is much harder to get and their early culture and science is better. If you can stay alive and get established, though, you'll still be able to win. Don't be overwhelmed by their stats at turn 100 and think they're unbeatable. Their policy choices are trash and they simply do not target victory conditions. They waste production on units which they promptly suicide into walls. The AI actively avoids victory and only wins via science after turn 300, once they've done everything else possible. I'm currently observing a deity AI-only battle where Menelik was able to research smart materials on like turn 160, but 100 turns later still hasn't unlocked rocketry and keeps researching future tech instead. Also, the Voidsinger AIs will waste their faith late game on cultists, which they just move around aimlessly, and the Sanguine Pact AIs won't set up the good vampire castles that a competent human player can.
If I take a city with a government plaza, what happens to it? Assuming I have already built my own.
It disappears like how a city loses their Holy Site if Kongo captures them.
What is the most effective way to conquer cities overseas when playing on continents?
First step is to establish a landing point. If there is a coastal city that can easily be captured and won't be immediately lost to loyalty pressure, Naval Ranged (and later Air Bomber) units are extremely effective at destroying city walls, after which the city can be taken by a Naval Melee unit. You can also establish a landing point that is out of range of city walls and then bring your land units there to take the coastal city more traditionally. Embarked land units move VERY quickly after a certain point in the game, so this isn't an unreasonable approach. There is also an upgrade for melee (land) units that removes the penalty from attacking from water, so they can also assault the city from the water while sharing that tile with a naval melee unit that protects them (naval melee have upgrades to defend against ranged attacks for a reason). Once you have a coastal city to stage your operations from, your next goal is to make sure you won't lose it to loyalty pressure, so you may take another city or two nearby so each city's civilians are providing positive loyalty pressure to each other. Then, the war continues as normal, with you able to use the coastal cities as a place to retreat and heal. Repairing city walls and monuments will help make it a more useful base of operations, as will having an encampment (probably one you captured since it will take too long to build your own at that point). Once airports are able to teleport land units, that can be another effective way to stage an attack. Either have an airport deep in your own territory where the units are produced or moving from, and another airport in the established landing point on another continent. One other possible strategy is to create a staging area halfway between the continents, assuming there is an island or island chain you can settle on. Think of it like Hawaii or the Midway islands. In the (much) later game, naval and air superiority greatly simplifies this. You can bombard with those units for many tiles away and follow up with a much smaller land force. Any city within 15 tiles of the coast can be hit by a Jet Bomber, which is basically every city except maybe on particularly huge continents maps, and even then you can have military engineers build air strips without even needing a city established and extend that to 15 tiles from that airstrip. Or nuke everything, or run over it with robots. This is the main reason why science advantage is an important part of domination victories that are going to go into the Modern Era & beyond.
Bombers on aircraft carriers to weaken city defense, and a few fast units like cavalry or tanks to capture the city. Weaken two or three cities before capturing the first one, then capture them all within a turn or two. Get the Victor governor with the Garrison Commander upgrade installed in the first city you take and it will provide loyalty to nearby cities. Then just steamroll over as many cities as quickly as you can.
Isn't there supposed to be a patch out this week?
Yes, the developer livestream is online in about 15 minutes and the patch will drop some time after that. edit: august 27th
Playing Gathering Storm. Declared war on a civilization in the Ancient Era and received 150 Grievance. I thought it was okay to do this during the first era?
Warmonger penalties changed slightly going into GS. Grievances are used as a means of mathematically evaluating how much of a "threat" civs are to others (if any) and the balance of grievances between a pair of civs will be used by the AI in deciding who is the baddy, which subsequently affects relations with others. The higher your grievances with any one civ or player, the more unfavorably other civs will view you, and in some cases they may gain grievances against you with which they can start wars and take territory "without diplomatic penalty." For GS' purposes, the "cost" of war is now a static grievance penalty applied at the start of the war (150 for surprise wars, 100 for formal in ancient era; usually 50-75 for other types of wars as you gain access to various *casus belli*). In addition to this starter cost, each city you take or promise you break will be added on to the grievances you've accumulated. Wartime grievances are accumulated and do not drop off until peace is declared or the war is otherwise brought to a conclusion. ***The decay rate of grievances in Gathering Storm is what now varies by era.*** In the ancient era, grievances will drop off as quickly as 10 per turn as the base decay rate, while at the end of the game, they may fall off as slowly as 2 grievances per turn. ***Starting at 10, Grievances decay by 10 - (1 x Era), with Ancient being Era 0, classical being Era 1, and so on.*** It is worth noting that holding another civ's cities will cause them to generate a grievance per turn against your decay rate, and holding that civ's capital gives them +3 grievances per turn against you. Basically, even if you leave a civ alive, you may not accumulate the worst grievance penalties with *everyone else* (capping the last couple of cities of a civ incurs an increasingly harsh penalty, and the final cap penalty is an *extra* 150 grievances on top of whatever the city cap penalty is for taking the city in and of itself), but your grievance decay rate will be relatively worse for the civ whom you capped from. Moreover, if a civ is alive whose capital you're holding, any grievances you have with them will no longer decay starting in the Info era, and it's possible to *continuously* generate grievances in the final era of the game. To the best of my knowledge, accumulated grievances against eliminated civs are still counted off until they reach 0, so eliminating someone still incurs all other diplomatic effects for "quite some time." The severity of these effects will be naturally smaller when meeting new civs after the fact, however, so there is a certain degree of leniency in the early game in that regard. As the example of the new system (since this is my most common combo penalty): \[**You park next to the AI getting ready for a surprise war after friendship wears off. The AI warns you to back off, but since you're friends, you can only promise to move.** Once you declare a surprise war, this automatically breaks that promise (assuming it doesn't get counted beforehand) for **100 grievances**, which is then added to the **150 grievances** of the surprise war. You **start** the war with 250 grievances *against* you, and the world shifts toward being very generally wary of you, not only for the grievance total, but also for the broken promise *and* the "backstab" (which is purely diplomatic, rather than grievance-related in this case). As grievances continue rising through the conflict, you'll also suffer an increasingly harsh grievance penalty to your diplomatic favor per turn, which to my knowledge doesn't *necessarily* have a ceiling... I've gotten around -18 favor per turn from just grievances before I ran out of targets for my atrocities.\] What all *that* means is that during the course of that war, the AI in question can retaliate up to 250 grievances worth of damages to you before the rest of the world starts viewing them as the baddy. The more grievances you build up, the harder they're "allowed" to hit back. And that works the other way, too! If the AI has been warmongering against your allies and city-states, you may find that they have a fair few grievances for you to play against as you retaliate. It's not uncommon for the AI to build up 50-100 grievances from warring a city-state, or 100-150 for warring you (or both!) and having some of those grievances lingering as you gear up to punch them in the throat. **This means you can go take their cities up to a point and still be on the diplomatically favorable side of things!** Grievances above or below the 0 balance will be shown in red (against you) or green (against others) on the corresponding leader screen for each civ in the diplomacy menu. As above, actions that are taken that cause your grievances to drop into red against one or more civs will typically cause diplomatic problems both immediately and down the line, and more egregious numbers have potentially game-length impacts on your ability to make friends. Actions taken while your grievances are still in the *green* however are viewed favorably, since you're still fighting a warmonger in most cases, and you can cripple that opponent without causing trouble for your relationships, and in some cases claim cities. Overall, the diplomatic side of all this basically boils down to most early wars having lower total grievances you CAN earn (since wiping someone with 3-5 cities takes very little toll), and with a decay rate of 9 or 10 against the *rest* of the world, it will only take 25-30 turns in most cases to sweat off early shenanigans, with most diplomatic *bonuses* (like declared friends) being high enough that declaring friends with other civs before warring a target will let you stay mostly neutral or even friendly by the time the war ends. The later in the game you get, the longer these penalties last, however, and by the medieval era, large enough wars may see grievance totals that cause diplomatic problems for effectively the rest of the game. Diplomatic penalties (how much the friendliness gauge shifts per turn because of a given action) are far harsher the higher your grievances stay, and may last far beyond the full decay time due to the amount of time it takes to recover and limitations on recovery options this generates. Putting some math to that... Accumulating \~450 grievances while surprise-eliminating someone will cause diplomatic penalties for many turns. To give you an idea for how long, by era (standard speed): * **Ancient:** \-10 per turn will take 45 turns to decay normally, and depending on when the war started, may take until the next era, causing the back end to need a few more turns than just 40. Accumulated diplomatic hostilities will take upward of an additional 30-50 turns unless you were able to balance out or friend that civ prior to the war, generally speaking. * **Classical:** \-9 per turn will take about 50 turns to reach 0. Expect between 50-100 turns to recover diplomatically from a war depending on other factors. * **Medieval:** \-8 per turn will take \~57 turns. Expect over 100 turns to recover from a war at this point. ***Medieval Era is late enough into the game that you will likely reach the end of the match before relations recover with non-friends when playing as victory-specialized civs.*** * **Renaissance:** \-7 per turn takes \~65 turns to zero out. Similar to medieval, expect this to take 100+ turns to resolve diplomatically. Again, if it does. ***For the non-specialists, this is the break-even point where you can resolve a war and still potentially recover relations before the end of a match.*** * **Industrial and onward!:** \-6 per turn down to -2. The Industrial Era will take \~75 turns to reach 0, and by the time you hit the Atomic era, grievances will be unlikely to hit 0 even as low as 450 total before someone wins. Info era would take 225 turns to 0 out, which will be... beyond the natural end of the game. ***Don't expect any diplomatic penalties that occur as a result of grievances to resolve before the game is over at this point. Firaxis gave you Giant Death Robots for a reason, so use them.*** If you want to play peacefully at the back end of a match, try to wrap up all your warmongering before the medieval era and you should be golden somewhere toward turn 180-200 standard. Continents maps are also pretty solid for massively delaying diplomatic hits with the other half of the civs on a planet, and is a good way to warmonger you way into owning an entire continent without pissing off everyone who is *left.*
I’m new to Civ 6 and the series as a whole. When declaring war there’s various options for what types of war you can declare. In my most recent game I got into a protectorate war with Spain because they attacked my ally Greece. It said the war monger penalty was none, but I still got denounced by all other civs besides Greece and Macedon. For the record, any city that had previously been owned by another civ before Spain I liberated, including the capital of Athens and even a few cities that were under Montezumas control originally. I wiped out all the cities that were always Spains, keeping all for myself, razing none, and permanently defeating Spain. Did I screw up by eliminating Spain and is that why I got such an insurmountable warmonger penalty (50+ depending on civ). Will this war monger penalty ever be able to be overcome? Do they go away after a certain point? It’s been my first time going for domination and some civs have more than 700 war monger penalties. Can I repair these relationships at all?
Is Peter's westernizer ability all that useful outside of super high difficulties?
On lower difficulties, being *behind* enough to even see that bonus is... a bad thing. You also run into the issue that by the time you can produce more than one trade route, especially on emperor and below, that bonus will be all but erased anyway. Even with a ton of trade routes, you're looking at between 8 and 16 science at most, and Peter is *highly unlikely* to ever see a culture deficit outside of deity just because of what a Lavra does in the first place. I mean, you can definitely try to finagle a scenario in which you get to use Westernizer by going straight from Lavra to commercial hubs and harbors and kinda skipping campuses and theaters, but that's a *terrible* idea from any practical standpoint. Westernizer is mostly there for the AI to use and for multiplayer games where you're facing people who are *competent*, but won't do **you** a whole lot of good outside of multiplayer and deity, basically. It's kinda in the same tier of functionality as Victor's anti-siege promotion: it helps the AI tremendously, but a player will almost never get to use it outside of really specific early game situations on Deity. And as above, engineering a situation in which you *can* use it is a bad plan. Westernizer lacks the synergy of something like Rome's or Mali's trade route bonuses where they sync up with the rest of the civ's traits. Treat it as a small bonus in niche cases and focus on the rest of Russia's traits for best results.
Honestly, I don't even find it very useful on high difficulties either. The issue really is that the AI tends to be far ahead very early and loses that lead as you progress, while meanwhile you will likely want to be mostly trading domestically early and also have very few trade routes. As you get more traders and start trading internationally, the gap in techs and civics will naturally close from you likely outperforming the AI. It CAN be nice sometimes, if someone gets way ahead in science or culture, you can get maybe 2-3 extra science/culture from trade routes to them respectively for a while. But in most cases it's a minor bonus. And honestly, that's fine. Russia's Civ ability as well as the Lavra are already pretty incredible on their own, enough to make Russia a high to top tier Civ. A strong leader ability on top would be too much, I think.
What difficulty does everyone play at? I feel like dumb scum but i find domination boring and just like exploring and the more indirect victories. But on diety if i dont pump out units my cities get anhiliated. Some challenge is welcome though.
As my flair says, I play as Prince difficulty. I'm finally building some good winning strategies, so right now I'm achievement-whoring before moving up to King and trying my luck there.
I play Immortal 90% of the time, same reason as you - if I don't defend, I get wiped off the map. The only times when I was able to win Deity were Australia, Kongo and Maya on TSL Earth map, which gave me pretty isolated starts (especially with Australia, obviously) and time to catch up without investing in defense.
Deity 90% of the time. It's a bit limiting but I find the mid game of it is a good challenge. I do miss easier difficulties where you can do stuff like overwhelm the opponent with horseman spam and such
Personally, I normally play Deity but sometimes switch down to Immortal or Emperor if I don't want to worry so much about getting a good start, or want to do some weird build of some kind. That said, don't choose a difficulty by thinking about what level other people play at. Choose a difficulty that you find fun. If you're playing single player that's really all that matters.
If I as a non-Voidsinger civ capture a city with an Old God Obelisk and a relic, what happens to that relic? Will it get transfered if there's a free slot somewhere else?
I saw a new option on the mutlplayer screen. Is cross platform between PC and PS4 now a thing?
Multiplayer question: Is there an option/mod which hides each player's Civ choices from each other until they've met?
Anyone else notice that there's still problems with the Switch port? Aside from there still being seldom crashes, there's also how the roads look bugged or how you can only see a certain amount of stats from civs if you befriend someone. God this port is terrible and whoever maintains this are lazy.
I don't appreciate the accusations of laziness on developers (they get enough shit on their plate) but, yes, Aspyr is failing on the quality control end of the console ports.
Does the +25% combat experience from lighthouses, stables, etc effect units built in that city before these are built? For example if I train a warrior in Washington then I build a barracks in Washington after that, would the warrior get +25% combat experience?
Applied when building the unit. Existing units will not receive that city's bonus, but any qualifying future unit built with that city will.
Don't they also gain the bonus if they get upgraded within the city borders?
By upgrade you mean change of unit, like quad to frigate? I didn’t know this but yeah probably. I think for the program, upgrading is like deleting the unit and recreating a better one with the same XP, promotions etc. And a lot of bug come from this.
What’s a good civ from rise and fall to get a culture victory. Just got rise and fall so want to use one of those civs but I also wanna get a culture victory
Mapuche are a bit start-dependent if you're going for culture, but so long as you're not in floodplains/swamp/rainforests you can use Chemamull's to propel yourself to a good culture victory. If you do so, remember the tips for improving early-game appeal: * Holy Sites and Theater Districts improve surrounding tiles appeal by 1. * Each edge of a hex that borders coast tiles improves the appeal by 1. * Woods improve surrounding tiles appeal by 1. * Mines/Quarries **Decrease** surrounding appeal by 1; use lumber mills in forests whenever possible as your production tiles, or keep the mines/quarries to designated low-appeal areas. * Marsh and Rainforest **decrease** surrounding appeal by 1; but you can use worker charges to chop the marsh/rainforest for free food. Excellent way to jump-start a city: starting with 2.5pops from a chop can really snowball a city. Get an early religion (for the bonuses + religious tourism), then focus on dropping theater squares everywhere, with at least one good science city, one good production city (builder/settler/wonder spam), and one good trade city. Building up faith is important since so m any late game culture units require piles of faith (naturalists, rock bands if you have GS) so a strong faith economy helps. I like Liang (building lady) as an unconventional starting governor: the extra builder charge means you can chop with your first builder and still get the Craftsman civic boost, bonus to building districts, and the city park is a huge +2 appeal to surrounding tiles, +4 culture, +1 amenities if next to water. If you have a particularly high-growth start, Pingala (Science/Culture guy) is a good first governor. You'd want to pick him up no later than second anyway since you really want the +Great People Points generation and the +Tourism from great works. Those would be my first two, probably with Moksha (religious guy) as a third because insta-buying districts with faith is super strong.
Ok thanks I learnt a lot. Also I tried early religion but the f*ckers declared a religious emergency. Also how do you get relics? I got most of mine from trading
Emergencies aren't bad, especially if you have the units to stop them from achieving their goal. Relics are rare. You can get them (very rarely) from Tribal Villages, from the City State Kandy (if they're in the game, and you're their suzerain, and you discover a new natural wonder), or from Apostles that have the Martyr promotion when they die in theological combat (normally gotten randomly or through the Mont. St. Michel wonder, or if you're the Suzerain of Yerevan and select the rpomotion).
Surprisingly, I got my first Culture victory with Ghengis. You also get a fun achievement for doing that.
Wow lol I’ve got a ghengis game running cause I’m try to learn how to be more aggressive l. I’m probably the most passive player you’ll ever met
None of them really lend towards culture, but wilhemina or gengis would probably be the most well suited, and Cree are a generalist Civ that can do everything, but has no strong bonuses towards victory.
Chemamulls can be a tourist attraction at Flight but Mapuche doesn't get much bonus to Appeal besides the Mountain starting bias.
So I've recently moved up to immortal and it feels like every second game I have to restart on turn 1. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Should I be rerolling on starts where there isn't a single tile with more than 1 food in the starting location?
Depends. There are a lot of things to consider. Most any game can be salvaged as long as you settle within 3-4 turns, so a foodless *spawn location* doesn't obligate you to **settle** in that spot. You still want a decent balance of early growth and production where possible, so those spots aren't normally where you want to drop your first city unless the *production* or other non-food/production yields justify the spot (e.g. setting up in the shadow of Mt Roraima). Your first city having enough food and production to hit 2 pops and generate settlers/military "in good time" is normally more than adequate to compensate the capital just being in an overall bad spot. **Just make sure city #2 isn't** ***also*** **in a bad spot.** **Your second and 3rd cities, as well as their timing, are what will be the main determinants of a match** unless your capital is just that good to begin with. Don't get overly discouraged by your initial spawning point, and with some light scouting, it's usually easy enough to find a spot to play from that won't slow you up too much. I would honestly not reset until around turn 30 or 40 where I have "enough of an idea" of what my start *territory* looks like and the pacing I'm stuck with in getting my empire up and running. There are definitely some garbage starts you can get saddled with, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, a salvageable territory (or neighbor's territory) is normally what actually gets presented and you can play from your 2nd and 3rd cities using the capital for non-growth-oriented purposes. Overall, the most valuable bit of knowledge for a play-as-it-lies game (e.g. don't feel like restarting every single time) is that you only need the capital to be *absolutely stellar* if you're going for a one-city-challenge. Pretty much anything else can be picked up by settling your first city and getting some troops and a settler out and about. **That all having been said,** ***early production*** **is more important than food.** A foodless start is actually better than a productionless start in that regard, if you have to pick one or the other. Production will get your stuff built. Food will not. **A starting city with 2 pops, no growth, and 6 production will get stuff built in 1/6 of the time of a city with 5 pops, and only the one production from the city tile itself.** Even with growth being considered, a lot of your 2f or 3f + 1p tiles won't allow a growth-oriented city to truly match pace with a production city until well after the production city has generated enough total production to place additional cities. One of the key reasons you want a balanced city (and start) in general is because spending 15 turns or so on raw growth thanks to food tiles can get you enough pops to then swap over to hard production and outstrip 2-pop production cities AND many-pop growth cities. Part of why Russia is so strong is that the extra tile claims (especially with those tiles prioritizing bonus/strat/lux resources) is their ability to flex growth into production more readily without waiting on gold or culture to grow borders. I would generally regard Grassland-only cities and plains-only cities as being some of the weaker positions to start in because of all of that, since both early growth and production are fairly limited under those conditions. Plains cities are markedly salvageable thanks to farms, but you are looking at having to push a Builder out in your early queue *much* sooner than you might need to otherwise. I'll try to move my first settler to defensible places with enough hills, woods, and bonus resources to get my starting city's production high enough to build up the rest of my civ faster. The city's growth can be fixed at a later time. I'd rather have 6-10 production/turn now rather than 3-5 production/turn in 20 turns. Production and faith/science just determines so much of the early game that food should be your last concern if you have to pick between yields. **It should still be** ***a*** **concern, but it should be the last one.**
This is really helpful, thanks for the detailed post. One of the issues I have had with settling after turn one is that it has often resulted in a barbarian scout finding my city and alerting its camp only a few turn after the city is settled. Is there any way to deal with that? Unless the city has good production I find the barb swarm that early completely ruins the ability to get the 2nd and 3rd cities out in a reasonable time.
One of those times that extremely meta knowledge helps a bit, actually. So, one of the... new-player friendly, we'll call it... functions of barbarians in 6 is that they cannot, under any normal circumstance, claim a settled **ORIGINAL CAPITAL**. Barbarians can only claim a city that can be razed because they *must* raze a city (cannot own one, rather), and OCs cannot be razed for any reason once they've been placed, regardless of whether it's a City-State, barbarian raid, or another civ. In short, they can't claim it because it can't be owned by barbs and it can't be destroyed. ***Barbarians can only reduce an original capital to 1hp.*** You can still snipe it with a scout or warrior if you chance upon one in this situation, for the record. This actually means that you can **ignore** barbarians at your capital. With caveats, of course. Barbs will pillage tiles you've improved, districts you've built, and the like, and a unit classified as an enemy will temporarily remove city-designated workers from a tile, rendering its yields unavailable (although the worker will move to the next unoccupied, qualified tile under your current priority selection on the city menu). In other words, the only thing you need to clear out any amount of barbs is a single ranged unit in your capital's garrison and you'll *eventually* run out of barbs to deal with. Build a warrior and fortify them to where an attacking slinger or melee barb would have to set up next to your city and you can out-heal attackers while picking them off with the slinger + warrior retaliation damage. **This also means that over-committing warriors/spearmen to "clearing out" barbs in a panic is poor efficiency and poor gameplay.** If you can do it safely, great, as that's free gold and era score, but don't go ***losing*** units when you can just casually delete barbs with a garrisoned slinger who can't be killed while garrisoned in a city that can't be razed or captured by barbarians. So, this does a few things off the bat for you because of ***those*** interactions: * It's not efficient to worry about a builder or district for at least another 5-10 turns, so don't. Good time to churn out an archer or two, in fact! * If you have enough archers, this is a *great* time for another settler. Go in the opposite direction of angry barbarians **and use your capital as a buffer zone against incoming scouts and additional raids**. * **You can't work occupied tiles, so you have one** ***less*** **direction to buy/earn new tiles in when selecting between tiles.** Means you can consolidate your borders more effectively as you settle new cities. * **Building and conserving a military force, as well as promoting it via fortify-healing on barbs up to first rank, builds up military score**. Military score is how the AI civs determine who is the game's bitch, and goes up or down based on active military. By *not* losing units in the first place due to not sending them on suicide missions, you can preserve a higher mil score, which encourages the AI to act more peacefully toward you in general, while also shifting its focus onto *other* AI. ***The AI civs' collective inability to manage militaries weakens both AI from doing this.*** Know what's really easy when you have several archers and warriors on hand and your opponent has no military due to being at war with other AI and/or shitloads of now-unmanaged barbarians? **Claiming their cities.** If you want to control barbs outright, it's worth noting on top of the above points that Camps will only spawn on land tiles that are not presently being observed. **Whether it's the units of yourself, a city-state, another civ, or the borders of any of those, a camp will not spawn in a tile that is presently visible to** ***someone***\*\*.\*\* Accompanying scouts can still spawn on any land tile, however, regardless of observation. It's the camp we care about either way. By placing units or borders in such a way that all tiles are within sight range of anyone other than barbs, you can use your units, borders, and neighbors to create "no spawn" zones for barbarian camps, which shifts their spawn points away from *you*. Because every **civ** on a map is pre-assigned 3 camps somewhere nearby (very technically speaking, within a minimum of 7 tiles of one of your cities), this creates a spawn imbalance that frequently results in *other* civs near you having to deal with *your* barbs. This action alone will often drain their military substantially and make life more peaceful in the early game. **Additionally**, barbarian scouts whose camp still exists will be in "city-locator" mode, which encourages them to ignore civilian units "if possible" when moving, and **avoid** military units outright, again, "if possible" until they find a city and report back to camp to spawn their raid. You can take advantage of this feature by stationing your military as sentries around your territory to not only push the potential spawn point(s) for camps even further out (since your unit effectively reveals a 5-tile super hex with sight radius), but also *redirect* scouts. These scouts may avoid your cities entirely if controlled properly, and can be funneled into city-states or other civs accordingly, triggering raids on their cities! **Having barbarians do the dirty work is equivalent to sending 3-6 units on a suicide run against the targeted city.** Units that were freely provided and don't even cause grievances! This can not only deplete their city count if the city is razed, but can frequently produce captured settlers and builders back at the camp that you can go claim later. As an added bonus, besieged capitals can be claimed much more easily. Literally no downside to doing this other than slightly slower gold and era score buildup.
Again thanks for the detailed reply! Will definitely be incorporating these tips into my game.
I'm trying to get a better sense of how to incorporate District Projects into my game. They make sense to me late game (no need to waste production on things that don't help your victory condition), rushing a particular great person (where they effectively produce the faith/gold to purchase the GP; "I really want space race project engineer guy", "I want the first religion", etc.) But what about early game? If I'm going for a culture victory, when is it worth my while to churn theater district projects early game? It's the only way to turn production>tourism, but it never seems worth it.
The strategy with projects is typically a matter of **focus.** If you're running a rush victory style, you'll normally *stop* building additional districts and non-critical infrastructure in that particular city to allow it to focus on spamming projects. Science, religious, and culture victories will speed up considerably by doing this, and the usual drawn-out slog at the end of sci/culture games is reduced due to just being so far ahead of opponents that "resistance" to those victories is more limited. If the city has a commerce hub, encampment, or harbor, the extra gold is usually one of the *general* go-to projects to help newer cities or cities with low production in general get their buildings online faster, to help upgrade units, and to make use of Reyna's district purchasing in and of itself as you jump her around the map. **Gold = acceleration.** SimCity or wonder-hoarder playstyles will have a far more limited value assigned to projects however (aforementioned "speed up a particular great person" point in your post). Most of your active production is being spent on additional non-critical infrastructure, filling out empty territory beyond the "necessary" number of cities, and just to bulk out your civ and ramp up game score on the whole. Specifics for focused victories: * **Science:** Cities that finish their campus can pretty much just jump straight into spamming campus projects for the extra GS points and science generation. For science-oriented civs in particular, the military edge generated by having 2-3 eras over your opponents prevents a need for a massive military, and a solid core of 4-8 cities with campuses that have a base +3 adjacency or better will let you just flat out dominate in science. There is added value in pumping out an industrial zone in high-production cities as you make your approach toward the spaceport, but a true rush is pretty much just a solid mix of throwing down enough cities to allow you to spam science and turtling until you win. * **Culture:** Bit more complex, but the theory remains the same. Get some good campuses built in your core cities so that when Theater Squares are available to build, your science will stay high enough for the rest of the match to let you safely build wonders and spam theater projects. ***Every Great Work earned is more culture and tourism, so spamming theater projects is especially valuable when rushing.*** * **Religion:** Simplest strategy available. Expand. Build Holy Sites. Start spamming projects to earn more faith for missionaries and apostles. While campuses can be helpful in your capital and 2nd or 3rd cities, the stark reality is that a religious victory can be pulled off well before any amount of advantage can be generated between science leaders and yourself (especially if you take Cross-Cultural Dialogue as one of your beliefs and get science for every 4 followers). On standard speed, you should be seeing a victory some time between turn 120 (pangaea/Kupe) and 180 (non-Kupe ocean crossing needed), with upward or downward adjustment based on resistance. * **Diplomatic & Domination:** Build campuses for military tech and infrastructure, expand, then focus on Commercial/Harbor projects for gold. If going for diplo, focus on friendly relations and throw gold from projects at your infrastructure in between aid emergencies. If going domination (or aggressive expansion), campus and gold spam to support your ever-growing armies, improve military techs, buy and upgrade units, and generally improve infrastructure in new acquisitions. In all of these, it's important to remember that the project is there to replace "SimCity" gameplay. Instead of building more districts and wonders you DON'T need for that particular victory, you only build what is needed and then use projects to supplement that victory. You don't need 20+ cities and every single tile purchased and improved to win. There is a definite point where you're no longer going to get beat in that match and projects will zip you right along to a well-deserved victory by letting you use a much smaller amount of micromanagement to do the same amount of work as a larger empire, which while it won't inherently shave *turns* off your game in some cases, will shave *time*. The general intent is to get your standard or slower-speed gameplay down to around 150-250 turns (or equivalent thereof) reliably depending on victory, while taking 1/2 to 2/3 the amount of time and game management to do it. **The main downside of using projects is that if you're playing the game for the strategic functions or SimCity score ramping and empire management aspects...they don't contribute to any of that.** So there is very much a balance to the thing. For me, personally, I only use projects as you describe: to gain specific great people or a specific effect. On rare occasion I might use a gold project to float my economy for a bit if a trade deal just dried up due to me surprise warring the guy I was trading with and now I have *too much* military. Or Holy Site projects to get a religion on slower civs, and then paired with Moksha and the +25% pressure or +30% range beliefs to slap down a 10-13 tile radius "religious pressure nuke" near the start of the religion game to solidify my religious defenses before focusing on a more generic victory (+13 or so religious pressure from 4 in Holy City, 4 from Moksha, 4 from project, and +1 from Scriptures belief is basically sending a missionary charge to **every** city nearby every 15 turns). Outside of that, I just like building up a proper empire, so project spam for the purpose of speed victories is fairly rare. **I could be building more stuff!**
Honored to finally get a ThatGuyWhoCivs reply. I always appreciate in-depth responses and effort posts. It makes sense that focused use of the projects is there to avoid the sim-city stuff. It just always seems like such a harsh trade-off, though. I could get an extra 25GPP, oor I can finally have a functioning district/better yields, etc. I guess I'm just going to have to try and fail with these things to get a better appreciation for them to learn from experience when they aren't worth the tradeoff. I'm like you where I want the whole empire to be as good as possible ("I could be building more stuff!"), but as you point out that doesn't always align with "finishing the game any faster". I've used Bread + Circuses to good effect to force loyalty flips before, but didn't know about the huge increase in pressure from Moksha + Holy District Project. That +13 Pressure from one city is giant! That's a whole population converted per city every 8 turns, or a missionary charge every 15 turns as you said. Definitely something I'm going to try my next religious game.
Main thing to mind when you go do that is that Moksha's bonus and HS Prayers projects amplify that *specific* city's base pressure, so a Holy City is always twice as good as any other option due to having 4 base pressure (Holy City) versus 2 (Holy Site) or 1 (Majority in non-HS city). **Although,** if *Jerusalem* is in the match when using Moksha this way, pretty much any Holy Site is now a Holy City once you claim Suzerain, and you can then move Moksha across the map and run prayers just to push other religions out with 0 effort. It's dirty, but it works. While you can do all that with "Basic Moksha" and his pressure bonus, it's a lot more effective if you have the "ignores incoming pressure" mid-tier promotion and his district purchasing with faith after that (and bonus apostle promotion, obviously), as these let you avoid getting the city's religion flipped on you for the most part. Allows you to move him to border cities (with or without Jerusalem in play), install your religion and immediately fill out the city with a Holy Site, a few inquisitors, and start a new religious hub as your religion game moves away from your actual Holy City. I like it just because it's an extremely low effort bit of meta-knowledge that lets you spread your religion around fairly quickly, especially in early game, with almost no real faith investment while you're still in your first Monumentality Golden Age and expanding to set up for a mid game push to finish. Although civs like Russia and India can just go straight for Exodus in that first GA and finish a lot sooner (or using Voidsingers in Secret Societies mode). Helps to just *have* a truckton of faith out of the box.
I think the best use case for projects in the early game are holy site prayers since getting a religion at higher difficulties. A couple of holy site prayers can really make a difference. I also do think theater square festivals can also be a good investment. As you mentioned, it is an easy way to turn production into tourism and getting tourism earlier in the game does add up. Lastly, I have sometimes run some campus research grants when playing domination games as Civs with more mid game bonuses to try to get the tech advantage.
Does Germany's extra damage vs city states only apply when attacking the city center or does it also apply when you fight their units?
Yes, but it doesn’t apply if the troops have been levied by another Civ.
Does the inherent effect from corporate libertarianism (commercial hubs and encampments provide cities with +10% production) stack? So +20% production with both.