Some Like It Hot: Montezuma, Emperor

Meanwhile, Catherine wasn't building settlers, but she was building an impressive array of Ancient era trash units. I've heard that the AI often goes after the player on high difficulties with an early rush. That would not be in the cards for this game, as Catherine decided to throw them at a nearby city state instead:

Wave goodbye to Valletta, which just became the easternmost province of the French empire. I do think it's a little bit too easy for cities to be captured in the early game right now; a handful of warriors and an archer probably shouldn't be rolling over a city state this easily. Perhaps Firaxis can make the default strength of cities a bit higher? I like that they require the construction of walls to be able to shoot back, that feels like a good change to me, and once walls are done cities can be tricky to capture. However, these early game rushes are definitely too effective right now, and players are running over the AI in the early game too easily. I hope we'll see this addressed in patches. (Note: in the first patch, Firaxis made it so that city states can upgrade their units even if they lack the strategic resources normally necessary to do so. Here in the release version, every city state was stuck with endless warriors and spears because they could never acquire the strategic resources needed to keep their units modernized. A good change.)

The biggest effect of Valletta's annexation was that France and I were now very close neighbors. Catherine had some negative modifiers on the diplo screen for "unknown reasons", and so I made sure I had a couple of archers on hand in case she decided to get frisky. Relations were a bit cool, but the peace held for now.

Domestically, I had researched my way to Early Empire on the civics tree (thanks pantheon culture!) and swapped into the Colonization policy for the +50% bonus to settler production. That meant it was time to churn out settlers in a hurry. Tlacopan went onto the western lake as my third city to stop France from pushing any further south. There was more good land up there by Lyon (France's second city taken with their additional starting settler), although unfortunately there was no fresh water available, and as a result I decided to leave it to Catherine and focus my efforts elsewhere. Tenayuca was the fourth city, as I began filling out my back lines. I never know whether to start these new cities on granaries or monuments, and decided to try the former option in this game. That seemed to work well and let the cities keep growing longer before hitting the housing cap, although I think I was helped substantially by my pantheon in keeping the civics rolling in at a good pace. This might be different in another game.

On the research trees, I was already pushing for Apprenticeship tech because, well, it's the best early tech in the game, and ditto for Political Philosophy and the early governments in the civics tree. Unfortunately, my continent only turned out to have two city-states on it, and I would not be able to land the boost for that expensive civic. Nothing I could do about it either, just the luck of geography in this particular game. That's a long civic to research without the boost...

After mapping out the north-south axis of my continent, my pair of scouts stumbled across Philip of Spain to the west of France. That river would end up being the dividing line between these two AI civs, and Spain would wind up with about five somewhat cramped cities on the continent's western peninsula. Unlike my rather shaky relationship with Catherine, Philip and I hit it off immediately in diplomacy, and we were able to sign Open Borders and exchange delegations, the whole works. I think being further apart from one another and having a common rival in Catherine helped here. In any case, Philip was shaping up to be a good friend diplomatically, which wasn't something I had seen before in Civ6.

These were my civic choices after finally reaching Political Philosophy and swapping into my normal choice of Classical Republic. I have Colonization running while still expanding, and Ilkum to keep cranking out the builders. Since there's essentially no time in Civ6's gameplay where I'm not training more builders, I always find myself running whatever builder policy is available. I also have Charismatic Leader as the sort of default choice in the Diplomacy slot; that's one area where I'd like to see more options available. The Diplomatic policies seem pretty boring for the most part right now. Them I'm using Urban Planning for lack of anything else better at the moment. It's surprising how often I find myself using that one in the early game, especially for helping new cities get started a little faster before trade routes are up and running.

Here's an overview picture from Turn 70, one of the few that I grabbed while playing as opposed to having to go back and take from the Livestream after the fact. I have five cities established at this point, with the sixth city about to be planted on the tile in the east where the Aztec settler is currently standing. I hadn't been too sure about whether to place a city over there since it was almost all desert, and ultimately went for it on the logic that anything with fresh water is worth settling in the early game. That city (with an unpronounceable Aztec name that I won't try spelling) would go on to be a solid contributer to my empire, and definitely was worth founding. Settlers are pretty cheap in the early game of Civ6, and with no maintenance costs or corruption to worry about, more cities are almost always a good thing.

The all-important Apprenticeship tech is about to finish in this picture, which will boost all mines by +1 production and open up Industrial districts for the first time. Like most of the non-Commercial districts, the Industrial district itself is relatively weak when first constructed, unless you're able to put it in a location surrounded by mined hills. The real benefit comes at the second tier, down the tech tree at Industrialization, when factories are opened up and can start buffing one another across multiple cities. You want to have the Industrial districts already placed and with workshops finished when factories become available, however I've found that you can delay the Industrial districts themselves a bit in the meantime. Getting Commercial districts up and running first to open up those trade routes seems to be a stronger option. That said, a completed Industrial district does provide +2 production to trade routes heading to that city, and the boost for Industrialism tech is to complete three workshops, which means that you'll want some Industrial districts finished pretty quickly in at least a couple of cities.

I also took a screenshot of the Aztec unique ability to add production to a district by using a builder charge. The benefit is supposed to be 20% of the base cost of the district, and I'm not sure if that means all districts can be completed with 5 builder charges or if the scaling cost of districts messes that up. This is one thing that I don't think I used very well during this particular game, as my builders always seemed to be needed to do something else on the map with a higher priority. I kind of forgot about this while playing for a lot of the game too, whoops. I'll have to come back to the Aztecs more at a later date and experiment a bit more with this ability.

That picture also shows the "pins" that can be placed on the map in Civ6. I was using them here to lay out where I planned to put Commercial and Industrial districts in a number of my cities. There are supposed to be a number of bugs associated with their use right now, but if Firaxis can ever get this sorted out, they'll be a nice feature to have.

I wanted to snap another image to demonstrate what my capital looked like with a bit more development. The two sugar tiles and the bananas tile are both producing culture via my pantheon, with the graphic interface unable to display the culture on the bananas. That tile is actually 3 food, 2 production, 1 gold, and 1 culture - not bad. There are several plains hill mines with that delicious 1/4 yield, and another one under the jungle waiting to be cleared and mined. Tenochtitlan is growing up towards the housing cap, working on a key district, and with amenities to spare. Everything looks good for this stage of the game.

If you've ever been wondering about the importance of trade routes, here's a good example:

Atzcapotzalco (that's the name!) has very sad terrain. There's the oasis, a plains deer in the second ring, one bare grassland tile, and then a bunch of desert with a few silver resources sprinkled in. Certainly not much to get excited about. I used trade routes to get this city started, supplying food and production, both of which were badly needed. For most of the game, I would be running two or three trade routes at a time out of this particular city. Now of course that meant that those trade routes weren't going to another and better city, but trade routes aren't limited in this game like they are in Civ5. Atzcapotzalco could and did build its own Commercial and Harbor districts to increase the trade route cap to essentially pay for itself. This means that fishing villages *ARE* a real deal in Civ6, in contrast to what a lot of the reports from Adventure One were suggesting. More cities are always a good thing in Civ6, because the major benefits come from districts and you can only build one copy of each district in each city.

There are a lot of Civ5 players out there who don't enjoy this sort of gameplay, and launch into that ridiculous nonsense about needing to balance "Tall" against "Wide" again. If there's one thing I can't stand about Civ5, it's introducing that absurd discussion into the Civilization community. Anyway, I love the fact that marginal land is worth settling and can be made productive. It turns Civ6 back into a game of expansion and empire-building once again, the way that the series is meant to be played. And sure, more land and more cities is better in Civ6... which is exactly the point, right? That's the key dynamic that creates tension between empires and creates a reason for conflict: to gain more land for yourself and keep other empires from doing the same. The one missing element right now is an AI who prioritizes expansion, and if Firaxis can ever deliver that, then Civ6 will be in business.

Catherine had been shuffling some units around up in the north around Turn 100. I didn't think too much of this, but somewhat surprisingly she declared war on Turn 102:

With a bunch of warriors and chariots, of course. Yeah that was pretty dumb. I had two archers up in this area, and on the first turn of the war I shelled out the cash to upgrade them both to crossbows. I try to hold off on the upgrades if I can since units get enormously more expensive to maintain in gold per turn cost as the player gets further down the tech tree. Even with a major tech lead, Catherine had enough units that Xochicalco may have been in some danger if she had simply thrown everything against the city. Failing that, she could have pillaged me pretty badly if she had gone that route instead, although I was lucky in having the city's districts located on the south side of the river in a relatively safe zone.

Instead, I spent the next few turns slaughtering Catherine's outdated junk units with my crossbows. This wasn't much of a contest, with strength 35 units shooting at strength 20 warriors. As I saw in my Adventure One game, the combat AI spent almost all of its time shuffling units aimlessly, not attacking, not doing anything. If there's one truly glaring flaw in Civ6, it's that the AI still has no clue how to play by the One Unit Per Tile rules. Not in the slightest. I can overlook this because I enjoy almost everything else about the setup, especially the city building aspect of the gameplay. And if I'm being fair, the combat AI has been pretty dismal in previous Civilization games too. However, I'm not going to pretend that this is anywhere near acceptable when it isn't. The combat AI remains a trainwreck, on fire, with gasoline being dumped on top. I don't blame anyone who's avoiding a purchase of Civ6 for this very reason. It's a completely legitimate reason to skip this game.

The ineptitude of the AI did allow me to set up a few attacks with my Eagle Warrior to test out the enslavement ability though:

Free builders, woot! Gimme gimme gimme. I do like this aspect of the worker -> builder change in Civ6, as getting a free builder, even in the early game, doesn't break the balance in the same way that a free worker in Civ4 would do. It's certainly way better than the worker steals from city states that were ubiquitous in Civ5. Anyway, I tried to set up as many successful Eagle Warrior victories as I could after the crossbows redlined the attacking French units. The text might say "62% chance of capturing the enemy" but I seemed to get a builder on every successful victory. Although this Aztec ability definitely does not work against barbarians, it does appear to produce a free builder every time against rival civilizations. Either that or I was very lucky indeed on this particular playthrough. I certainly wasn't complaining, as those builders helped speed along the development of my cities.

The war I had fought against Rome in the Adventure One game had been a comedy of errors when trying to capture Trajan's capital city. What I learned from that experience was that I needed siege units to take enemy cities that were defending behind city walls. This time, I built some catapults and had a chance to see how they worked:

That was one shot from a catapult, and it removed most of Valletta's city walls in a single blow. Certainly a lot better than hammering away with archers or crossbows at 5 damage per shot! So you need siege units of some kind to take cities in Civ6, that or knights (which come too early on the tech tree and need nerfing or being pushed back) which were not an option here due to lack of iron. I had actually brought two catapults to the siege of Valletta, and to my surprise the AI jumped all over one of the catapults, killing it from 100 to 0 in a single combat round. Wow, that was better than I expected from the AI. That was the only unit that I lost throughout this whole war, and it did slow my offensive. From what I could see, the AI does do a good job of targeting siege units; the city defenses always went after catapults first, which is the correct tactical decision. It just wasn't enough to stop me from rolling over Valletta and capturing the city for myself:

It came with a Commercial district already intact, not bad at all. Valletta had pretty good land, just a little bit weak on the production side of things. This was a part of the map with relatively few hills, but tons of cropland that could be farmed for fast growth. (Where is my Slavery civic, heh.) I kept Valletta and set about incorporating it into my empire.

From here, I went ahead and razed the brand new city of Rennes and then sued for peace. Razing Rennes was a mistake, and I would have been better served to keep the location after Catherine went to all the trouble of building a settler and founding the location. That was something I'll recall for the future. In the meantime, this was the peace deal that I secured with France:

I made sure to get a formal cessation for Valletta to make it fully part of my empire. I had been stuck with a city that couldn't grow in my first game, and I wanted to avoid that again. Catherine was also willing to throw in the city of Nantes in the treaty, which was a small size 2 city northwest of Valletta, up near the northern tip of the continent. That left France with only three remaining cities, and I figured I could come back again later to complete the conquest, or simply ignore Catherine for the remainder of the game. With war weariness creeping up and my offensive stalled due to having only one siege unit, this looked like a good time to sue for peace. Time to get back to the building game.

This report is continued on the next page. (Check out my Stone of Scone! That's the relic I popped from a goody hut at the start of the game. Nifty thing to find hiding in a tribal village. )