~Beyond the Border~ > Akyu's Arcade
[SSLP] Let's have a Touhou Party in Sid Meier's Civilization VI! (Completed!)
O4rfish:
The expansion comes this Feburary.
Gesh86:
--- Quote from: niektory on January 09, 2018, 02:47:56 AM ---Nice LP! It makes me want to start playing Civilization again. I... must... resist...
--- End quote ---
Thank you! :D
I know how it feels "Just...one...more...turn" is followed by "Just...one...more...full campaign" and that is followed by "Just...the rest...of those...impossible Steam achievements"
--- Quote from: O4rfish on January 10, 2018, 06:22:36 AM ---The expansion comes this Feburary.
--- End quote ---
Sure does, February 8th is where I marked it on my calendar. I'm really looking forward to it, but I'm sad to say it'll have zero impact on this LP. Upon campaign creation, the chosen game rulesets are very rigidly a part of it. We unfortunately can't retroactively apply Rise & Fall rules to a vanilla game that's been running for a hundred-something turns :D.
Update nr. 10 - Would you like to make a trade agreement with yourself?
Turn 41 - 2.400 B.C.
Last time, the Lilliputians got bored of Gulliver and founded the second city of our empire. We were also just about to punish a careless horse archer.
Horse archers are indeed as weak as scouts when defending, but this one has a mild advantage for at least standing on a hill. Our first warrior deals 34 damage and suffers 27 himself, the one who follows delivers 39 while getting hurt for only 21. With 27 hitpoints left, the invader has no chance to survive another assault when it comes.
Turn 42 - 2.360 B.C.
The barbarian's reaction to the Kobito's clobbering turned out to be either a very headless or simply desperate move:
Rather than fighting back, the riders have traveled onto our tobacco fields. I see what they were trying to do: Pillaging this tile would have been very annoying to us. Yet the adjacent warrior crushes his dreams, taking but 19 damage in return for the total victory. We did cut the escort order with the builder first, otherwise the builder would have followed our warrior for no reason back towards our capital. A melee unit that defeats an enemy on offense automatically walks onto the tile of the beaten defender.
Barbarians rarely attack cities. Units are more likely, if the combat odds are at least somewhat favourable to them. But what they like to do at any opportunity they get is damaging your improvements. This explains why the horse archer acted as he did. If this happens, you'll have to repair the improvement with a builder. Repairing costs no builder charges at least.
Almost out of the blue, we swap to another civic:
It ends up being Early Empire. This action may seem very random, but believe me, there's some good logic behind it. See, State Workforce has been developed to a little more than half its culture cost and we have not yet achieved its eureka. If we build the district required to trigger said eureka, we will instantly achieve the civic. Let's say we were to ignore this procedure and would just carelessly keep developing State Workforce. Were we to make that district within for example 4 turns, the culture we kept spending on the civic over those 4 turns would have been forfeit.
It is very clever and highly recommended that when you know you can get an inspiration for a technology or civic soon enough, you only complete them to 50% and then swap to something else.
That's the last really important action of this turn. Our scout in the northwest is witnessing that Kaguya is trying to destroy a barbarian camp near Eirin, but may not actually succeed with the single and very injured warrior she's using. I'm imagining she might win by a hair and wish her the best of luck. Our own warriors will heal within our borders over the next few turns, so that they'll be healthy when we next need them.
Turn 43 - 2.320 B.C.
As we notice our gold count recover back to 50, it's time to upgrade our first unit, the slinger guarding Shining Needle Castle:
This marked button will only appear if you have the technology that grants you a unit that's considered the evolution of the selected. For slingers, that is the archer. Upgrading always costs some money, so you have to ask yourself the question: Do I upgrade, or do I spend the turns to just build the superior unit? Very often, upgrading isn't too terribly expensive and is also worth it for another reason: Upgraded units keep all their experience and promotions.
Upgrading is only possible within your own borders. If you're planning a war, think whether you want to wait until every unit is up-to-date before you march. At the enemy's gates, you're stuck with the soldiers you have.
We are now poor again and have our first archer. Their stats (as a reminder) are 15 combat strength, 25 ranged strength, 2 movement point and an attack range of 2 tiles. Very formidable.
I've been yearning to show you an interesting result from our scouting of the north. Here's a decent one:
This is in the area of the Great Lakes and even with as much as is still obscured there, I'm pretty sure it's Lake Superior. It has the luxury of pearls in it! Like whales, this is a sea resource that you obtain through a builder after researching sailing (we still have not). The tile would give a not so insignificant amount of gold and food if worked, after all, you can also slurp up the clams around the pearl. If you want. I won't. Mollusks don't belong in my belly ::).
Just as we're about to wrap up our turn, the younger scout makes an even better discovery than some sea-creature's residue to wear on our body:
There is a goody hut in Alaska! Despite being so enamoured with the cold north, Kaguya seems to have missed it. Let's make a dash for it before she noticed. The AI does not take offense for snatched villages close to them, luckily.
Last but not least, our builder enters the influence of Lilliput and improves the sheep just to the southeast of it. One more turn for the cattle, and it'll be on its way into what soon should be a very productive city.
Turn 44 - 2.280 B.C.
Hearing Sean Bean's voice at the beginning of a turn means it's going to be a good one:
I don't have to tell you who Mark Twain is, but I will link him as always. Finally someone who I have in my bookcase! The quote seems to not be from a book of his, (I thought it might have been a smartypants thing Tom Sawyer said) but just a memorable line of Mark Twain himself. It refers to all the ideas you may discard and rephrase when writing something.
A library is a quick ticket to increasing your science output. "Citizens" are sort of specialists, we may hear of them later. "Great Scientist" is a type of Great Person who we will also hear of later. The library itself requires a "campus". Now what's that? The next advancement tells us:
The campus is a district. The district system is the one feature that Civ 6, more than anything else it did new or differently, is the most proud of. Similar to wonders, a tile must be sacrificed to construct any district, but the amount of specialization it will allow your city to have will be so much more impactful than making any simple building like a monument or granary. We want to build our first district soon and it will likely be such a campus.
All the listed science bonuses are so called "adjacency bonuses". We'll learn about those when we decide on a location for our first district.
A new technology means another one to choose:
Currency is a new option unlocked by writing. What good would currency be if no one wrote price tags in the supermarket after all? What we really need to work on now though is a tech that has waited long enough, since the beginning of the game actually: Mining
Builders by the way slam down their hammer onto the ground so hard it creates a shining, almost divine effect when making an improvement:
That was the last charge of the builder at Lilliput, he disappears. The two pastures our young city now has should make it useful quickly, soon returning the investment of the settler to us.
Meanwhile, the goody hut previously sighted in the cold northwest is claimed:
A free scout is meant by this. This gift would in many situations be considered as just about the crappiest outcome of a goody hut. However, I actually planned to build a third scout in Shining Needle Castle once the trader was done, so this is quite fortunate. That's 2 or 3 turns of production saved! When you are gifted a scout in this way, it'll appear in the closest city, which is Lilliput. His mission will be to explore Central and South America for us.
As we wait for our next turn, a blunt, loud sound is heard that means nothing good in this game:
Someone must have beelined straight for the Hanging Gardens and it's neither Kaguya nor Mamizou. They were so quick, even if we had allocated all our production to building it after researching irrigation, I doubt we would have beaten them. So the wonder is lost to us...actually I'm not too sad. The Hanging Gardens are good, but not a game deciding wonder.
Turn 45 - 2.240 B.C.
We have control of our first trader! Here's what it looks like when you click on him:
Traders do not have the movement point that we know from all the other units. You can invest a turn to "warp" them to a different origin city, but apart from that. you just select a destination and that's it. Yes, that destination needn't be our own city, we can send him to our neighbours as well. Such foreign trade routes tend to yield gold, internal trade routes usually buff food and production. The displayed bonuses are always exclusively gained by the city the trader starts in, but sometimes the targeted leader has an ability that makes them benefit from trade routes others make to them as well. Cleopatra of Egypt is an example.
We send our trader from Shining Needle Castle to Lilliput. I see it as a priority to make road connections between my own cities. I also want to start with this short route because traders can be destroyed by barbarians, and we should be able to protect him best if he just passes through our own territory. Know what else is great about having our very first trade route?
When choosing our technology in the previous turn, I smiled knowing that we would fulfill the condition for currency's inspiration in but a moment. I didn't want to say anything back then because I couldn't do it now if I did :3.
What's next to build in Shining Needle Castle? I would really, really like to start making that campus, yet the problem is, the tile that I would like to place it on is not yet claimed by our cultural borders. There's a lot of strategy involved in where you place districts actually, so let's literally settle for the second best, another settler. 10 turns is how long he'll take.
Turn 46 - 2.200 B.C.
In the final turn of this update, not too much happened. We've gotten our newest, gifted scout to the south of Shining Needle Castle and I'm planning not just to send him further south, but to have a warrior and an archer follow him to the unknown. Unless another, currently unmet neighbor took care of it, the barbarian camp that harassed us earlier in the game is still in the vicinity. Hopefully we can reveal it soon and wipe it out as well. Marching hasn't really begun, but the positions of our units are the following:
Scout in front, archer still in city, warrior lagging a little behind. We'll work on getting those in a better formation soon. As we end our turn, Mamizou would like to adress her frustration with us:
We have acted against what should be Mamizou's hidden agenda. Every AI controlled leader has hidden likes and dislikes that you'll only learn of in advance if your information access level to them is high enough. I forget the exact name of this one, but it seems Mamizou gets angry when you've uncovered more of the earth than she has. She is Parsee levels of jealous of our exploration prowess! We have indeed been very thorough in mapping almost all of North America, I doubt she's even close. Unfortunately, the green, friendly smiley next to Mamizou's symbol has disappeared, getting us back to neutral terms with her.
Had we purposefully or out of inability scouted very little, we would have gotten on her good side for "leaving the exploration of the world to her empire". Agendas that favour doing a poor job at something are always annoying, as, well, doing better is obviously punished. And you want to do as well as you can in anything.
That will be it for today. Next time, we'll cross the Rio Grande and see what dangers await us in Mexico. Not claiming real Mexico is dangerous! I have not even been there yet. In this fictional version of the world inhabited by Youkai and in savage 2.000 B.C., we should assume it will be...
Gesh86:
Update nr. 11 - I'm in the zone, baby! The zone of control unfortunately...
Turn 47 - 2.160 B.C.
Last time, we learned to write and read. Some installments of the series were notorious for dividing the technology of the written word into writing and literacy, possibly allowing your people to be unable to read what they had learned to write down. Weird, I know.
The scout and warrior at Shining Needle Castle push ahead, leaving the archer at the end of their trail. That's how you want a war party to proceed, the warrior becoming the archer's shield and the scout as the expendable eyes in front. There's little else to report other than these and a few more minor troop movements. The two scouts in Canada are uncovering the last few spots on that map. They'll go on their way home at some point in the near future.
Turn 48 - 2.120 B.C.
The 5 turns we spent on this now finished technology means there was more to it than ramming pickaxes into rock:
We know Will Rogers already. Firaxis, the developer of the newer Civ installments does clearly favour some of these wise speakers, it's not just one quote for each person. A group of British comedians comes to my mind who they seem to be especially fond of. I hope we'll hear them at some point.
Like the farm, mines don't neccessarily need a ressource to be made, just any kind of hill will do. If you want your city to be a production powerhouse, you'll set down sufficiently many of them.
The word "appeal" drops here and mines do literally drop it by 1. Appeal is a numerical stat that any tile will have. Apart from when you're setting your sights on heavy cultural play, appeal has little relevance to your interests. Basically, if your lands are litttered with dusty, industrialized mine shafts with the nearby hot and smelly forges, they may be unattractive to the tourists. Let's also not forget about all the noise pollution...
Quarries are very similar to mines, but bound to only be made on certain resources. Stone is one of them, and I think marble?
I don't think I've ever harvested copper for an instant return in production power, but chopping forests is actually an effective way of rushing your build options. To get the gain in production, the forest in question has to be within your cultural borders. In an earlier patch of the game, this was not so. Sending out lumberjack builders into the wilds and just ravaging nature was extremely lucrative, but ultimately unintended for the balance of the game, so they fixed it. I think you could even steal the lumber of other civilizations if you tricked them into opening their borders to you...
Rather than selecting the next technology from the typical shortlist, here's something else that you can do in the full technology tree:
Iron working is greyed out at the moment. It is a technology we still lack the prerequisite for, which is bronze working. If you click on it anyway, you'll do a research beeline: This means you will queue up all prerequisite technologies and end with the selected tech. If you want something asap, that's how you do it, you don't have to calculate the fastest route yourself. A "2" appears on iron working, meaning it's the 2nd in our queue. Our current research is therefore bronze working, boosted through a eureka and only 7 turns left to grab.
Lilliput has completed its first project, another archer. We set the monument as the next one. I already said that one is a typically good choice for a young city to make. Since we didn't pick it as the very first, we should be so reasonable as to at least make it now. It'll take 8 turns. A few turns ago when Lilliput was still on population level 1, it would have taken twice as long. My suspicion that this was a good place to put down a city seems to be proven true...
You can see here that the new archer and the garrisoned warrior inhabit the same tile. The warrior was already there, then the archer was built. This is not allowed in Civ 6, at least not longer than momentarily. The so called "doomstacking", as in having multiple military units gathered in the same place, has been thrown out with Civ 5. Unless we move one of those units away from the city tile, the game will not allow us to end the turn. We move the warrior to the south, temporarily guarding our trader.
The units on our southern borders are beginning their hunt for barbarians. We were worried last time that Mexico would be a bad place. It can't be as bad as we thought as it has something devilishly delicious:
Trees that grow chocolate! No, it's actually the luxury of cocoa. Until we get the chocolate modern people can buy, you'll have to do some intricate processing of those cocoa beans. The Mesoamericans are indeed believed to be the earliest connoiseurs of cocoa products. To find it there is very accurate of Greatest Earth Map and could have been expected by someone with an overview of all luxuries.
Turn 49 - 2.080 B.C.
What better way to start a turn than to receive an inspiration?
You get early empire's boost when the sum of your population reaches 6 for the first time. Shining Needle Castle just grew to 4, Lilliput is at 2; 4 + 2 = 6. We're mathmagicians. We're currently on this very civic, its development time is now on a single turn.
By the way, a barbarian warrior has stepped on the hill next to the cocoa. This is a clear sign that the barbarian camp is truly still there, they were just taking a break after their horrendous defeat against us.
And as we move closer, we finally find the hideout of those trouble makers. The barbarian camp is guarded by a spearman. Spearmen are a so called anti-cavalry units with a base combat strength of 25. It'll be higher than that due to them having a fortified position. At least we are not using cavalry which they are so anti against.
One of our older scouts happens to be near Kaguya's territory and has some less menacing news to spread to us first hand:
That Kaguya is still one step ahead of us! While we're only creating our next settler, she's already on her way to a third city. At least we know this: She's sending it northeast, most likely not colliding with our interests again. Maybe she doesn't know Yosemite is but a few tiles from her capital?
Turn 50 - 2.040 B.C.
We saw it coming a mile away, a new civic:
As fancy as that crown is, Shinmyomaru is not going to trade the lid of her rice bowl for it, I assure you. Gary Edward Keillor has been active in several creative fields, but is most well known as a radio host. Interesting, he seems to have recently fallen from grace pretty severely if Wikipedia is to be believed. His quote at least is still one of my favourites in the game. Duh, the classical Romans did not have air-conditioning! Of course this is to be interpreted as the general complacency the empire had so notoriously developed just before its capital's conquering.
We have not yet covered what purchasing a tile is all about, but I already foresee an opportunity to do this in the not too distant future. With this card, you can do it at a better price.
Settlers are not a cheap unit to build. If well timed and carried over the duration of making one or more of them simultaneously, this policy can create a pretty substantial production margin for you.
Like the joint war, open borders is a tradeable item. You can have good reasons to move your army through someone's territory. Perhaps they're blocking your access to your actual enemy? Having open borders active also plays a role, like appeal, in attracting tourists. We don't have any so far. That's ok, people couldn't imagine the idea of vacations 4.000 years ago. It's not like we're backwards.
The fourth advancement of early empire is really just the complement to the third. Now the AI will by default see our border lines as continuous and will have to respect them unless they want to start a war.
All that surveyed, we really need to change our policies. Agoge is of little use, we're not building any military units right now and there's no immediate need for more. God King...you bet we don't want to hang onto God King anymore! After some thinking, our setup ends up so:
We know we're just about to have fierce battles with barbarians. We can literally see them. 5 combat strength in all situations can make a pretty big difference, believe me. As for Colonization's benefit, I've just explained it and we are indeed building a settler. I've weighted it against a few other cards, but it won the pot.
Lastly, we set our next most desirable civic to military tradition, available in 10 turns. It brings a lot of conflict-focused policies and is boosted by clearing a barbarian outpost. Where could we ever find one of those, hmm? ::)
On the battlefront, the tension is rising...
Selecting our scout, we see that some tiles adjacent to the barbarian warrior have weird, red marking. This symbolizes tiles that have zone of control. Zone of control is a game mechanic to make even single units more meaningful and reward strategic placement. The idea is that the moment someone moves their unit onto a tile directly next to an enemy unit, zone of control is applied and the only movement option becomes attacking the tile of that enemy unit. This is so that units can't just ignore and swiftly walk around others, unless they are classified as light cavalry. Zone of control does not apply to those. On the flipside, ranged units do not excersize zone of control unless you've picked a promotion for them that says they do.
The only other military action we take this turn is to move the scout one tile to the southwest. Is it perhaps possible for our scout to distract and lead that barbarian? The brute moves west onto the jungle tile during his turn and that is actually a manuever we may be able to exploit soon.
Turn 51 - 2.000 B.C.
If the barbarians were controlled by a human, they'd know they're in a pickle now:
This is what the map looks like after all the troop movements of our frontline. Starting next turn, our archer will be able to rain arrows onto our foe from the elevated position he is on.
As a last action of this fairly uneventful turn, the warrior we had to reactivate from Lilliput has traveled to Shining Needle Castle and we put him on alert there. While its original protectors are on their expedition to the south, he will be the temporary garrison of our capital.
On the barbarians' turn, they obviously go for the weakest target, our scout that's pinned down in the west. They deal 34 damage, scout and his trusty dog only deal 23 in return. While in the words of the game, that's a "minor defeat", it's still not too bad considering the circumstances. You'll be used to your scouts taking more damage than that, no matter what combat situation they get in. Our Discipline policy is to be thanked for this.
Turn 52 - 1.960 B.C.
A new millenium has dawned! Except our people don't know as our calender can't possibly be Gregorian in this age. It's payback time for the attack against our scout:
Those are some delicious damage predictions. The archer shoots for 37 points of damage, but we're not satisfied. We send the warrior right after them for another 29. It reduces our opponent's health to but a sliver. Doing math, he has 11 hitpoints left. That's so little, a scout with a whack of his hiking stick could probably kill him now!...
The not so hypothetical scout did, taking 37 damage in return. A scout can attack if he wants, it's just that he almost never should. Except here we were absolutely certain his attack would be enough to destroy the enemy. He is now in bad shape and should recover before charting our maps any further. Our continued exploration is just one of the things that will take place in the next update. If everything goes as planned, I'm predicting a third city of ours. See you then!
Gesh86:
Update nr. 12 - The Sword Coast's Iron Crisis
Turn 53 - 1.920 B.C.
Last time, a lot of things happened, but let's all agree that the most important of them was learning of the existence of chocolate. We also engaged a new barbarian threat, this time as the aggressors.
A new settler was born in Shining Needle Castle this turn. Still remember the minimap enlargement I showed you for the first? We're aiming for position nr. 3 this time:
Florida. Don't worry, the alligators are not going to eat us. What I think is the Apalachicola river gives this very spot the best possible housing. We'll also have quick access to sugar, whales and a little later some jade. As a possible negative, I'm expecting the production output there to not be especially high, due to the many coastal tiles nearby. Coastal cities don't typically yield many of those orange gears.
The settler is being escorted by the warrior we stationed in our capital just 2 turns prior, and should arrive to settle in 5 turns if there are no unexpected hostiles blocking the path.
What's a logical option to build in Shining Needle Castle, knowing that we're about to claim land with several improvable resources? A builder, of course. We'll have him in 6 turns.
The scout you're seeing there is not one we built anew. I think it's the first one we ever made. He's cartographed most of the America's northeast for us and naturally came back home. In such cases, you're always wondering what else to do with a scout. The west coast is actually still relatively unexplored. Once Yosemite had been discovered, we turned north instead. Let's send him back to California, it might still be worth it.
Meanwhile, our troops in the south are still advancing. Except for the scout. He shall rest where he sits and gain +10 hitpoints every turn until we have something better to do with him. Shielded by a warrior and an archer, he's very safe at the moment.
Turn 54 - 1.880 B.C.
The injured scout might not be allowed to stay idle as long as he would have hoped:
Stepping on a hill, our warrior revealed a goody hut. I'm suspecting no other player civilizations in South America with this one still unclaimed. Of course, we want the scout to pick it up for the experience bonus. Ideally, we should destroy the barbarian camp first.
Did I put Qin Shi Huang in the game by accident? Somebody is addicted to those wonders...
Stonehenge is unlocked at astrology and is viewed as a wonder with religious purposes. Build it, and you will instantly gain a Great Prophet who can expend his charge at Stonehenge to found your state religion. I very rarely succeed in getting it, as you must have a tile with a stone resource next to it, otherwise you can't start construction. This was not the case for any of our cities. Kaguya could have done it, but she didn't.
Stonehenge is actually really great to pick up for civilizations who want to have a little bit of religion for boosting their worldly affairs, but not a lot of it. It's less vital for a dedicated religious play where all of your cities will build holy sites to gain your Great Prophet quickly and have a generally high faith output.
Turn 55 - 1.840 B.C.
At last, we can slip into that sexy Spartan breastplate with room for our six-pack already modelled into it:
Aeschylus was a Greek playwright and considered the father of the tragedy genre. Bronze, as evident from the quote, is an alloy easily moldable for blacksmiths. That's one of the reasons why the bronze age preceded the iron age. Another is how widely available it was.
Want your footsoldiers to be superior? You'll need barracks. In many earlier Civ installments, barracks were a building you could make without researching anything. Not only is this not the case anymore, you'll also need an...
This is a district for any city you want to be a production line for soldiers. Moreover, having an encampment somewhere allows you to lessen the amount of neccessary resources to build units. For example, to recruit horsemen, you need 2 improved horse resources in your empire. A city with an encampment can make them with just 1.
Encampments will also gain the ability to shoot enemy units with a ranged attack if the city it belongs to has walls. This ranged attack and reasons of balancing are also why an encampment always has to be built at least two tiles away from the city itself.
We can now build that same spearman the barbarians currently have. The evolutionary line of anti-cavalry units is unfortunately considered very unkind in the meta of the game. There's a rock-paper-scissors system involved here that makes it so that regular melee units beat anti-cavalry of a similar age. A spearman will actually lose to a warrior, despite a higher base combat strength. Anti-cavalry is not even considered that amazing against cavalry, as they are naturally on foot and therefore outrun in a chase. Most people will tell you that the best way to defend against a mounted assault in Civ 6 is to throw your own mounted units against it...
Iron is now visible. Like horses, it is a strategic resource. You need to have some improved if you want certain build options unlocked. We're going to check the map in a moment and see if we have any available to us.
We can also chop away that rainforest now if we choose to. Remember those marketing initiatives that were like "every container of beer you buy from us saves one tree in the rainforest"? They should have sent the memo to ZUN and not an acre of it would have been touched.
No research selection prompt appeared this time, since we had iron working queued. 19 turns. That's a painfully high number to hear...
The only sources of iron somewhat nearby that I could find were west of Shining Needle Castle:
They're in the state of Sonora and that is very inconvenient. You've got to understand that any resource more than 3 tiles away from a city is considered out of reach. To claim that iron, we would have to build a city specifically for that purpose. The area is otherwise not very interesting, mostly desert, so we would have an otherwise very useless city. Getting any iron would have triggered the eureka for iron working, but I think that dream just popped like a bubble. We'll have to research it all by ourselves.
On the bright side, the barbarian AI did something very unusual and beneficial to us here. For some reason, the half-killed scout was so enticing that they pulled out their guarding spearman to go after him. I really didn't expect them to be this stupid. The unit stationed in the camp itself almost never leaves it or attacks anything next to it even. We first shoot him for a whole 42 points, and our warrior simply walks into their hideout.
Barbarian encampments are automatically destroyed and plundered the moment a non-barbarian unit touches them. We get an immediate 45 gold from this and...
This is the civic we were just developing, and we were a little past the half-way point, so...
we instantly get it, mid-turn. Colonel Hack served in the Korean and Vietnam War. But Firaxis wouldn't be taking poignant quotes from but a simple soldier, as this man later became a military journalist and wrote about subjects like PTSD. The new policy cards are...
The equivalent of Agoge, but for anything involving horses. We can't make any of those at the moment.
This is a "Wildcard policy". Our chieftain government does not have wildcard slots, so we cannot use it, even if we wanted to. All types of policies can go into wildcard slots, but wildcard policies themselves can go only there and nowhere else.
When you have several units stationed around an enemy and then attack with one of them, you'll get a small combat bonus called flanking. I'm not quite sure about support, I think it's the equivalent on defense. A defending unit adjacent to another friendly is a little harder to damage than if it were alone.
We are once again allowed to change our policies. It may be only useful until we've destroyed another damaged spearman, but we'll leave Discipline in for now. As for economic policies, our settler has been born, so we must change our card there. We pick Urban Planning to increase our production in every city by 1. We have 3 cities, so that's a total gain of 3 production no matter what we build. Urban Planning is a good go-to policy when you simply can't think of anything more clever. At worst, it won't be completely wrong to pick.
As our next civic focus, we'll be working on mysticism over the next 6 turns, a mostly religious civic, for better or worse. The other two options were "drama and poetry", a pick for the cultured, and state workforce. Again, we want to get state workforce by procuring its eureka through construction of a district and not waste any more culture output on it apart from that.
Next up, we want to put the lucky and free money we got from the barbarians to good use. We want to purchase a tile:
Tile purchasing happens from the marked button on the city menu. Buying a tile means adding it to your cultural borders immediately, otherwise, the city claims the tiles it views as the most valuable over many turns. We pay the 70 gold for the circled tile. Price of tiles depends on how far away from a city they are and how far you've advanced into the game. They'll naturally be a little more expensive in the later eras.
Now here's where I want to tell you about a small metagame trick: Production cost for districts also rises the longer the game goes on, and quite substantially, too! For this reason, you can sacrifice a tile for a district in advance by briefly choosing the district in your build options. Once you've chosen the tile to make the district on, you don't have to build it, but now the production will be fixed to what it is at this very moment.
We're going to put this trick to use right now. We're swapping our builder production in Shining Needle Castle to a campus:
The marked tile is the one we just bought. A campus on that spot gains +1 science adjacency from the mountain to the west of it. This means that when the campus is done, we'll gain +1 science, so long as the campus stays intact. It doesn't need population assigned to it for this. We select it, "reserve" the tile and production cost for the campus and go back to making our builder. This trick is not considered an exploit from what I know, like lumberjacking in the wilds was.
Rather than attacking the scout, the barbarian spearman seems to have completely lost his mind and attacks our warrior to the southeast of him, where the camp used to be before we purged it. We take 15 damage, they 54. Scissors beats paper, just like I told you. That concludes this behemoth of a turn.
Turn 56 - 1.800 B.C.
First thing's first, we put the enemy spearman out of his misery, and we use our archer for this. With the path cleared, we move our scout closer to the goody hut we uncovered. Our last unit in the south, a warrior, gathered enough experience from getting attacked previously that he can pick the Tortoise promotion.
War and combat is one thing, but in civil regards, Lilliput has finished its monument. Our culture output is now at 7.3; not too bad I would say, but it didn't lessen the time for developing mysticism. Many build options sound tempting: A granary, a campus, maybe a builder to get access to horses? Some other time. In the end, we decide to bolster our defenses a little more with a spearman in 6 turns. I said spearmen weren't especially good, but I think getting a kill with them, no matter against what, triggers a eureka. It would be great if we could make that happen.
In the northwest, a pretty funny picture is painted:
Our scout, a barbarian scout wedged in between and Kaguya's scout have gotten themselves into a weird traffic jam at the coast of British Columbia. We're going to beat up the poor barbarian during the next few rounds, if we can. It's not a very relevant happening, but a moment that's worth a chuckle to me. Hopefully Kaguya won't be stubborn and retreat out of the way afterwards.
Turn 57 - 1.760 B.C.
So close! It looked like our scout was going to be able to reach the goody hut, but the terrain was a little more costly than I anticipated. He's now sitting next to the villagers. In the same area, we're having some problems with pathfinding:
With the job done, we should retreat our combat parties back to our homeland, but Mamizou's scout is very annoyingly in the way. I've told you that military units can't inhabit the same tile, that also counts for units foreign to each other. We would need 3 movement points to get our archer to the hill north of that scout, but that's just not possible. Since we can't end our turn on the tile the scout is at, we can't even get closer to the hill this turn. Yeah, it's possible to troll other players with your units like this...hopefully she'll move out of the way. The AI usually does.
Canadian scout has nothing better to do than attacking the barbarian scout. 28 damage dealt, 30 in return. The scout who is now exploring California (I think he was the middle child) discovered another source of iron:
This is right next to Yosemite Valley and therefore actually very eligible to settle close to. Our current settler is not going to turn heel and go all the way there though, because...
...we just cashed him in. The name is supposed to be "Blefuscu", Lilliput's rival tribe in the written work they come from. The guarding warrior's symbol is making it hard to read. The inspiration for sailing is gained by setting up your first coastal city, another reason why we chose that very location. Sailing isn't a very expensive technology, so the science yield from this idea isn't amazing. Still, every bit helps.
Blefuscu starts building a monument to help it possibly claim that jade resource soon. 30 turns, because of only two little cogs of production. Yuck.
One last message for today:
This means they either got their first tech or civic that is considered classical and are therefore also doing better on the science/culture front than we are. Iron working for example would be such a tech that would catapult you into a different age.
Only 5 turns passed, but this felt like an especially big update. Next time, we'll do what we can to modernize Blefuscu. See you around!
CyberAngel:
Should you be wary of Kaguya or Mamizou getting upset at this point? How much would it matter if they did?