Update nr. 9 - This land is my land, this land is my land...Turn 36 - 2.600 B.C.Last time, we learned that Kaguya and Mamizou got their second cities quicker than we did. Let's not give them this headstart for much longer! Our settler has finished, bringing Shining Needle Castle from 3 population points down to 2. It has a lot of improvements around it, so it should recover the neccessary food quickly. Anyway, we first need to select our settler and use a certain command on him...
The marked symbol only appears if a civilian unit, like builders and settlers, is on the same tile as a military unit, like warriors and slingers. Clicking it will "lock" the units onto one another, meaning if you give one unit the order to go somewhere, the other will instantly follow. This is for the purpose of escorting vulnerable civilian units. We're going to send our settler somewhere and if we do not make sure he and the warrior end their turn on the same tile, he could fall victim to barbarian enslavement, or to that of an empire that declared war on us.
You practically never want to send out settlers unescorted. If you were to lose this settler, the first one you manually built over several turns, it would be a massive setback. In multiplayer or on an especially high difficulty, I'd say you'd be out of the game.
Now the big question is, where should we settle? It'll take us many turns to traverse the map, so we need to make up our mind now, rather than turning around half way. I've set my sights on 3 promising locations that I think I can best describe to you on the mini-map:
About upsetting rival nations: If you settle too close to someone, it's always considered an affront and they will call you out on it. It's understandable, they consider nearby land attractive to settle themselves.
When playing with human players in multiplayer, settling intentionally close towards the direction of another empire is called a "forward settle" and will probably get you yelled at and a war declared to take that very land you claimed. If not more than that.
I want to have our second city be a powerful, productive one that is easy to link up with our capital and where it's quick to send troops to and fro. 1 and 3 feel too remote given our situation. Because of that, I mark
position nr.2 by the map pin function. The other places will likely make for future cities.
Using the third symbol from the left above the mini-map, you can set map pins. I put one where our city should go so that I don't need to think again where the ideal place was, should I forget. No chance to be scatter-brained!
The cattle and sheep make that area very fertile, the horses very productive, and the river will provide "fresh water", a status where a city will have the highest possible base threshold for housing. Seaside cities will have not as much, those without any water sources even less. The route says it'll take us 4 turns to get there.
Since the settler was created, we need a new build option in Shining Needle Castle. I have a rule of thumb for a defensive military: Having as many units as cities is an adequate defense, less is meager. Having 2 units per 1 city means having a strong defense, basically ready for any war. We know that we will very soon have a second city, so let's go from adequate to strong-ish. We're making a
warrior, he'll be drafted in 4 turns.
I took a look on our treasury at that moment, and with 221 units of gold said to myself that we're quite wealthy. Wealthy enough to buy something. Apart from making units over several turns, there is the option to purchase them instantly if you have the funds.
When choosing what to produce, there are three tabs on top. Next to the normal building process, there's the instant purchase by gold, next to that the instant purchase by faith. Gold purchase has mostly the same options as building over turns, with a few exceptions. Examples are protective walls (so better get those up before the hordes stand at your gates), and any kind of world wonder, obviously. Imagine if you could just buy out a wonder...
Since we have a respectable surplus and gain new gold every turn, we're instantly getting ourselves another
builder for 215 gold.
One of our scout notices that something unusual has happened with Kaguya, near what has to be the city of Eirin:
Notice that her borders are no longer freckled, but that all lines are spaceless? This tells us that she has gained the Early Empire civic. Her borders are now closed to other nations by default. Were we to have our scout walk into her territory, the game would stop us and ask us if we want to declare war. Yup, unless we want to have an absolute political escalation, her borders are now off limits. The excuse that it's just a scout who wants to explore won't cut it either.
If this new distance between us and Kaguya makes you sad, don't worry. There's actually a green smiley under her diplomacy portrait now, telling us that she's generally benevolent towards us. We're on the road to friendship, but a war from her side would technically still be possible.
Upon ending our turn, we witness a scout from Mamizou getting attacked by a barbarian horse archer, suffering 40 points of damage a little northeast of our capital. Horse archers are a swift, ranged shock unit that is incredibly weak on defense. Only barbarians with a camp next to a horse resource can build them. A pretty insignificant event, but a good chance to tell you about that unit's existence.
Turn 37 - 2.560 B.C.First off, we deactivate the order to work on the tobacco fields in our capital. We have 27 faith right now, we should very soon get our pantheon of gods. We want to get back to the population level 3 that we lost, and that order was keeping us down in that regard.
The builder we purchased heads one tile east and puts a simple farm onto the riverside grassland. This is now the only tile that creates 3 units of food in our lands if worked. That should help with Shining Needle Castle's generally mediocre growth. Yet the main incentive for buying the builder was our soon to be second city. The remaining two builder charges will be spared for it.
Having our younger scout sneak around the edge of Kaguya's city, we learn that it's indeed the one called Eirin, surrounded by some wheat, silver and lots of tundra. Really, what was the princess thinking putting it there...?
On our other neighbor's turn, Mamizou, we hear the sound of Raiko's thundering drums again:
While I've belittled the news of our rivals clearing barbarian camps in the past, this is one that concerns us in a way. See, the camp in question was right next to the horse archer we can currently spot. Mamizou actually thwarted a potential menace for us. As good as that is, it also means the horse archer is now homeless and may wreak havoc whereever he feels like. Hopefully not in our country?
Turn 38 - 2.520 B.C.A new technology is ours!
If you read the quote out loud and think
Henry Longfellow might have been a poet and he didn't know it...he was a poet and I'm pretty sure he knew it. That, and a university professor.
Just one advancement for a tech is pretty scarce, but if that one is worth it alone...
It absolutely is. Not only are the combat stats of an archer superior to that of a slinger, they have a range of 2 instead of 1. A slinger when going on the offense always has to fear retaliation. Archers could hide behind a melee unit and shoot from there with little danger. The basics of battle formations, I guess.
Archers are the first unit to have a running maintenance cost of 1. Understandable, your soldiers want to be paid and need equipment. Have a too large and bloated army and they will bleed out your finances.
Our research options are largely the same as before we finished understanding archery, only horseback riding is now newly available to give us mounted units, should we want them. It's a close decision between mining and writing, and we pick
writing in the end. Fun fact: In earlier builds of Civ 6, archery was a "dead end technology". No other techs required you to have it. Your empire could theoretically build rockets to travel into space, but be too stupid to gut animals for a bowstring.
We've been waiting for this:
We hit the mark of 25-30 faith (there's always a bit of a dice-roll to what it has to be) and I'm confident a lot of good ones are still available. When we click it, we get a pretty big selection:
Apart from these two pages, there's one more pantheon "City Patron Goddess - +25% production towards districts in cities without districts". If you analyze the many pantheons, you'll notice that many lead to the generation of more faith. These are generally uninteresting for us, again: We're not going to put much focus on religion. Some of these are a lot more practical, like "God of the Open Sky". We have many pastures in our lands, 2 of them already worked, and +1 culture for each is not to be underestimated, especially in the early game. It is a choice that I have ended up with many times in the past. But not today. We pick
"God of the Forge - +25% production towards ancient and classical military units", a pantheon of which the benefits vanish very, very quickly, and the choosing of which could be seen as very short-sighted. It is also very telling of our intentions...
So that's our pantheon. Pantheon bonuses are not considered super powerful, but it is an exciting decision nonetheless. A single pick is all we get, all those ones we refused will never again become available to us.
The boost to the mysticism civic comes as sort of a byproduct to choosing your pantheon. It is not too vital a civic, so rather than getting all giddy, we give a low-key, dignified approval.
At the end of the turn, we move settler, warrior and builder closer to the map pin of our second city. Looking at it now, the builder is somewhat endangered by that horse archer. Let's hope he doesn't try anything funny. I think we're still out of his sight range?
Rather than getting on our nerves, he destroys Mamizou's severely injured warrior. She ravaged the barbarian camp, alright, but at these costs, it's safe to say that the AI is not as good a tactician as most human players.
Turn 39 - 2.480 B.C.First thing's first, our newest warrior has finished his boot camp, our military power is much better now. There are many sensible build options now. Even more soldiers is a possibility. A granary could help with growth. Making the Hanging Gardens would be bold, but 29 turns? No thanks. Should we think long-term and maybe already start working on our next settler? He also would need a whole 18 turns (Settlers get more expensive the more you've made of them and the more you've advanced through the eras). Know what would be a boon? That
trader we got from our last completed civic. I didn't emphasize how important traders were for nothing, so that will be it and it'll take 7 turns.
At the end of our movement phase, the escorted settler sits on the hill he is supposed to set down his city. We also refused to move the builder towards there. Instead, we sent the newly trained warrior after him and made another escort lock. That barbarian horse archer is just making me too nervous to leave my civilians unguarded. I think their movement is a swift 3? Our villainous foe simply waits during his turn, possibly because he can't see any city borders nor units from where he is. Campless barbarians can be this apathetic.
Turn 40 - 2.440 B.C.We've reached our destination, and with a couple of more clicks...
Lilliput has been set up. The names of the Kobito civilization's settlements all refer to very tiny beings I believe. The second city you make as them needn't always be Lilliput, there's a random chance it'll be one of the next 10 names from the list that has been assigned to the civilization. This is to have it so that players don't see the same cities cropping up in the same order every time they play.
The escorting warrior now has no one to escort any more, as the settler has vanished with the founding of the city. He will however be given garrison duty in Lilliput. Our second, less experienced warrior will keep the builder company as he travels to Lilliput.
Now what shall we build in the new city? A monument is a decent first build order, not only for its inherent culture bonus, but because it will help the city claim tiles for its borders by cultural influence. However, I'm still not too happy about our military situation, and Shining Needle Castle is busy with a trader. Lilliput only needs 9 turns for an
archer, so it'll teach its people how to handle the bow and arrow first.
As we end our turn, we get this angry reaction from Lady Kaguya:
Lilliput was too few tiles away from Eientei and the AI recognized it as the mentioned forward settle. This message appearing already cost us a little bit of Kaguya's respect, but what you do from here has a potentially much higher impact. The first option will make a promise to not build more cities close to Kaguya for I think at least 40, maybe 50 turns. Once the timer is up, the game will let you know that you've kept your promise and little damage has been done. If you ever break the promise during that time, the game will also let you know and that would really anger the princess from the moon in this case!
The second, very belligerent option is to kick Kaguya's concerns with your feet. This will annoy her a lot now, but at least you didn't make a promise you know you'll break. If you know you're going to keep forward settling, it is the best option.
The third option is a little bit of a mystery to me. If you pretend not to have heard Kaguya, you'll slightly annoy her now. If you do settle a city again in a way she disapproves of, she'll be miffed...but not as much as if you made a promise that you broke I think? But still more than if you had been straightforward to her? Something like that. We won't be picking it anyway, in fact, we will
apologize. I think we can place future cities in a way that's not against her interests.
On the barbarians' turn, we witness this military blunder:
The horse archer discovered Lilliput and got very close to it, how threatening. He also wedged himself directly next to our two warriors who are going to have a good time pinballing him between their clubs in the next update. This one didn't cover especially many turns, but it did feel like a big one where a lot of stuff happened. Bis bald!
