I know we're 20 tiles apart, Vicky, but that doesn't mean we can't be together...

Playing on iOS, inland sea, king, standard size. There are a standard 8 civs on this map.

I'm on turn 180, explored a decent amount of the map, and found zero other civs. I'm Suzerain of 5 cities, still nothing.

I don't think I've ever gone this long without running into someone else, and no one has been eliminated yet. It's weird.

So...audience chambers. It's the government plaza building that gives +4 housing and +1 amenities to cities with governors, and -2 loyalty to cities without governors. At first glance, it seems clear that it's trying to encourage tall gameplay. Unfortunately, my experience with it seems to fall flat on this from every angle.

First off, the bonus. +4 housing seems rather overkill, while +1 amenity is way too little. If I'm playing tall, I'm always going to settle in prime locations, which includes access to fresh water. I'm also going to build an aqueduct sooner or later. With audience chamber, I have all these cities that are sitting at ~8-10 population, 12-16 housing capacity, and -2 amenities. All this housing does nothing for me because there's way too little amenities to go around.

On top of that, -2 loyalty is nowhere near enough to discourage going wide. I find myself going wide anyways, even past 8 cities where I'll have cities that don't have governors in them. If I'm gonna go wide either way, then Ancestral Hall is simply better.

The only time I felt Audience Chambers was fully functioning was when I managed to get both Temple of Artemis and Colosseum to cover for the shortage in Amenities. Even then, I was STILL left wondering if Ancestral Hall would have been better since I went wide anyways.

So yea...Audience Chambers needs both stronger bonuses for governors and bigger penalties for not having governors. I'm not sure what these could be, but it needs to be something.

I'll start us off.

• I was quite far ahead of my neighbor in technology and had started to make resort colonies for my people to take some time off, when I become the target of a declaration of war. I look over to my new colonies and see them being pillaged by knights. Yes, knights. The image I have in my head of people throwing their selfie sticks away to avoid getting gored by a lance is nothing short of hilarious - please make this a movie

• After running out of Great Writing slots, I declared war on my neighbor to get more space. My soldiers engaged the enemy being followed by hordes of great writers, eager to capture their brilliant thoughts on paper as soon as they had somewhere to put it. The idea of a war being fought over library space is hilarious to me.

One of the weird things about Civ VI is that building an army early on is much, much more preferable to actually building them in any era. Not only does this reward early warfare (which is fine by me) it also punishes uniques that can't be upgraded into.

Here are the two main issues that make prebuilding very powerful:

• unit cost scaling

Ancient era units cost around 40-60 cogs per unit. A city with say 6 production would be able ro pump them out within 10 turns, and if you had a card like Agoge or Maneuver this would get lowered to 6 turns. The bottom line is that unit cost scales much faster than city production does; while your core cities can still pump out units at a good rate this is because they have the infrastructure to do so. IMO ideally your frontline cities should be the ones focusing on unit production while core cities pump out culture or science.

• unit upgrade costs are too cheap

It's much more affordable to upgrade an existing unit over upgrading it, or for that matter building a semi-obsolete unit (e.g. a Warrior when you only have 1 copy of Iron) then upgrading it.

It's pretty surreal that your most prestigious tank brigades started out their careers as chariot drivers then switched to horseback then to internal combustion engines.

"No one starts a war - or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so - without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it." –Karl von Clausewitz

I just realized something really obnoxious about war declaration in Civ6: unlike in Paradox games like CK2 or EU4, wars, even the "formal" wars never have a defined war goal to let you know why war was declared.

As a human player, you probably know what you intend to do after declaring war (or being declared on), but when the "friendly" AI agrees to a joint war declaration, there's no visible indication of what they intend to accomplish by doing so. And then I think of that quote Sean Bean says when you research Military Science, and it highlights how half-assed the cassus belli implementation is compared to Paradox games.

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Here's a CivFanatics post I made on it: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/democracy-vs-communism-production-bonuses.629387/

Link to the table

Basically, Democracy provides better production bonuses unless you have a very populous city AND you have high average production per population (with the breaking point being 2.7 prod per pop at size 20, increasing as your city size gets smaller).

Thoughts? Any corrections to my methodology?

Recently in Mexico the city of Tlaxcala had its very first Escalators (article in spanish), and I just couldn't believe it, I mean, I know my country isn't a technological powerhouse like Japan, but I couldn't believe that a city, the capital of a state didn't had them.

And then it hit me, we were just busy doing other things and we forgot to upgrade Tlaxcala. Monterrey had a lot of hills so that was a great place to increase production, Guadalajara has a lot of luxury resources and gold, Sonora and Sinaloa make the food to keep the other cities growing, Acapulco and Cancún have crazy appeal and thus a lot of tourism... and Tlaxcala just never came up

As it stands, you can join an emergency, do absolutely nothing, and get an equal share of the prize pot as anyone else. Also, if you're the only one to join a CS emergency and the CS flips back the next turn, you gain an absurd amount of money for having done nothing.

It would make more sense if there were a fairer system where civs who contributed more got a larger share of the gold. Each action (killing an enemy unit, being the one to liberate a city, etc.) can have a value that contributes to how of the prize money that civ gets.

EXAMPLE: Genghis takes Antananarivo. Emergency is declared. England, Cree, India, and Khmer join in. The prize pot is 6,000 gold.

England kills 3 Mongolian units: 2000 gold

Cree does nothing: 0 gold

India liberates Antananarivo: 3000 gold

Khmer kills 1 Mongolian unit: 1000 gold

This would greatly incentivize actually taking risks and actively engaging in the emergency, rather than joining and sitting idly just to get some free money off the back of the work of others. In the example above, Cree rightfully got nothing as they did not participate. India got the most gold for achieving the primary goal of the emergency, and England and Khmer get some fair compensation for their efforts.

I personally feel that RaF has addressed most of the big issues I had with vanilla civ 6. The game is starting to feel really complete to me. Still, I think there's more room to make the game even better, and I'm excited to see what they add moving forward. What gameplay changes would you guys most like to see?

For me, it's an overhaul to the culture victory. Culture was my favorite victory type in Civ 5, but it feels too passive in 6. I'd really like to see something more similar to the way you had to actively foster tourism from every other civ in civ 5. I'd also like to see tourism have tangible benefits to your civ before you actually win the game.

I haven't had a problem on Deity before. However, domination is a huge problem for me, especially civs that have a lot of bonuses for the early warfare when the AI is already ahead. Most of my time on Deity is Religious and Science victories.

I decided I'd try him out, but I'm doing something wrong and I'm not sure what. Should I just neglect Campuses and Beeline for Bronzeworking? Should I forgo scouts/builders/settlers and just build Warriors and Slingers and try to take a city in the first

Do I just rush for his UB and hope for the best? I tried that and ended up a bit too behind infrastructure and science wise. He's rated so high on tier lists, but I can't seem to do anything with him.

My usual strategy is to just bunker down, build science and culture districts for catching up and once it's closer to even with my neighbors I spend my production on units. This didn't seem to work for this Civ for some reason.

So

I have +4 amenities, and i have 4 housing more than current population. But it takes 90 turns to go to the next population number. Are there other factors that get taken into account ? Because i am really far behind the enemy cities. I feel like i am missing something here.

I wish the domination victory was more balanced in difficulty compared to the conditions. Maybe if they made each unit cost maintenance food as well as gold each turn, or war weariness effected your culture and science output, which makes sense thematically, it'd be harder to raise these huge armies and run across people. The loyalty system helps, but they can do more.

Went to war with Sumeria, I killed all of his units and pillaged every improved tile but yet he still won't trade me his outlying city that he forward settled on me. How do you get them to trade?

I just can't get into a religious game of civ6. I usually play highly random maps with random civs. After a few attempts at having fun with a religion game, I just couldn't get into it, and find myself rerolling every time I get the Poland/Spains of the world.

My main gripes with religious civs are:
It seems pretty random whether you get the beliefs you want, which are obviously pretty game changing. I know the key is getting a religion founded ASAP, but I'm often not first to get there. Feels pretty handicapping that beliefs which are integral to a RV are often just gone by turn 50, with no way to access them.

RV games feel like limited domination games to me. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but its basically build up faith, buy one of the small # of units which can spread religion, march them toward a city and convert. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. Trade routes and pressure seem to be a pretty small part of the equation, and diplomacy is arguably more important than in some other victory types, but really doesn't seem essential (not to mention, theres a handful of agendas you can't do a thing about!)

Anybody here an advocate for religious games? Sell me on them! I'd like to play some good games with it, but just haven't been able to enjoy them the same way I do any of the other victory types.

Rise & Fall added Loyalty, Governators, Ages, Emergencies, and changed the Government legacy function.

Now, when Firaxis gets around to making their second or third Civ6 expansions, what would you like them to add? Here's what I think Civ6 could use:

• The return of World Congress and Corporations, and through them, the addition of Diplomatic and Economic victory conditions.
• Expanded mechanics for city population, giving them a defined culture like in Civ4, and if applicable religion. This would enable mechanics such as resettlement, immigration, and refugees to move population between cities.
• Overhaul district specialists to have a special functions, like manufacturing certain luxury goods (e.g. glassware).
• Expanded diplomacy functions, like viewing the other civ's opinions of each other (with appropriate level of diplomatic visibility), and using Casus Belli on City-States (instead of being locked into Surprise war)
• Maritime city-states
• Barbarian camps upgrading into Free Cities
• Flesh out of Tech Tree and Civics Tree to eliminate several obvious gaps, which R&F forgot to do