Realms Beyond PBEM7: Part Three: The Strain of Battle

The first turn of the war had finally concluded. I was up to play next at the start of Turn 147, the last remaining turn before Steel research concluded and battleship upgrades could begin. But the grind of playing wartime turns was already underway and sucking up more and more of my time:

Sullla:
This was another tactically excellent but strategically frustrating turn.

The notifications at the beginning of the turn had some bad news: my isolated frigate was not just killed but captured by an English Sea Dog. See, that's what can happen when a unit is out of position. There must have been more Sea Dogs off in the fog that I didn't know about. According to the notifications, my ironclad was also attacked by a Sea Dog but wasn't captured, fortunately. There's at least two Sea Dogs off to the east therefore. That unit is also really stupid from a design standpoint, a naval unit with a percentage chance to capture an enemy unit and bring it over to your side. Fine for Single Player but way too gamey and luck-based for a more serious Multiplayer endeavor. The sacrifice of those two units did successfully buy me a turn's worth of time, however, and it kept my other ships north of the little island from being attacked. Ultimately I think it was worth it.

As usual, the first thing to do was to scout out the enemy ships:

At least five English frigates over here, plus the captured frigate, plus the two Sea Dogs. That's at least eight ships in the east and there's a lot of fog that I couldn't see. Plus there are builders at Lepanto and Midway about to chop forests, and each forest will mean two more frigates. This really sucks you guys. More on that later though. At least this gave me some vision on where these ships were located, and where I should position my own ships to try and stay out of range.

Here's what I was up against in the west. These were the same seven ships that I spotted last turn, along with the group of three fleet/armada ships attacking Genova. I spent a long time sitting and planning out my attacks to make sure that every ship could once again get into the fighting. There was one frigate who was too far back but everything else looked able to contribute. Let's finish taking apart this half of the English navy.

My top goal here from a tactical perspective was to take out the frigate protecting the Great Admiral. It was positioned pretty well in the back to boost every ship except this poor caravel out in front. If I could eliminate the Great Admiral, killing off the rest of the ships would be a much easier task. When I plotted out the moves, I saw that I needed to remove this caravel first to get rid of its zone of control. That would allow me to move onto the fish resource east of Genova and fire on the frigate guarding the Admiral. This unfortunate English caravel was just in range of one of my backline frigates and therefore took the first shot to open up the combat.

Ravenna's brand new frigate finished this turn was only able to reach the caravel, and therefore had the honor of eliminating it. By the way, the Valetta city state has a galley down there that we'll need to kill off at some point, heh. No attacks available this turn to deal with it.

This was the attack that I mentioned before, hitting the frigate covering the Great Admiral to set up a future attack. Damage was a little bit low on the attack roll at only 46, which goes to show how having the Great Admiral's +5 strength makes such a difference. Attacking at +17 strength deals significantly more damage than attacking at +12 strength.

I wanted to finish off the Great Admiral frigate next, only to realize that I had to get rid of this frigate as well or else its zone of control would block movement around to the north to get at the Great Admiral. I needed to avoid a poor dice roll here and I did, getting a slightly above average result.

Which was then enough for a second frigate to finish the enemy ship off. Whew. This was the most luck-dependent pair of attacks in the sequence. I only needed average luck to get the kill, but as we all know, you don't always get average dice rolls. This opened the path forward to target the Great Admiral:

I attacked at +17 strength and... argh, came up short! Two below-average dice rolls in a row, the first one for 46 damage and then this one for 50 damage on a possible range of 47-71. 4 out of 100 HP remaining on the enemy ship, almost like the Great Admiral was providing a dice roll bonus. See, things don't always go perfectly for me either. I had enough grace room on the previous turn to two-shot everything because I was averaging about 55 damage per attack, and even a low roll would be overcome with the second shot that did additional damage due to low health.

Fortunately, I was able to shift plans and use this ironclad to get the kill. In retrospect, I would have needed to move a unit onto this tile regardless, but I was hoping to move a frigate here and still be able to get a shot off. Instead, I had to "waste" an attack to remove the ship and the underlying Great Admiral, plus my ironclad took another 10 damage in the process. Well, nothing to be done about it. I needed that Admiral and its combat bonus gone from the battlefield.

And there it went, teleporting over to Lepanto's Harbor. The Great Admiral is now out of the fighting in the west, but it will come back to annoy us again in the east. Fortunately it can only move three tiles per turn until England discovers Steam Power tech and that limits its effectiveness.

Back to the main action. With the Great Admiral gone, I could begin carving up the rest of the enemy fleet essentially at my leisure. I pasted in the damage printout to demonstrate how the removal of the Great Admiral significantly increased the damage of each shot. These +17 strength attacks deal an average of 59 damage so this was actually a slightly below average roll, believe it or not.

Mopping up.

Now the caravel was actually a tougher target because of its 50 melee strength, as opposed to the 45 melee strength of the frigates. This is why I waited to take on the caravels until after the Great Admiral was gone, as otherwise I'd only be attacking at +7 strength and averaging 40 damage, not enough for a two-shot kill without getting lucky. One shot from my frigate to soften up this unit...

Followed by the ironclad cleaning up for the kill. At +21 strength differential this was a guaranted kill of the English caravel, but look at that damage taken. 15 damage from the caravel when it was fighting at -21 strength? That was a max damage roll from the enemy ship there, argh. A bit annoying.

I had my non-promoted frigate shoot at the injured English caravel. While I knew that it wouldn't deal as much damage, I also wouldn't need to inflict a full 100 HP worth of damage to get the kill. I rolled below average and did 35 damage to this guy, but that was still enough to take him to half health since the unit was already injured.

And then this was an almost guaranteed kill, although if I had rolled the absolute minimum of 48 damage I may have come up short. Fortunately an average damage roll here was plenty to get the job done.

My injured frigate from last turn got into the action as well! I needed some kind of damage on this last remaining English frigate because my ironclad couldn't one-shot it. The amount of damage didn't matter very much, anything around 30 damage would do. I got a max damage roll here at a time when I didn't particularly need it and ended up with 42 damage, heh.

The last ironclad easily finished things off. Now I moved my injured frigate up next to the enemy ship to provide an additional support bonus for the ironclad when I attacked, but that wasn't really needed here. I probably should have placed the injured frigate east of the fish tile so that it was out of range of the remaining English fleets/armadas. As it is, this unit is now vulnerable to being attacked by one of those ships and killed on England's turn. So that's a tactical misplay on my part, although any movement by those fleets/armada ships out of the narrow Genova fjord will ensure their immediate destruction on my next turn.

The net result was another fantastic turn for our navy from a tactical perspective. Seven more English ships sunk and my own ships placed far enough to the west that they should mostly be out of range of the English ships in the east. While I wasn't able to go after the three ships attacking Genova, I was able to hit everything else and destroy it. The kill count now stands at 17-4 in my favor, although I will probably lose another ship or two on the upcoming English turn. I placed an ironclad to block the 1-tile path leading to Nan Madol; only two ships can attack it from the east and everything else has to go up and around the island to the north, where they will put themselves in range of my ships again. The one frigate that couldn't get into the fighting this turn is two tiles back from the ironclad in what will hopefully be a safe spot, ready to promote into a battleship and keep fighting. With Steel coming online next turn, I should feel charged and excited about our prospects in this war. But I don't, I mostly feel depressed and with little interest in continuing. Let me take a quick break and I'll explain what I mean in a second post.

It was another amazing turn in terms of pure tactics, sending another seven English ships to the bottom of the ocean. The kill disparity of 17-4 was better than I had ever imagined getting in my wildest dreams before the start of the fighting. However, I was still feeling pessimistic about the outcome of the wider war due to Chevalier's ownership of the Venetian Arsenal and the power of chopping/harvesting of resources. Here in non-expansion Civ6 where there was no resource consumption of units, it was far too easy to deforest the landscape and produce a carpet of modern units. I explained this issue in more detail in a followup post:

Sullla:
So what's the larger problem that I was referring to in the previous post. Aren't we winning the war handily at sea? Tactically yes, but I'm not sure that continues to hold true at the strategic level. I've already killed 17 ships worth about 900 combined power rating. That should be enough to deliver a massive, crushing victory to our side. However, the ridiculousness of Venetian Arsenal combined with lategame harvesting of resources means that I'm only breaking even in these trades. I have to kill enemy ships at a 2:1 ratio at least, and probably better than that in order to prevail. I checked the power ratings for this turn, and England's power has barely decreased at all, only 200 power down from last turn. I'm actually losing more power in the war right now than England because Venetian Arsenal-powered chops/harvests are continuing to turn out ships at a fantastic rate. Let me post this picture from earlier in the turn again:

Lepanto has a forest left, Midway has two forests and a stone remaining. That's probably enough to produce 8 additional ships for England when they're all harvested. Combined with the other ships that England has in the eastern half of the ocean, I'm probably still outnumbered despite the incredible bloodletting thus far. And while that's almost all of the tile features remaining to be harvested, Chevalier could potentially chop two silk forests in cities over here, and he could buy some of the forest tiles in the third ring of Midway to harvest them. That's what, another 8 ships potentially there to be claimed? Settling a pair of junk cities has produced close to a dozen ships for him already, and he still has more yet to go.

It's not just England though. Woden's Nubia is doing the same thing:

Look at Kurgus. It's a complete junk city, thrown down in the middle of the jungle for the express purpose of chopping the jungle tiles. Woden has Goddess of the Harvest pantheon, so he's clearing jungle and getting 150 faith with each chop, which he then uses to faith-purchase units in Theocracy government. He tossed down Shaat this turn to keep doing the same thing. It's not even on the coast and there's no intention of ever building anything here, just harvesting the terrain. On our team, Singaboy spent the whole game building wonders and Holy Sites for faith to be able to purchase units in Theocracy. On EmperorK's team, Russia spent the whole game carefully building Lavras and settling the tundra to collect faith.

Woden throws down junk cities and harvests stuff with his pantheon. And I don't blame Woden and Chevalier. They're only playing the game as it exists, not as the way it should be. Furthermore, all of the rest of us have been doing the same thing, if not quite so blatantly. I founded Lucca for the sole purpose of harvesting resources. Look at what TheArchduke is doing now:

His island city has harvested the terrain for a Harbor district to unlock another trade route, same as I did at my own island city of Ferrara. There's another settler heading off into the tundra to do the same thing.

Plus this settler is headed off to another island for more harvesting of resources. It's the smart play at this stage of the game. But it's so, so disappointing from a mechanics standpoint. Our actual cities that we've built throughout the game up to this point are being eclipsed by junk cities that exist only to harvest forests and resources. It's just like what pindicator and Ichabod were posting about at the tail end of the PBEM5 game. Let me reproduce their posts here again:

Ichabod:
The hammer cost scaling is not only about districts/settlers/builders (the costs that scale during the game). Those actually work fine, since it's more organic (well, there's the problem that, without chops, new cities will never ever build a district). The problem is the scaling of fixed cost production, like units, buildings and wonders. After a certain point, they cost way too much for the benefit given (buildings/wonders) or have different ways of acquisition that are way better (faith purchasing and upgrades, in the case of units).

Housing is a problem, because cities are just too weak right now. The dependence on hill tiles is also very bad, even worse (well, I guess there's the option of planting forests and lumbermills for flat tiles, but that's way more costly - perhaps not even worth -, and depends on rivers as well). Cities after a point (and that point is not that far from midgame, I'd say) are just chop fodder, you either have things to chop, or the city will likely never come close to repay its costs. I think the problems you point out are way more serious than they appear on a first glance, Pindi.

Pindicator:
By the way, with the earlier discussion, I agree with Ichabod 100% here. It's not so much the scaling production costs, it's a combination of base costs of buildings and units being so high in the late game, and that combined with districts being tweaked just a little too high. Maybe not. My 2nd wave cities (the ones I took from Japper and the ones I planted after) can make a district in about 20 turns right now, which is probably a good number for them being underdeveloped at this stage in the game. But it means a new city has really hard time to get up and running, to the point where it doesn't seem worth building settlers.

But worse are the unit costs. Units cost as much as districts right now - actually moreso. Early in the game the balance is definitely that units cost less. And the high unit costs also mean that if a player were to have his army wiped then that is likely game-ending for him in multiplayer. If I can corner and wipe out those Arabian cavalry then Alhambram will likely never be able to replace them in any realistic timeframe. And with the 3 cities i have building Rough Riders - they aren't slouches on production, but they are going to take 14-18 turns each to complete. I could research up to tanks in that timeframe - so there's definitely some imbalance between not just production but also how production relates to research in the lategame.

Sullla:
These are very serious problems. Unfortunately the whole economy of Civ6 completely falls apart after the midgame. We couldn't see this for a while because all our Multiplayer games were ending at fairly early dates, and a lot of the chopping math is counterintuitive at first. But now that it's been a year of competitive play and we're starting to have longer games, it's all falling apart. The whole gameplay after a certain point revolves around upgrading old units (because new units are too expensive to build) and chopping/harvesting resources because they yield incredible amounts of free production. None of this makes any sense, and it renders the cities that you build up laboriously over the course of the game to be almost worthless in the late stages of the game. I can spend 8 turns building a frigate in a mature city... or I can toss down a size 1 crap city and harvest a stone resource for the same effect, with the ship appearing instantly. It's ridiculous. The game shouldn't work this way. (Obviously Magnus only makes things ten times worse in the expansion which is why I refuse to touch it until he's fixed.)

Venetian Arsenal takes a bad problem and makes it much, much worse. If it were just the case that England's manually-built ships were doubled, I could probably live with that. Difficult and annoying to counter them, but we have a tech lead and that would likely be enough. But no, every one of those blasted resource harvests gets doubled too. It's almost impossible to defeat someone who can convert every forest into two frigates. That's totally absurd and represents a blind spot on the part of the developers. They obviously didn't forsee the results of the system that they created, and we didn't realize just how bad it was until recently when everyone began to start making heavy use of resource harvests. The Venetian Arsenal basically says "whoever builds this becomes invincible in naval combat, forever" and no world wonder should ever be that powerful. It's virtually an auto-win button. Like, does everyone realize how horribly Woden has botched the combat so far from a tactical perspective? If he had played things better, he could have destroyed my whole navy by now or close to it. It's a miracle that I have a modest edge right now; my whole force started out with 20 ships and I've already killed 17 ships, while needing to face down another 15-20 ships before all is said and done. Oh, and my opponent has the movement speed edge, double Great Admirals, two fleets, and an armada!!! But he has the Venetian Arsenal and forest chops in crappy size 1 cities so I guess tactical brilliance doesn't really matter.

I still think that I can eventually win the struggle on the eastern ocean with the technological edge by upgrading to battleships. I think. But it's not fun to play this game, and it's clear that we aren't strong enough to make any serious headway against England or Nubia. England has 2300 power and Nubia has 2000 power this turn, just slightly weaker than us. We couldn't put together a force to conquer Russia/Germany, and we haven't been able to put together a force to conquer England/Nubia. As a result, here's my proposal: I think we should offer a three-way draw to this game. All three teams have played magnificent games thus far. We are all too strong for anyone to conquer anyone else. We're also entering into the most broken portion of Civ6 gameplay, and seeing who can abuse forest chops the most doesn't particularly appeal to me. On a personal note, I need to stop playing the turns soon. They just take too much time and effort, and I really want to get back to playing some other games. I know from Chevalier's PBEM8 thread that he finds these turns to be grueling as well, and I suspect that there's a similar fatigue from the Russia/Germany team. It's been great and fun, but I think we're pretty much at a stopping point.

This was the first PBEM game that made it deep into the tech tree and the cracks in the Civ6 gameplay were really starting to show. There wasn't enough production available and chopping/harvesting of resources was way too strong, turning the lategame into a race to see who could settle the most junk cities and clear cut the most terrain. Obviously the Venetian Arsenal and Goddess of the Harvest pantheon (removed in the Civ6 expansions) made things significantly worse. This gameplay wasn't particularly fun and after seven months of playing turns I had little desire to keep slogging through seemingly endless units. It didn't seem possible for any side to conquer the other, everyone was too big and too powerful. Maybe we could eventually out-tech and defeat our opponents but I didn't have the stomach for that kind of time investment. Thus I thought we should offer a three-way draw to reflect how well everyone had played in this game. This game had been a ton of fun but I thought we had pretty much reached the stopping point.

Singaboy was amenable to the draw idea but for the moment the game continued:

Woden was able to raze the canal city of Genova on his turn but otherwise didn't seem to have touched the Roman fleet. (I would include some images from England's point of view but Woden wasn't updating his spoiler thread during these turns and Chevalier was still out traveling.) With Steel tech finishing and battleship upgrades about to begin, this looked like a promising situation for my team. Then the next turn arrived and Civ6's poor programming reared its ugly head:

Sullla:
I'm disappointed that we didn't get more of a response in the General thread yesterday. Woden and EmperorK seem noncommittal one way or another, but TheArchduke clearly wants to keep playing. That's going to make it difficult to negotiate an end to this game, sigh. In the interests of not holding up the game any longer, I grabbed the turn this morning to play it.

The notifications were pretty much as expected. Steel completed, Modern era unlocked with the sweet road movement bonus. Somewhat amusingly, a barbarian caravel has popped up outside the city of Parma, the one that just finished a frigate and gained city wall defenses via Steel tech. Well, this isn't a problem, I'll swap into Professional Army policy and turn a frigate into a battleship somewhere, and then shoot the barbarian unit with the city defenses after they've gained the strength of a battleship. That should be enough to kill the barb unit along with the frigate shot. So I open up the policy screen and...

What the heck is this?! The game won't let me change policies. Stupid piece of crap buggy interface, are you freaking kidding me. It's critically important that Rome be able to switch policies this turn, we've been basing our whole strategy around a Turn 148 discovery of Steel and a Turn 148 policy swap into Professional Army. I finished a civic this turn. It says it right there on the screen! But it won't let me change policies because this game's coding seems to be made out of spaghetti string.

That was the last straw for me. I'm tired of playing these turns and I don't want to invest any more time into a game where the mechanics have collapsed into nonsense. By the way, after killing 950 points worth of military power from England, their power has gone down by... about 200 points. As I said before, England is basically invincible now thanks to the combination of Venetian Arsenal and lategame resource harvests. Maybe instead of offering a draw we should all surrender to England/Nubia. They built the weakest empire out of the three remaining teams and have the weakest teching, but they have Venetian Arsenal so I guess nothing else really matters at this point.

I really hate to be the party pooper in this game and see things in this state. But I've lost all motivation to keep playing between the Venetian Arsenal nonsense and the realization that the game's mechanics are hopelessly broken once everyone reaches this point in the tech tree. In real life terms, I still work full time and we're in the process of buying and moving into a new house. I just can't keep devoting hours and hours to this game when it feels increasingly pointless. I'm profoundly sorry about that, and I almost wish that I hadn't played this game because it's basically ruined Civ6 for me. Now that I know how messed up the mechanics are under the hood, it's killed my interest in playing more games. Maybe we wait and see what Chevalier wants to do right now? If he also wants to continue, we can let Singaboy play the Roman turns thanks to his gracious offer. This policy thing was just a kick in the rear today and annoyed me so much that I didn't want to do the rest of the turn.

It was enormously frustrating to have planned for the last few weeks that we would save up gold for a big frigate to battleship upgrade when Steel tech finished on Turn 148 only to have a completed civic somehow not unlock a policy shift into the discounted upgrade card. Cornflakes eventually figured out what happened: (1) Sullla played T147, being ahead of Singaboy in the turn order. (2) Singaboy played T147, discovered Nationalism which in turn provided the boost to Sullla thus completing the civic research for him on T147. (3) Sullla loads T148, but since the boost was credited on T147 the policy swap is not available on T148. It was completely nonsensical but there was nothing we could do about it. We would have to spend 445 gold for a policy swap - the cost of three battleship upgrades - to make the desired switch into Professional Army policy for upgrades. What a mess.

The failed policy swap was ultimately a relatively small thing in this game. If this had been the only ongoing issue, I wouldn't have cared that much. But coming on top of the frustration with the chopping mechanics, the Venetian Arsenal, and exhaustion from playing and reporting so many turns, it was very much the last straw that broke the camel's back. The naval war was proving to be too much of a grind and I badly needed to step away from the ongoing time investment. Outside of the game, I was literally in the process of purchasing and then moving into a house along with planning a wedding and working full time. I simply wasn't in the same place in my life when this game took place in 2018 as opposed to when the Civ4 Pitboss #2 game took place back in 2008. There just wasn't as much gaming time available to invest into this stuff anymore. I appreciated that the lurker community was very understanding of this and mostly had polite things to say in response. I was trying to make it clear that this wasn't a rage quit from the game, more of a case of someone who couldn't keep giving the turns the amount of time that they deserved.

As I stepped back from the game, Singboy stepped up by taking over the playing of the turns for both Rome *AND* China:

Singaboy:
Rome's Turn 158: Steel is in as well as Nationalism, but the swap costs 445 gold. We bite the bullet as Rome needs to upgrade quite a few units from now on. At the same time, I take out the somewhat curious choice for 1 envoy for 2 for the first envoy. Even though it's not much, but merchant confederation will give a little more gpt [gold per turn]. For the gargantuan task to eliminate two fleets and one armada. Two of the frigates shoot at the armada but cause only 61 damage combined. This won't be enough to sink the armada with another frigate shot. I suspect that the armada will be promoted during England's turn.

However, I decide to bring in another frigate to redline the armada. I am hoping that England will promote the armada so that it won't attack my frigate. I suspect that England will swap the frigate armada with the caravel fleet and the attack my frontline frigate. I am hoping that my frigate will survive this. Even if I lose one frigate, there will be a good counter coming next turn as I am starting to upgrade some ships to battleships.

What do I mean by that? Well, have a look at the tactical situation at the end of all upgrades and attacks. At Siena and Ravenna as well as Firenze, I have upgraded three frigates to battleships. Unless I am mistaken, those battleships at Siena and Ravenna will be able to shoot at the English ships over the narrow land (it's flat land). Together with the battleship from Firenze as well as the remaining frigates, that should be sufficient to sink at least 2/3 of those strong enemy ships. At Bologna, I upgraded two further frigates to await the potential English attack. In two rounds, things should be a little safer with lots of battleships.

I am planning to upgrade two frigates to battleships once China has Steel on T149 to counter any English fleet from the south. I thought at first that Rome would need some gold for upgrades. However, next turn, it will have 1000 gold thanks to the Great Merchant and then make even more gpt thanks to 6 envoys in Muskat which will result in +4 gpt per commercial district for Rome. This should push the income to 200 gpt. It should be enough for now. Of course, soon there will be upgrades to submarines and then tanks and infantry. I do hope that Rome can keep the technology edge over the rest and start razing English coastal cities with its fleet

Singaboy used the existing Roman navy to pin England's remaining ships in the little fjord where Genova used to stand. Woden had successfully razed the canal city but it was clear by now that it was going to cost him the entire western portion of his fleet to do so. Singaboy was also upgrading frigates to battleships as fast as possible, with his main limitation being the number of water tiles within Roman cultural control. You can only upgrade units within your own tiles or those of an allied civ / city state and that limited Singaboy to five total upgrades on this initial turn. Battleships had another 15 strength above frigates, 70 against 55, and could fire at targets from 3 tiles away instead of 2 tiles. They would be a powerful weapon once Singaboy had them available in numbers.

On his turn, Woden sank another Roman frigate and continued chopping/harvesting more frigates at the English cities in the east:

Overall things looked pretty good with battleships starting to appear on the waters and England lacking enough technology to counter. However, Woden and Chevalier weren't ready to give up yet and Singaboy had a long way to go before he could translate these initial military victories into decisive territorial gains. The strain of war had already claimed its first victim and there were many turns still to be played.