Augustus of Carthage / Mongolia / Buganda
Small map, Fractal, 5 AI Opponents
Immortal difficulty
Patch 1.1.1 (mostly)
Watch this game on YouTube (Playlist Link)
When Civ7 first came out, I played an initial game on Livestream where I had no real clue what I was doing for the first couple of sessions. It took a little over a month to finish that game while I kept experimenting and learning more about the gameplay in a series of private games. I only finished one of those games, the CivFanatics Game of the Month #2 that I used as my introductory report for Civ7, but I did spend enough time with Civ7 to have a pretty good feel for its quirks by the time that I was ready to start another Livestream endeavor. I wanted to try some kind of variant for this game and settled upon the idea of a one *CITY* challenge. This would mean that I could have lots of towns, the initial form of settlements that don't have build queues, while being unable to convert any of them into cities as the developers intended. This would give me a chance to do some more testing of town specialization which wasn't something that I had explored much beyond turning them into fishing/farming villages. This would also be a pretty good challenge because Civ7 players rapidly realized that towns were terrible and it was better to turn all of them into cities, for reasons that we'll address over the course of this report.
Augustus Caesar was the only logical choice for this game and also one of the leaders that I hadn't tried yet. All of Augustus' abilities center around towns in some fashion which was great because I'd have no shortage of them while playing this variant. His capital city receives +2 production per town, definitely nice since production is by far the most important yield in Civ7, but the real advantage was located in Augustus' other two unique traits. Towns under Augustus can purchase cultural buildings and all gold purchases of buildings in towns are discounted by 50%. This was huge because towns normally can't purchase science or cultural buildings and one of those big disadvantages would be ameliorated. I knew that I'd have to do tons of rush-buying over the course of this game (since towns don't have build queues and can't produce anything on their own) so any discounts there would be greatly appreciated. Augustus would allow my civ to have strong cultural output, however I did worry greatly about what I was going to do about science where there was no such edge.
There was also a logical pick for the civ choice: Carthage. This was one of the new civs added in the first downloadable content drop (which was included as part of the preorder edition that my wife bought) and features several unique mechanics. The biggest restriction was right there at the top of the civ description: Carthage can only have one city and towns cannot be converted into cities. Obviously that's a huge restriction in a normal game without being a penalty at all for this setup, making Carthage effectively the Venice of Civ7. To counterbalance this, Carthage receives a second settler and merchant every time that they train one. The settlers are even a unique unit in their own right named the Colonist that gets faster embarked movement speed and an extra population point if founded next to a resource (very easy to do). Thus Carthage is really good at expanding across the map since they get 2 for 1 deals on every settler, even if those towns then can't be converted into cities. It's too bad that the biggest restriction on expansion in Civ7 is the settlement limit, not the production cost of training settlers.
Carthage also gets a unique cavalry unit that can only be purchased and comes with a huge bonus to combat strength based on collecting resources, and then more interestingly a unique district that can actually be purchased in towns. Normally the buildings that make up a unique district can only be constructed in cities so this is a nice perk that dovetails with Carthage's abilities. The Punic Port can only be placed on water tiles and contains a production-granting Cothon along with a gold-generating Dockyard. Placing both of them together on the same tile, which the player should always do, creates a unique quarter granting two additional resource slots to the settlement. The biggest benefit of the Punic Port is that it's ageless like all other unique quarters, thus preserving its yields through all three eras. If only the whole game were ageless and didn't have the stupid era transitions, sigh.
I rolled an initial start and immediately found my settler situated on the coast next to a bunch of tundra tiles. OK, that wasn't quite what I was looking for, so I rolled another start... only to get the near-identical setup pictured above. Well, I guess the game wanted me to work my way out of this situation, I guess this was fine. Starting in the tundra actually isn't bad at all in Civ7 as the base terrain doesn't matter in this game, only the tile improvements placed on them. A grassland farm is the same as a plains farm is the same as a desert farm is the same as a tundra farm. I think that's bad for gameplay purposes because it means that only the resources really matter for city placement but them's the rules in this game. Speaking of resources, this start did have the best resource of the Ancient era present in the form of hides. They grant +3 production when assigned to a settlement and as I keep repeating production is king in Civ7. I moved one tile northwest to have fewer water tiles in the city radius and founded the capital on Turn 2.
Before starting the game, I had taken the memento that grants 200 gold on game start along with the memento that granted a Scientific attribute point. That initial gold boost feels critical to me because it allows the player to purchase one of the starting buildings right out of the gate, in this case a granary for extra food. Then I used the gold that the scout brought back from goody huts to rush buy the second building, an early saw pit, on Turn 11. Getting out the early buildings fast is super important not only because they accelerate the yields of the capital but also because every building adds +1 to the size of the city. Civ7 doesn't allow the player to train settlers until reaching size 5 and therefore adding these buildings lets the player start cranking out the settlers faster as well. Thus I was able to open with the starting scout, then two more scouts, followed by a settler on Turn 11 upon hitting size 5. That settler split into two Carthaginian colonists when it finished on Turn 15 and we were off and moving.
The scout builds turned out to be kind of duds in this game though since I quickly realized that I was alone on a small island. The Fractal map script will throw these out pretty frequently which is far better than the inevitable pair of blocky continents that every other map script produces. On the plus side, this meant that I wouldn't have to compete with the AI leaders for control of this territory which could be claimed quickly thanks to Carthage's dual settlers. The countering bad news was that there weren't that many goody huts to exploit which can sometimes give huge benefits if the player finds enough of them. I also had a hostile independent power (IP) up in the north to contend with and it didn't seem worthwhile trying to befriend them. Here in the early game, I wouldn't have enough influence to ally with them for ages on end and frankly I wanted that territory for myself.
Shortly thereafter I met Isabella of Egypt when one of her scouts sailed over from the west. There must be another landmass over there and in fact it would prove to be the location of the main continent as I was off on some Australia-sized miniature continent. My two settlers targeted the resource clusters to the northeast and northwest, with both of them quickly grabbing cotton resources that they sent back to the capital. Cotton is another one of the strong Ancient era resources with +2 food and +2 production when assigned to a settlement, and the capital was doing great with a pair of them plus those initial hides. By Turn 20, I already had a sizable portion of this island under my control:
I really wanted to rename these cities to something more fun and interesting which sadly wasn't allowed in this patch version. It still baffles me that Civ7 launched without the basic ability to do text replacement for a city name, sheesh! 
Anyway, the hostile independent power was pumping out a decent number of units here on Immortal difficulty and being a general nuisance. I trained a pair of slingers and sent them racing up to Motya which was being harassed by an enemy sword. The settlement was knocked down into the red on health but managed to survive thanks to several volleys of slinger shots. I'd have to keep the barbarians in check up there while also thinking about expanding further.
The completion of the pictured altar in the capital allowed me to choose my pantheon for this game:
The clear choice as far as I was concerned was God of Wisdom: +1 science on quarters in settlements with an altar. As a reminder, a quarter in Civ7 is an urban district with two completed buildings on it, and obsolete buildings do NOT count for quarters purposes (this is never explained anywhere in-game). As a result, it's usually best to place ageless buildings together to ensure that they will always get any benefits that apply to quarters, and similarly pairing up buildings from the same era together also works well. God of Wisdom's modest science benefit was my early game answer to the biggest challenge in this variant, trying to generate science while only having one city. While I couldn't purchase libraries or academies in my towns, I could purchase an altar in them for extra happiness which would then grant +1 science to any completed quarter. That would include the Punic Port once it was unlocked on the civic tree and I could also pair up cheap ageless buildings like granaries and brickyards together which would give them some minor science as well. This would be a really cool mechanic to emphasize throughout the whole length of the variant playthrough... except that once the Ancient era ended, every altar would go obsolete and cease to provide its pantheon benefit any longer. So what is even the point of having pantheons in the game if they disappear after the Ancient ea finishes? It's an open question.
Once I discovered Sailing tech a short while later, my scouts could embark onto water tiles and begin heading over to the western main continent. They immediately discovered the presence of Xerxes who had his capital not even ten tiles west of Hadrumentum, and I couldn't avoid a groan as soon as I met this new customer. Xerxes is very aggressive in Civ7 and also one of the most competent AI leaders since he loves to spam settlers everywhere with his increased settlement limit. I knew he would be trouble in this game and I was right. At least I was having some success against the barbarians, with a slinger gaining control of the central tile of that northern IP and dispersing it on Turn 32 though it did cost the slinger his life in the process. RIP brave solider.
By Turn 43, I had double expanded again with a fishing village east of the capital designed to send food back to Carthage along with this new settlement in the north. I'd been able to pick up several boosts to the settlement limit from the tech and civics trees, and ideally I would have kept pushing out more towns since I could easily manage 7/6 on the meter from a happiness perspective. There were two problems to my expansion-driven planning, however. The first was a lack of territory to plant additional settlements, at least on the starting island which was pretty full at this point. More problematic was the presence of barbarian units everywhere from the remaining hostile IPs, especially barbarian galleys that swarmed across the seas. Sundapura spawned three galleys along with a bunch of swords and then it turned out that there was another hostile IP to the south of Xerxes which produced another three-pack of enemy ships. I tried to send a pair of settlers across the western gulf at one point, only to run into those barbarian galleys who sank one of them to the bottom of the ocean. I would spend the next two dozen turns building and cash-rushing a decent-sized navy to deal with this threat and it had me yelling in exasperation on the Livestream at the sheer number of barbarian ships.
By this point around Turn 50, my initial set of towns were starting to come online in their own right. I was trying to get an altar in each of them for the +1 beaker on completed quarters, then once they were large enough and didn't have any more good tiles to grab, I converted them over to a town specialization. The most common of these is the farming town option, which adds +1 food on farms and fishing boats and therefore makes the town better at sending its food over to connected cities. Remember that towns cease all growth once they've been assigned a specialization so it typically makes more sense to accentuate whatever food they're passing off elsewhere. Here in this game, however, I decided to test out the urban center option instead: +1 beaker and +1 culture on all completed quarters. This is usually terrible because towns have next to nothing in terms of quarters and most of the game's buildings can't even be constructed in them. If you want science and culture from quarters, then it's basically always better to turn them into a city. However, in the unique context of this variant, the urban center was pretty decent and allowed me to wring additional science and culture from these locations. I was keeping pace with most of the AI leaders on science and culture despite their major bonuses here on Immortal difficulty.
Now the main benefit of towns is supposed to be their food getting offloaded to other cities which are better and stronger, thus sacrificing the development of the towns to have more powerful cities elsewhere. Unfortunately that wasn't going to work too well in this game, partially because my capital was located at the southeastern corner of the map where it had little in the way of town connections. Only Hadrumentum, Motya, and tiny fishing village Utica were connected to Carthage so towns like Hippo in the north simply sent their food nowhere once they were given a specialization. The larger reason why towns are lousy in Civ7 wasn't specific to this game though; it's due to how the growth formula works. I referenced this table back in my initial GOTM2 report and it's worth posting again:
Posters at CivFanatics reverse-engineered the city growth formula which apparently scales up in exponential fashion as listed above. The food requirements start out modest enough and then quickly balloon to stratospheric proportions, requiring 1000 food for the ninth pop point and 11,500 food for the 18th population point (!!!) Granted, city population in Civ7 doesn't have to feed itself as it did back in Civ6 and previous civ games, but these numbers are still set too preposterously high. This is why towns are bad: because generating extra food for cities is more or less pointless. You can set up these extra towns (which count against the strict settlement limit!) and they'll send back 50, 100, maybe even 300 food/turn back to your cities. And all that extra food gets the player maybe two or three extra pop points over the course of the whole game. Let's say you had a town sending fully 100 food/turn to another city for the entirety of the Ancient and Exploration ages, roughly 200 turns in total. That's 20,000 additional food which sounds great! And in practice it takes the city in question from size 14 almost but not quite to size 17. Congratulations, all that effort has gained a single city 2.5 population - it's pointless. 
After the initial half dozen pop points where the food numbers are reasonable, for the rest of the game nearly every increase in city size comes from constructing buildings or getting the occasional migrant. This breaks the gameplay in all sorts of unfortunate ways, including making all of the food buildings essentially useless. Oh hey, I can build a gristmill in the Exploration era for 6 extra food/turn? That will be really helpful in reaching the 9488 food I need for the next pop point. This mechanic also renders many of the game's leaders, civs, and social policies utterly worthless in a way that obviously wasn't intended. It's an unfortunate case of the developers not understanding their own game and highlighted that I was playing a pretty serious variant here. Supposedly the city growth formula is going to be tweaked in the next upcoming patch and I really hope Firaxis can come up with something more reasonable.
OK, mechanics discussion finished for the moment, back to the narrative. After a lengthy battle around Hippo that nearly saw the town fall into barbarian hands, I finally regained control of the area shortly after Turn 60. I had been forced to tank a series of shots from hostile offshore galleys for long turns on end until I could finally get three of my own galleys into the area and sink those troublemakers. A separte force of Carthaginian galleys had been battling with more barbarian ships in the western gulf and they managed to clear the way for settlers to seize a foothold on the continent. I started out by planting Oyat around Turn 60 and cleared out another hostile IP which had been located next to those hides in the extreme south. That independent power had its own swarm of galleys plus a bunch of swords, and it required four of my own galleys rotating back to Oyat for healing to down all of them. Maleth was established further northwest on Turn 81 because there was a gold resource present and I had to have that. Gold resources in Civ7 discount all purchases by a small amount and that was important for Carthage given all the rush-buying that I was doing in my towns.
In terms of economy management, I was trying to have each town connect its local resources and then purchase the basic ageless buildings to complete one or two quarters. A production-yielding building like a saw pit would eventually pay back its own cost since towns convert all production into gold. Then I often combined an altar together with a monument since both buildings were associated with the Ancient era and they added a nice chunk of happiness and culture to the settlement. Later on, I also made sure to get the Punic Port in every settlement along the coast since those unique buildings were also ageless and paid for themselves relatively quickly. They also increased the resource capacity of their respective settlements, leading to this ridiculous screenshot:
Triple camel resources plus the Punic Port resulted in the capital holding 20 resources all on its own. That's right, I completed the Economic legacy scoring goal for the Ancient era with a single city! 
Many of these resources were tagged as city-only objects which meant they had to go in the capital or else sit around unused. Bonus resources that could be assigned to towns were always in short supply since I had so many towns clamoring for their effects. Incidentally, this is another place where Civ7's interface is needlessly difficult to use: the resources cannot be sorted and the different resources insisted on being jumbled all together despite my attempts to group jade resources next to other jade resources. What an incoherent mess for no reason! I would later download a basic interface mod that solved this sloppiness; why were modders in their spare time able to fix this stuff that the professional developers continue to leave untouched?
By the time that Turn 100 had rolled around, I was beginning to pull decisively ahead of the AI empires even with this ridiculous variant. This seems to happen in every game because they're so bad at handling the economic side of the gameplay, completely unable to build their cities effectively as testified by the yield ribbons on the corner of the screen. Xerxes was probably doing the best since he was keeping up with my Carthage in expansion, however he was barely scraping half of my science and cultural output despite having three full cities. Ada Lovelace couldn't even muster a third of my science which was even more ridiculous - how can you only have 33 beakers/turn after 100 turns on Immortal difficulty?! Isabella was the strongest from an economic perspective depite having a mere two cities, thanks to running a wonder-heavy gameplan that was decent for now but destined to be horribly outscaled later. This is one of the most frustrating aspects about Civ7 because some of the mechanics are genuinely exciting and fun, and yet the inability of the AI to play the game drags everything down.
There is one thing that the AI does decently well though and that's to defend itself by spamming out units. Xerxes had turned hostile with me, as he seems to do in nearly every game, and I could see the writing on the wall that we were headed for war. I had scouted out everyone's territory earlier and I noted that Persia's capital was surrounded by water on three sides. With my large navy and some Carthage-specific bonuses granting extra range and combat strengths on all ships, I could see that Xerxes' capital was indefensible against a dedicated assault. He couldn't control the waters and that meant he couldn't put up a real defense. Since I had plenty of extra happiness on hand, I was eager to gain additional territory and thus declared a Formal War on Turn 102.
The first few turns of the war played out in the way that I expected. Carthaginian quadriremes sailed into the small bay south of Parsa and began shelling the city along with any land units trying to defend it, even as my army commander moved in from the west with another half dozen land units. I started the conflict with 3 war support thanks to having built the Gate of All Nations wonder; this wonder benefit was so strong that it was nerfed down to +2 war support shortly after I played these turns. Xerxes quickly brought in Isabella on his side of the conflict even though I'd had good relations with her up to this point; that caused me to sign an alliance with Ada Lovelace to avoid being completely isolated and the first world war of this game was afoot. It didn't take long for my units to seize control of Parsa itself, though that wasn't enough to achieve the city capture thanks to Xerxes having earlier constructed the Dur-Sharrukin world wonder. This is normally one of the worst wonders in the game, since all it does is make fortified districts stronger and forces an invader to capture its tile along with anything else fortified. However, Dur-Sharrukin very much served its intended purposes here as I was forced to fight my way over to that eastern tile and take control of it as well. I might not have managed this at all if I didn't have five different quadriremes blasting away from the coasts who could target that exact tile.
If this had been Civ6, the AI would have rolled over and collapsed at the first sign of pressure. That's not the case in Civ7 though because the AI does know how to build units in this game. Like, lots and lots of units. A veritable Carpet of Doom you might say:
Ummm.... 
Pretty clearly I wasn't going to be pushing onwards to Bactria in the face of that immortal and archer spam. This is something else that is increasingly bothering me about Civ7 since every conflict against the AI on higher difficulties seems to turn into this kind of slogfest: all of the units in this game are simply too cheap to build! Archers only cost 50 production while the tier 2 melee units (normally spears and here immortals) cost slightly more at 60 production. Most player cities can crank these out every 1-2 turns while the AI cities with their bonuses on higher difficulty can keep 1-turning a unit each turn from each city. The AI also gets extra combat strength in every fight on higher difficulties, +5 strength on Immortal and +8 strength on Deity, which means that the player has a huge disadvantage in every combat.
But isn't that a good thing? Don't we want the AI to be able to defend itself instead of huddling in a crouch as it does in Civ6? I mean, I suppose this is a little bit better, but it's also maddeningly frustrating. I wouldn't mind the AI having a bunch of units if it could stack them together in some way and thereby threaten objectives with them, with my own civ also being able to stack units together to do the same thing. Instead, the cheap units just break the One Unit Per Tile system because no one can maneuver across the map. Everything is packed together way too tightly and only the use of army commanders (which the AI is clueless about) can break through the traffic jams. Note as well that the AI has no idea how to use all these units that it builds, with most of them continuing to shuffle around aimlessly on Xerxes' turns. They just drag out the combat because it's not possible to advance through the endless swarms of opposition, stretching out a forgone conclusion in the same way as the forced era transitions. If the units on both sides could actually stack together, we could have a real battle and some kind of resolution instead of these carpets of doom blanketing the landscape.
I swear, I'm never going to be able to forgive Civ5 for inflicting the One Unit Per Tile mechanic on the series (and apparently almost every other strategy game designed since 2010, argh!)
With Carthage stymied on land, the Livestream viewers pointed out that there might be an opportunity to advance at sea. I still had five quadriremes available on the eastern ocean and the city of Pathra-Gada to the north didn't seem to have as many units in the area. While my land units held position and defended at Parsa, my ships began blasting away at the new target. Of course, as soon as Pathra-Gada came under attack it rapidly spammed out archers and immortals onto every tile as well. None of these units were any good at attacking my territory and indeed they fell apart instantly as soon as they were required to do any maneuvering. All they could do was clog up the tiles and shoot at my ships when they came in range, and there were enough defensive archers here that they began sinking my quadriremes. I was able to deal enough damage to knock out the city's defenses though and then kill the defending unit inside, allowing a cheeky ballista to sail into the undefended tile to effectuate the capture. There was no chance of holding Pathra-Gada, not when it was surrounded by Persian units, however Xerxes was ready to sign a peace treaty, the dope. He inked a deal that left Parsa and Pathra-Gada in my hands, plus another settlement named Tarsus even further north. The result:
A massive amount of territory passed into my control, giving Carthage dominance over the southern half of the main continent. Xerxes was badly battered by losing two of his original three cities though he would still continue further expanding and get back up to six settlements before the end of the era. Xerxes even claimed Ada Lovelace's second city of Ostia in a peace treaty which gave Persia a city in the middle of Roman territory. What a tough customer. For my part, I was now three settlements over the limit which was costing me -15 unhappiness in every settlement. Cities and towns that fall into unhappiness suffer a drag on all of their tile yields, and this has a substantial effect on the topline civ-wide numbers though Civ7's interface does its typically absymal job at conveying what's going on to the player. I needed to fix the happiness situation as much as I could even though that was somewhat limited given the building restrictions on towns. What I really needed was an increase to the settlement limit which would sadly have to wait for the next era since I had already grabbed every possible option from the tech and civic trees.
I was also approaching the end of the Ancient era with the meter reading 88% and rapidly nearing its endpoint. For these remaining turns, I concentrated on rush-buying the Punic Port in as many settlements as possible because it would no longer be available after the era transition. I believe that I managed to get it completed everywhere before time ran out. I also built another army commander in the capital so that I could carry more units over to the Exploration age; I had gotten some good use out of the unique unit Numidian Cavalry which had +9 to combat strength thanks to all the resources in the capital. It was too bad that they would all get converted into generic units on era transition - why did the developers think this would be fun to play again?
The Ancient era ended on Turn 129 which was a bit later than what I've come to expect in my games. I think it was slower than normal because I was slower to hit a lot of milestones due to the one city variant, plus this collection of AI leaders was pretty sad outside of Xerxes. The final tally was 239 gold, 130 beakers, and 87 culture per turn which eclipsed the other AI leaders everywhere outside of Isabella's culture. Note that these yields were still being depressed by quite a lot of unhappiness which was something that I'd have to work on in the Exploration age. I think it took me a while to grasp the importance of staying on the positive side of the happiness ledger because the game suggests this is done globally when in fact unhappiness is tracked on a per-city basis, with the yield penalties buried deep in a submenu that requires three clicks to see. Even with some economic drag from unhappiness, I was quite pleased with how the game was going overall. This was a tough variant and I was still in firm control.
I also did much better than I was expecting in terms of the legacy scoring goals. My plan had been to ignore most of these and yet I still wound up with exactly the same result as in my GOTM2 effort, maximizing scoring in the Military, Science, and Economic categories while getting only the first tier in the Cultural category from 3/7 wonders. I think that I easily could have gotten seven wonders if it wasn't for the restrictive tile requirements that locked out more than half of the wonders from my capital; the developers clearly didn't expect the player to have only one city capable of building them! As for the other categories, I demonstrated earlier all of the resources that the capital was holding and the successful war with Xerxes had easily gotten me over the hump for the Military scoring. Somehow I managed to research enough tech masteries to reach 10 codices, plus unlock enough building slots to hold the things. Given my weakness of being unable to construct libraries or academies in towns, I'm genuinely surprised that I managed to reach this objective. I think that the captured Xerxes cities were what gave me enough slots to fit the various codices that otherwise would have been left without a home.
That took me through the Ancient era which is the most balanced portion of the gameplay. Next I had to take this variant forward into the Exploration age where things should theoretically be getting more difficult due to the lack of additional cities, but in practice would only get easier because the AI is so bad at the later periods. Read on to see how things played out from here.
