Assessing some Starting Locations - Civ6 Tutorials

hey buddies potato mcwhiskey here and welcome to civilization six today we're going to talk a little bit about starting your early game strategies um adapting to your circumstances and how to get the most out of your start location and what a build order actually might look like when you're playing against the AI on deity now I do have a few mods activated here most of them are just UI mods some of them do have a technical gameplay impact but that would be got Lakes most of them are just UI mods so don't worry about that and I'm just going to go ahead and create a game on a completely random map a standard size continence map which is probably what most people are going to play I'll start it on deity and we could just do a little bit of like a master class tutorial style thing I don't care which sieve I'm playing I don't care what you know scenario I'm in I think it would be kind of interesting though um this is something I would maybe like to do in the future it would be to go through and do a whole bunch of start locations which each and every sieve in the game um like here's how you you know analyze a location as the cree and this is how Georgia wants to interpret the world here are like the early game objectives of Georgia here are like the few different build orders Georgia can do so let's take a look at this start location um there's kind of a number of things wrong with this start location but there's also a few things right with this star location we don't have a whole lot of Hill so let's go ahead and just do like a hill search oh actually I'm completely wrong there's a ton of Hills here never mind uh there's a lot of Hills we got plenty uh so we're good to go this is actually I would say this is a very playable start location one big problem is a lack of early game food however the cree do have you know uh the meekwap which is unlocked fairly early into the tech tree right at Pottery which is also when you get your free Trader so you could make use of them equip alongside uh some bonus resources which actually seem to be lacking here too but this is like fairly standard of what you're gonna see in like start locations which are not amazing so let me go ahead and open up the fire tuner and I'm just going to kind of talk about like why this map kind of sucks so I'm gonna reveal the entire Terrain and you can see here like this is my start location let me let me just shift enter to give the AI a chance to take their turns and the thing that I want to talk about here is that in Civilization 6 with the standard default settings and without any map mods or any balance mods there are what we would like to call there's there's winners and losers when it comes to start location and let me tell you this start location we have is a loser because uh just look at the lack of bonus resources look at the lack of food look at the lack of forests for chopping now keep in mind chopping is one of the most important mechanics in the game for you to master and honestly the simplest way to master chopping is to chop every single tile that you see now there are times when you want to save chops or not shop but like imagine if I had spawned down here on this peninsula look how bad this land is okay there's barely any forests there's barely any trees there's barely any rain forests um look at look at pakravska over here yeah sure they started next to the Matterhorn which is like a really nice natural wonder but the actual land of trash we've got like really crappy floodplain a handful of bonus resources a handful of forests and then compared to like Jerusalem Jerusalem's land's amazing tons of forests a decent number of Hills a decent number of rainforests be hungry probably the best that location I've seen so far right two food two production tiles three food two production task three for one production task this really high yield tiles right compare that to my start one food one production one food two production one food two production one food two production right these are these are very very weak tiles I'm on the edge of tundra I'm on the edge of desert I mean sure I can get a good Petra but a good Petra doesn't get you into the game it's something you achieve in the middle of the game and hopefully that it pays off and like even over here for the gall like they have a way better start than me in this game let's have a look uh Canada got a really bad start they're not even on Tundra which is where they want to be and the 200 that they do have have almost no Woods on it and similarly if we go check out Mali mali's not even on their normal desert area so they're they're struggling too so this is kind of what I want to talk about the reason you're having bad game to Civ 6 is because your map settings sock so what I want you to do is exit a menu and I'm going to give you the settings that you should almost always use so the the two most important settings here when it comes to creating a world is to set rainfall to West and World age to new this adds so much more quality to the map now this does make it harder for the AI but it just makes the game a lot more playable if you want to make the game harder set it to Old World and arid okay you will not have a good time so that's why I say new and wet that is the best way to play sieve these two settings are incredibly important and honestly I also like to do abundant resources I think it makes the game more interesting it makes the game more Dynamic but if you don't want to do that yeah it's fine you don't have to um I definitely feel like the game just plays better if you play with these settings all these other settings not super important just doesn't matter as much but abundant resources New World age wet rainfall it will significantly improve the quality of the map and let me go show you that now I want to be very precise here I'm not saying that it completely eliminates the ability to get a bad start you can still get bad starts but it makes the average start much better so you're much more likely to get a good start so I want you to just look like drink in this start location compared to the previous one I have so many options about where I want to settle my city I could move off of the coast onto the cattle and get a really nice free food base tile for my city center I could move on to the marble I get a one culture based tile with a 2-2 tile or two food two production tile a two food two production tiles these are what I would call Standard tiles these are tiles that you want to have inside your first two rings of your city we don't actually have that many two through two production tiles here we have one and two in range of this city so kind of a you know mediocre start we have a a one three time which is pretty damn good um but let's go ahead and reveal the map again and we'll just kind of look at the map and get a feel for how it looks now this might actually be the most interesting continents map I've ever seen I've never seen a continent map generate like this like four distinct Islands um but just like look at the quality of Scotland's start right a good sprinkle of resources a good sprinkle of woods there's a natural wonder nearby a good sprinkle of luxuries let's take a look at Greece's greases kind of a weak start but the tundra has better quality there's more forests in the tundra there's more bonus resources in the tundra there's a really nice natural wonder nearby um let's take a look at Ethiopia Ethiopia nice luxury resources some good bonus resources a good amount of forest nearby another quality of the land isn't amazing but you could definitely see there's no like huge sparse areas where there's a lack like a big lack of resources so honestly these are the settings that I would just recommend in almost every game because it will it will just significantly increase the quality of the game that you're playing um even if you take a look here at sweet Sweden start location look at all these pearls that are around they could do a really interesting Coastal game they have lovely land over here it's not like super dense or super amazing but there's like a sprinkling of Hills there's a sprinkling of marshes there's a sprinkling of resources there's plantations there's deer there's diamonds and we haven't even revealed things like horses we haven't even revealed things like iron those things are also going to improve the quality the quality of your land and your land quality can be thought of as basically how many yields can I get per tile per worker you know like how much can I get out of a tile but I think it's pretty obvious to me that like I should move on to the marble and settle there I know I'm playing with the you know fog of War off and all that sort of stuff but that's not really important for what we want to talk about today um so the reason that I want to settle on the marble is because I'm playing Australia so Australia gets plus three housing in coastal cities and their campuses commercial hubs holy sites and theater squares get plus one yield in tiles with charming appeal now if we hit the I think it's three key you could see all of this bright green area this are tiles with charming appeal I believe it's plus three in breathtaking yes so the the light green area here that would get us plus one yield on all of those districts the sorry the the light green area would be plus one the bright green would be plus three now so we're gonna settle on the marble for a variety of reasons the first one being when we settle on the marble we actually get plus one culture per turd in this city normally this city produces uh 2.3 culture per turn Baseline but because we settled on the marble we actually get access to that marble you can see up here it's in our luxury resources and the marble can be traded to the AI so like theoretically I can come in here and be like hey what do you want to buy my marble for now obviously I don't want to sell my a my marble because I you know I can't but also playing Australia I have really good yields and then I have a 2-2 tile and I can potentially buy some more tiles like this deer over here is a good tile up so when you're working a tile I want you to think about um the amount of surplus that you're producing and there's kind of two important things that go into a surplus um there's opportunity cost which is what is the cost of working this tile versus working this tile and then what is just the cost of working the tile so every tile in the game every citizen in your city up costs two food per turn you can see here this city has one citizen which means it consumes two food so the price to work a two food tile with a citizen is two food so that means this tile is producing two food the citizen eats two so the net output is zero food and then you get a net output of two production so when you people people look at this tile here and they're like oh this is only one more production than this tile that's like you know these tiles are like pretty similar and it's like no not even close these tiles are far and away because this tile right now it costs two food to work it it produces two food so that's zero food surplus and one production Surplus which means this tile produces a one production Surplus this tile produces a two production Surplus this tile right here is literally twice as good it is I want to say that again this tile is twice as good and similarly this deer tile here right it costs two food to work this tile it produces one but it also produces three food so it has a minus one food cost like that's the Surplus the Surplus is this is a net drain on your food economy but it produces three food and surplus so you have to pick up that extra food from somewhere and your city won't grow at a reasonable Pace if you're not picking up all your food hopefully that kind of explains the concept of like tile economy and you want to be thinking about tile economy when it comes to where you settle um so now that we've got we've talked a little bit about settling and how to settle cities and all that sort of stuff let's talk about opening build orders in this particular map it's not going to matter so let's go ahead and just like do a quick restart we'll we'll get a new save we'll get a new map and I'll be able to talk a little bit about like super early build order stuff and what different what your first like what the first five things that you built in a game are gonna Define about your game as well as your first couple of Technology choices okay this is a little bit of a crappy start location because we're settled on pretty bad desert and on deity it can be quite hard to get pyramids but I think we can make it work we do have a pretty good two foot two production three Gold Tile on the Truffles and we also have a decent copper tile to settle on I don't love my study location but this copper tile is actually really good to settle on because it's a two it's a one food two production tile when the city center is settled it will turn it into a two foot two production tile and normally a city center by the way if I search if I search the City Center normally it is a two two food one production tile does that not show here no it doesn't Okay um normally City centers are are two food one production right but if you settle on a Plains Hill it'll become two food two production really really nice you also have this two food two production and three Gold Tile that's a fantastic start to the game that's like quite a bit more gold there's actually a really high gold star right where we've got five more gold per turn that's twice the norm of the mega gold per turn that we would have um it would normally take us like 40 turns to buy a builder we're gonna be able to get one in like 20 which is pretty damn good all things considered the first couple of things you want to build in a game are really kind of gonna be dependent on a few different things so I would say a 95 of the games if you're doing anything related to Faith you want to get two Scouts almost immediately and then you want to get one settler and then you want to build a holy site this is because you want to get our religion ASAP and that's the only way to get a religion in Civ six and religion is really really powerful um particularly when you're playing on deity it's really the only way to guarantee a religion you can get religions otherwise a little bit more of a safer build where you aren't going for a holy site-based game is where you can go like double Scout into double settler that would be the standard opening in my opinion double Scout into double settler and then a monument in every city that you settle so it would look like scout scout Saddler settler monument and that would be like the standard opener and then by the time you have those three cities down you would either start building your campuses or like your you would start working towards your theater squares or you would build another three settlers and expand your Empire or consider setting up for a war or whatever so yeah the other way that you can do this is to go either Scout Slinger as your opener or Slinger Slinger or um just one Slinger into Monument as an opener that's a totally viable thing to do you can go like Slinger Monument settler settler this is not what I would consider to be a recommended build but it can work if you have like a relatively strong opening hand and good tiles that you can improve with an early Builder purchase or something like that I would say generally though 99 of games get two Scouts into two settlers that's going to be your most default basic opener um there are like cases where you might want to go like Warrior or Slinger and particularly if you're playing someone like the new Caesar um but yeah that's like this is two two Scouts and this is the build that will carry you through almost every single game that isn't faith based in Civilization 6 and you want to be looking for Scouts and you always want to be checking okay what does this city state do the city state Singapore gives a plus one production by Capital when I'm building buildings you also want to be looking around for wonders while Singapore will let me build wonders and also um you know Mercedes received plus two production for every foreign civilization they have a trade route too and we want to be looking for particularly in the early game our goal is to grab as many tribal Villages as possible and the reason we wanted to find tribal Villages and we want to find other civilizations is because we want to get error score if we can get 25 aeroscore we can get a golden age and the getting a classical era golden age is honestly one of the most game defining things you can do because it can be the difference between launching into the game with extreme success and like slopping your way into the game sluggishly so always always always be looking for that era score be look like the second that I noticed a Barb camp in this area I'm moving my warrior over there because you can clear a bear camp with a single Warrior it's super easy now you are going to want to adjust your build slightly as you explore if you encounter more than one Barb cap you might want to switch a scout for a Slinger you might want to switch a scale for a warrior that's all going to be context dependent it's going to be something you learn over time but generally you're going to be looking for scout scout settler settler like we found the Fountain of Youth finding natural wonders super good for aeroscore but we're not actually going to go for astrology here I just researched that just for the sake of um example I'm going to send this guy out to the north I'll send this scout to the west and you're coming along this way and so there's like basically a few things that we're looking for in the early game we're looking for natural wonders for us to pick up we're looking for tribal Villages we're looking for Barb camps we're looking for city-states we're looking for other players so that we can kind of map out the sort of bonuses and things that we're gonna have to be ready for almost always you want to get a Pantheon on so discipline allows you to fight barbs more effectively god king allows you to get a Pantheon you can plug in surveys sometimes if you find no Barb camps nearby but if you're ever killing a Barb cap it's as good to have it's good to have discipline it's useful you almost always want to go early Empire foreign trade into early Empire is the is the way to go and you're also looking for places to settle your cities I cannot stress this enough you need you need a good settling plan and you need a good settling pattern and so I'm seeing right here there's a nice Plains hill by the way detailed map tax allows you to with shift a you can place pins so it's a good good old thing so do keep that in mind so I would maybe settle on this plane's Hill because I would get this second City plus two plus two production on the city center it also kind of forms me a little bit of a barrier with Samaria who I'm gonna try to declare a friendship with so that I can keep him from declaring war me it's not a foolproof plan he may still declare warn me and we cleared a Barb camp and because the Barb Camp was within six tiles of one of our cities we got three Aero score we're already up to 13 era scores so we just need to get like a little bit more if we can get 12 more in 23 turns we're doing amazingly like here's another tribal Village for us to pick up this potentially more continents for us to discover I'm going to put my Scout into defensive Terrain in the hope that that means when this guy attacks him he survives quite surprised that that barb Scout chose to attack there but it looks like we did in fact win we should be able to step down now and pick up this tribal Village and level up and look how many city-states we found off the back of these two Scouts we have so much scouting information about the land about where we might want to go where we might want to settle it's fantastic um animal husbandry and Mining are two pretty important early game things to pick up be careful with researching animal husbandry because horse tiles can block your um what's it your horse tiles can block your um your District placement if you get an unfortunate horse tile but you know I've been thinking of actually moving the city down onto the cattle because then this leaves this part over here open for a settlement later if I choose I kind of like that idea it's kind of cute pick up this tribal Village pick up a promotion almost always it's good to go for the forest promotion but Hills is also totally valid I I kind of just do it based on what's like nearby like if I see two Hills nearby I take kale promotion just so I can get individually turn by turn better exploration but yeah I'm gonna settle up the cattle because the cattle give me free food and one production and then the basic transition here is you get monuments in the newly settled cities you can also like let's say you have a neighbor who's a little bit threatening you can go for Slingers and switch over to craftsmanship plug in a Gog and go for an early three-slinger build that would be my recommendation is you could like you should be making your way towards early Empire but if things are looking a little bit sketch don't be afraid to switch over to craftsmanship but yeah this is going to be like the structure of most of your strong early game openers and really what you're looking to do is to try to form a triangle or a line of cities that all reinforce each other with loyalty and in particular you want to like guard space so you can see I settled South and this forms a line with my city pikun mapu and chingwetti that means that this space behind me here is protected and similarly I'm going to settle a city potentially you know just out of these bananas because it's near the tea it's near the bananas it's got really nice sugar as well two luxuries and it's on a hill it's in a good defensive location and it blocks Congo settling any closer to me because one two three this title here would be blocked I wouldn't want to settle any closer because I want to use defensive terrain to my advantage um but I would settle right here and then I've drawn a line between Singapore to my Capital my Capital to chingari which basically makes all of this land over here very easily settled and claimed by me so hopefully that kind of gives you a really good you know quick lesson on how to have more interesting early games and how to actually play an early game depending on the situation you get into and you know I'm trying to get very general lessons rather than like very specific things don't get tunnel visioned into trying to settle this tile this tile is totally fine if Sumeria settles it just make sure you have enough units to defend or a friendship or whatever right you always have to assess the situation carefully yeah I just wanted to do like a quick throwaway video because I'm going on vacation and hopefully it contained a few thoughts and philosophies in my brain that will be helpful to you guys I love you all very much and I'll see you guys next time bye right [Music]

Channel: PotatoMcWhiskey

Views: 339,798

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Id: 16Ot710JCjw

Length: 19min 47sec (1187 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/littlemissfuzzy]

I just wanna know how the heck his game starts so quickly :) The narrator hadn't even finished speaking. :D