How to Analyze Start Locations in Civ 6 Rise and Fall a Guide to your Settling Strategy

let's quickly talk about how we're gonna be conducting this sort of experimental way of looking at starting locations we're going to be running on fairly standard settings the only thing I have changed is Pangaea so it's all default except we're running on a Pangaea map so if you want to try and run this experiment yourself to try to learn how to analyze starting locations that is how you do it so to start with we're going to cover the basics of how to analyze a start location and I have selected a random civilization so every time we reroll we're going to get a chance to maybe have a have a little bit of insight in how your civilization might specifically influence how you analyze a star location the obviously the most important and prime thing that you're going to be looking for in a starting location is going to be fresh water green tiles you want to be settled on fresh water particularly in your capital because I believe it'll let you get to six pop-up five without growth penalties which is pretty nice what are we looking for in a starting location well the first thing that we're looking for is a good tile to settle on that's like that's number one and then after you found a good tile to settle on you're looking for good tiles to work with in the first and second ring of that settlement we have spawned here on the grassland hill now we could settle in place here but there's a better location we could settle in place here and we would have a to food one production tile underneath our Capitol because what your Capitol does is it takes the tile underneath it and it tries to conform it to two food and one production so if we settled over here it would be two food in one production underneath the Capitol tile but the actual best location for us to settle here is right here on this Plains Hill Plains Hill airplanes hills are very very unique they provide your city with +1 production for the entire game now me personally it takes me on average about 250 turns to win a game of DD so that's an extra 250 production in my empire from turn one working away from me helping me get my settlers out quicker helping me get my district out quicker so I will always try to settle on a Plains Hill if it's available there are other reasons though that this part is better if we take a look at the first ring of tiles that are available to this grassland Hill not only are we missing out the one production of this but the tiles that are available to work aren't very good so generally speaking you want to have at least one tile within one tile you want to have one tile immediately workable by your capital that has a yield of four so for example this Plains Hill forest here is one food a three production that's a four yield this mercury mine is one two three yield these dear tiles over here are two food three production those are five yield tiles those are incredible on top of the fact that we are going to be settling on this Plains hill and we're going to have two five yield tiles here and still be in range of the mercury that's incredible this is a really really powerful starting location other important things that you're willing to consider with your aesthetic location are the number of hills available to you so let's have a quick Hill count so within the first generally speaking you're only ever gonna work the hills within the first two rings of your city so that's immediately adjacent and then one tile out anything that's three tiles out you're probably going to have to purchase which is why we assign a lower value so for example two hills on an inner ring are worth like six hills on the outer ring because your it's just gonna take so much culture and time for you to ever get out there and work those you could honestly a single Hill in the inner ring is worth an arbitrary number of hills on the outer ring just because of how impractical or expensive it would be to work those outer rings you want your you want your things to be available to you as cheaply and quickly as possible so let's move our settler over one tile now a lot of people have the debate of should you move or not and really it's not a debate about should you remove or not I mean I think it's extremely obvious to me that I should move to this plains Hill for a number of reasons because of the knowledge that I have the plus one production these amazing high-yield deer tiles and the fact that it doesn't really move me too much there's also another advantage here which is where the civilization specific analysis comes in and that we're playing the Netherlands and we get extra bonuses from being rivers we do lose a little bit all the bars because we're not coastal but that's not a big deal because a couple of our bonuses are closely related but settling on a river here means that by moving to the left we could potentially fit another city on this river I get some more Jason C bonuses for our districts so that's sort of an example of when the analysis of individual civilizations can come into play when we're doing a standing location going to want to consider what way do we want to scout with our warrior now I could Scout to the left here but when I settle this city it's gonna reveal most of these tiles and this land over here looks much flatter so I'm gonna make my way over here so I can start to explore down the river because I want to know if I want to settle there I'm not again because I'm playing the Netherlands so there's all these like small little adjustments and things that you're gonna want to keep in mind as you play and really don't worry about getting this stuff right immediately it'll take some time so we revealed mountains here if this is even better mountains are really really good if you're going for a faith or science victory so that's another thing in the favor of this capital unfortunately it is where the deer tile is but deer tiles are also really really nice particularly forest deer tiles in rise and fall because of the governor Magnus who gives you double plot harvest and feature removals and with feature removals and plot harvesting you can actually guarantee certain wonders on DD for example you can guarantee the Temple of Artemis you can guarantee stuff like the world valley you can guarantee stuff like the Big Ben with lots of chopping or pretty much any wonder that you can reasonably Tek to on par with the AI they won't be chopping out there wonders so if you have stuff like deer and forests with Magnus you can secure yourself a few wonders even on the highest difficulty okay so we kind of explored our starting location and we picked a good spot let's have a look I don't know their starting location where we can begin to analyze and perhaps contrast it to this starting location okay so here's a starting location as Brazil now this is quite an interesting study location because it is a lot of hills that means potentially we could pack a lot of cities in here and get a lot of production particularly in the mid game after we pick up apprenticeship which will give our mines extra production which will mean these Plains Hills would be one food for production das and grassman tales are very very nice so this is a very nice starting location for a number of reasons lots of hills lots of rain forest for chops and bonus points we are playing Brazil so we get extra adjacency from rain forests just as an aside there I consider the rain forest adjacency bonus to be an early-game bonus because I think rainforests are still worth chopping even if you're playing Brazil so this is where some interesting analysis can come it may actually be worth our while to not move one tile but two tiles and to settle on the truffles I talked about how Plains Hills are the best house to settle on so this is a Plains hill right here so this is one of the best tiles to settle on the only thing better than a Plains Hill tile to settle on for your capital or indeed any city is a Plains Hill tile with a luxury and there are truffles right here so we would give up two turns however we would pick up three gold per turn for the rest of the game which means we essentially sacrifice a couple of turns of an advantage for somewhere in the region of you know the 750 gold let's say it takes me about two hundred and fifty turns to win a game of deity so that absolutely seems worth it to me by generally speaking I won't move more than two turns if you can get your capital settled within two turns on a really powerful tile that is you have your city placed on turn three you're you're gonna be okay I think Annie more than two like once we're hitting like three I'm really questioning unless I have like an a god tier natural wonder to settle on that'll give me either culture or science then then I would definitely consider it so in this instance pretty much most of these tiles within two range here towards down for example here is good here is good here is good here is good now the additional thing that makes this tile really nice is these airplanes hill jungles with so they have to food and to productions that means like even if I move over here I'm still getting really really good yields on to food to production tiles are about as good as you can ask for in the early game typically I would look for two of those but right now we've got four of them which is really really strong in the early game because it's gonna let you grow and produce so let's walk over to D truffles and settle in place and I'll show you this so there is another reason you want to settle on luxuries in Civilization six and it's not just because you get the the yield from the luxury so normally when you settle a city you would get plus five gold and you can see here we indeed are making plus eight because we get to keep that plus three gold from settling on the luxury and it's a Plains Hill so we keep the plus one gold plus one production so right now we have a city producing eight gold and six point three production don't forget it gets multiplied by amenities but I'm kind of like I'm leaving that by the wayside for now so this is our this is a really really strong start now there is a bit of desert over here which is know a couple of points out of its favor the second most important reason you want to settle on a luxury is because it allows you to immediately sell luxuries to the AI and in the early game you can often get the first turn you meet an AI and you give them a delegation you can often get somewhere in the region of a hundred to a hundred and sixty gold and that's about half the price of purchasing a settler in the early game so if you settle on a luxury and then quickly grab a builder and get a second luxury online and sell that to an AI as well you can often purchase a settler by turn 12 or turn 12 somewhere between turn 12 and 20 while also building a settler so you can get two settlers out by like turn 20 to 25 which is really really powerful I've had games where I just continuously change settle on top of luxuries when I got really good luxury placements and I think I had nine settlers out by turn sixty which is absurd that's the second reason we like to settle on luxuries Plains hills are the most important freshwater is really really important we're good workable tiles within range of the first two rings of the city stuff like mountains I haven't talked about victory specific things for example mountains are really good if you're going for a religion or science victory because of the campus adjacency for culture victories coastline is really nice because seaside resorts are really good also for cultural victories generally speaking forests and jungles are really high value a because they add yields to the tiles that they're on in the early game so they're kind of like a free improvement in the early game but also because of the addition of Magnus you can use this to not only accelerate your cities but get Wonders and stuff like that obviously resources increase the value of a starting location like amber or sheep food resources are really really valuable too because what I like to do is harvest food resources and use them to force growth in my cities so that I can place my districts down sooner I would much rather harvest the rice and get to population seven in one turn and then grow slowly after that without the rice then I would to slowly work the rice and get the population seven x amount of turns later because the cost of Dix districts scales with how many texts and how many civics you have so generally speaking that's why I will always recommend harvesting food resources like sheep sheep rice and wheat outside the early game I would say once you hit once you hit say somewhere between medieval yeah say once you're starting to hit medieval era that's when you want to start considering to harvest these bonus resources rather than improving them improving them in the early game can be really really powerful and I would absolutely recommend that but probably once you have apprenticeship and maybe worn or their tech in here maybe like millet you know depending on where you're going in this tech tree you would want to start harvesting the food resources so you can just play through districts down a little bit sooner and therefore save yourself some production in the long run this is a this is actually a really really good starting location for us to get in this video because it's a really really bad starting location out of first glance so let's talk about why I am not a fan of their standing location first of all we have desert we have a lot of desert near us and that is not very good we do have a plane tail with easy access to a plane's Hill however it's very dangerous to settle on your plane's Hills when you don't have a lot of hills around for example if we settle on this hill we only have one two three three hills in within two range of our city 4 if you count the desert hill which kind of counts but there's no food on it which is a mark against it it's just like yeah very very painful so let's move this warrior across the river we want to see what we're missing out on yeah this is again another really bad starting location so this starting location is bad for a number of primarily the desert is the problem desert is really bad for a starting location because if they're basically dead tiles going for Petra generally speaking is going to require a lot of chops we do not have a lot of forests here so that's another point against it the other thing that's holding the city back is we don't really have very good tiles to work no matter where we settle if I settle in place I settled on a marshland and I think I get the plus one food but then my best tile is a one food three production tile and one food three production tasks you generous beacon you want to be working a minimum minimum of a two food tile on the first turn you settle a city but I think the best spot here is on this Plains hill because again we pick up that plus two production or plus one production sorry the other reasons that this starting location is quite poor is that there is a lack of resources I see no real bonus resources to speak of and additionally our luxury resource is an irrigation luxury resource irrigation luxury resources are inherently lower value in terms of starting location unless you can move and settle on top of them then other ones I would much prefer to have a pasture luxury a camp luxury or sorry a cap luxury or a mining luxury or a quarry luxury than a plantation luxury because it's much harder to get irrigation we don't even have a week tile to improve to get the boost for irrigation so that's another mark against this settlement we're also playing Sumeria however we are playing Sumeria and I believe ziggurats can't be built on Hills so let me have a double check on that just try to remember just to give some examples of specific things yeah so cigarettes can't be built on Hills so the idea of having these kind of plane styles is kind of okay because it means we can build a lot of cigarettes but you know that's a small consolation but Gilgamesh is really strong anyway so that's just another I just weave in a little bit of safe specific stuff with the starting locations to help give you guys an idea of how to analyze them for yourselves I'm not try to tell you how to do how to I'm not trying to tell you what the best starting locations are rather I'm trying to give you my thought process so that you can learn to do it yourself that's that's my hope that's my goal so I think I've talked about most of the reasons why the starting location is bad the desert the lack of resources the lack of good tiles to work generally speaking you want to have tiles with at least three yields preferably four and you want to have at least two of those yields to be food and we have one for yield tile and then mostly two and three so this is very very weak starting very very weak all righty this is a fantastic starting location as an example because there's a lot of different decisions we could make for example we could move to the coastline if we are playing on a naval map if we spawn off the coast we may want to go to the coast because we're playing Norway that's a consideration you might want to make it will it take us two turns to get over there but you never know there's also the option of settling on the T to get the plus one science and unlock the the resource itself to be able to sell that to the AI it would move us off the plains Hill that we're on so we would have to make a choice between the plains hill or the T however by moving off of the plains hill we could then work the plains hill jungle which would be a to food to production tile and if we settle on the plains hill we kind of don't really have a to food to production tile to work with the exception of all the horses over here which will take us a while to grow to the only real downside the other upside of moving towards the T sorry is that it would move us closer to this nice spot here which is a pretty decent campus location combined with this science we could have a pretty strong science game going there are some other things in favor of this settlement there's a lot of food resources here that we could harvest to be able to throw down districts early in the game and lock in their price of the cheap price we have access to horses and easy pasture boosts we also have access to wheat for getting the irrigation boost so even if we don't settle on the tea we can get the tea in a reasonable amount of time so personally speaking this would really be down to personal tattoo or sorry so strategically speaking this would be down to personal choice whether you want to settle for the production or the science plus the amenity I think I would kind of always gravitate towards settling on the luxury just because being able to sell luxuries to the AI is so powerful for the early game that it's really hard to pass up there's also quite a few jungles and forests in here which means we could chop out settlers or we could chop out a wonder or we could chop out districts so I would give this I would give this a reasonably strong rating as a starting location it's a little bit flat there's a little bit of a lack of hills in this location which is kind of making me worried too mmm we do have some reasonably productive tiles we have three Hills in range of our capital and yeah that's not so good that's not so great but by moving off of this Plains here we essentially gave ourselves another hill that's do I say three hills if this is also in range it is three tiles out so we could maybe purchase it but it's a little bit far generally speaking I try to only count things within two toes so it's a little bit light on production but if we settle on the luxury and are able to crack out settlers that shouldn't hurt us too bad so let's have a little bit of a look at this studying location for Persia now this is a pretty rough starting location for a number of reasons first of all we're starting in tundra however they are tundra Hills which are not so bad they're essentially just like plains hills - one - one production which is reasonably acceptable in terms of the production because they do have that one food on them so again they're just like plains hills as if you had - one production from mines so it's not the worst Tundra start so despite what I said about wanting to settle on hils I still do think that moving to the incense here would be the best move and there's a couple of reasons for this first of all settling on a luxury is really really powerful but also settling on a luxury with for example I yield like faith is really nice for getting that early getting that early Pantheon without having to really do any sorts of investment not only that but moving off of the plains Hill will give us a four yield tile to work immediately in the capital for us to maybe crack out a quick settle or a quick a quick Scout into Builder or something along those lines not only that but moving off of this Hill gives us access to another forest chop to be used later in the game that we could use for for example building wonders so that's why even though Plains Hills are generally speaking the best tile to settle on sometimes moving off of the plains Hill makes sense other dimensions of analysis for this city it's a little bit weak it has some good tiles and some early culture it can pick up which is quite nice and you can see here we settled on the the faith tile and we are now getting +1 faith which is quite nice because that'll get us a fairly early pantoum without really having having to do anything for it so let's do maybe like two more examples of starting locations and then we'll wrap this up so we are playing as the Zulu in this game and we're playing as Shaka now that means we don't have any specific bonuses towards for example religion victories or science victories or tourism victories so really we're looking for production we're looking to maximize the production in the early game this is a really really really nice starting location we have not only do we have Plains which has really really good production we have ample hills within range or rather this I don't think this is it it is a help we have Apple Hills in range but also at least two luxuries and some bonus resources that can be harvested for food and plenty of shops available so I think settling in place here is definitely a good move alternatively moving to the mercury while an okay move would move me not only further from these diamonds but also these hills and I really don't want to move away from these hills if this bananas here was a hill I would actually consider moving onto it and settling on it because that might give me access to more of these grassland Hills over here in my capital but as it stands having a look at this this is a reasonably strong starting location and I would settle in place here because I would pick up the extra production from the plains Hill and I have an immediate three food one production tile to work and with another two food to production tile to work down the line and a nice very very very nice diamond mind to work for my third growth tile so here's a good example of a fairly weak starting location we do have Hills however none of them are Plains Hills this Plains Hills is off River so we can't settle on it we do have a couple of choices of where we want to settle we could settle in place on the grassland Hill unfortunately even though the grassland hill is a to food to production tile when we settle the city the forest will be destroyed and it will revert back to a to food one production tile I'll just show you that really quick you see that one production disappeared so that's really not ideal it's not the sort of thing that we want to be doing now when I'm looking at this my personal opinion is that I see a stone that's a really nice harvest for getting potentially wanders down the line which is something also we're talking about when we come to talk about starting locations the potential for wonders is something worth considering but I felt like it would be better if I just kind of kept things simple and focused on the basics of a strong start and not about chaining that together in getting wanders and stuff like that so again for me personally I would settle on the citrus here it's a really strong food tile yield it'll unlock another mind for me because there's really not a whole lot of minds in range of this tile but by moving here I guarantee myself another mind which is pretty good and that means we would have one two three minds I would say three minds is a good number two have to have like a pretty basic city now I did know I do know that this city right here did have a couple extra as well had three as well but I feel like you know when you've got a lot of flat land you want to avoid settling on heels if you can if you've got a lot of hills go Hill wide and so you can see we have the for food one production in our capital which means we can get away with working low per to low food tiles in our capital which is pretty damn nice for example we could work this plains Hill we could work this plains forest or we could work the those are about the only two low food toes so I hope this kind of general purpose sort of kind of look at how I analyze my studying locations and how I make a decision about where I want to settle and why in particular Oh another advantage of settling on the citrus is that it is a plantation resource that can be hard to unlock and we can immediately sell it just thought that would be worth repeating but yeah I hope this has been a useful little bit of a tip video ad ID video I don't know I like what I call this a guide video is this more like a strategy video I don't know but basically I thought I would share how I approach analyzing standing locations with a view of having a good early game there are more dimensions of analysis than I covered in this video for example wonders Civic boosts and [Music] tech boosts and stuff like that worth considering certain tech beasts only I kind of touched on irrigation but there's others like the coastal boost improving to see resources building pastures building mining a resource building a quarry all these sort of smaller things like apprenticeship building mines and aqueducts less so what else I try to think of a couple other examples like you those are other things you may want to consider into your settlement location but at a lower level than just getting good raw yields to start with other dimensions of analysis again are wonders there's lots of different ways to do it but also you know a good starting location for your empire doesn't necessarily guarantee you a good starting of the game because a truly good start of the game involves getting access to early early game city-states to get envoys with them for example getting pretty decent distance between you and your neighbor for example is another way that's gonna decide whether or not you're gonna have a strong early game and that depends whether or not you want to be close to them because you want to go to early war or you want to be far away from them so you have plenty of room to expand so I hope you guys have found this video useful in improving your ability to analyze and make decisions about where and why you should settle your cities in particular on the first 2 to 3 turns I will be doing more videos following up to talk about early game strategies and making decisions with regards to I will be doing a follow up video about early game strategies with regards to making decisions on how to get a good game going after you've picked a good settlement location for your capital and not only that but also have to identify good settlement locations for follow-up cities and stuff like that so keep an eye out for them other than that though I want to say I love you all very much and I'll see you next time bye bye you

Channel: PotatoMcWhiskey

Views: 2,092,968

Keywords: Civ 6 Guide, Civ 6 Rise and Fall Guide, Civ 6 Settling Guide, Civ 6 Settling Strategy, Civ 6 How to settle first city, Civ 6 where to settle first city, Civ 6 what to look for in first city, Civ 6 best city locations, Civ 6 Starting city, Civ 6 Starting Strategy, Civ 6 rise and fall city guide, Civ 6 Rise and fall settler guide, Civ 6 city settling tips, Civ 6 tips, Civ 6 settler tips, Civ 6 settler guide, Civ 6 settler strategy

Id: BKZmRBy2QrY

Length: 29min 42sec (1782 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/ur_meme_is_bad]

https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/81ea4d/how_to_analyze_start_locations_in_civ_6/

[u/DBenzie]

I think there's a flaw in his logic, when he talks about settling on a resource providing him with X amount of an extra resource. He says it will take him about 250 turns to win, so settling on a tile with +1P will give him an extra 250P over the course of a game. This assumes that he never works that tile at a later time. That amount of resource is only 'extra' until you would otherwise work it with a population.

By settling on a resource, you also never get to improve that tile, so for example the camp on the truffles tile in his second example, could provide +2 gold to make it +5 per turn.

[u/ComeOnReallly]

His Let’s Plays are pretty interesting too.

[u/[deleted]]

Watched the video and as a civ noob found it really helpful, so I continued to watch other videos to get some more insight. In the first episode of Cree playthrough he says that he made a huge mistake by not sending a delegation to Rome right away, can anybody tell me why? In my games I don't think I ever sent an early delegation and everything was ok, is it a difficulty thing, since I play on prince and he is on deity?

[u/ThePyroEagle]

That title is a garden path sentence if you're not familiar with the name of the DLC.

[u/dayoldsoda]

Does anybody know what mod he is using to get all those pins for the map? I clicked through the youtube description and on some of his videos he has one UI but it does not include the extra pins (thinking specifically the pins that show district symbols).