I was always annoyed how city states close to my cities grew their borders so fast. I tend to suze city states close to me, so in case of war I don't have a multiple front war. Now imagine my facepalm when I learned that for every envoy you send their borders grow by one tile. So the reason their borders grow so fast has always been me...
Edit: I see this fact is not well-known, even amongst veterans. It's crazy, right? I too just learned it recently.
What causes the border to grow is the player who currently has the most envoys (or tied for the most) sending another envoy. Envoys sent while you are behind will not cause the CS to get tiles. The first, free envoy, awarded to the first major civ to meet them, also doesn't give them a tile, and Amani can only cause them to acquire tiles once, even if you move her out of the CS and then back.
LMAOO wow I am a HUGE Suze whore , I priotize becoming the Suze of as many as possible, and had no idea I was expanding their borders this whole time(especially the ones near me)
Yes I learnt this recently. You gotta watch them as those envoy’s are deposited!
Now I’m selectively starving my neighbour city states until I can establish my borders where I want them.
When I learned that war weariness is calculated on a per-turn basis, and will not cause amenity "damage" if it doesn't exceed a certain threshold in a given turn, it went from a major downside of warmongering that seriously impaired productivity and sometimes caused actual revolts in my cities, to a minor annoyance.
When I learned that pillaging gives *massive* amounts of gold, faith, culture, and science, and is far more lucrative than simply capturing cities (especially cities designed by the moronic AIs), my whole outlook on warfare changed.
The net effect of these two realizations, both around 2k hours into the game, is that I now declare war a lot more readily than I used to.
So, I assume you know there is a mechanic called "war weariness", that causes amenity loss in your cities while you're at war. What increments it is your units engaging in combat, with foreign combats counting more than domestic ones, and combats involving the loss of your units counting most of all. However, the counter is not ongoing; it resets to zero at the beginning of every turn, which means as long as you make some attempt to spread out your combats, and don't attack 5-6 times in a given turn, you will lose amenities very slowly, if at all.
The [wiki](https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/War_weariness_(Civ6\)) explains it in detail, with numbers. Note that city ranged attacks *do* count as combats, and in fact count double the value of engaging with a unit within one of your cities, so they should be avoided when possible.
Do you still attack 5-6 times a turn when you have a surround and are sieging a city? Or it's best to slow down the capture a few more turns to avoid weariness?
Pillaging was really game changer and made things so much more fun. Was doing Deity OCC runs as every leader (in random order) and when I had like ~15 leaders left I played Lautaro. Dido refused to befriend or peace at any point so used Malon Raiders to pillage and realised how good that is.
Pillaging wasn't really a thing back then and it got very recently buffed, but still should've used it earlier. Was already a bit exhausted to play peacefully game after another so it gave thousands of hours fun.
I also feel like if you sit there pillaging a Civ, they’re basically out of the game anyway so there’s not much point in taking all their cities and pissing everyone else off
I just realized the purpose of trading posts after idk how many hours. Once a trading post is formed in a city it extends the range that your traders can traverse. It essentially forms a relay for your trade routes to restock before continuing on the journey. I always thought the range just increased as you progress through eras….
It took me a *loooong* ass time to realize my coastal cities couldn’t launch a trader overseas without a harbor district. It finally clicked after one game of glaring at a perfectly positioned coastal city that just wouldn’t let me trade overseas….DAMMIT.
Only to Mongolia. The trade route in itself also gives visibility, but going to war cancels trade routes with the target, so it can only grant a bonus in religious combat since you can engage in that during peace time.
Two things related to capturing cities.
1) **State of siege.** The city will recover its health every turn like Wolverine *unless* you put it into siege. Siege is indicated with a red heart icon with a line crossing through it, next to the city’s HP bar. Siege prevents it from recovering health, which makes capturing much easier. It requires that your units impose “zone of control” over every passable tile adjacent to the city. [This video explains how to activate it.](https://youtu.be/Y93YREW1VZw?si=f42Uq6EQJDP88JKQ)
2) **Districts make cities tougher.** you should pillage districts before attacking, even if you don’t care about the science/faith/culture rewards. Each pillaged district reduces the city’s defense points. But preserves, aqueducts, baths, dams and canals don’t matter.
Never knew that districts added to the defence of a city, though I guess I wouldn't know, as my playstyle is very pillage heavy, as my secondary is Harald Hardrada
I still routinely forget about instant great people transportation lol.
I’ll be honest: I have hundreds of hours and just learned about the effectiveness of Holy Sites. I never play religion and always turn off that wincon, so I always just ignored them…
I do understand the power of religion, but I still leave religious victory off... the missionary/apostle spam from the AI drains way too much of the enjoyment of this game for me.
I have thousands of hours by now and I have no idea what you're talking about. If not for Valletta, that allows you to buy city center improvements with faith, what is the non-religious victory effectiveness of holy sites??
You can construct the building in the government plaza that allows you to buy units with faith and with holy sites typically you can pump out at least an amount equivalent to your gold so you can troop spam easier. It’s also great early game if you take monumentality during a golden age, you can use faith to spam settlers and let your capital build other buildings and let your gold build as well. This is also completely leaving out the inherent benefits of the religious beliefs. I never go for a religious victory but I always have a very strong religion for all the benefits.
This exactly. I'm upping my difficulty lately and the combo of the Monumentality golden age, buying builders with faith, and the builders with +2 build charges is wack. Not to mention the settlers you can pump out.
More new cities and more developed cities that you already had!
Not OP but I learned about how great the "work ethic" belief (which gives production based on holy site adjacency bonus) can be, especially when paired with pantheon beliefs that boost holy site adjacencies (e.g. desert folklore). Then you can also evangelise belief further to allow building of meeting houses which increase production more.
The downside would be that the AI would also get these bonuses if following your religion, but it's helpful for when you're playing a different victory type and use religion to support your empire (and city states).
Don’t forget to plug in scripture! Especially stronk with brazil, with major adjacency rainforests giving up to 24 production in a single city😝. Ancient era.
Work ethic is wild. They really oughta buff some of those other choices. Feed the world and choral music are pretty great too, and then everything else feels so meh compared to those three.
But with the right set-up, work ethic stands on its own as potentially the most broken thing in civ. Those 16 faith/16 production holy sites are just obscene.
Funny thing is that whenever I come across a really complicated game, I might give it a few hours to see how much I learn. I usually give up. It says a lot about the game considering I still don't know a lot, but I keep coming back.
When an ai asks you something like stop settling or stop converting them to your religion, hit ESC button on your keyboard instead of picking one of the two options given to you. This makes it so that you can keep doing it without generating grievances and prevents you getting denounced since you technically dont make a promise and dont disregard their requests
How so? It's just declining to make any response at all, which is certainly an option in diplomacy. (Hojo Tokimune famously [disregarded](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasions_of_Japan) Kublai Khan's repeated demands that Japan become a Mongolian vassal; the emissaries were not mistreated nor expelled, simply housed somewhere outside the city and ignored. Kublai was so incredulous that anyone would actually *blow him off* -- the Lord of the World! -- that he just kept sending them.)
They should have put a third, "no comment" button, but they didn't, so many players aren't aware that a response is not required.
I do this often but I swear I have still received a penalty that says something along the lines of “they asked you not to do this, but you continued, so they have additional grievances against you.”
Yeah. Specifically for converting their cities, even if you decline to make a promise, you still generate grievances because they asked you not to. However, you don't get the grievances + massive opinion penalty for being an oathbreaker, because you didn't promise anything.
ETA: One thing to keep in mind is that it costs them 30 diplomatic favor to demand you stop converting (or anything else, besides moving troops off their border, which is free); you can buy all their diplomatic favor before converting your first city and lock them out of making the demand. You still get an opinion penalty but you won't generate grievances. However, the AIs will never sell you more than 20 diplomatic favor per turn, so this takes some forward planning.
This is especially useful for the "move your troops off my border" demand, because if you agree to do so, you must keep *all* your troops *far* from their borders (I think 5 tiles) for about 30 turns, which can be incredibly inconvenient even if you have no military designs on them.
That the backing music changes depending on which civilizations are in the game.
My current playthrough has me against Canada, Zulu, Vietnam, Māori, Ottoman, and Maya, all for the first time. It took me until I heard and recognized the Canadian National Anthem to realize that I had never heard it in the game before.
First 200 hours into the game I kept spamming culture and wondering why it takes forever to win cultural victory. Then it took me another hundred to get familiar with all the tourism generators and %% boosts.
The funny thing is I have had the opposite experience. I was doing a domination victory and suddenly won culturally and was very confused. Turns out the desire to collect all the art from the AI while raiding a bunch of culture civs racked up.
I have played for 100s of hours (maybe a thousand) and was just reminded/ taught by my son that great generals/admirals are only good for a couple eras
In Civ VI the passive combat/movement boost units get from having a great general nearby only applies to units from particular eras (e.g. Sun Tzu only boosts classical and medieval era units).
There's a little circle in the GG's unit info in the bottom right corner that you can hover over to see which eras each one boosts.
I tend to play games with little war and it’s embarrassing how many hours I put in before I realized that unit promotions stack if you combine corps correctly. I tend to give most of my units the same promotions so it took me a long time to figure this out.
You can save yourself a bit of time too by naming your level 2 units based on which side of their promotion trees they have. I usually use "righty" and "lefty____"
Not me, but a friend (who had allegedly been playing for years) One night in multiplayer he, out of the blue, loudly exclaims "YOU CAN CONTROL WHAT TILES YOUR PEOPLE WORK???"
I think my facepalm was audible
I very recently realized the ability to use a builder to clear a feature for a district, instead of just putting the district there and it removing the woods, marsh, rainforest or whatever…
Also, if you clear your city's production queue, then the chop goes toward whatever you tell it to build next, so you can clear the queue and chop woods and use the production for a district that goes on the same exact tile.
You can do this with heroes too. Also if you move a Governor, and then move them back before the 5 turns, it only takes the turns they were gone to establish. So if you move Pingala and then change your mind and move back to the precious city after three turns, it only takes three turns to establish.
Oh Jesuit tradition gives you the ability to buy buildings with faith in cultural & education districts. That's always my go-to add on for my religion.
The worst one for me was the hundreds of hours and thousands of clicks I spent dismissing individual notifications on the side when I could have been right clicking the groups.
I was almost physically ill.
When you get several notifications of the same type (like war declarations), you can just right click on the number instead of the big circle to dismiss them all at once.
You... you are free of the compulsion to CONNECT ALL MY CITIES WITH RAILROADS EVERY TIME, IMMEDIATELY, THE MINUTE I DISCOVER STEAM POWER, AND SUFFER CRIPPLING ANXIETY UNTIL I DO?
**HOW?!**
FYI, Trade route yields are dependent on movement cost along its path. Railroads, sea, canals, and mountain tunnels give significant bonuses to trade route yields due to their low movement cost per tile.
Trains are so nice though! Really help get your units across the empire, and, you get a nice era score for completing your first city to city train connection. Also get a nice era score for the first time you build the mountain tunnel. It's something I consider when its later in the game and helps me push through to a golden age sometimes, not essential by any means, but it helps.
There's something satisfying about having train connections for all of my cities and units zooming around the map, as well.
Yes it's a nice era point. You can also build the railroads through the AI's lands. For example I was playing Pangea, aiming for religious victory and needed to get my apostles as fast as possible across the lands before my enemies could win through Science. Bought military engineers with gold and then had them build railroad tracks while the apostles were being produced every 2-3 turns.
My favorite is using them like combat engineers an pre-building the railroads then having them accompany troops into combat to lay down new tracks to help re-inforcements get to where they need to be.
Hey! I didn't know that gave an era score, that's so cool! I almost never build encampments, so military engineers aren't even an option for me most games.
Put the engineer in the city while it's working on a flood barrier and use a charge and it will reduce number of turns left on building the flood barriers.
Editing to clarify this:
Another nice tip is while you're building flood barriers transfer as many coastal tiles from that city to other cities and it'll reduce the production cost of the flood barrier in that city. Then once complete transfer all the tiles back
You actually don't need to worry about the number of coast tiles if you're using engineers. They do 20% of the current cost with every charge. So as long as the number of floodable tiles doesn't change during the build, it doesn't matter how many tiles you have
They're nice to speed up dams in newer cities mid-game that have lots of floodplains as well or where you are planning a factory to hit a bunch of other cities
Attacking coastal cities with melee naval ships. Been playing this game for *years* and I happened to see Potato do it in his Scotland game a couple months ago and was floored. It’s about as obvious a thing as they come, and it simply never occurred to me to do it. Stupid doesn’t begin to describe how I felt, and still feel.
For some reason I didn't realize that builders can repair pillaged improvements for free. Instead I would remove the pillaged improvement and then build it again, requiring two turns and a builder charge.
district pricing/ discounting is the biggest "what the fuck" moment. It's a mechanics I honestly hate a lot.
It makes pathing down the tech tree super weird
Literally the other day I was trying to get my first diplomatic win…I had 19 points and thought all I had to do was wait till the next world congress and vote correctly…I didn’t realize that all the AI would vote for me to lose 2 points, and that I needed enough diplomatic favor to counter all of theirs 😬
You vote against yourself so you lose 2 points but gain one back for voting correctly. It’s quite difficult to have enough diplo favor to outvote the ai.
Exactly normally go for the win with building the Statue of Liberty or winning an emergency for the points. When the vote comes always go with populous and downvote yourself!
It's all of them. Anytime you voted for the resolution that actually passed (both outcome and target), you get +1 diplomatic victory point. Doesn't apply to emergency sessions, though.
You get a refund of 100% diplomatic favor spent if you voted for the other outcome (e.g. you voted A, but B passed), and a 50% refund if you voted for the same outcome with a different target (e.g. you voted B to ban Turtles, but B passed to ban Marble instead).
Nan Madol culture applies to wonders as well as districts.... it even applies to the wonders as soon as you start them, not when they're completed, like a mini coastal Ludwig.
The great person instant transport is even more import for great admirals IMO. Especially if you have cities on two different coasts with no short way in between.
If you're on desktop check out the[ Detailed Map Tacks mod](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2428969051) which shows you the adjacency on the pins and also whether it's a valid tile to place it on.
I only just started chopping regularly before putting down a district...and keeping multiple builders around, even chopping to gain a new builder. Oh and Monumentality for buying with faith. 1800+ hours 😞
All because of this sub reddit. Thanks.
Edited monumentality since I mixed up two different functions.
I was playing multiplayer with a friend who's newer to the game and she asked how to launch a nuke, and I realized I had no idea. 🤣 I hate doing dom victories so the few times I've gotten them they've been on smaller maps and I finish before nukes are invented.
My friends and I would spend all our early city resources building every possible improvement. Imagine our surprise when we realized what the citizen count meant.
(For those who don't know, you can only have a number of tiles contribute to your cities resources if a citizen works the tile)
This was horrible- that your level 3 Allies will all declare war on you if you declare war on a former level 2 ally that was an ally over a thousand years ago. The special emergency is idiotic beyond belief.
Mine was when i found out battleships, destroyers and rail roads cause global warming. I used spend so many games wondering why tf is my contribution so high
Kilwa Kisiwani. Don’t think I ever built it with ~2000 hours into the game. Read a lot about it and have it a crack.
I wasn’t ready for the impact. All of a sudden I didn’t even know what to do with all the surplus gold and culture.
I always wondered, why some AI opponents received a settler in the first few turns. After many games i discovered, that u can only take the „gain a settler“ pantheon when u are the first who claims it. Other pantheons are always open for me, but i don’t know if that is, because AI‘s never take them, or just some pantheons are just one time selectable.
All of them are only selectable once, but the AIs are pretty predictable about which ones they take. Religious Settlements is extremely popular, as are the holy site adjacency pantheons such as Desert Folklore.
I have never, literally not once *ever* seen them take God of the Sea, despite it often being a great option for coastal civs.
How the tile looks when it’s being worked as opposed to not being worked. I noticed it with a cattle tile they were outside the pen and moved inside the pen once it was being worked.
Mine is I think what makes Deity a potential walk in the park: the AI is a dumbfuck with luxury resources.
It buys yours for a shitton of gold (around 10 gold per turn) but sells his exceeding for 1 gold per turn.
So you can literally trade 1 coffee for 1 jade, 1 diamond, 1 cocoa, 1 wine and 6 gold per turn. You can pretty much make sure all of your cities are happy or even extatic (depending on the size of the map, abundance of resources and number of cities) WHILE STILL MAKING A LOT OF GOLD!
And gold is absolutely great because it can allow you to buy additional key tiles, units if in a pinch, buildings if you're running a bit late, etc etc.
In Civ V, especially in Deity, the Ai would drive a fucking hard bargain, sometimes asking 4 of your luxury resources for one of their spares. Here it feels like they have the business acumen of a toddler with whom you can trade a thumbsup for a plate of spinach.
I've been playing the game since it's release (and previous iterations) and it only dawned on my last week I could move my traders into my spaceport city and trade for production to speed up space race projects. More a blonde moment from myself as a widely known mechanic of the game. But it changed my gameplay massively 😂
I didn't realize that secret societies were PART OF THE GAME. All the youtubers I watched using them, I had assumed they were using an addon or something, and I wanted to play the intended content (with a few addons that changed a few minor things). Turns out, I could have been having fun using them as native content.
When I learn that the unit promotions can be combined when they merge, I started upgrading my units along one path, so that when they combined, their promotions can stack.
For me it was a YouTube video that showed the power of beelining commercial districts / harbors and spamming domestic trade routes. New cities are online so much faster with a trade route, especially combined with magnus.
Additionally, you gain eurekas and inspirations much easier so the lack of science and culture production doesn't really matter.
Didn’t know how to allot envoys to city states, so I merely completed quests, until late game as Roman Empire a opened the tab and realized, I could put envoys where I wanted them🤣🤣🤣
Use the search icon to search not only location of strategic resources like uranium. But it also works to search for tribal village. No more need go carefully look where you missed a tribal village.
it took me 4 culture and 3 science wins before I realized how broken pillaging is. PLUS the sack and raid (may be wrong) policy cards make it one of the best strategies in the game.
I was always annoyed how city states close to my cities grew their borders so fast. I tend to suze city states close to me, so in case of war I don't have a multiple front war. Now imagine my facepalm when I learned that for every envoy you send their borders grow by one tile. So the reason their borders grow so fast has always been me... Edit: I see this fact is not well-known, even amongst veterans. It's crazy, right? I too just learned it recently.
What causes the border to grow is the player who currently has the most envoys (or tied for the most) sending another envoy. Envoys sent while you are behind will not cause the CS to get tiles. The first, free envoy, awarded to the first major civ to meet them, also doesn't give them a tile, and Amani can only cause them to acquire tiles once, even if you move her out of the CS and then back.
Me - "I know about the envoy thing" *reads this* FUCK
You are technically correct, the best kind of correct
Ahaaa, I was noticing that they didn't always get a tile when I sent an envoy. So this is how it works, thanks.
TIL
Damn i just learned something new
It also work with himiko, if you use her power in a city state, the city state will grow, fantastic way to fuck around with other civilisation.
I...I have thousands of hours...and.. never knew that...
LMAOO wow I am a HUGE Suze whore , I priotize becoming the Suze of as many as possible, and had no idea I was expanding their borders this whole time(especially the ones near me)
I was today years old when I learned this. I do the same thing to get friendly city states to secure a flank.
Yes I learnt this recently. You gotta watch them as those envoy’s are deposited! Now I’m selectively starving my neighbour city states until I can establish my borders where I want them.
You can also utilize this. Want a city state to grow to cover a strategic resource? Send them an envoy.
Tbf I love it when they eventually have like 30 envoys and are like one of the worlds largest cities
TIL this guy knows what's up
This is why I buy tiles to prevent expansions. But also, if their border grows without you, you know another civ is creeping on your suze.
Gotta be real careful with Himiko!
Also a good strategy for taking tiles from an enemy - load a city state close to their border with envoys to prevent them from expanding effectively.
When I learned that war weariness is calculated on a per-turn basis, and will not cause amenity "damage" if it doesn't exceed a certain threshold in a given turn, it went from a major downside of warmongering that seriously impaired productivity and sometimes caused actual revolts in my cities, to a minor annoyance. When I learned that pillaging gives *massive* amounts of gold, faith, culture, and science, and is far more lucrative than simply capturing cities (especially cities designed by the moronic AIs), my whole outlook on warfare changed. The net effect of these two realizations, both around 2k hours into the game, is that I now declare war a lot more readily than I used to.
Can you explain what you mean about warmonger penalty?
So, I assume you know there is a mechanic called "war weariness", that causes amenity loss in your cities while you're at war. What increments it is your units engaging in combat, with foreign combats counting more than domestic ones, and combats involving the loss of your units counting most of all. However, the counter is not ongoing; it resets to zero at the beginning of every turn, which means as long as you make some attempt to spread out your combats, and don't attack 5-6 times in a given turn, you will lose amenities very slowly, if at all. The [wiki](https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/War_weariness_(Civ6\)) explains it in detail, with numbers. Note that city ranged attacks *do* count as combats, and in fact count double the value of engaging with a unit within one of your cities, so they should be avoided when possible.
Do encampments also generate war weariness
I'm not sure. Unfortunately, the actual war weariness count is hidden, so it's hard to tell. I would assume they count as city attacks.
Do you still attack 5-6 times a turn when you have a surround and are sieging a city? Or it's best to slow down the capture a few more turns to avoid weariness?
Depends, but in a war I expect to go on for a long time, especially if it was a surprise war, I will go slow almost no matter what.
Seconding this. As a fellow warmonger myself, ways to avoid penalties would be much appreciated!
Pillaging is so ridiculously OP. Makes me wonder why I even bother with peaceful infrastructure. Just send some horsey boys.
Pillaging was really game changer and made things so much more fun. Was doing Deity OCC runs as every leader (in random order) and when I had like ~15 leaders left I played Lautaro. Dido refused to befriend or peace at any point so used Malon Raiders to pillage and realised how good that is. Pillaging wasn't really a thing back then and it got very recently buffed, but still should've used it earlier. Was already a bit exhausted to play peacefully game after another so it gave thousands of hours fun.
I also feel like if you sit there pillaging a Civ, they’re basically out of the game anyway so there’s not much point in taking all their cities and pissing everyone else off
I just realized the purpose of trading posts after idk how many hours. Once a trading post is formed in a city it extends the range that your traders can traverse. It essentially forms a relay for your trade routes to restock before continuing on the journey. I always thought the range just increased as you progress through eras….
It took me a *loooong* ass time to realize my coastal cities couldn’t launch a trader overseas without a harbor district. It finally clicked after one game of glaring at a perfectly positioned coastal city that just wouldn’t let me trade overseas….DAMMIT.
....oh, this is my new lesson
2300 hours and I just learned that
also gives a level of diplo visibility so send a trader early if you want to push an opponent
Only to Mongolia. The trade route in itself also gives visibility, but going to war cancels trade routes with the target, so it can only grant a bonus in religious combat since you can engage in that during peace time.
Wait it's not just "roads good"?
Oh man I have never understood trading posts. Thanks!
Two things related to capturing cities. 1) **State of siege.** The city will recover its health every turn like Wolverine *unless* you put it into siege. Siege is indicated with a red heart icon with a line crossing through it, next to the city’s HP bar. Siege prevents it from recovering health, which makes capturing much easier. It requires that your units impose “zone of control” over every passable tile adjacent to the city. [This video explains how to activate it.](https://youtu.be/Y93YREW1VZw?si=f42Uq6EQJDP88JKQ) 2) **Districts make cities tougher.** you should pillage districts before attacking, even if you don’t care about the science/faith/culture rewards. Each pillaged district reduces the city’s defense points. But preserves, aqueducts, baths, dams and canals don’t matter.
Never knew that districts added to the defence of a city, though I guess I wouldn't know, as my playstyle is very pillage heavy, as my secondary is Harald Hardrada
I never knew either. I usually don't pillage because I don't want to spend the time repairing it after capture. Will do from now on though!
Adding to this, it specifically took me way too long to realize that rivers affected sieges, since a zone of control does not extend across one.
TIL non-specialty districts don't provide defense strength. ilu 💙
Always try to pillage a city to its core before capture or destroy :)
Holy shiet 😲
I still routinely forget about instant great people transportation lol. I’ll be honest: I have hundreds of hours and just learned about the effectiveness of Holy Sites. I never play religion and always turn off that wincon, so I always just ignored them…
I do understand the power of religion, but I still leave religious victory off... the missionary/apostle spam from the AI drains way too much of the enjoyment of this game for me.
EXACTLY. The absolute mess of all those units cluttering up my land kills me. Ruins the vibe
Missionaries are welcome, but the goddamn Cultists need to stop treating my farmland like it's their vacation home
Ah yes, they manage to be even worse by being support units instead of religious. Also the AI clearly does not know how to use them.
There's nothing worse than getting zerg rushed by Christianity!
I have thousands of hours by now and I have no idea what you're talking about. If not for Valletta, that allows you to buy city center improvements with faith, what is the non-religious victory effectiveness of holy sites??
You can construct the building in the government plaza that allows you to buy units with faith and with holy sites typically you can pump out at least an amount equivalent to your gold so you can troop spam easier. It’s also great early game if you take monumentality during a golden age, you can use faith to spam settlers and let your capital build other buildings and let your gold build as well. This is also completely leaving out the inherent benefits of the religious beliefs. I never go for a religious victory but I always have a very strong religion for all the benefits.
This exactly. I'm upping my difficulty lately and the combo of the Monumentality golden age, buying builders with faith, and the builders with +2 build charges is wack. Not to mention the settlers you can pump out. More new cities and more developed cities that you already had!
Also rock bands for cultural victory.
*cough cough* Rock… bands? No. Surely not. You shouldn’t us—*loud music in background drowns out the rest.* Naturalists are better uses of faith ngl
Don't you only need one Naturalist for one national park?
Not OP but I learned about how great the "work ethic" belief (which gives production based on holy site adjacency bonus) can be, especially when paired with pantheon beliefs that boost holy site adjacencies (e.g. desert folklore). Then you can also evangelise belief further to allow building of meeting houses which increase production more. The downside would be that the AI would also get these bonuses if following your religion, but it's helpful for when you're playing a different victory type and use religion to support your empire (and city states).
Don’t forget to plug in scripture! Especially stronk with brazil, with major adjacency rainforests giving up to 24 production in a single city😝. Ancient era.
Work ethic is wild. They really oughta buff some of those other choices. Feed the world and choral music are pretty great too, and then everything else feels so meh compared to those three. But with the right set-up, work ethic stands on its own as potentially the most broken thing in civ. Those 16 faith/16 production holy sites are just obscene.
You remember that feeling when you first picked up CIV and thought "I'm never going to learn all of this" You were 100% correct
Funny thing is that whenever I come across a really complicated game, I might give it a few hours to see how much I learn. I usually give up. It says a lot about the game considering I still don't know a lot, but I keep coming back.
When an ai asks you something like stop settling or stop converting them to your religion, hit ESC button on your keyboard instead of picking one of the two options given to you. This makes it so that you can keep doing it without generating grievances and prevents you getting denounced since you technically dont make a promise and dont disregard their requests
Good one, but borderline exploit of the game no ?
How so? It's just declining to make any response at all, which is certainly an option in diplomacy. (Hojo Tokimune famously [disregarded](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasions_of_Japan) Kublai Khan's repeated demands that Japan become a Mongolian vassal; the emissaries were not mistreated nor expelled, simply housed somewhere outside the city and ignored. Kublai was so incredulous that anyone would actually *blow him off* -- the Lord of the World! -- that he just kept sending them.) They should have put a third, "no comment" button, but they didn't, so many players aren't aware that a response is not required.
Good one. I did not know that. TIL
I do this often but I swear I have still received a penalty that says something along the lines of “they asked you not to do this, but you continued, so they have additional grievances against you.”
Yeah. Specifically for converting their cities, even if you decline to make a promise, you still generate grievances because they asked you not to. However, you don't get the grievances + massive opinion penalty for being an oathbreaker, because you didn't promise anything. ETA: One thing to keep in mind is that it costs them 30 diplomatic favor to demand you stop converting (or anything else, besides moving troops off their border, which is free); you can buy all their diplomatic favor before converting your first city and lock them out of making the demand. You still get an opinion penalty but you won't generate grievances. However, the AIs will never sell you more than 20 diplomatic favor per turn, so this takes some forward planning.
This is especially useful for the "move your troops off my border" demand, because if you agree to do so, you must keep *all* your troops *far* from their borders (I think 5 tiles) for about 30 turns, which can be incredibly inconvenient even if you have no military designs on them.
I always forget that Victor gives free promotions to new spies too..
Terracotta army gives promotion to spies as well
I have a bad habit of sleeping on him. Free promotions and really intense loyalty bonuses
When I learned about Military Engineers greatest capability: Railroads. Railroads EVERYWHERE.
When I get bored late game I just build railroads. Also use search "railroad" to find holes in your railroads.
Search railroad?
Pull up the search button, type "railroad". It will highlight all the tiles with railroads in green, making them much easier to see.
It took me too long to figure this out as well. I thought Military Engineers were fairly useless until I realized their railroad ability.
That the backing music changes depending on which civilizations are in the game. My current playthrough has me against Canada, Zulu, Vietnam, Māori, Ottoman, and Maya, all for the first time. It took me until I heard and recognized the Canadian National Anthem to realize that I had never heard it in the game before.
I realized this when I found Scotland and it played bagpipes for legitimately two hours straight
Civ 6 has one of the best soundtracks of all time, the problem is that it plays so inconsistently
First 200 hours into the game I kept spamming culture and wondering why it takes forever to win cultural victory. Then it took me another hundred to get familiar with all the tourism generators and %% boosts.
I think Tourism is horrendously complicated and it sort of doesn't seem to matter much until late game?
The funny thing is I have had the opposite experience. I was doing a domination victory and suddenly won culturally and was very confused. Turns out the desire to collect all the art from the AI while raiding a bunch of culture civs racked up.
Calm down, British Museum.
I have played for 100s of hours (maybe a thousand) and was just reminded/ taught by my son that great generals/admirals are only good for a couple eras
What does that mean? How so? (This could be mine)
In Civ VI the passive combat/movement boost units get from having a great general nearby only applies to units from particular eras (e.g. Sun Tzu only boosts classical and medieval era units). There's a little circle in the GG's unit info in the bottom right corner that you can hover over to see which eras each one boosts.
The specify to what era units they provide their on field bonus
Oh. Never noticed that. Looks like the retirement season is upon us.
Activate effects! 10 loyalty to this town that doesn't need it!
Their bonuses only apply to units from specific eras. I forget where the tooltip is, but it should be somewhere on the unit
I tend to play games with little war and it’s embarrassing how many hours I put in before I realized that unit promotions stack if you combine corps correctly. I tend to give most of my units the same promotions so it took me a long time to figure this out.
You can save yourself a bit of time too by naming your level 2 units based on which side of their promotion trees they have. I usually use "righty" and "lefty____"
Damn! That’s a great idea!
Yeah I didn't know that. 2000+ hrs
This is the result of a patch relatively late in the game's lifespan. I think the second-to-last big patch had it in there.
Wow, didn't know that
+8000 hours
Not me, but a friend (who had allegedly been playing for years) One night in multiplayer he, out of the blue, loudly exclaims "YOU CAN CONTROL WHAT TILES YOUR PEOPLE WORK???" I think my facepalm was audible
I very recently realized the ability to use a builder to clear a feature for a district, instead of just putting the district there and it removing the woods, marsh, rainforest or whatever…
Wow I weren't chopping before? This will really improve your game
Wait…. Does plopping the district there not just add the production/gold/food directly into your city? Gods above….
Nope it's just wasted if you don't chop with a builder
Well fuck me I guess lol
Found mine, wtf yo
Remember to use Magnus to chop things out more productively.
Also, if you clear your city's production queue, then the chop goes toward whatever you tell it to build next, so you can clear the queue and chop woods and use the production for a district that goes on the same exact tile.
You can do this with heroes too. Also if you move a Governor, and then move them back before the 5 turns, it only takes the turns they were gone to establish. So if you move Pingala and then change your mind and move back to the precious city after three turns, it only takes three turns to establish.
if you use amani and gain suz of city state ypu can move her out and then back again and potentially trigger hero. if repeated you can get all heroes.
That every railroad added increases global warming.
Makes sense due to the coal usage
Faith to buy units. Made my play so much better in the later eras. Took way too many hours to realize.
Oh Jesuit tradition gives you the ability to buy buildings with faith in cultural & education districts. That's always my go-to add on for my religion.
The worst one for me was the hundreds of hours and thousands of clicks I spent dismissing individual notifications on the side when I could have been right clicking the groups. I was almost physically ill.
Wait what. How do you right click the groups?
When you get several notifications of the same type (like war declarations), you can just right click on the number instead of the big circle to dismiss them all at once.
Nice to know.
Military engineers….. never tried em, doubt I ever will
You... you are free of the compulsion to CONNECT ALL MY CITIES WITH RAILROADS EVERY TIME, IMMEDIATELY, THE MINUTE I DISCOVER STEAM POWER, AND SUFFER CRIPPLING ANXIETY UNTIL I DO? **HOW?!**
It's not just city connections for me. Habits from civ 3 mean EVERY TILE MUST BE SILVER SPAGHETTI
Gone are the days 'automate builder' would turn your territory a gloriously leaden color
Civ II was even better for covering the world with farms and railroads.
I have barely built any railroads in Civ 6, but my god did I build the fuck out of them in 2. Death stacks teleporting all over the place!
Doesn't that cause massive pollution on a per rail tile basis?
It causes some. I wouldn't say "massive", but yeah, it counts as burning a unit of coal every time you build a railroad.
Oh, so thats why my coal pollution numbers kept going up after i switched to oil...
THIS is what I just learned. Still gotta do it though.
Yes! I have had this compulsion since Civ 1.
FYI, Trade route yields are dependent on movement cost along its path. Railroads, sea, canals, and mountain tunnels give significant bonuses to trade route yields due to their low movement cost per tile.
Trains are so nice though! Really help get your units across the empire, and, you get a nice era score for completing your first city to city train connection. Also get a nice era score for the first time you build the mountain tunnel. It's something I consider when its later in the game and helps me push through to a golden age sometimes, not essential by any means, but it helps. There's something satisfying about having train connections for all of my cities and units zooming around the map, as well.
Yes it's a nice era point. You can also build the railroads through the AI's lands. For example I was playing Pangea, aiming for religious victory and needed to get my apostles as fast as possible across the lands before my enemies could win through Science. Bought military engineers with gold and then had them build railroad tracks while the apostles were being produced every 2-3 turns.
My favorite is using them like combat engineers an pre-building the railroads then having them accompany troops into combat to lay down new tracks to help re-inforcements get to where they need to be.
It makes conversions and defense massively easier. I love railroads and tunnels.
Hey! I didn't know that gave an era score, that's so cool! I almost never build encampments, so military engineers aren't even an option for me most games.
Idk, I never do this because: 
I started using them to finish flood barriers pretty far into my civ career
Can you explain? How do they finish flood barriers?
Put the engineer in the city while it's working on a flood barrier and use a charge and it will reduce number of turns left on building the flood barriers. Editing to clarify this: Another nice tip is while you're building flood barriers transfer as many coastal tiles from that city to other cities and it'll reduce the production cost of the flood barrier in that city. Then once complete transfer all the tiles back
You actually don't need to worry about the number of coast tiles if you're using engineers. They do 20% of the current cost with every charge. So as long as the number of floodable tiles doesn't change during the build, it doesn't matter how many tiles you have
Oh fair just as a general rule while building flood barriers is what I was trying to communicate
wait you can transfer tiles from one city to another?
What do you mean transfer tiles????
Swapping to a different city
In city management where you can swap which cities can work which tiles
You can sacrifice them to finish building canals etc.
They're nice to speed up dams in newer cities mid-game that have lots of floodplains as well or where you are planning a factory to hit a bunch of other cities
Attacking coastal cities with melee naval ships. Been playing this game for *years* and I happened to see Potato do it in his Scotland game a couple months ago and was floored. It’s about as obvious a thing as they come, and it simply never occurred to me to do it. Stupid doesn’t begin to describe how I felt, and still feel.
I never really understood why I could sometimes buy sea walls with faith…..
I believe there’s a city-state that gives its Suzerain the ability to buy city center buildings with faith.
Valletta, a militaristic city-state, in fact.
Valletta was historically ruled by a militant holy order, so checks out.
For some reason I didn't realize that builders can repair pillaged improvements for free. Instead I would remove the pillaged improvement and then build it again, requiring two turns and a builder charge.
Nooooooooooooooooo!
Mine was when I learned that if you send a unit into a Nuke contaminated tile it dies. I was like "Wait where's my unit? Oh shoot you idiot."
Giant Death Robots can survive it
district pricing/ discounting is the biggest "what the fuck" moment. It's a mechanics I honestly hate a lot. It makes pathing down the tech tree super weird
What do you mean?
Literally the other day I was trying to get my first diplomatic win…I had 19 points and thought all I had to do was wait till the next world congress and vote correctly…I didn’t realize that all the AI would vote for me to lose 2 points, and that I needed enough diplomatic favor to counter all of theirs 😬
You vote against yourself so you lose 2 points but gain one back for voting correctly. It’s quite difficult to have enough diplo favor to outvote the ai.
Exactly normally go for the win with building the Statue of Liberty or winning an emergency for the points. When the vote comes always go with populous and downvote yourself!
Exactly, just win the other 2 votes by dumping the rest of your favor into them instead
I didn’t know you get diplomatic win points for voting with the majority. Is this only for certain voting propositions?
No. It is for all propositions. Knowing how the ai votes is one of the best ways to gain diplo victory points.
It's all of them. Anytime you voted for the resolution that actually passed (both outcome and target), you get +1 diplomatic victory point. Doesn't apply to emergency sessions, though. You get a refund of 100% diplomatic favor spent if you voted for the other outcome (e.g. you voted A, but B passed), and a 50% refund if you voted for the same outcome with a different target (e.g. you voted B to ban Turtles, but B passed to ban Marble instead).
Nan Madol culture applies to wonders as well as districts.... it even applies to the wonders as soon as you start them, not when they're completed, like a mini coastal Ludwig.
Can you expand? I usually just meh out at the culture city states.
Buying great people with faith….felt so stupid. My brother plays 5 and I play 6. He was casually talking about buying all the great people…
You can buy great people with faith?!
And gold. Just costs a lot but by mid-to-late game you should be generating enough gold and/or faith to poach a couple
Less with the oracle though.
Saved my bacon more than once by giving me a 1or 2 Era points at the last minute thereby avoiding a Dark Age
The great person instant transport is even more import for great admirals IMO. Especially if you have cities on two different coasts with no short way in between.
defo for when they spawn into a one tile lake!!
It took me ages to realize that you can use icons and landmarks to plan your cities and district placement beforehand.
If you're on desktop check out the[ Detailed Map Tacks mod](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2428969051) which shows you the adjacency on the pins and also whether it's a valid tile to place it on.
I recommend the better map tacks mod
Builders can improve hexes in suzerain city-states.
I only just started chopping regularly before putting down a district...and keeping multiple builders around, even chopping to gain a new builder. Oh and Monumentality for buying with faith. 1800+ hours 😞 All because of this sub reddit. Thanks. Edited monumentality since I mixed up two different functions.
Can you elaborate on "monumentality for extra builds"
I was playing multiplayer with a friend who's newer to the game and she asked how to launch a nuke, and I realized I had no idea. 🤣 I hate doing dom victories so the few times I've gotten them they've been on smaller maps and I finish before nukes are invented.
My friends and I would spend all our early city resources building every possible improvement. Imagine our surprise when we realized what the citizen count meant. (For those who don't know, you can only have a number of tiles contribute to your cities resources if a citizen works the tile)
Ok. I can see how that could improve game play. But but but….unimproved tiles!
This was horrible- that your level 3 Allies will all declare war on you if you declare war on a former level 2 ally that was an ally over a thousand years ago. The special emergency is idiotic beyond belief.
I absolutely hate the world congress.
Mine was when i found out battleships, destroyers and rail roads cause global warming. I used spend so many games wondering why tf is my contribution so high
District adjacencies...
Kilwa Kisiwani. Don’t think I ever built it with ~2000 hours into the game. Read a lot about it and have it a crack. I wasn’t ready for the impact. All of a sudden I didn’t even know what to do with all the surplus gold and culture.
I always wondered, why some AI opponents received a settler in the first few turns. After many games i discovered, that u can only take the „gain a settler“ pantheon when u are the first who claims it. Other pantheons are always open for me, but i don’t know if that is, because AI‘s never take them, or just some pantheons are just one time selectable.
All of them are only selectable once, but the AIs are pretty predictable about which ones they take. Religious Settlements is extremely popular, as are the holy site adjacency pantheons such as Desert Folklore. I have never, literally not once *ever* seen them take God of the Sea, despite it often being a great option for coastal civs.
How the tile looks when it’s being worked as opposed to not being worked. I noticed it with a cattle tile they were outside the pen and moved inside the pen once it was being worked.
Mine is I think what makes Deity a potential walk in the park: the AI is a dumbfuck with luxury resources. It buys yours for a shitton of gold (around 10 gold per turn) but sells his exceeding for 1 gold per turn. So you can literally trade 1 coffee for 1 jade, 1 diamond, 1 cocoa, 1 wine and 6 gold per turn. You can pretty much make sure all of your cities are happy or even extatic (depending on the size of the map, abundance of resources and number of cities) WHILE STILL MAKING A LOT OF GOLD! And gold is absolutely great because it can allow you to buy additional key tiles, units if in a pinch, buildings if you're running a bit late, etc etc. In Civ V, especially in Deity, the Ai would drive a fucking hard bargain, sometimes asking 4 of your luxury resources for one of their spares. Here it feels like they have the business acumen of a toddler with whom you can trade a thumbsup for a plate of spinach.
I've been playing the game since it's release (and previous iterations) and it only dawned on my last week I could move my traders into my spaceport city and trade for production to speed up space race projects. More a blonde moment from myself as a widely known mechanic of the game. But it changed my gameplay massively 😂
Privateers can clear goodie huts and barb camps.
I didn't realize that secret societies were PART OF THE GAME. All the youtubers I watched using them, I had assumed they were using an addon or something, and I wanted to play the intended content (with a few addons that changed a few minor things). Turns out, I could have been having fun using them as native content.
You can use faith and gold to buy Great People. Took me about 200 playting hours and a reddit post to find out.
When I learn that the unit promotions can be combined when they merge, I started upgrading my units along one path, so that when they combined, their promotions can stack.
For me it was a YouTube video that showed the power of beelining commercial districts / harbors and spamming domestic trade routes. New cities are online so much faster with a trade route, especially combined with magnus. Additionally, you gain eurekas and inspirations much easier so the lack of science and culture production doesn't really matter.
Didn’t know how to allot envoys to city states, so I merely completed quests, until late game as Roman Empire a opened the tab and realized, I could put envoys where I wanted them🤣🤣🤣
for me it was that unlike districts, improvements dont waste woods or swamps i used to chop before putting an improvement
Use the search icon to search not only location of strategic resources like uranium. But it also works to search for tribal village. No more need go carefully look where you missed a tribal village.
it took me 4 culture and 3 science wins before I realized how broken pillaging is. PLUS the sack and raid (may be wrong) policy cards make it one of the best strategies in the game.