So, I was in a mood to make some good life choices (tm) yesterday. Despite recovering from a flu, I came home, took a nap 'till 10:30 or so, dragged myself back out of bed, and played Civ VI 'till 4am once it unlocked at midnight.
It's good. Like, I think I played around seventy turns (out of a 500 turn default (standard?) pace game), got well into the Classical era (I don't remember how many turns past 800 B.C. -- when I last looked at the date -- I played, so it might be closer to 200 B.C. now). I've built three cities, and stopped as I was mid-production on two more settlers to go snag some strategic resources.
I'm really enthralled by the districts. The way they get bonuses for tile adjacency makes you think so much harder about what makes a good city location, which tiles to improve, which to save/claim for districts, and so on. The game has also done a lot to break up the notion of a build order, for me. Part of that is the relative production times of buildings and districts (they're on the lengthy side compared to tech advances, in large part due to the Eureka feature, which is AWESOME); I can still crank out units when I need to shift my civ into raising an army or spawning a wave of settlers for expansion with the right civic policies in place, but cramming every building into each city as I keep unlocking new ones just doesn't seem feasible. But it's also not necessary. So I find myself specializing. I've got a city that I risked the ire of the Greeks to found, so I could snipe a lovely little tile adjacent to 5 mountains out from under Athens before they expanded their borders to encompass it (I paid some cash to buy the tiles swiftly), and it's going to soon be a rock star of a campus district. Another city will be my seaport and trade hub. And so on. Neither of these particularly need monuments, for instance, and the cities I'm about to found can probably skip granaries because I don't need them to be big (though one of them might become a nice breadbasket population center later)...
So far, Trajan has declared war on me once. He was kind of a dick about it, doing so immediately after the oath of friendship (that he suggested!) expired. I'd kind of heard he's often an aggressive jerk, reading reviews, though, so I wasn't that upset about it, particularly when he wandered his little army near my civ and noticed I had sent my garrisons off to clear out barbarians. I thought I was doomed, staring down six warriors with nobody at hand. Turns out, the rivers and hills around my city created a good natural defense that prevented him from arraying his forces around me quickly, so I was able to recall two of my units, wounded from battling barbarians, to stall him a bit more. They gave their lives in the process, but it was long enough for me to finish off a timely civic research that granted me a military policy to slot into my chieftainship that gave me double production towards classical and ancient melee and ranged units. Two archers and a warrior later, and I was beating him down from my good defensive position thanks to Civ 5's excellent no-stacking hex combat. After dismantling the majority of his army, killing probably four or five units and sending two or three fleeing wounded, Trajan came back to me with an offer of peace... and tribute, for starting a war he wasn't ready to win! That was a refreshing change from the nonsensical and capricious Civ 5 diplomacy that I was used to. It felt like he bailed at an appropriate time, and he recognized my superior position with the terms he offered. I took his money, and let him pay off my standing army while I ramped up my trade to displace his thirty-turn tribute.
I've been playing as Peter the Great of Russia, by the way. They get bonus production on Tundra, which has meant I've been able to carve out a big chunk of land nobody else cares about, and turn it into something worthwhile. Very thematic. I've founded a religion, and selected bonuses that should fuel my intent to pursue a science victory, though I'm also leading on score last I checked, as a backup plan.
I'm, ah. Excited to play more.
