On Towards the Stars: Synergies, Civ/Leader Abilities, and First Turn Planning
50 civs in civ 6 (and counting)
[This post is part of a larger strategy guide for Civilization 6]
I opened the strategy section of this guide by talking about geography and game speed, because they are largely outside of your control as a player but define every aspect of how you approach the game. Your civ abilities are similar: once the game starts, the unique abilities of your civ are immutable and chart the course of your empire.
In my opinion, the difference between a decent civ player and a great one is the ability to synergize arbitrary game mechanics with specific civs.
On your first turn, you should spend a chunk of time understanding in detail what your unique abilities are. By the end of the turn, you should have the rough outline of a plan that takes you to the very end of the game. It's like a rough trail charted on an incomplete map — as the game moves on, you'll fill in details, but from the start you should know the major decision points along your route to victory.
Let's walk through an example. Say I'm playing Basil's Byzantium, a civ with a very constrained strategic roadmap.
First, Byzantium's Taxis ability synergizes incredibly well with a religion, and is entirely useless without one. It's a strong ability — it's a guaranteed +2 combat strength from basically the start of the game, and can scale all the way through to the end. And it gives me a boost to getting Great Prophets, which makes it easier to activate. So from the first turn, I know I should have a religion on my mind.
Second, Byzantium's unique building (the Hippodrome) gives me a free heavy cavalry unit when it is built. Byzantium's unique unit, the Tagma, is a heavy cavalry unit. This means I can create an army essentially for free, as long as I wait to bring my Hippodromes online. So now I am thinking, "I need to do an infrastructure wave into a military timing push in the Middle Ages".
Third, Tagmata give nice combat boosts to adjacent units (+2), and cavalry do full damage to cities (i.e. ignore wall strength) when those cities are following the same religion as Byzantium. This synergizes well with the fact that Byzantine units spread religion when attacking enemy units.
From this alone, I have a rough layout of how the game should unfold: I need to get a religion, then I want to do a timing push1, and finally I want to win with a domination victory.
Obviously this is a very rough sketch. But with this general path laid out, I can start filling in some details without really knowing much else about the game.
Because I know I need to get a religion, I want to pick up a pantheon that maximizes my faith output. If I am near a desert or tundra, desert folklore or dance of the aurora are great picks.
I need to get a religion and generate a lot of faith.
I know I want to play a pretty aggressive game that combines spreading religion with strong military pushes, so I want to take Crusade (+5 combat strength against cities following your religion).
In the early game, I should aim to spread my religion as much as possible. Most of my faith generation should be going to missionaries who can spread my religion to nearby civs.
Work Ethic (production equal to faith output for shrines and temples) is always fantastic. I might also want to take Choral Music (culture in addition to base faith output, helpful to get to Divine Right faster), Lay Ministry (+2 Culture/Faith per Theater/Holy Site) or Pilgrimage (+2 Faith for every city following this religion) to help with faith generation.
Once I have my religion, I should aim to spread it as much as possible while building up a pretty wide civilization. Ideally I can get ~7 cities by the time Divine Right rolls around.
More cities means I can more Hippodromes, which means more free Tagmata.
More cities converted means an easier time knocking down walls later on. If everything goes right, I should have +9 combat strength by the time the Tagmata come out.
I want to time my civ so that all of my Hippodromes are built at the same time the Tagma is unlocked. So I'll do a big infrastructure wave right before I unlock Divine Right.
In the meantime, any additional units I build should be ranged units. Archers and crossbows are hard counters to spearmen and pikemen. If I have a few ranged units in my army, I can better protect the Tagmata from any anti-cavalry.
Ideally, I also get a great general right around when the Tagmata go live, which will take my combat bonuses to an obscene +14 — equivalent to a Cuirassier, a full two eras early. I might try to have at least one encampment, or run Strategos (+2 Great General points per turn) to land the Great General.
If I can roll my Tagma push into a complete domination victory, that's great. But more likely than not, the push will be stopped after taking out a few nearby civilizations, especially if those civilizations don't have their own religions. So I want to have a backup plan — most likely, culture2.
I have a religion, holy sites, and a bunch of entertainment districts. These all are great for tourism, and can generate high culture adjacencies. All necessary pieces for a culture play.
I can use preserves to bump up the appeal of my tiles further, which gives me a lot of opportunities to build national parks and get high yields.
I might want to build wonders that help with war, religious spread, tourism, or generally synergize well. A few examples:
Colosseum (amenities and culture, should be easier to build because I already have hippodromes);
Hagia Sophia (extra spread for missionaries and apostles);
Terracotta Army (a free promotion on all units, can be a game changer in wartime);
Cristo de Redentor (holy cities retain their tourism output);
Eiffel Tower (+1 Appeal to all tiles).
So now my plan looks more like this.
Will every game work out like this? No, of course not. Maybe you miss the religion, maybe your wars go slower than you expect, maybe you fall behind on science and production, maybe maybe maybe… But now, at turn one, I have a plan. A detailed strategy with key markers that I can drive towards through the entire game.
You can and should do this kind of thought exercise at the start of every game. You'll find that some civs (Zulu, Poland, Spain) will have fairly constrained strategic roadmaps, with abilities that are fantastic-bordering-broken in the right conditions and useless in others, and the whole game turns on setting up a single push. Others (Rome, Inca, Cleopatra) have more generic abilities that are useful in a wide variety of strategic setups. In either case, your civilization abilities are the crux of your edge against everyone else in the game. In order to win, it is on you to find the synergies that can take your empire to victory.
More on this in the Tactics section.
If playing against deity AI, a religion play could also work as a backup. But religion is near impossible to win against human players — they will just declare war on you and kill your religious units.