On Towards the Stars: Tactics vs Strategy, Geography, and Game Speed
The parts of CIV 6 strategy that you CAN'T control
[This post is part of a larger strategy guide for Civilization 6]
Tactics vs Strategy
Going off Google for this one:
While strategy is the action plan that takes you where you want to go, the tactics are the individual steps and actions that will get you there.
One of the reasons I love Civ as a series is that it encourages players to really focus on strategy. From the beginning of the game, you're encouraged to think about the long term. Actions you take in the first few moves have demonstrable impact all the way at the end of the game, so you want to start thinking about the last few turns from the very beginning.
Less prosaically, there is no way for someone to out-APM you. I came from Starcraft and Age of Empires, where I would regularly lose games because someone just clicked faster than I did. Though they are marketed as strategy games, I think they are more accurately 'tactic' games.
That's not to say that tactics don't matter in Civ 6 — losing a war can easily mean losing the game. But there's a lot to write about strategic considerations, and how they might set you up to win or lose over the course of the next ten hours. The next few chapter are going to focus heavily on strategy, starting with Geography and Game Speed.
Geography
As in the real world, the geography of your civilization will determine a lot about the strategy you choose and the victory conditions available to you. From the beginning of the game, you should be thinking about the terrain — where can you settle? Where can you defend? Where can you get resources? How much can you grow before you bump up against opponents?
Geo Systems
In my mind, there are roughly six different systems that the game uses to encourage players to think critically about their environment.
Workable Tiles. At the most basic level, your ability to progress through the game is directly determined by the yields on the map. High yield tiles are more valuable than low yield ones, so you are encouraged to settle on and buy high yield tiles. Working those tiles requires population, which in turn is capped by housing and food. In order to get more housing, you need rivers, sources of freshwater for aqueducts, or farms and fisheries. In order to get more food, you need farms on plains. Volcanoes and floodplains provide tempting resource yields, at the risk of infra damage. And so on.
Adjacency Bonuses. Every district in the game gets bonuses from being near other things. For example, Holy Sites and Campuses get bonus faith/science from being near mountains, while Commercial Hubs get bonus coin for being near a river. If planned correctly, those adjacency bonuses can stack hard. I have built +6 Holy Sites and +10 Industrial Zones. With the right setup, those yields can double or quadruple. The geography of your territory determines where you can place your districts, which in turn impacts your resource generation.
Strategic Resources. Iron. Niter. Oil. You need these resources to field an army, and you need an army to defend yourself. In a multiplayer setting, your opponents will force you to constantly think about how you can maintain lines of access to these resources. And you will want to know which resources your opponents have to determine where and when they will be weak to an attack. That generally means being aware of where these resources spawn, and rushing to build cities or otherwise control access to sources of strategic resources.
Movement and Combat. Units move slowly through forest and hills. They require certain techs to go through oceans and lakes. And they can't move over mountains at all. Meanwhile, ranged units require sightlines to hit, which can be blocked by natural terrain. And all units get combat modifiers based on what kind of land they are on. Understanding the defensible points of your civilization — and a well placed defensive encampment — can often make the difference in a siege. It may even deter opponents from attacking in the first place.
Placement Requirements. Many buildings in the game have strict requirements about where they can be built — wonders, aqueducts, canals, dams, harbors, builder improvements, many civilization-specific unique improvements, and more. If you know that you need certain synergistic buildings or wonders, you have to plan in advance to get them.
Appeal. If you want to win a culture victory, you'll need natural parks, which in turn means you need high appeal tiles. Appeal takes city planning to a new level, requiring you to think deeply about the placement of preserves, mines, lumberyards, industrial zones, and more. If done right, high appeal tiles can also become powerhouses for yield generation.
Thinking about Geography
Many systems in Civ are at least somewhat optional, and the player has significant optionality in what level of influence those systems have in the course of a game. Don't want to have a religion? No interest in appeal? Don't care about tourism? Just ignore it!
This is not true of the geography. Geography is forced on you, your starting location is a set of constraints. You have to come up with a strategy that can best exploit the resources around your starting point, while creating a defensible perimeter. The upshot is that Civ has enough flexibility for you to create an economic and military powerhouse out of the least forgiving conditions.
Geography directly impacts a ton of downstream tactical and strategic decisions, and I'll talk more about how you can use geography to your advantage when it comes to settling, ramping, war, and more. But for now, I'll leave off by saying: if you haven't spent at least a second looking at your start location, do that! If you're on a flood plain, figure out how you can create production. If you're on a coast/without freshwater, invest in housing. If you have mountains, look for campus placements. If you have desert or tundra, think about the pantheons and religious options that can turn that land into highly productive faith generators.
The course of a game is defined by what you have nearby. Spending time thinking about how civ's various mechanics interact with geography is a huge part of improving your game.
Game Speed
Game speed is set at the beginning of the game and is unchangeable. Faster games result in lower production times and purchase costs. Slower games do the opposite — longer production, more expensive.
But units retain their movement speed regardless of game speed. A warrior will always have two tiles of movement, whether on marathon or online. In a slower game, the warrior will be able to move more and will have a longer time period before becoming obsolete by swordsmen.
As a result, speed only really impacts your strategy in one way: slower games have more focus on military (and units in general). You'll want to build and upgrade units earlier, and focus more on aggressive wars, when playing slow.
Very useful for someone who's a total noob to the Civ games. Looking forward to the next parts, keep it up!