My last Vanilla Civ VI game was a domination win. It was Prince difficulty, standard sized map, playing as Alexander of Macedon. Main thing with Domination is that it only requires taking enemy capitals, not complete decimation of the opponent. I started with an aggresively expanding Montezuma who placed a number of forward cities on my borders (remembering this is pre-Rise and Fall). I was procrastinating when it came to army deployment, but when gunpowder came around, I decided to start. As it turns out, classical/medieval era walls and units don’t stand up to bombard cannons and musketmen and I easily rolled through whatever defences Monte put up. I kid you not, cities were bombarbed and losing most or all of their health in one hit. Three bombards in my army was overkill. That war was the longest I did.
My second war was with Poland. She must’ve gotten screwed pretty badly having only 4 cities to her name and lagging behind everyone else. Once again, gunpowder units were too strong and I merrily took her two biggest cities. From there, the AI was moving into gunpowder, their cities were getting harder to crack in one turn, except Sumeria who was just plain silly rolling around with war carts. England and Japan I chose what cities I wanted and left the rest, much like with Poland. When it came to the final two opponents, Norway and Brazil, I decided it was much easier to travel by sea and simply snipe their capitals in a fairly quick raid. By that stage I’d moved onto tanks because the techs were rapidly flowing in thanks to my earlier conquests.
@robc04 - domination was faster compared to going for culture or science victories. Would I do domination on anything larger than standard? I don’t know. I have a lot of games to play that are better than Civ VI.
The last time I did domination on a big map that I can recall was in Civ IV, oddly enough as Alexander of Greece. That was a special game though, the map was extra large and it was a particular script that had the old world and new world and all civs started on the old world. In that game, I chose to run a specialist economy to keep my warring going, and conquered the whole of the old world for myself. That was one of my last Civ IV games, played on marathon speed and took in excess of 30 hours to complete thanks to the meticulous city management involved with a specialist economy.
I play solely on epic speed so I have a decent gunpowder era. It is a holdover from Civ IV where once I started playing on marathon speed I was hooked. I can’t justify marathon with Civ V/VI however, everything just takes too damn long to build. Or in other words, too many irritations for no real payoff. Units cost more, seeing the big numbers of turns required just to get a district down is quite demoralising and even with space race, it becomes a case of knowing I’ve won and just tapping end turn for too long to play it out. Epic does feel good and it will still punish me for making stupid mistakes while also getting a chance to make use of those units between classical era and atomic era. T nice thing about the slower game speeds with Civ IV is that you have to anticipate more of what is happening. For instance, not having a standing army means it can take so much longer to react to an invasion. Civ IV was especially brutal about it. Having Monte roll up on your doorstep with a stack of 20 units and I’ve got a piddly garrison force of 3 archers and nothing else means I wasted too much time on crap and I’ll probably lose big time before I can field a decent army.
One caveat with epic I noticed is that the general game pacing does get pretty bad. I found it easy to trigger golden ages. I’ve only ever been in one dark age in the two games I’ve played. I’ve learned to stop looking at the date and just focus on turn number now. Always an issue with Civ in general moreso with the later ones IMO.