I just finished my first game of Rise and Fall playing as Nubia (Amanitore). The end game was a slog with long turn times and the general brain drain that comes with managing a large empire. I stopped caring in a sense, but wanted to see thing through to completion. No way could the AI contest either cultural or space victory, and both of those were mine well before the final turns. In fact, I had 230 turns until finish, playing in epic speed.
Furthermore, I was playing on a standard sized map with the default number of civs, yet still there were large empires including my own. I had 13 cities spanning across a vast desert, and admittedly a few of those cities were more space fillers than anything else because Civ 6 doesn’t penalise ICS anymore, a big step back from Civ IV and V. Amenities were well and truly covered with all my cities at happy or ecstatic, populations in my cities ranging from 10 to 28 in size and still happily growing.
My early game advantage was cemented by an early war against China. I had one turn to go before progressing to classical era, so I made good use of that time by declaring war on China. I think the only reason for the war was to try out the Pitali archers that are the unique unit to Nubia. Those things hurt! A group of 3 archers were able to siege down the cities and allow a single melee unit to claim it in my name. Because war was declared pre-classical era, I incurred no warmonger penalty. I don’t know what to say about that.
I don’t want to whinge too much about combat AI. It lacks aggression, it doesn’t read far enough into the future, it is just plain bad. And the gripes have been said over and over again. A classic example was when I had China’s capital under siege with archers and at no point did they choose to send their spearman out to attack my archer that was within melee range. It just camped in the city waiting to die. Another example was Scythia moving Great Admirals around the ocean that I merrily killed off with a roaming battleship during an emergency. Or its lacklustre effort of sending single cavalry to my troops just to die during the emergency.
I had the strongest military without even trying. In fact, I didn’t really bother to build much in the way of new units. So much so that when I had espionage events that saw barbarians rise up in the middle of my lands, I had to rush buy a couple of units just to deal with that threat. It wasn’t much of a threat though as they kept on targeting a holy site that was near useless to me, bypassing rich cities, fertile fields of wheat and productive plantations loaded with bananas.
Good news is that the AI did manage to conquer cities. Scythia knocked out Mongolia over a series of wars. 4 city states fell and I believe an early war between Dutch and Mapuche gave Lautaro another city. I had problems with the AI when first released where it never upgraded units. Thankfully in latter wars I saw modern units on the field. The Cree in fact had a fascination with making armies from helicopters with a few of those buzzing around. For a long time, the AI did seem to be stuck with swordsmen, archers and crossbows, but I think I can put that down to the game pacing where unit upgrades around that time are light. Given the fact I play on epic speed, it does prolong the eras enough to have a true medieval and renaissance era.
Casting an eye over the city development on the map and it looked like distract placement was pretty good. The AI was making good use of adjacency bonuses. Campuses and Holy Sites placed next to mountains, and even positioned to make good use of little nooks in the mountains to maximise their output. Harbour districts would be adjacent to cities and/or commerical distracts, and normally with a fishing resource or two nearby. I did notice that one AI nation beset by barbarians took too long to restore pillaged fields of wheat outside its capital. Too long in this case being around a hundred turns.
I have so many mixed feelings over this Civ. It makes me appreciate what Civ IV did, and also the mechanics in a game like Europa Universalis. I can appreciate that Firaxis tried new things. For instance, Espionage is a marked improvement in Civ VI over Civ IV. Now I want to AI to feel like a threat when it comes to military. I can only hope I suppose?