Beginners help please

[Dirty&Hairy]

Hi,
even though, I play games several decades by now, I have never owned a CIv game since couple of days ago when I bought this one.

It's not my first grand scale strategy game and I played the turorial, however I seem to be doing something wrong or misunderstand some key concepts it seems.

Why can my city only do one (1) thing at the same same time? Either build a harbor or train an army unit- and both takes several turns with one turn seemingly representing 25 years. It takes several centuries to create a scout unit and its the only thing the entire citiy is doing?

When I found a new city all build options take over 20 turns. 500 years until the first guards unit after foundating?

That cannot be it. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks a lot in advance!

[Evrach]

You're doing nothing wrong. The calendar year is only here for "flavor" purpose, but there's no level of accurracy in it. You'll soon be able to launch rockets on the moon in 1400AD, so... don’t take it too seriously ^^

Note that you can change the game speed in the settings, so you can have very long games like Marathon, where it will take dozen of turn to make a single unit, or very short like Online, where it will only take a couple of turns... both have pros and cons, do as you prefere

[grognardgary]

Originally posted by Dirty&Hairy:

Hi,
even though, I play games several decades by now, I have never owned a CIv game since couple of days ago when I bought this one.

It's not my first grand scale strategy game and I played the turorial, however I seem to be doing something wrong or misunderstand some key concepts it seems.

Why can my city only do one (1) thing at the same same time? Either build a harbor or train an army unit- and both takes several turns with one turn seemingly representing 25 years. It takes several centuries to create a scout unit and its the only thing the entire citiy is doing?

When I found a new city all build options take over 20 turns. 500 years until the first guards unit after foundating?

That cannot be it. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Your beginning city is short on production capability. There are two ways to fix that and they are not mutually exclusive grow your population and improve your terrain. I usually try to place my 1st city on a plains hill adjacent to a 2 food and production hex. That extra production is op early However there are even better hexes. With the loyalty mechanic growing your pop is key to success so take the 3 food over the 2/2. But keep in mind that strategie vary a bit depending on map size and time setting.

[Dissenswurst]

You're at the slowest point of the game - directly at the start, so you don't do something wrong (apart maybe from having chosen a bad settling point with no good production tiles like 2 food 2 prod). There are many factors which are going to accelerate things over time:

• Your city is growing by accumulating surplus food (2 food is consumed per population per turn) until it hits a certain threshold; you get then a new population that works another tile and can give you more production.
  
• You can build workers, research tile improvements, and improve tiles by spending worker charges, so you get more income per population from your tiles.
  
• You build settlers to found new cities to produce different things in different cities in parallel.
  
• You build buildings in your cities which grant you extra food and/or production (granary, water mill), or districts like industrial zone, harbour, or military encampment with their related buildings.
  
• You earn money so you can buy stuff after some time to accelerate things (note, however, that you can't rush the current production with money, you buy things either entirely or not at all). Under certain circumstances you can even use faith to buy non-religious things (e.g. if you manage to have a Golden Age you can choose a bonus that allows you to buy workers, settlers, and traders with faith).
  
• As soon as you meet other civs (not city states) you can start trading to make much more money. You need something to sell, though, so improved tiles with luxury resources or strategic resources like horses or iron are mandatory.
  
• As soon as you have a government, choose policy cards that increase your production.
  
• When founding a pantheon, try to take a bonus that increases your production (if such a bonus is still there).

But yeah, Civ VI forces you to build and invest much before things really start to heat up. Keep growing your cities and improving your tiles with workers. so don't forget to build new workers from time to time. They've only a limited amount of charges to improve tiles so you need a steady flow of new ones.

In the following thread I documented about 120 turns or so of a game of mine. At the end there is a documentation which things were build in which city on which turn. Just to give you an impression how this game may develop over time (on standard speed). I played Kristina (no bonuses in the early stages of the game) and were caught alone on an island so I was forced to build everything from the scratch without the possibility of early trade with other civs, thus this is a good example of how things may develop early on without trade.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/289070/discussions/0/591764421283491374/

[fuzion2100]

the game is made for cities to do one thing at a time. i would advise watching some starter vids by potato mcwhiskey. he is a awesome civ helper on YouTube. there is a lot to learn about the game if you are new. i would play on the easiest difficultly lvl till you get a basic grasp of the game.

[Dirty&Hairy]

Thank you all, I will see if I get the hang of it. At the moment it honestly does not really tick with me, but I will give it a bit more time.