Are production times too long?

Falk

Prince
Joined
Nov 25, 2005
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334
Location
Mainz, Germany
I have played 20h now (Standard speed), abandoning multiple games to try new things, and one thing I noticed is that I always run into production problems. Everything takes forever to produce, especially districts and wonders. I'm now trying to play as Germany to get more production, but it takes eternities to set up the industrial zones.

I'm not sure if I like this or not. In Civ6 you clearly can't build everything, you're not supposed to. You're supposed to specialize cities and maybe get one wonder if it fits your strategy. I like that a lot - in Civ5 I would usually build everything in my cities and on King or lower difficulties I could even build almost all wonders.

On the other hand the game feels extremely sluggish even if you do specialize cities. I feel compelled to build industrial zones and the corresponding buildings everywhere asap and the time before these zones become available seems increasingly boring with every new game I start.

Maybe districts and wonders should cost less production? Maybe there should be other or better means to increase production before industrial zones become available?

Unit production seems ok because you can use +50% production policies early on. The general production policies (+1 production in all cities, +15% wonder production) don't do much though.

I'd try a faster game speed, but science and culture pacing are fine, so I don't know if that would improve my experience.

Do you have the same impression?
 
I agree that districts are crazy expensive in terms of hammers. The only game I've played in which I had a bunch of districts was with the Aztecs because you can get builders like mad and rush them. Otherwise, the other several games I'm lucky to have even a single district in many of my cities. Just too expensive.
 
I think the problem is that techs/civics go too quickly. Slowing them down has the same effect as speeding up production, with the added bonus that the date at the top of the screen is more inline with my level of progression.
 
Yes to all of this.

Currently the districts that matter are:

- Industrial
- Commercial
- Harbor (for the trade route)

The Holy district can matter situationally.

It looks like in their quest to make Science no longer king they went too far. Science feels barely relevant. I think all tech/culture costs need to increase by 50% or so, and production of most buildings brought down around 50%. Then the effects of the Industrial zone need to be lowered a bit.
 
Yes to all of this.

Currently the districts that matter are:

- Industrial
- Commercial
- Harbor (for the trade route)

The Holy district can matter situationally.

It looks like in their quest to make Science no longer king they went too far. Science feels barely relevant. I think all tech/culture costs need to increase by 50% or so, and production of most buildings brought down around 50%. Then the effects of the Industrial zone need to be lowered a bit.
Your numbers seem a little excessive but i do agree that lowering production costs and inceasing science/culture costs at the same time might be a good idea.
 
When you are going for a religion victory you will build a lot of holy districts otherwise its not to useful. It can enable you to buy walls/builds in the early game if you save it up.
 
I agree on the need for at least an Industrial and Commercial district in every city. Money helps build the districts faster so that helps a lot. The problem though is what else or you going to build if we reduce their hammer cost? More military? The human controlled military is way too good in Civ VI and given us more units isn't going to help gameplay.
 
I agree on the need for at least an Industrial and Commercial district in every city. Money helps build the districts faster so that helps a lot. The problem though is what else or you going to build if we reduce their hammer cost? More military? The human controlled military is way too good in Civ VI and given us more units isn't going to help gameplay.
I would also reduce the hammers from factory and power plants, I think 2 and 3 instead of 3 and 4 is reasonable.
 
I don't build units ever. I buy every single one. It does seem like the tech tree flies by anyone's ability to produce things.
 
I was struggling a lot with production until I got the double adjacency bonus card, than I built four mines around one IZ and got huge production.

But I agree science is too fast, it seems to just jump into the next era before you really begin on the previous era.
 
Yeah I think I over-valued building early Science Zones in my current game. Early on they don't seem that great compared to what they cost. Eh, you live and you learn.
 
<Shameless plug for the mod in my signature />
 
I dont think it is true. In my last game I am playing with Japan (immortal, standart speed), and I have 6 cities. I already produced multiple districts for all cities and I cant find new buildings to build, I builded decent numbers of wonder, evet two wonders in some cities and I therefore did lots of projects (towards great people generation). I guess one anothr problem can be captured cities, If you dont get them ceded after war, or totally destroy the opponent, you cant build anything on them.
 
Ruhr Valley wonder in my capital with only 2 mines and 1 quarry makes the world of difference.
I can build modern wonders in 15-25 turns (instead of usual 35+). Got broadway in 18 turns I think.
Built spaceport in 12 turns, and each space project has been 12 turns.
With a few trade routes to my good cities, I'm making about 6 production with each route.

But yes, production costs are definitely high. But Ruhr Valley helps a lot
 
Going nuts on science early doesn't seem like a great play - it just escalates your district costs and makes you unlock units way before their discount policy card is available (had this problem with Samurai in particular). You can't turn down a 3+ adjacency campus, but I wouldn't go out of my way building libraries and so on early, before my core districts are built.

In games where I've gotten my population up, built mines and lumber mills, used internal trade routes (can get +5, +6 hammers out of these mid-game), and used policy cards, my build times have been very reasonable - building Cavalry in 2-3 turns later on in the game (online speed).
 
I agree on the need for at least an Industrial and Commercial district in every city. Money helps build the districts faster so that helps a lot. The problem though is what else or you going to build if we reduce their hammer cost? More military? The human controlled military is way too good in Civ VI and given us more units isn't going to help gameplay.

The ideal answer to this, should be, "nothing." We should stop needing to produce produce all the time.

To limit unit spam, all the game needs to do is introduce a second-layer limiter, in the same way that growth and districts have built-in limiters. For pre-industrial warfare this should just be tied to some concept of armies as financial products of each city's gentry, since that is what they were in real life. The player cannot expand armies without appeasing and taking care of the "gentry" (gold economy) in each city.

Meanwhile district costs have to come down, not just for gameplay balance but to preserve the metaphor of the game. If you have a city, why wouldn't that city want to make a commercial hub, or theatre district, etc? -- not everything at once, but some of the things that all cities in history had during these eras, after all that's why buildings are in a history game in the first place. Would the citizens of that city simply say, "Oh, it's too hard to make an encampment, we are all at the lumber mill all day long to build a factory for the next 100 years."

There are already secondary limiters to force city specialization, and that's great - so get rid of the high production costs.

Essentially the problem here is the same that happened with trade routes in BE - the metaphor has been destroyed. The devs need to step back and ask, Why is production a gameplay element at all? What does production represent in the game? In real life, cities do not need mines, factories to build a theatre or market - they just build a trashy theatre or market out of dirt and boxes, because they want those things. Workshops and factories make fancier buildings, and home products, and the weapons that armies use, and that should be in the game. In V, production did everything, both city structures and armies, and it made no sense, but it worked OK for gameplay:

1 it was a limit on what cities could do, so it always gave you something to decide, and
2 it tied to local and global economic development, and
3 it scaled up at every era to represent increased efficiency of human industry

It was a neat little system, though it was broken in some ways (same as VI, you couldn't make half the buildings before Industrial). Rush-buying or engineer-bulbing was always the funnest decision of the game, but also a glaring indicator of how nonsensical and simplistic the metaphor was.

In VI, city production is not needed for system 1, because we have limiters for districts and can add limiters for armies, and it currently fails at 2 and 3. The result is the same as trade routes in BE: Production is both all powerful, and incredibly boring as a gameplay element.

VI should decouple production from local city economy strength, rethink the idea of each city having a "passive thing-development task" (the production queue is no longer the most interesting decision a city faces), introduce city gentry, and later corporations and national industries, who will patronize armies or factories that create units directly.
 
You should only go for a Science/Culture focus after you have your traders/factorys/mines kicking in, otherwise you will feel like it takes forever to build stuff.


Focusing on Science/Culture gives little to no reward because the production cost of higher tech stuff you unlock goes up exponentially (each new era unit/wonder/building has like double the production cost of the equivalent from the era before it), so there is no gain in focusing on tech before production because even if you invest so much in culture/tech that you will unlock units/wonders a reasonable time earlier, you will lack the production to build it effectively anyway.
 
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I'm now in turn ~150 of a Barbarossa game and it's going much faster. I have skipped all districts except commercial hubs and Hansas and have built these asap. 4 cities are set up like this and I am now building some science to get to Factories/Ruhr fast. I've also used all my traders to boost production and I beelined Guilds (+100% for commercial hubs and Hansas).

However, this is the most production possible in the game right now (except maybe if you get lucky with city states) and production doesn't feel too fast at all. Maybe a little in the capital, but overall it's what I consider "normal" building speed.

Which leads me to believe that the numbers definitely need to be tweaked. I do not wish to play every game like that.
 
I agree on the need for at least an Industrial and Commercial district in every city. Money helps build the districts faster so that helps a lot. The problem though is what else or you going to build if we reduce their hammer cost? More military? The human controlled military is way too good in Civ VI and given us more units isn't going to help gameplay.

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