Yeah this is absolutely not the right place to discuss this but I prefer having a discussion on this subforum rather than on a civ6 forum. I know you guys and a lot of you are quite reasonable, also with the civ 6 leaders being kinda inspired by the CPP leaderformat from what I can tell, this should work out fine.
Anyways the idea is to get some discussion going maybe making it easier for someone to get some balance-structure going once firaxis releases the modding-tools.
Anyways in general I find one of the biggest issues when it comes to leader-balance is the UB-slot. As the game is currently designed there are 3 different things that can fill the UB-slot with two notable exception. Most civ UB-slots are either a district-replacement, a building-replacement or a unique improvement(not replacing anything as far as I can tell). The exception being Rome with their unique Aqueduct-replacement and Kongo with their neighborhood-replacement, these are technically districts, but as they aren't specialty districts I want to separate them from the rest.
With the way these uniques are balanced within their own group (sometimes more successfully than other times) it gives us a pretty definite powerscale here:
1. Unique Districts
These things usually have minor and sometimes negligible bonuses over the baseline districts that they replace, but that's not what makes them powerful. What makes them powerful is the fact that they ignore normal rules for number of districts per city as well as being cheaper to build, you're going to build them in every city available to you because there is absolutely no good reason not to.
It pretty much gives every civ with a district-replacement the German UA, the ability to build one more district than pop-cap allows. Yeah sure, sometimes you don't want a specific district in a specific city, but it's not like any of the districts are bad or not worth the tile.
So where does the Kongo and Rome districts fit in here?
I'd say the Kongo district is probably up there fighting with the best of them, it doesn't exactly have the same effect as the other districts but, at least from my experience, it is still one of the better ones, population is just as powerful in Civ6 as it was before, and Kongo's ability to basically ignore housing makes growth really easy.
The Roman Bath replaces the aqueduct and provides a solid +2 housing and +1 amenity on top of the Aqueduct effect. This by itself is really powerful, in fact it's a lot more powerful than most of the other uniques if you just go by numbers. But in my experience, which is kinda limited truth be told, I just don't want to build aqueducts in most of my cities. Assuming you have the possibility of settling next to freshwater an aqueduct only really provides you with +2 housing at the permanent cost of a tile. Yeah the Roman replacement pumps this up to +4 housing and +1 amenity which is definitely worth building in every city, but as that tile could probably have been used for a neighborhood district later on the win isn't exactly that big, and the placement restriction on the Bath is horrible.
Still as Rome always wants to build a bath in every city it gives them free roam to settle cities one tile away from freshwater without much though. With this in mind I would probably place the Bath below all other unique districts, but still above the next in line.
2. Unique Improvements
Unique improvements place here for one simple reason, they can be used mostly anywhere.
Much like the unique districts you can build these improvements in any city and that availability is a clear win. That being said with the notable exception of the Indian stepwell all these improvements seems REALLY bad. I mean yeah people usually don't agree with my views on unique improvements, I tend to value hammers and food above yields like science (and culture in civ6) and faith. My preference for farms and mines have even been strengthened with the introduction of the crazy powerful adjacency-bonuses that mines provides to industrial zones and that farms provide to each-other. The unique improvements, don't really interact with these in any ways and for that reason they just aren't that interesting to me. Besides, if I wanted to waste a citizen on culture/science production I could just work one of those district-slots and save a tile
.
The stepwell seems different from this as it provides pretty beefy food as well as a full point of housing, I haven't actually played around with it at all but it seems at least bearable.
As for the other ones, I've played 4 full games as Egypt and I have never actually worked a sphinx-tile.
3. Unique Buildings
These seems to vary quite a bit, but just from the fact that they are all district-buildings it limits you to either build the related district in every city or miss out on your unique building in that city. This limit in by itself is why I placed them in the bottom. The reality is most of them are more useful than most of the improvements (but again coming from me that doesn't mean much).
The bonuses on them compared to the buildings they replace are minimal, exception being the American UB, which if I understand correctly doubles your culture output, which sounds crazy powerful. Might actually just list them off while I'm at it.
Other than the American one we got the Arabian Madrasa, which if I remember correctly adds +1 science as well as faith equal to the campus adjacency bonus. Even if you consistently manages to pull off big campuses, faith doesn't seem to be a very useful yield. This just feels a lot like big work with low return.
We got the Aztec Tlachtli replacing the Arena in the entertainment district, providing a massive +2 faith and +1 great general points. Even if this building actually had a decent bonus instead, you're still running into the biggest problem of them all, the fact that you just don't want to waste one of your district slots to build an entertainment district early on, I mean pretty much all other districts are a better choice than the +2 amenities you can get out of the entertainment district, and the actual useful buildings for the districts unlock way later. This is made even more ridiculous when you consider that the Aztec civ is based around collecting luxuries and getting extra amenities from them, meaning they are far less likely to suffer from amenity-related problems.
We got the Norwegian Stave church which might actually be worse than the Aztec UB. From what I can tell all it actually does is doubling the adjacency bonus from forests for the holy-site. Yes that's right, building a holy-site which is probably the second worst district to build early on (assuming prophets have already been distributed) and saving forests around the site instead of chopping them to speed up production and get better improvements and you get a massive +0.5 faith per forest from this building.
Last but not least we have the Japanese Factory-replacement. As far as buildings goes it is probably the second best one after the American one, providing +1 production in all cities within 6 tiles, as well as +4 culture one and a half era later. Apparently they thought getting that culture directly from this industrial era building would be too powerful. This building is also pretty awful, but in the end of the day you're probably going to want a industrial zone in every city anyways so this building takes the least amount of work.
Also worth noting that while all the unique districts also got their hammer-cost cut in half, this is not true for the unique buildings. So yeah, they are great.
To sum it up we have the unique districts, which are all great, then we have one improvement, stepwell and one building film-studios which are both decent. The rest just seems awful.
I would continue ranting about other stuff but this has already taken up a bit too much time so I'll just leave it for later or for someone else.
Anyways the idea is to get some discussion going maybe making it easier for someone to get some balance-structure going once firaxis releases the modding-tools.
Anyways in general I find one of the biggest issues when it comes to leader-balance is the UB-slot. As the game is currently designed there are 3 different things that can fill the UB-slot with two notable exception. Most civ UB-slots are either a district-replacement, a building-replacement or a unique improvement(not replacing anything as far as I can tell). The exception being Rome with their unique Aqueduct-replacement and Kongo with their neighborhood-replacement, these are technically districts, but as they aren't specialty districts I want to separate them from the rest.
With the way these uniques are balanced within their own group (sometimes more successfully than other times) it gives us a pretty definite powerscale here:
1. Unique Districts
These things usually have minor and sometimes negligible bonuses over the baseline districts that they replace, but that's not what makes them powerful. What makes them powerful is the fact that they ignore normal rules for number of districts per city as well as being cheaper to build, you're going to build them in every city available to you because there is absolutely no good reason not to.
It pretty much gives every civ with a district-replacement the German UA, the ability to build one more district than pop-cap allows. Yeah sure, sometimes you don't want a specific district in a specific city, but it's not like any of the districts are bad or not worth the tile.
So where does the Kongo and Rome districts fit in here?
I'd say the Kongo district is probably up there fighting with the best of them, it doesn't exactly have the same effect as the other districts but, at least from my experience, it is still one of the better ones, population is just as powerful in Civ6 as it was before, and Kongo's ability to basically ignore housing makes growth really easy.
The Roman Bath replaces the aqueduct and provides a solid +2 housing and +1 amenity on top of the Aqueduct effect. This by itself is really powerful, in fact it's a lot more powerful than most of the other uniques if you just go by numbers. But in my experience, which is kinda limited truth be told, I just don't want to build aqueducts in most of my cities. Assuming you have the possibility of settling next to freshwater an aqueduct only really provides you with +2 housing at the permanent cost of a tile. Yeah the Roman replacement pumps this up to +4 housing and +1 amenity which is definitely worth building in every city, but as that tile could probably have been used for a neighborhood district later on the win isn't exactly that big, and the placement restriction on the Bath is horrible.
Still as Rome always wants to build a bath in every city it gives them free roam to settle cities one tile away from freshwater without much though. With this in mind I would probably place the Bath below all other unique districts, but still above the next in line.
2. Unique Improvements
Unique improvements place here for one simple reason, they can be used mostly anywhere.
Much like the unique districts you can build these improvements in any city and that availability is a clear win. That being said with the notable exception of the Indian stepwell all these improvements seems REALLY bad. I mean yeah people usually don't agree with my views on unique improvements, I tend to value hammers and food above yields like science (and culture in civ6) and faith. My preference for farms and mines have even been strengthened with the introduction of the crazy powerful adjacency-bonuses that mines provides to industrial zones and that farms provide to each-other. The unique improvements, don't really interact with these in any ways and for that reason they just aren't that interesting to me. Besides, if I wanted to waste a citizen on culture/science production I could just work one of those district-slots and save a tile
.The stepwell seems different from this as it provides pretty beefy food as well as a full point of housing, I haven't actually played around with it at all but it seems at least bearable.
As for the other ones, I've played 4 full games as Egypt and I have never actually worked a sphinx-tile.
3. Unique Buildings
These seems to vary quite a bit, but just from the fact that they are all district-buildings it limits you to either build the related district in every city or miss out on your unique building in that city. This limit in by itself is why I placed them in the bottom. The reality is most of them are more useful than most of the improvements (but again coming from me that doesn't mean much).
The bonuses on them compared to the buildings they replace are minimal, exception being the American UB, which if I understand correctly doubles your culture output, which sounds crazy powerful. Might actually just list them off while I'm at it.
Other than the American one we got the Arabian Madrasa, which if I remember correctly adds +1 science as well as faith equal to the campus adjacency bonus. Even if you consistently manages to pull off big campuses, faith doesn't seem to be a very useful yield. This just feels a lot like big work with low return.
We got the Aztec Tlachtli replacing the Arena in the entertainment district, providing a massive +2 faith and +1 great general points. Even if this building actually had a decent bonus instead, you're still running into the biggest problem of them all, the fact that you just don't want to waste one of your district slots to build an entertainment district early on, I mean pretty much all other districts are a better choice than the +2 amenities you can get out of the entertainment district, and the actual useful buildings for the districts unlock way later. This is made even more ridiculous when you consider that the Aztec civ is based around collecting luxuries and getting extra amenities from them, meaning they are far less likely to suffer from amenity-related problems.
We got the Norwegian Stave church which might actually be worse than the Aztec UB. From what I can tell all it actually does is doubling the adjacency bonus from forests for the holy-site. Yes that's right, building a holy-site which is probably the second worst district to build early on (assuming prophets have already been distributed) and saving forests around the site instead of chopping them to speed up production and get better improvements and you get a massive +0.5 faith per forest from this building.
Last but not least we have the Japanese Factory-replacement. As far as buildings goes it is probably the second best one after the American one, providing +1 production in all cities within 6 tiles, as well as +4 culture one and a half era later. Apparently they thought getting that culture directly from this industrial era building would be too powerful. This building is also pretty awful, but in the end of the day you're probably going to want a industrial zone in every city anyways so this building takes the least amount of work.
Also worth noting that while all the unique districts also got their hammer-cost cut in half, this is not true for the unique buildings. So yeah, they are great.
To sum it up we have the unique districts, which are all great, then we have one improvement, stepwell and one building film-studios which are both decent. The rest just seems awful.
I would continue ranting about other stuff but this has already taken up a bit too much time so I'll just leave it for later or for someone else.
