Commercial Hubs/Harbors nerfed.

[Victoria]

The navy game, at the moment, is usually not so important

Having played England to death I can say that it is a different strategy going aggressive naval early. And quite a powerful one. Housing your cities on the coast and having "sailing archers" that can move faster between cities is great defense. When these become frigates they become very powerful. The sad thing is you can do this strategy without the dockyard but Vicky does get cheap dockyards and therefore cheap trade routes. I noticed quite early that people that said coastal cities were pointless played pangea domination games. Of course their value is less there. I only played an island map twice. I normally play continents and with continents the naval domination does work. its just most people like the army domination and I get that, I was also a Panzer Leader player and like pushing the land units around. before that I loved the napoleonics and WW2 hex strategy games.

The thing that made Vicky a half decent civ was the fact that if your first 2 districts are harbor / CD then you have loads of trade routes and this made up for losses in other areas. The fact they have nerfed what was not in fact an issue is a bit sad.
Any logic behind it I would like to know. I mean I have always said that coastal cities are not production hubs, they are gold hubs.... now they have removed what happens in reality. In reality you have cities on the coast being big trade centers, even now. They have just removed this probably because they think having 2 trade routes in one city is OP without appreciating people did not think so.

The fact that sea dogs do not work (as far as I know still) is apalling and just makes England poorer now and relies on the foreign troops policy which is still quite powerful. Being able t build musketmen with no Niter for example. and getting a new infantryman of the best class of every city you take can allow some pretty mean snowballing in a crowded space.

 

[Art Morte]

I don't know, I don't mind the change. I was never building harbors in a hurry for the trade route anyway. I'll still build a couple of harbors in cities where I want to build ships or need the housing or food bonuses. Then again, I'm not as gold-orientated as most players here seem to be.

 

[Cymsdale]

I don't really mind the change on the surface. But I do wish there was more incentive to build coastal cities. Water tiles are terrible. You can't build districts on them, and you can't improve them with anything unless they have a resource. I think bonus resources like fish should be more common (and bunched up).

 

[Katakanja]

I don't really mind the change on the surface. But I do wish there was more incentive to build coastal cities. Water tiles are terrible. You can't build districts on them, and you can't improve them with anything unless they have a resource. I think bonus resources like fish should be more common (and bunched up).

I actually thought the opposite might solve the problem. It sometimes feels like there's way too much fish and crab spam, and that sea luxuries are too rare, especially since there's like, what, just whales and pearls? Civ V had those plus crabs as a lux rather than a bonus. They need to come up with a new sea luxury or two, perhaps even with an unusual yield that makes it valuable compared to land resources.

 

[Cymsdale]

I'm not saying less water lux resources, I'm saying less water tiles with nothing on them at all.

 

[Katakanja]

Hmm, yeah I see what you mean. At least on land there's always something you can build on an empty plain or whatever. Maybe they should get rid of fish altogether and make fishing boats a generic improvement you can build on any coast like farms

 

[Brutha2]

It just makes no sense, they nerfed production as it was in the previous patch and nerfed coastal cities in this one; people were asking for the opposite. They don't seem to have done anything about pacing and production costs of districts either, two issues that they really should have prioritised.

 

[kamex]

I suppose it encourages you to only ever build harbours on archipelago maps now, thus saving a 'valuable' land tile for something else. Still, I think this was the wrong choice.

If they could just improve yield of basic water tiles...

 

[Cymsdale]

Fun fact, if you play a map type that has few water tiles in it, then water tiles become quite good because the sea resources get a lot more bunched up (inner sea is a good example), but on maps like archipelago they are a lot more spread out.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Finally they nerfed harbors. That was the balance change we all wanted.
I'm starting to get frustrated with the Civ 6 patches. Not as frustrated as with the Beyond Earth patches, but there's still a lot of very necessary and not even that complicating balancing to do.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Correct me if I am wrong but the new rule seems to be designed to encourage the player to pick between a harbor and a commercial district. If your city is on the coast, you will want to build a harbor instead of a commercial district and if your city is inland, you will want to build the commercial district instead. So the rule is designed to encourage specialization because up to now, players were ignoring harbors for coastal cities and just going with commercial districts.

 

[Cyon]

I think harbours or lighthouse should give +1 gold and or food per fishing boat, and let docks bost cogs for fishingboats like it did in civ V.

 

[Evolena]

Correct me if I am wrong but the new rule seems to be designed to encourage the player to pick between a harbor and a commercial district. If your city is on the coast, you will want to build a harbor instead of a commercial district and if your city is inland, you will want to build the commercial district instead. So the rule is designed to encourage specialization because up to now, players were ignoring harbors for coastal cities and just going with commercial districts.

What about the harbour adjacency bonus of commercial hubs, then? I think the goal was really only to decrease the number of trade routes one can have, and they came to this way of doing it... with the side effect of nerfing already weak harbours.

 

[Siptah]

I wonder why they didn't do the Civ BE thingy where you need trade route capacity per city instead of per empire. That would have worked in a similar way.

 

[KmDubya]

Correct me if I am wrong but the new rule seems to be designed to encourage the player to pick between a harbor and a commercial district. If your city is on the coast, you will want to build a harbor instead of a commercial district and if your city is inland, you will want to build the commercial district instead. So the rule is designed to encourage specialization because up to now, players were ignoring harbors for coastal cities and just going with commercial districts.

A Commercial District is flat out much better than a harbor. The tech comes sooner (in fact the harbor tech can be ignored for a really long time), the bonuses are easier to get (rivers are pretty universal while multiple sea resources are not), their is a policy card that doubles the gold yield of the buildings in a CD which is I believe +15 and Great Merchants are one of the best while reat Admirals are one of the worst.

I don't see building a harbor anymore unless the location is awesome and I need to build ships. I already built CDs in every city, this patch does nothing to dissuade that plan.

 

[xxhe]

Harbors are already weak in game. The OP one is Commercial District. A fair game to me is to keep the one trade route from harbor while reducing that from commercial hub to 0.5 (To correctly reflect the advantage of sea trade).

 

[Gorbles]

Finally they nerfed harbors. That was the balance change we all wanted.
I'm starting to get frustrated with the Civ 6 patches. Not as frustrated as with the Beyond Earth patches, but there's still a lot of very necessary and not even that complicating balancing to do.

a) this thread is specifically about the changes to Harbours (and Commercial Districts).

b) there is a general patch reception thread where there are more balance changes (including improvements to the tech tree) to be discussed.

It seems like you have an agenda here beyond actually constructively-discussing the gameplay changes.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Correct me if I am wrong but the new rule seems to be designed to encourage the player to pick between a harbor and a commercial district. If your city is on the coast, you will want to build a harbor instead of a commercial district and if your city is inland, you will want to build the commercial district instead. So the rule is designed to encourage specialization because up to now, players were ignoring harbors for coastal cities and just going with commercial districts.

The problem is that if we have to make this coice, Harbors almost always lose. You might want one to be able to build a navy, and that's it. If they keep this change, Harbors or their buildings should get significant buffs. Instead of just gold from rare sea resources Harbors could get adjacency bonuses of 1 food from fishing boats (doubled with a Light House) and 1 production from Lumber Mills (doubled with Shipyard). Then you'd have a real choice: more gold from CHs or more growth and production from Harbors.
I see the need to cut down on trade income and the huge mid to late game gold surplus, but limiting trade route count and indirectly nerfing one of the least useful districts is the wrong way. The frist thing they should have done was nerf Caravansaries and Triangular Trade.

It seems like you have an agenda here beyond actually constructively-discussing the gameplay changes.

Why does everybody have to "have an agenda" ? I'm just venting after being particularly annoyed at this one change.

 

[Magil]

Correct me if I am wrong but the new rule seems to be designed to encourage the player to pick between a harbor and a commercial district. If your city is on the coast, you will want to build a harbor instead of a commercial district and if your city is inland, you will want to build the commercial district instead. So the rule is designed to encourage specialization because up to now, players were ignoring harbors for coastal cities and just going with commercial districts.

This doesn't make sense, given that Harbors specifically have an adjacency bonus for being next to a Commercial Hub. As for "players were ignoring harbors and just going with commercial districts," I have a feeling that's only going to become more common now that you can't get a trade route from a harbor if you already have a commercial hub.

Harbors don't have a lot going for them (without mods), their adjacency bonus is pretty weak, a navy is a situational choice, and the buildings are good but not great. If you don't get a trade route out of them they're rarely worth it, and I don't think they can match the generally powerful adjacencies of the commercial hub.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Civ Developer #1: So EgonSpengler was complaining about our naval and maritime trade module again.
Civ Developer #2: Yeah, what else is new?
Civ Developer #3: Screw that guy. I hated Ghostbusters.