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[Victoria]

Oh dear, I want seriously off the rails, was that me? Ok, apologies @Olleus.
I guess if you are really short on luxuries then your colonies may suffer while your capital is happily visiting animals.
The luxury mechanic has been inherent for a long time and IMO both works and is critical to your success.
What you suggest is to dumb it down to a slider like civ 4 with a name called order so you can avoid some of the mechanics like local war wearyness? Exporting zebras to the colonies to keep them happy?

@Browd has this been tested to ensure those local amenities are not spread? I did some that indicated this was so and earlier you will see greygamer referenced Beyond the Monument Episode 29. Now it may be that the local stay local and I just had not tested well enough, I will check it. Unless you have serious amenity issues the net effect is all cities have the same bonus. My issue is I appreciate 10% extra on everything but food (20%) and tourism as well as the trade value so always keep positive.

Sorry for being quite negative

 

[Browd]

The game will manage allocations of luxury amenities to minimize net amenity imbalances between cities, which means that a city that "needs" 5 amenities to be content and that has an ED, arena, zoo and a Retainer garrison (+3 amenities from entertainment and +1 amenity from policies) would only "need" 1 luxury amenity assigned to it to be content, while another city that also needs 5 amenities to be content but that has no other sources of amenities (e.g., no entertainment district and no garrison in this example) would need 5 luxury amenities assigned to it (assuming you have 5 unique luxuries). Yet another city that only needs 4 amenities to be content but only has +1 amenity from an ED (but no ED buildings) and no garrison (in this example) would "need" 3 luxury amenities assigned to it to be content.

To take an extreme example, let's say you only have 4 cities (so each city will get +5 amenities from your 5 unique luxuries, in this example). Let's also assume that you capital needs 8 amenities to be content, and cities 2 through 4 each needs 6 amenities to be content. Finally, let's assume that you decided (for whatever reason) to prioritize local amenities in your capital and city 2, but not cities 3 and 4.

Your capital gets +1 amenity from the Palace, +5 amenities from luxuries, +1 amenity from its ED, +2 amenities from its arena and zoo, and +1 amenity for a garrison (retainer policy), for a total of 10 amenities, in a city needing only 7 amenities -- your capital's citizens are ecstatic, with associated growth and yield bonuses.

City 2 also has +5 amenities from luxuries, +2 from its own ED and Arena, and +1 from your capital's zoo (since it is within 6 tiles of the zoo), for a total of +8 amenities in a city that only needs 6 amenities, so that city also enjoys growth and yield bonuses.

Cities 3 and 4 have nothing but the luxury amenities -- they are out of range of the capital's zoo, they have no EDs, no garrison, no other amenity sources whatsoever -- they each get +5 amenities (all from luxuries) and nothing else. Since those cities need 6 amenities to be content, their citizens are discontent and those cities suffer growth and yield penalties.

 

[EpicWestern]

+1 to Browd, and yeah I actually did test it today and that's how it works. Entertainment district amenities are simply not global, even though it can seem that way since building them *may* spread your luxury resources out and positively affect other cities.

Why is it preferable for Amenities to be consumed locally such that different cities will have different bonuses (some happy and some ecstatic for example), when I do not have control over which city has which bonus?

The current system is kind of a hybrid between being able to decide which cities you're making more powerful and just making your empire more powerful as a whole. With four cities you're making whatever city builds ET district and buildings more powerful, with 5+ cities (with high populations) you have less control. Granting us full micro, where we have to manually trade luxuries between cities would be an absolute nightmare. Even just the option to allow us to micro resources forces always-try-the-best-possible-play type players like myself to manually check and shuffle them which is just too tedious. But anyway, I would say probably 80% of the time building an ET district/building will positively affect that city as opposed to shuffling your resources around so it positively affects something else.

 

[GhostSalsa]

I still agree with this thread's OP.

Here is how I would currently phrase the argument for globalizing amenities or otherwise scrapping the current system: In VI if my city wants "thing" the choice should only be "give city thing or not."

We want binary growth choices and complex impacts. That is the design of a game that knows what the stakes you face are and lets you get to pathing your way through alternate strats. Complicating the growth choices (in VI instead I have to think, this city needs thing, so maybe putting a rock under the thing pool here will shift thing water there) puts a third party between player choice and game impact, called "player accounting incompetence." (Accounting is meanwhile pretty fun and rewarding when it is bent toward the complex impacts of simple choices...)

The effect is that the player understands they will not know the right thing to do a lot of the time, and treats this hugely complex gameplay element as random and unworthy of care.

Here is how I would currently phrase the design flaw with the current system: Ed explained growth would be limited by two dimensions at once, while powered by the third thing, food. In microcosm every city would have a cool, two-things demanding care at once, personalized growth challenge. But using semi-global resources for one of the limiters was sloppy and lazy, it reflected not ever really finishing the design of the "per city three factor growth game."

 

[EpicWestern]

Going back to flavor, I'm pretty heavily opposed to amenities being purely global. Again, a zoo in San Diego doesn't really make people happier in New York. It doesn't really matter that housing is something that already exists in Civ6, housing and zoos are both something cities have in real life and their function is reflected properly in the game. If anything, amenities should be effectively less global. Getting a zoo in San Diego doesn't mean its people just suddenly stop eating truffles. Still, I wouldn't argue that we should just have infinite copies of all resources, because again, in real life you don't just get infinity resources because you have them somewhere in one place.

But I agree that there should be at least some sort of mechanic to improve effective overall happiness. There has to be *something* a big city can do to make smaller cities better/happier. I think the best option would be to have some sort of buildings/districts that allow you to improve upon or make new luxury resources. So once San Diego has truffles it gets locked in and won't be shuffled out, but it might have some 'business headquarters' building that doubles the copies of truffles worldwide from 4 to 8. Or it could have some 'specialty factory' that produces a new luxury resource (kind of like cosmetics or jeans).

 

[GhostSalsa]

I thought more about whether amenities should be global or local based on the stated design intention of each city having a mini-game with three elements for growth. (Sorry to hijack the thread)

In my last post I said: the semi-global amenities resource reflected that they never really finished designing the growth mini game so it should just be back to global

But the other option is to double down and make it truly per-city. A good UI and more focused definition of resource elements, and we can implement the player micro-ing the distribution of luxuries without it being tedious!

The UI would be this: when we are in city screen (when they bring city screen back), amenities are a tall expanding column of cute bubbles. The background behind the bubbles indicates how many bubbles should be filled by showing city pop. (depicted as a pile of citizens). Copies of luxuries are assigned into the bubbles, with NO SHARING (think how great works were a global resource assigned to cities in V). True local amenities (buildings) fill their respective bubbles. City needs dictate one new desired local amenity as a faded image of the item (e.g. This city doesn't want a sewer next (sewer should be am. not h), it wants a park, it wants a military monument unlocked a victory, whatever whatever, we know how quests work). Luxuries count as +4 am. in their assigned city and this is depicted by the bubbles spacing out higher (above the pop demand). Other global luxuries are available to assign to different cities, but worth fewer am., such as your circus, your theatre troupe, whatever it's just details at that point…

Later "civics" can increase the am. value for different amenity types, just as V's happiness policies freed up large increases of growth all at once. But we need to go back to some of the government being of permanent policies. It was really sexy in V to flavor your policies and play around happiness sources..

The bubbles work because moving luxuries is always easy but rarely desirable. So the player is microing, but won't have a lot of reason to move bubbles between cities except for meaningful changes in city roles, e.g. "Ok I need this city to grow a lot and am going to put a halt on the others for now," the same way we re-focused food TRs in V.

Edit: ack, I forgot the most important part:

Assigned luxuries have a high maintenance cost. So not just are you losing out on the sale to another player but you are paying high $ to subsidize the luxury for your gross non rich citizens. I imagine 7gpt, the same price we pay for 4 citizen's worth of luxury am. already (anyway the game needs something so that global gold income stays low for players not going all-out on international TRs)

This is crucial to the bubbles system. It's important that unassigned lux's have a large passive benefit (otherwise players who are stuck at housing caps are being taxed twice).

True local amenities can cost maintenance too. This implies that amenities unlocked by certain local buildings can have the same initial hammer cost as a generic-version amenity, but a lower maintenance cost. For example, have a granary in city, can build amenity: "the dole" for low gpt maintenance. Have aqueduct, can build baths (sorry Rome). This creates add-on value for one-off buildings and districts (with TRs so strong now buildings feel weaker).

 

[dagriggstar]

I feel like there are two system that do the same thing, the logical thing to do is to completely remove one of the systems ? I mean do we even need a happiness/amenity system ? In what version of the game has such a system been fun ?

I'd rename luxury resources to economic resources that yield gold, with more gold for having the same type (For example 1 tobacco = 1 gold, 2 tobacco = 3 gold, 3 tobacco = 6 gold, 4 tobacco = 10 gold etc)...

 

[EpicWestern]

But I don't see the point of designing a game mechanism "because it exists in the real world" if it doesn't do anything for gameplay.

I mean the art, music, and having Sean Bean narrate doesn't do anything for gameplay either but it makes the whole civ experience more enjoyable. I mean I would agree that developing the amenity system was probably somewhat of a waste of time and resources, but well, they did it and we're here now and I don't feel like going backwards accomplishes anything. Unlike other features in civ like military AI and diplomacy, housing and amenities seem to actually run smoothly. There's a somewhat annoying learning curve (not helped by a barebones civopedia), but once you figure it out the complexity stops mattering.