What I'm saying is I
think the quantity of both tiles are roughly equal on most maps, which is why total gold income shouldn't be much different than the previous method. It's just a difference between favoring peninsulas (old method) or bays (new method).
Now, the bay-favoring method does take effect earlier, but the issue you described is in the Industrial era, after both bay and peninsula methods would be in effect (since we have the harbor by then). City sizes are also probably large enough in that era to work the applicable tiles (due to the Hospital and Fertilizer) so it shouldn't be an issue of individual tile value.
It might depend on if you typically build coastal cities on bays or peninsulas though. Which is more common for you?
If you think favoring peninsulas works out better, I can change it back. The downside I saw with previously was it's at the stage in the game most cities are already settled, so it didn't really influence placement decisions. Now, like you say I could move the bonus from the harbor to the water itself... but then it'd be basically the same as the current method, only with the bay/peninsula difference, so I'm not really sure what it'd accomplish.
The reason I changed it to favoring bays is most real-life port cities I can think of are more successful if they're on a bay than a peninsula/island. A few prominent exceptions are Singapore, due to its unique position at an ideal naval passage, and Honolulu because of its military value.
I look for opportunities to make things fun for builders whenever possible.
I do not thinking having a high overall gold income makes the game fun.
The game is fun when it has meaningful tradeoffs. When gold income is very high, then you can easily buy up all the city states, the gold cost of research agreements is trivial, you can buy your military units in a single city with all the XP-boosters, and upgrade costs are trivial.
When gold income is lower, you have much more severe tradeoffs; you can't buy buildings *and* get research agreements *and* get city state alliances; you have to pick and choose.
Builder = small empire
Warmonger = large empire (since cities can't flip from culture anymore, the only route to take cities is warfare.)
I agree meaningful tradeoffs are important, and this is the one I'm working on: the relative success of
pirates vs ninjas builders vs warmongers.
CiV favors warmongers more than earlier versions of the series, especially due to the removal of war weariness. Science is also based off population now, which favors warmongers. From what I've seen in discussions, a warmonger is typically going to be more successful than a builder. I suspect this inequity isn't very fun for former builders, though I'm a warmonger, so it'd be helpful if anyone's a builder and can give some thoughts on the subject.
Now back to the topic at hand. If income increases by X
/turn, but warmongers spend X
/turn more on upgrades and unit purchases, warmongers are unchanged while builders are buffed.
Yes we could keep our army less up-to-date, but there's that meaningful tradeoff - we'd be shifting from a warmonger track to a builder track, and would be less successful at warfare. This inherently means the builder track has been improved. Therefore, it's more likely for a builder to be as successful as a warmonger, and relative success among peers is a big fun factor. I don't want to make pure turtling a dramatically better strategy than warmongering though, of course.
I could improve national wonders further instead, but I like pursuing several small changes instead of one bigger one. I already added 3 national wonders and improved all national wonders by adding specialist slots. Now I'm exploring economic buffs for builders. Yes, the balance might not be quite right yet... but that's why it's a development version, not a release version.
etc) are:
adjacent to rivers. What I do is add +1
