At first I thought UIs are rubbish

[OmegaDestroyer]

speaking of city-states, I'm in love with Cahokia mounds. That sounds kinda weird. Oh well. Definitely worth getting 1 or 2 (with natural history) in a city. I haven't had the opportunity to work with Nasca lines yet.

Cahokia mounds are fantastic. The gold is nice but the housing is a major boon.

To me, any UI that gives housing, culture, or science is a major plus. The UIs that can be placed on poor tiles, are incredible (Kampungs, outback stations, etc.).

 

[Stilgar08]

Some of them really suck, though e.g sphinx and chateau.

Great Wall is easily the worst unique improvement....

Wait for Patch day, Ladies and Gentleman

 

[kaspergm]

Wait for Patch day, Ladies and Gentleman

Not going to change much.

Chateau almost got a circumstantial nerf by the changes - it was 2 culture, 1 appeal, +2 culture if adjancent to wonder, +1 gold if adjacent to luxury. Now it's +1 gold for each adjacent luxury - which is a boost - but only +1 culture for each adjacent wonder, which means you actually needs to adjacent wonders to match the old yields, and needs a very unlikely 3 adjacent wonders to surpass old yields.

Sphinx is changed from +1 appeal to +2 appeal (yay?) and gets +1 culture if build on floodplains, which would give it a total of 2 culture/1 faith on floodplains without adjacent wonder, which is pretty meh, and 2 culture/3 faith when on floodplains adjacent to a wonder, which starts to look appealing.

Great wall gains the ability not to be destroyed (but still pillaged) by natural disasters, with no other changes, which still makes the great wall the single biggest missed opportunity at an awesome game feature.

Only the Mission really seems to get a decent boost, with the +1 food and +1 production on foreign continents apart from the faith and possible science if adjacent to campus and holy sites makes it very good under these circumstances.

 

[Pietato]

Wait for Patch day, Ladies and Gentleman

Sarcasm?

 

[Aristos]

Sarcasm?

Has to be.

 

[Stilgar08]

Not going to change much.

Chateau almost got a circumstantial nerf by the changes - it was 2 culture, 1 appeal, +2 culture if adjancent to wonder, +1 gold if adjacent to luxury. Now it's +1 gold for each adjacent luxury - which is a boost - but only +1 culture for each adjacent wonder, which means you actually needs to adjacent wonders to match the old yields, and needs a very unlikely 3 adjacent wonders to surpass old yields.

Sphinx is changed from +1 appeal to +2 appeal (yay?) and gets +1 culture if build on floodplains, which would give it a total of 2 culture/1 faith on floodplains without adjacent wonder, which is pretty meh, and 2 culture/3 faith when on floodplains adjacent to a wonder, which starts to look appealing.

Great wall gains the ability not to be destroyed (but still pillaged) by natural disasters, with no other changes, which still makes the great wall the single biggest missed opportunity at an awesome game feature.

Only the Mission really seems to get a decent boost, with the +1 food and +1 production on foreign continents apart from the faith and possible science if adjacent to campus and holy sites makes it very good under these circumstances.

Sarcasm?

Has to be.

whoa, don't jump on me! We are still taking UImprovement here, not gamebreaker. Changes are more or less minor but for the good IMO. And placement restrictions apply to All of the improvements so I'm more or less fine with them. To me (and many on these forums it seems) FXS approaches Changes often too cautiously, not shaking up things greatly. Let's wait for the real impact when actually playing the game.
I'm bored of min/maxing so if you're coming from that side I guess I get your complaints but I won't share them.

So we agree on Mission I assume.

Sphinx: +2appeal can help in some occasions (neighbourhoods, sea ressorts, to a limited degree adjacent natural parcs...). Flood resistance means no repair and for the flavour it's good, too. So personally I'm good. Egypt received slight buffs lately and here is another one. Fine.

GW to me always was ok. I tend not to build 10+tiles of it but where it fits... It is very situational and China is doing good without GW, so that might be another thing.. Interestingly enough with the new map generation I tend to build more than before. So having them less likely to get destroyed is nice.

I had the impression Chateaus will get more tourism later, isn't that the case? Arguably more of a slight move to the side instead of forward...

 

[Victoria]

I used to quite like UI’s. One of my first GS games I built the Rapa Nui statues around a 1 tile lake and they were +4 each, really nice but not always lakes around. It felt good, like AI had achieved something nice and cool. Then I discovers you can put them everywhere and each adjacent gives +1 culture so one 7 charge builder can make a 7 cluster for 31 culture making a mockery of the Great Wall and all other civ culture UI’s.
What is worse is in a game I will go to use my builder and have a choice between statues, Alcazars, Cahokia mounds, colossal heads. I can fill my lands with junk statues without having a UI myself.
Toys toys and more toys. These UI’s used to be rarer to get and less strong. Now they are plastic toys making plastic mountains all over the land.
These things have also degraded monuments to the point where 1 game where I Amani’d Rapa Nui I did not build a monument anywhere but the first one in my cap.

To be fair a monument is just that, another stone statue but it is the spammed level of these that has become insane irregardless of whether it is your choice to do so or not because... it is in fact better to.

 

[Pietato]

Chateau was nerfed...

 

[Victoria]

Chateau was nerfed...

Yeah, they listen well. Why have a chateau when you have Rapa Nui on the board.

 

[Pietato]

Yeah, they listen well. Why have a chateau when you have Rapa Nui on the board.

Yeah, the buffed city-state UIs crush most of the old ones. It is just...weird. Why do they not see how bad some of these things are, or how weak some civs are? If I was the balance guy, I would be ashamed at poor balance.

 

[kaspergm]

whoa, don't jump on me! We are still taking UImprovement here, not gamebreaker. Changes are more or less minor but for the good IMO. And placement restrictions apply to All of the improvements so I'm more or less fine with them. To me (and many on these forums it seems) FXS approaches Changes often too cautiously, not shaking up things greatly. Let's wait for the real impact when actually playing the game.
I'm bored of min/maxing so if you're coming from that side I guess I get your complaints but I won't share them.

So we agree on Mission I assume.

Sphinx: +2appeal can help in some occasions (neighbourhoods, sea ressorts, to a limited degree adjacent natural parcs...). Flood resistance means no repair and for the flavour it's good, too. So personally I'm good. Egypt received slight buffs lately and here is another one. Fine.

GW to me always was ok. I tend not to build 10+tiles of it but where it fits... It is very situational and China is doing good without GW, so that might be another thing.. Interestingly enough with the new map generation I tend to build more than before. So having them less likely to get destroyed is nice.

I had the impression Chateaus will get more tourism later, isn't that the case? Arguably more of a slight move to the side instead of forward...

No intention to jump on you, just wanted to point out that imo. these improvements still fall in the below-average group.

With regardes to Sphinx and Chateau, I'd like some more incentive to build them here-and-now. The tourism and appeal later might be nice, but we're talking about something that becomes relevant 3 or 4 eras after the improvement unlocks. It feels sad to have a unique slot occupied by something as iconic and the sphinx, and then never really building any until perhaps much later in the game. Arguably in Civ6 food is less valuable than in Civ5, but still I feel often you'll have to sacrifice prime spots to squeeze in these improvements for very little yield.

With regards to the Great Wall, like I said, I feel it's one of the biggest missed opportunity in the game. They have all the game logistics to make so many cool things with it, and they just passed them over. The super-deluxe version would be to make it act a bit like the Encampment district, i.e. give each tile some fortification health and restrict movement across it until the section is broken. A less advanced twist on the same would have it work like river, i.e. it requires full movement to step across. Then there's the restriction that you need to place it on a border tile, which I can follow the logic behind, but it's just so frustratingly cumbersome to time it so that it actually works to your advantage. In terms of yields, obviously you need linked segments for the yields to add up, but this also means you need to sacrifice a large number of tiles for it, which is a pretty huge cost, because it will work heavily against farm and district adjacency planning. Again, a cool way to work around this would have again to look towards rivers and have the feature place between hexes rather than occupy hexes (and then give a minor yield to adjacent hexes), but again they didn't choose to go that way.

 

[S1AL]

The "buffs" to UI in the upcoming patch really highlight how incredibly bad Firaxis is at balance, and seemingly at understanding what players want/how the game actually works.

Chateau and Mission changes are a net nerf (Mission was getting 2 science if adjacent to a campus). Buffing the inconsistent aspect of the improvement (foreign continent bonus) is a really odd choice, especially given how the civ is already a huge dice roll for power level based on continent split.

Great Wall change doesn't fix the things about it that matter.

Sphinx is largely meaningless since the practical use of rivers is building districts on them.

Golf Course is still terrible.

Nubian Pyramid is still terrible.

Kurgan is still terrible.

Chemamull is still terrible because you can't place it anywhere.

And the strange thing is that they clearly realize how terrible these are because all the GS improvements are so much better. Not to mention things like Mekewap. But instead of good, significant changes, we get things like "+1 culture on floodplains". Compare/contrast with the savage butchery of Maori*.

Heck, even the updates to the old CS UI were mostly more substantial than these changes.

*Note: I play multiplayer, where Maori's yields were very cool and strong, but not broken at all; the double nerf on Toa, however, is just insane.

 

[Victoria]

How about this @S1AL ... makes a chateau nerf a kick in the face... certainly not what they call ‘balance’
Another look at Egypt

 

[S1AL]

How about this @S1AL ... makes a chateau nerf a kick in the face... certainly not what they call ‘balance’
Another look at Egypt

I replied there as well, with more detail.