Best elements of Civ 6 that should be retained

[ManoftheHour333]

I'm literally suggesting no gameplay changes at all; I'm only suggesting making the districts represent visually what they're already representing in the game: small satellite cities of the urban center.

Oh lol. Huh I guess I never thought of it that way. In my eyes, a district of a city that specializes in a certain attribute (culture/scienc/etc.) just to me doesn't take up as much land as say, a mountain or a massive plantation. The acropolis of Athens is small yet is wasn't it's own city-just a place for administrative, cultural, and religious activity. That was how I viewed them...just parts of the city. And yeah having a huge city represent multiple principalities or smaller subdivisions isn't ideal, but it simplifies gameplay IMO

 

[Zaarin]

Oh lol. Huh I guess I never thought of it that way. In my eyes, a district of a city that specializes in a certain attribute (culture/scienc/etc.) just to me doesn't take up as much land as say, a mountain or a massive plantation. The acropolis of Athens is small yet is wasn't it's own city-just a place for administrative, cultural, and religious activity. That was how I viewed them...just parts of the city. And yeah having a huge city represent multiple principalities or smaller subdivisions isn't ideal, but it simplifies gameplay IMO

Yeah, it's consistently how the devs have described districts, but the artists have definitely failed to get that idea across. In general I've kind of felt there was a disconnect between the art team and other designers--and maybe not the greatest leadership in the art department given how wildly the leaders vary in stylistic choices. Hopefully they can tighten that up for the next iteration.

 

[ManoftheHour333]

It was explained by devs, and I basically repeated in my post here: you need to break the concept of Civ cities as "cities" and treat them more as provinces: There is an administrative center (the "city"), and then there is different supporting quarters/hamlets/towns/sites (the "districts"), which depend on the city center for government / administration / community. Military it works, because if you conquer the citadel/city center the different districts should then gets its administrative support from you and not from the former owner (altough I won't object a more dinamic management of districts, with the option to re-assign them to different cities), and probalby the district inhabitants have fleed nevertheless to the city center for protection...

As @Zaarin said, it is not matter of making a district a city on its own, but a matter to make it easy to underestand visually a city represents a full province, with several urban centers, with the one named the city the being "core" one, to which all others are satellites.

Thanks-I hate it.

Interesting as this revelation makes my respect for Civ VI's district devs go down slightly XD. Just my opinion of course but if the devs were actually trying to have districts represent other mini urban centers...they've failed horribly. I don't ever plan my cities in a way that I would be cogniscent of that and am actively annoyed when my "urban centers" are further away from each other. I just asked 2 other civ-playing friends of mine and they've never thought that is what is was trying to represent either. The game is graphically and strategically designed to make you think that these are "quarters" of the city and rewards you (minorly) for having them closer to other districts. If these were truly other urban centers, why wouldn't they be separate things to manage? Why would they be so tied to the city/administrative center?

It also makes sense as parts of a city. If civ was trying to model this style of system they should not be calling these urban centers with city names. If anything it sounds like a county/province like you say. But that also isn't nearly as fun and the fact that civ was trying to go in that direction over just logically making better planned out cities is not to my liking. Maybe it's just me but I don't care as much about the scale of the map and minute details of where exactly all my population and yield come from...I'd rather just have nicely unstacked cities. Making provinces of cities just throws up a bunch of red flags. I dunno this just makes me think that this grand way of trying to represent something really in-depth was done needlessly and confusingly...but ain't that Civ VI in a nutshell.

 

[pokiehl]

I think districts should require another adjacent district to be placed, and they should autogenerate many more smaller building models than they current do. This would really make huge cities feel sprawling and grand.

 

[Zaarin]

Thanks-I hate it.

Interesting as this revelation makes my respect for Civ VI's district devs go down slightly XD. Just my opinion of course but if the devs were actually trying to have districts represent other mini urban centers...they've failed horribly. I don't ever plan my cities in a way that I would be cogniscent of that and am actively annoyed when my "urban centers" are further away from each other. I just asked 2 other civ-playing friends of mine and they've never thought that is what is was trying to represent either. The game is graphically and strategically designed to make you think that these are "quarters" of the city and rewards you (minorly) for having them closer to other districts. If these were truly other urban centers, why wouldn't they be separate things to manage? Why would they be so tied to the city/administrative center?

It also makes sense as parts of a city. If civ was trying to model this style of system they should not be calling these urban centers with city names. If anything it sounds like a county/province like you say. But that also isn't nearly as fun and the fact that civ was trying to go in that direction over just logically making better planned out cities is not to my liking. Maybe it's just me but I don't care as much about the scale of the map and minute details of where exactly all my population and yield come from...I'd rather just have nicely unstacked cities. Making provinces of cities just throws up a bunch of red flags. I dunno this just makes me think that this grand way of trying to represent something really in-depth was done needlessly and confusingly...but ain't that Civ VI in a nutshell.

To be fair, it's always been implicit that the cities you see on the map are only your most important urban centers, not every city in your empire; Civ6 just attempted to make it explicit--granted, in the most fumbling, obtuse way possible.

I think districts should require another adjacent district to be placed, and they should autogenerate many more smaller building models than they current do. This would really make huge cities feel sprawling and grand.

I didn't want this before HK. I want it even less since HK. Except the generating more small buildings. That part I'm all for. Really, districts need an art overhaul to look more like cities and less like...whatever they were going for and to look more like they belong to their proper civ.

 

[ManoftheHour333]

Yeah, it's consistently how the devs have described districts, but the artists have definitely failed to get that idea across. In general I've kind of felt there was a disconnect between the art team and other designers--and maybe not the greatest leadership in the art department given how wildly the leaders vary in stylistic choices. Hopefully they can tighten that up for the next iteration.

Maybe the "conceptual" devs but even the gameplay and naming schemes make this seem to be about city design. If these were urban centers discrete from the city center we wouldn't have a campus we would have a "college town". We wouldn't have an industrial zone (ffs zone as in city zoning?) we'd have an industrial or manufacturing core. And this is only compounded with the art style looking better and more "flowing into each other" if you put your districts near each other.

Like I said, I lean heavily into what the devs were not going for...and that concerns me for Civ VII.

 

[pokiehl]

I didn't want this before HK. I want it even less since HK. Except the generating more small buildings. That part I'm all for. Really, districts need an art overhaul to look more like cities and less like...whatever they were going for and to look more like they belong to their proper civ.

I understand your point but I disagree entirely. I don’t think districts have ever been intended to represent cities and having them do so would be a big mistake to me.

 

[ManoftheHour333]

To be fair, it's always been implicit that the cities you see on the map are only your most important urban centers, not every city in your empire; Civ6 just attempted to make it explicit--granted, in the most fumbling, obtuse way possible.


I didn't want this before HK. I want it even less since HK. Except the generating more small buildings. That part I'm all for. Really, districts need an art overhaul to look more like cities and less like...whatever they were going for and to look more like they belong to their proper civ.

I mean, that was always obvious from improvements. Farms meant rural settlements, fishing boats represented small seaside communities...districts were just ways of unstacking cities and giving them more character/clarity/depth. What the heck is the role of improvements then? Should we just have a "farming" district that represents a rural area?

I would much rather improvements be improved throughout the game to represent "urban centers" (i.e. a farm can be later improved to a farming community etc.) as the city's population grows. Ideally, this improvement wouldn't cost a builder charge and could allow for autobuilding to return-reducing bloat midgame and making it easier for the AI to improve stuff.

I'd keen districts as just adjacent/nearby parts of the city...oi vey this way to looking at them is giving me the ruinations...

 

[Zaarin]

Maybe the "conceptual" devs but even the gameplay and naming schemes make this seem to be about city design. If these were urban centers discrete from the city center we wouldn't have a campus we would have a "college town". We wouldn't have an industrial zone (ffs zone as in city zoning?) we'd have an industrial or manufacturing core. And this is only compounded with the art style looking better and more "flowing into each other" if you put your districts near each other.

Like I said, I lean heavily into what the devs were not going for...and that concerns me for Civ VII.

Yes, as in just about everything Civ6 tried, what we got was a muddled mess that more or less does the opposite of what the devs intended. I love Civ6 to pieces, but the game has so many incoherent pieces. I really, really feel like the devs had a lot of fun but maybe needed some stronger central leadership all around--someone to make the pieces all work together.

I understand your point but I disagree entirely. I don’t think districts have ever been intended to represent cities and having them do so would be a big mistake to me.

It seems like Civ7 (assuming it keeps districts, which seems almost certain as Civ6's most popular feature) has two choices if it wants to make districts look better: make it more explicit that they are separate from their city center or make cities sprawl like in HK. The sprawl looks bad. It doesn't make sense in the early game; it just looks unreadable and ugly in the late game (granted, that's HK in a nutshell and not necessarily a pitfall for Civ7--even so). IMO districts either need to be scrapped and packed back into the city (which would be a shame) or else made explicitly separate from the city.

 

[ManoftheHour333]

Yes, as in just about everything Civ6 tried, what we got was a muddled mess that more or less does the opposite of what the devs intended. I love Civ6 to pieces, but the game has so many incoherent pieces. I really, really feel like the devs had a lot of fun but maybe needed some stronger central leadership all around--someone to make the pieces all work together.


It seems like Civ7 (assuming it keeps districts, which seems almost certain as Civ6's most popular feature) has two choices if it wants to make districts look better: make it more explicit that they are separate from their city center or make cities sprawl like in HK. The sprawl looks bad. It doesn't make sense in the early game; it just looks unreadable and ugly in the late game (granted, that's HK in a nutshell and not necessarily a pitfall for Civ7--even so). IMO districts either need to be scrapped and packed back into the city (which would be a shame) or else made explicitly separate from the city.

Agreed on Civ VI overall. Still a net positive but the experience-particularly in MP-leaves a lot to be desired. A lot of great ideas that start out great in the early eras of the game but just become a mess later on that no one wants to play through...also agreed on that they needed more of a "singular" vision for the game to be great. But with Anton leaving and assumingly Ed not leading VII...who knows what's going on at Firaxis. And given the bare bones that this leader pack has shown it has me worried even more about split leadership making decisions without the understanding across subdivided dev teams.

Again I don't know HK so I can't comment fully but I think the easiest way to go about this would be to keep city specialty districts adjacent to the city center and/or another district. Give bonuses to keep players to clump districts and wonders near these city centers. The next step would be to expand the role of builders. Sure you can keep their charges when terraforming tiles into different types (Production-mines/quarry/lumbermill, Farming-pasture/cropfield) or removing features but they should get to construct free improvements on theses tiles that make these into mini "urban centers". Like make just a mine to begin with, but with culture/science alter on, a mine with some houses around it...a mining town. And increased yields can represent that. One city's citizens would still "work" that tile but it would be more like a tax collector over a group of people working the farms/mines/etc.. This makes more sense as the smaller hamlets wouldn't be devoted to science/indsutry/commerce/culture/faith as it apparently is but huddled around small industries. I think it would more naturally represent going from urban areas to fields than having a random research lab surrounded by fields. Just my 2 cents but that is what 7 should strive for (As districts were popular yet cumbersome to place late game) and I think optimizing all of this means keep them close and keep them to the city.

 

[Josephias]

I understand your point but I disagree entirely. I don’t think districts have ever been intended to represent cities and having them do so would be a big mistake to me.

I'm afraid Ed Beach disagrees . Filnally I had to look for and bring this interview to the discussion.

GamesBeat: I have a bit of trouble with sense of scale. Now it seems like it’s thrown off a little. All of a sudden everything is spreading out across a continent. If my army’s on this side, and the barbarians are over here, it’s gonna take two centuries to walk over here and fight them.

Beach: That’s true. It’s something I’ve had to come to terms with as well. I live in the mid-Atlantic area. If you think of Washington DC as the city for that area, there are lots of regional pieces nearby. Norfolk might be the harbor. That’s where the Navy is based. There are great universities like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. That might be the campus district. West Virginia is where all the mining goes, a couple of tiles away. That might be the industrial zone. If you think about it in those terms, it’s okay. I’m not saying it’s perfect. It’s still an abstraction, for sure.

 

[pokiehl]

I'm afraid Ed Beach disagrees . Filnally I had to look for and bring this interview to the discussion.

Sounds like an off-the-cuff way of retroactively trying to make sense of an admittedly strange abstraction. Certainly nothing in the gameplay, visuals, or game design screams that districts are their own settlements.

It seems like Civ7 (assuming it keeps districts, which seems almost certain as Civ6's most popular feature) has two choices if it wants to make districts look better: make it more explicit that they are separate from their city center or make cities sprawl like in HK. The sprawl looks bad. It doesn't make sense in the early game; it just looks unreadable and ugly in the late game (granted, that's HK in a nutshell and not necessarily a pitfall for Civ7--even so). IMO districts either need to be scrapped and packed back into the city (which would be a shame) or else made explicitly separate from the city.

I think the sprawl looks phenomenal in HK. It's literally the best part of the game's visual style to me. The cities look so much more impressive than the disjointed blocks of Civ 6.

 

[ManoftheHour333]

Sounds like an off-the-cuff way of retroactively trying to make sense of an admittedly strange abstraction. Certainly nothing the gameplay, visuals, or game design screams that districts are their own settlements.


I think the sprawl looks phenomenal in HK. It's literally the best part of the game's visual style to me. The cities look so much more impressive than the disjointed blocks of Civ 6.

That's what I (And I think Zaarin) were saying! If this was really the case it makes no sense. I think honestly the dev team had 2 different ideas for city building and they just put both in the game without telling anything to the artists beyond "make cartoony campus". Minor changes to the visual style and gameplay (Separating smaller urban areas to improvements and restricting district placement) would do wonders in actually making sense of this while streamlining the game. There just needs to be a way to automate builders and reduce the amount of options for district placement...for both the player and AIs sake.

It's just frustrating since I think the devs just didn't want to limit the player so they kept adding more and more options (Part of VIs charm is finding ways to "break" the game) but that just hurt the AI and lategame...we'll have to see how they mold Civ VII.

 

[Zaarin]

I think the sprawl looks phenomenal in HK. It's literally the best part of the game's visual style to me. The cities look so much more impressive than the disjointed blocks of Civ 6.

I hate it. It looks cluttered and illegible; nothing in HK looks grand to me. TBH the chief lesson I want Civ7 to take from HK...is to do everything the exact opposite way HK did it. (Hmm, maybe take some notes from HK's diplomacy. That wasn't bad, certainly better than Civ6.)

 

[Josephias]

Sounds like an off-the-cuff way of retroactively trying to make sense of an admittedly strange abstraction. Certainly nothing the gameplay, visuals, or game design screams that districts are their own settlements.

I could go the other way around and say the way the districts look is retroactively trying to make them well identifiable in the map, because mixing the district buildings with other buildings made it hard to detect what was going on.

Moreover, there is a concious design decision to allow you to spread districts, and there is a conscious desing decision to favour placing them together (most districts get minor adjacencies for other districts), so close cities, as well as spread cities are somewat modelled in the game (with spread settlements favored/forced in specific cultural cases -> Gaul, Korea's Seowons, and compact settlements favored in other cases -> Japan).

Indeed already the more "city-dweller" oriented districts (CH and TS) favour being near the city center and/or other districts, while the ones that favour other locations are IZ (being near resources) and Campus/Holy Site. I do not know all the world configurations, but were I live, the Industrial Zones are not right next to where the houses are (you normally need to move to them by car, or commute). And regarding Universities and Holy Sites, while they may be located in populated areas, there are as well plenty of examples were Scholars/Monks favour more secluded, calm areas were they are not disturbed, so they are not either the kind of site that needs to be right next to the city center.

Summing up, making up a strict rule to favour a specific type of urban sprawl is nothing I thing adds to the game: there is already rules that favour being next to the city center as well as rules that favour searching other places, and this is fine as part of the gameplay. Anything in the lines of tweaking these numbers might be good, anything that forces a specific gameplay for just a specific idea on how it should be, I don't think so.


PD: If historically had forced districts being next to city center houses, Athens would have never been a naval power (note there was a 10km wall corridor uniting the city to the, probably thrice or for times the city diameter at that time) . Period

 

[Leucarum]

I didn't want this before HK. I want it even less since HK.

The more restrictive quarter placement/volume of quarters/adjacency bonuses mainly coming from quarters in HK really destroyed the optimization puzzle. As well as looking indistinct, a lot of the challenge in laying out a city was lost.

I feel like all districts being adjacent is maybe a monkey paw 'careful what you wish for' situation.

 

[pokiehl]

PD: If historically had forced districts being next to city center houses, Athens would have never been a naval power (note there was a 10km wall corridor uniting the city to the, probably thrice or for times the city diameter at that time) . Period

In the system from Humankind I’m referring to, harbors are exempt from the adjacent district requirement and you can build districts off of harbors.

 

[Zaarin]

In the system from Humankind I’m referring to, harbors are exempt from the adjacent district requirement and you can build districts off of harbors.

Building quarters adjacent to harbors had been patched out the last time I played.

 

[ManoftheHour333]

In the system from Humankind I’m referring to, harbors are exempt from the adjacent district requirement and you can build districts off of harbors.

Unpopular opinion but harbors shouldn't be allowed to be constructed unless connected by districts to the city center. A hot take but naval warfare/ coastal cities needs to be a thing. Athens doing that is a very VERY niche case when ~60% of humanity lives directly by the coast...

 

[Zaarin]

Unpopular opinion but harbors shouldn't be allowed to be constructed unless connected by districts to the city center. A hot take but naval warfare/ coastal cities needs to be a thing. Athens doing that is a very VERY niche case when ~60% of humanity lives directly by the coast...

Athens isn't a niche case, though. Rome, London, and many other major cities enjoy the benefits of being a naval center without the dangers of building directly on the coast.