Bring back the specialist economy

[Archon_Wing]

If we believe how Civ 6 works, basically people toil on farms and mines (mostly mines) forever. There's not much room for scientists and engineers.

Currently, there is very little reason to actually grow cities as long as they hold the districts you want and the tiles you want to work. Improvements are pretty weak IMO and that's another topic, but older civ games had better ways of you of taking advantage of population that's not tied to the land.

The problem is they moved GPP to the buildings and the amount of citizen slots is not much (only 1 per building).

I think it'd be a good idea to buff the amount of citizen slots and maybe adjusting specialist yields by a bit. This would be better than just straight up buffing specailists and making it better for you to grow cities.

The disadvantage of course is the added micromanagement requiirement but the auto function already does an adequate amount, and "focus science " seems to work.

I think this would be a much better solution for catering to people that want to build huge cities, and certainly much better than "I liek playing tall, you should be kicked in the groin every time you capture a city"

 

[Myomoto]

Yes, please! I don't think I've ever assigned citizens to districts while playing VI, the yields are worthless.

 

[Mr Jon of Cheam]

It's a good point, I liked specialists in V but never assign them in VI. A few small tweaks would give you a decent incentive and potentially lead to more specialised cities, e.g one with lots of science specialists, one with merchants, etc. I wondered whether it might be interesting to have the benefit of specialists tied to adjacency, thereby encouraging well placed districts rather than city and campus spam.

 

[Magil]

If they would ever add modifiers to the modding part of the game to allow us to dynamically alter the yields of specialists I would've written a mod for this kind of thing long ago. As is it's possible to buff the base yields so they're somewhat usable, and there's even a table to allow them to make Great Person Points again, but without the ability to dynamically affect their yields with policies and the like I never saw much point.

Maybe it's possible to do via scripting or something but I dunno. I'm not a super experienced modder, always just used the xml/sql stuff. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than I will chime in on that.

 

[darkace77450]

I don't care what they do as long as they do something to incentivize the use of specialist slots.

 

[ExtremeGardens]

Maybe they could give +X% modifier to their yield, as well as the flat bonus? Like a scientist would give +3 science and +1% overall for the city (with policies maybe increasing that).

I think you would start using them heavily at high population anyway, so this would be a nice way to reward a bustling metropolitan city.

 

[bbbt]

From my understanding they do contribute effectively for something like a speed science victory (i.e. lots of cities, chop out campus district and buildings, assign folks as specialists and freeze growth), but that's about it. And thats not terribly interesting imho.

My vote would be to give them adjacency bonuses for neighboring districts. So say for a campus bordering a holy site and an IZ, the campus specialist would be +2 science, +1 faith, +1 prod. And the prod specialist would get +1 science etc.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Here's what I'd suggest of the top of my head

Scientists: 2 Science. (+1 science @ Scientific Theory)
Priests: 2 faith, 1 production, 1 gold (+1 faith @ Reformed Church, +1 faith with Grandmaster's Chapel)
Artists: 2 culture (+1 culture @ Humanism, +1 culture @ Opera and Ballet,+1 gold +1 culture @ Cultural Heritage)
Engineers: +3 production (+1 production at Guilds, + 1 production @ Mass Production, +1 Production @ Electricity, +1 production @ Communism, +1 production @Robotics)
Commanders: +2 Production, +1 culture (+1 culture @ Nationalism, +1 production @ Rapid Deployment)
Harbor: +1 Science, +3 gold-- (+1 gold @ Naval Tradition, +2 gold @ Economics, +1 production @ Globalization)
Merchants +6 Gold (+1 gold @ Mercantile Legacy, +1 Gold @ Merchant Republic, +2 gold @ banking, +2 gold @ Economics, +3 gold @ Globalization)

Districts give 1 slot per 5 population (except entertainment complex)
The Street Carnival gives slots for artists and engineers for every 5 pop.
t2 buildings provide 2 slots
T3 buildings provide 4

Throw in some wonders that benefit specialists. Probably those useless religious ones.

Scientists are already useful so I don't think they need that much of a buff, and I think blue/purple districts are already too good early as well.

EDIT: Actually Harbor/Merchant specialists don't seem that bad...

 

[AriochIV]

Yes, please! I don't think I've ever assigned citizens to districts while playing VI, the yields are worthless.

Same. It's weird to have a system that is almost complete unused, even by the AI.

 

[UWHabs]

I still don't understand why they didn't make it setup like on most board games (like Puerto Rico, for example), where you need citizens in a district to actually get the yields out.

You may need to rebalance building yields, but it also means that population points matter, since you need them working every building, and you need to make sure you actually have enough farms working to support the city itself. So if you build a campus in a city of size 1, you need to decide - do you actually want to work the campus, or do you want to work the fields to grow?

Whether this would also apply to city centre buildings would be another thing, and you would almost certainly need to add some extra food in the early game. But it really would make a lot of sense.

If not that, then I think at the very least, specialist yields should probably increase with the number that are either available and used. So, for example, a library gives 1 scientist spot who is worth 2 science. If you build a university, then you have 2 scientist spots worth, say, 4 each. Build a research lab, and now you have 3 scientist spots worth 6 each. Maybe at a tech like urbanization you double the number of specialist spots available. Would definitely better symbolize an urbanized environment to literally have your citizens working in cities and districts.

 

[Tomice]

Same. It's weird to have a system that is almost complete unused, even by the AI.

Exactly. It probably only made it into the game to avoid a horsehockystorm before release ("they've cut a traditional feature" and "the game is dumbed down")

 

[Tomice]

Actually, what would happen if a citizen would give 3 science or 4 production - would it break anything? Would it be viable? And if yes, how long?

Are specialist yields boosted by cards that boost building yields like rationalism?

 

[Arent11]

If we believe how Civ 6 works, basically people toil on farms and mines (mostly mines) forever. There's not much room for scientists and engineers.

Currently, there is very little reason to actually grow cities as long as they hold the districts you want and the tiles you want to work. Improvements are pretty weak IMO and that's another topic, but older civ games had better ways of you of taking advantage of population that's not tied to the land.

The problem is they moved GPP to the buildings and the amount of citizen slots is not much (only 1 per building).

I think it'd be a good idea to buff the amount of citizen slots and maybe adjusting specialist yields by a bit. This would be better than just straight up buffing specailists and making it better for you to grow cities.

The disadvantage of course is the added micromanagement requiirement but the auto function already does an adequate amount, and "focus science " seems to work.

I think this would be a much better solution for catering to people that want to build huge cities, and certainly much better than "I liek playing tall, you should be kicked in the groin every time you capture a city"

Simple: Just make your buildings/districts similar to terrain. They give you nothing at all, unless you work the "tiles", or, more specifically, the buildings. Additional buildings in the districts might give you several slots to work and make the tiles more and more effective.

You could even program the city AI to automatically adjust them (They do already for ziggurats after all). So you wouldn't even have to micromanage, if you don't want to be absolutely efficient.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Simple: Just make your buildings/districts similar to terrain. They give you nothing at all, unless you work the "tiles", or, more specifically, the buildings. Additional buildings in the districts might give you several slots to work and make the tiles more and more effective.

You could even program the city AI to automatically adjust them (They do already for ziggurats after all). So you wouldn't even have to micromanage, if you don't want to be absolutely efficient.

Now that Builders cost charges, I think the game is at a point where the use of Population could be flipped: external improvements like farms, mines, etc., could all produce automatically (the way some do now, though not the basic production ones), while buildings are the things that need Population to operate.

Your city's Population then becomes the size of it's urban population, which is marginally more intuitive, and you avoid the current 1st Population = 2 Population problem that has contributed to the value of Infinite City Spam since forever. Having more cities still give you more buildings, but larger cities can work more and more sophisticated buildings that, together with districts, both give you specialization and reward the investment in growing larger.

 

[fail-deadly-]

I agree that it's weird and that specialists should have to work the districts to get the yields out of them, with adjacency bonuses modifying the work.

 

[playshogi]

The incentive to use the existing specialist slots is to prevent city growth. For example, I'm on a major conquering spree in my current game and I can't afford my cities to grow as this would create an amenity problem.

 

[Sostratus]

All specialists yielding 2 flat yield was kind of a silly idea. They also have what I would consider to be inconsistent yield conversions with specialists vs what you see in, eg, terrain & chopping.
According to luxury and bonus resources, 1 science/culture/faith=3 gold; 1 food/prod = 2 gold. With specialists, 1 of everything equals 1 of everything else, which equals 2 gold.
I would rather see specialists adopt the terrain valuation system, and then have specialists' yield all set to be some uniform amount of equivalent gold. I also think all specialists should give 1 GPP of their type.

Example: (very in line with Archon's post)
Scientist 2 science
Artist 2 culture
Priest 3-4 faith*
Merchant 6 gold
Engineer 3 production
Drill sergeant 2 production, 1 culture
Harbor dude 2 production, 2 gold or 1/4
*Empirically faith is less valuable than science, so i'd give our priest more.

Okay, then we do something else: we take the district adjacency cards and we make them also double the yield for the relevant specialist. Presumably, if you are focusing one yield, you are also prioritizing the adjacency of those districts. So there's a trade off or pressure to eventually get you to want to run both cards for a district, instead of slotting rationalism after universities and calling it a day.
We maybe even add some stuff like a religion wonder that gives priests +1 science and culture. where my civ4 priest economy at Then a city with a little extra population (3) could just focus on the relevant district and basically double its efficacy. (Library+uni=6 science; 2 scientists under the card would = 8 science.) I admit that I like how buildings all give one specialist slot, but maybe this could be expanded to make early specialist economies viable- grant all districts +2 slots. Then you'd end up with 5 total.
A late game policy to grant +5% yield per specialist slotted in a city would be neat too.

Alternatively, I've seen people propose each building in the district adds a point of yield to the specialists, so a library makes them +3 science and a research lab pushes them to +5, which isn't a bad idea either. My goal for specialists is to emphasize the value of food and housing, and achieve this by changing how population affects yield. 3 population anywhere supports one district and its flat yield buildings right now. Adding more does nothing for your outputs. If 6 population could give you double or more output, then you've got a massive incentive to stack on a marginal citizen. It's much cheaper to have a group of size 13 cities focusing scientists than twice the number of size 10 cities with empty campus slots.

 

[pokiehl]

Firaxis may be planning on having Specialists generate GreatPersonPoints again. There's an unused table in the database called District_CitizenGreatPersonPoints (cf. District_CitizenYieldChanges). Maybe this'll come with GS.

I'm pretty sure it works when you add your own values to it.

I've been interested in making a mod for this for a while. So if you guys can think of a good buff to specialist yields + appropriate GPPs, I'd be very happy I'm not sure where I personally think is a good balance so other opinions are great.

 

[criZp]

Firaxis may be planning on having Specialists generate GreatPersonPoints again. There's an unused table in the database called District_CitizenGreatPersonPoints (cf. District_CitizenYieldChanges). Maybe this'll come with GS.

I'm pretty sure it works when you add your own values to it.

I've been interested in making a mod for this for a while. So if you guys can think of a good buff to specialist yields + appropriate GPPs, I'd be very happy I'm not sure where I personally think is a good balance so other opinions are great.

CitizenGreatPeoplePoints doesn't work properly, if you set a slot to give 1 GPP then it will give 0, while if you set it to give 2 GPP it will actually give you 2.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

CitizenGreatPeoplePoints doesn't work properly, if you set a slot to give 1 GPP then it will give 0, while if you set it to give 2 GPP it will actually give you 2.

1 is the new 0

It's all the rage.