Bring back the specialist economy

[rattatatouille]

Not to toot my own horn, but this is part of my District Overhaul mod. Districts and buildings no longer give GPPs at base, but specialists do. Also, in general, Tier 1 buildings get 1 specialist slot, Tier 2 buildings get 2 (though the Temple gets 3), and Tier 3 buildings get 2 (though Religious Buildings get 1). (I haven't touched UAs and beliefs like Divine Spark, however).

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.

See above. While @criZp has noted it's bugged, it does work, somewhat, and I've seen the AI use specialists to rush Great Prophets, so yeah.

 

[pokiehl]

Ah, thanks for the heads up guys!

 

[Temppu]

The previous iterations of Civ had much more to Specialists than good yields, e.g., Ideology bonuses for smaller food consumption and Policies boosting the yields. Anythings similar would require more than just buffing the yields.

Im not so much into speculating a third expansion yet, but maybe a theme focusing on urbanization and larger cities with Health, Ideologies, and Specialists is a possibility.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

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"

Been saying for ages that a proper specialist economy system would help balance wide vs tall. That & a return of the distance & # of cities multiplier for city costs.

 

[cvb]

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.

I'm virtually toying around with something similar, VARIABLE maintenance costs. Right now these are, as the yields, constants - modifiable, but CONSTANTs. Presumably that point of view won't change, even if we receive some of "the DLL sources".

Via Lua script you could be notified from the EventManager that GovernmentPolicyChanged, DistrictAddedToMap, DistrictPillaged, BuildingAddedToMap, CityWorkerChanged ... -events have occurred and based on that do your own calculations of the yields and then later @LocalPlayerTurnEnd or TurnEnd overwrite the game's values of accumulated yields with your "corrected" ones.

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).

With respect to science, culture etc. probably less would be more. Not so production.

Anyways you could have a look into the NQmod (https://github.com/notque/nqmod). In the file DistrictChanges/IndustrialZoneBuildingChanges.sql you can find SQL code for those changes:
--Reduce workshop flat production from 2 to 1 and give the city a 5% production bonus
--Reduce (elec) factory flat production from 3 to 2 and give the city a 15% production bonus
--Reduce power plant flat production from 4 to 3 and give the city a 25% production bonus

The project as a whole seems abandoned, but mentioned file could be a good starting point.

 

[fail-deadly-]

Archon_Wing and Sostratus I think both of your ideas are for specialist balance are really good and I would love to see something similar implemented. My only major change from either of your ideas would be to have specialists in both the encampment and government districts generate loyalty. So the encampment specialist would be +1 or 2 production and +1 loyalty, and the government district specialist would be +2 culture +1 loyalty.

Here is an idea that I think would also help increase the specialist economy. Let cities build multiple copies of all districts except the government district and aqueduct district. Keep the district population limit, or introduce the district population -1 for duplicate instances of a district, so that a city with 4 population would still be able to build less districts than a city with 10 population. Each copy of a district would require its own individual set of buildings. This would introduce a bit of complication because a player would need to pick which district would get a new building. However, since the overall amount of districts should be the same it should be too much of a burden. I say this because first, cities can already build multiple copies of neighborhoods. Second, it's not like a city can only build one farm or one mine. This would certainly encourage cities to specialize, so that you may have an industrial heartland city with 3-4 industrial zone districts (Guangzhou or Detroit could be a real world example), a holy city with several holy site districts (Mecca or Jerusalem could be a real world examples), a city with multiple entertainment districts and water parks (Orlando and possibly Dubai could be real world examples), and so on.

I think the trick would be to keep the multiplicative bonuses to a minimum and use more additive bonuses. So for example, if we examine three players - one use a skyscraper strategy which has six science districts in one city; one using a tall strategy which has six science districts in two cities; one using a wide strategy with six science districts in six cities - and all districts were fully upgraded and using max specialists, then I think the science outputs of all of the districts should be very similar. Wonders like Broadway, Kotoku-in, and Oxford University which provide a multiplicative bonus to a single city give me pause, but having a city with six fully upgraded theater square/holy site/campus districts and the wonder would probably be very difficult, especially on higher difficulties. However, Ruhr Valley and six Industrial Zones in a single city could easily be over powered. Amundsen-Scott Research Station on the other hand would be fine since it provides a bonus to all cities.

 

[WillowBrook]

Revising the specialist system is yet one more candidate for a future expansion, like they're revising the resource system in the upcoming one. I wouldn't be surprised if they've had plans to flesh it out from the start, but wanted to have other systems in place first, like the revised resource and new power systems.

At least, we can hope so.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Revising the specialist system is yet one more candidate for a future expansion, like they're revising the resource system in the upcoming one. I wouldn't be surprised if they've had plans to flesh it out from the start, but wanted to have other systems in place first, like the revised resource and new power systems.

The initial Resource approach in Civ 6 was simpler than the approach in Civ 5. We haven't yet fully seen how it will work, but it looks like post GS it may be more complicated than Civ 5.

There may be parallels to Specialists and the Tier 3 buildings.

Keep in mind, though, we don't yet know exactly how the power system will work or what impact it will have on the Tier 3 buildings. It's possible the boost to Specialists may come with GS, too.

 

[Archon_Wing]

https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/acf6ta/civ_6_suggestion_a_change_to_workshops/

Upon reading this thread, I think I thought of a better system that would be a bit more involved. This was meant for IZs, but they could follow a similar pattern.

Workshop


Cost: 100


+3 Production, 2 citizen slots, +0.5 production to all specialists


Factory


Cost: 300


+4 Production, +10% to all cities within 6 tiles (does not stack), + 3 citizen slots, +0.5 production to all specialists


Power Plant


Cost: 400


+5 production, +10% to all cities within 6 tiles (does not stack), +4 citizen slots, +1 production to all specialists

So basically, campuses would give each specialist more science, theaters would give more culture to each specailist, etc.

Of course, the issue with that is that they'd no longer be specialists, but I suppose people had to develop more well rounded skillsets as society advanced anyways.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I wholeheartedly agree about bringing back the specialist economy. It's not just important to make big cities more powerful but there should be a clear distinction between your rural pop and your urban pop. I think the easiest way to make a specialist economy work in civ6 is to increase the number of citizen slots in district occupying buildings and make the yields of specialists better. That way players with high population cities could stack a lot of specialists and get much bigger culture, science, faith or production yields. It would also make that distinction between rural and urban as you might have say 6 population working tiles but 7 population in district buildings producing more science, culture, production etc...

 

[Sostratus]

I think I thought of a better system that would be a bit more involved.

Those boosts could go either directly to the specialists of that district (so the factory makes your engineers more productive) or you could have it just raise specialist output generally (but only in their yield area.) That way they would stay specialized.
So workshop/Factory/Powerplant each giving a slot would you eg
3/4/5 production engineers. Part of me thinks, since districts require 3 pop to build, each district should support 3 specialists so a fully slotted district ties up the same amount of citizens you needed to build it. But i also think 3 fully slotted specialists should produce about what a fully built district does for balance reasons- to offer an alternative to spam more cities. This would also be neat if each gave 1 GPP, since then a slotted district also gives about double what an unslotted district does (4 v 7). Of course, should natural philosophy cards affect specialists? What about rationalism cards? I wouldn't mind if we kept specialists at base 2, allowed the adjacency cards to double to 4, then had t2/3 buildings pack on an extra point each for 6 total. That would be slick.

The other side of me listens to the civ4 devil that says we should have way slots more available, otherwise there's no real point in growing your city more and more, since there is no "unemployed citizen" you can use who simply gives a little production. If we had one (they could be assigned to the city center) perhaps they all produce 2 hammers, so we have an outlet. But we would also need a wonder to buff specialist yields, and maybe some cards to play around with food consumption, amenity needs, etc.

 

[killmeplease]

percent modifiers are good for cities working a lot of mines
what i like about discrete yields is that cities in flat locations (or islands) can have some production
for such cities there should be a possibility to turn a significant portion of their population into workers, like build a big workshop and set 10 citizens as workers there. they dont have to give gpp or % modifiers, just make some cogs, like 3 per worker.

i like the Trav'ling Canuck's idea about flipping the citizen mechanics, so that most workers are in the buildings, and only a small part toiling on farms and mines. land improvements can give stuff without being 'worked' directly. its not very realistic though as historically the most of population were peasants. they weren't only growing food though, they were manufacturing much stuff by themselves, like clothes, tools, homes etc. the danger of overpowering specialists is ics: if the land isn't used much, you'd plop as many cities as possible into the smallest area.

so we need some mechanic to put all the land to use. maybe, cities should grow faster and to higher populations, so they'd run out of land fast and start to employ specialists. that is 36 tiles per city, or 36 people working the land. some tiles will be used up by districts and wonders, and mountains, but still it seems not fun to manage. another solution could be some form of extensive land use, like 1 citizen working several land tiles. it could be that with technology, one citizen would work a group of tiles -- two adjacent tiles, a triangle, a 'diamond' (4 tiles) or a 'flower' (7 tiles). e.g. with combustion, one citizen can work 4 farms (a diamond). with automation, 1 citizen works 2 ajacent lumbermills. that would look very nice on the map. per-city micromanagement would also be reduced.

for the earlier eras, using the land not working every tile may be realized through adjacency mechanics, like increased yields for pastures per tile of unimproved grassland/plains around it, or unworked farms surrounding worked farms (that's fallow land)

with such measures, all the land can be put to use without actually assigning most of the citizens to work it, nor increasing populations beyond the reasonable limits.

and about mines, they could produce a different yield, like.. minerals? or raw materials, to cover lumbermills and other primary sector facilities. they can be represented by a 'pile of something' icon. these should then be consumed by manufacturing sector (workshops in the city, and maybe some improvements, like farms -- historically peasants were producing most of the stuff, before this function shifted to cities), converting raw materials into cogs. so you won't have much people in mines unless you have the matching manufacturing capacity.

ps: by the way, historically hunter-gatherers had very thin population densities, that means 1 hunter would 'work' several times more tiles than a traditional farmer. a hunter specialist could be assigned to work a 7-tiles 'flower', so even in the early game there would be no unused land (4 hunters cover almost the whole area of the city).