Plus getting +1 charges feels impactful. Unlike +25% worker speed.
Agreed. The advantage of using builders is that it allows FXS to play around with more mechanics - what currency you can build them with, how fast they move, how many charges, who else gets builder charges (eg Legions), what they can build and when and on what. And that ties in more generally with how improvements provide this additional layer of infrastructure between district / buildings and the map. I mean, Hokey Rinks and Gold Courses etc really are sort of “pseudo” districts.
Love it or hate it, Civ’s main elements on the map are “units” and “cities”. Even districts are really just “mini cities” the way they are implemented.
I think the sillier part is making Great People a type of unit. They should have either been like a “card” that you spend or should have worked like spies and traders. Oh well.
Builder instant builds I agree are disjointed from the rest of the game. I agree with
@Duuk that Builders are an awkward interim step between two better systems. But I also think the direction the dev team has gone with Builders is the right one, and I'd prefer to see the disjointedness be resolved by no longer needing to wait 8 turns for city A to finish it's market, 4 turns for city B to finish it's library, etc. Wonders should take time to build, mundane buildings should be instant built. I say this as someone who has loved Civ 1+. This mechanic was fine for Civ 1. It's time to move on from it (and a few other things, especially the fill the granary to make babies mechanic.
I’m fairness, you can insta-build buildings via gold.
I think the design is that early game you build everything with hammers. But once you have an empire wide economy, you should be building most things with gold and your cities should only spend hammers on projects or really hard to build things (spaceports, gdr, whatever).
Districts I'm conflicted on. As an idea, I like them. In practice, I don't. What they're intended to do is positive, and I was excited for them leading up to the release of Civ 6. I'd like to see them retained and refined in future versions of civ. Being able to bulldoze them and build something new over them is one minor way they could be improved.
FXS made a decision with Districts to have each one basically specialise on one yield rather than each being more generic and then you specialise the district and or city by what you build in the district.
I’m not saying that was a bad decision. But it does give Districts and Cities a distinctive “flavour”. Your cities basically almost never feel “real” IMO, instead they always feel a bit “power rangers meets city planner”. ie this is the BLUE POWER RANGER CITY! and this is the YELLOW POWER RANGER CITY!.
One of the reasons I play coastal / naval so much is that the Harbour feels like a “real” district, so my cities in turn feel more real.
The focus on one yield per district type also means your cities don’t sprawl much, because FXS has to limit how many districts you can build (on of each, one per four pop etc).
This is getting better now we have more and better green districts, which gives you more scope to make your city feel like a city. And buffs to the encampment and IZ are great because it really adds these districts back into the mix.
At the end of the day, Civ is a competitive “board game” style 4x game (with a bit of war game thrown in). It can certainly have some Sim City elements and empire management / grand strategy elements, and I wish it did too, but there are limits to what the game can bear.
I’m convinced that when Civs development cycle is over I’ll end up getting into EU IV for that very reason. I really love Civ VI and love where it’s going. It scratches a few itches. But at some point the empire sim itch is going to need a bigger scratch, and it’s not really fair to make Civ V do that.
(Hmm. On reflection, I’m not sure anyone wants me to talk that much about itching and scratching. Oh well.)
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