Well, your links don't work, so there is that much. I click on them trying two different browsers and nothing happens. So I don't know what posts in particular you care so much about. But what the original poster said was that he "hates it less". Not exactly a ringing endorsement! I would say the system has merit in that there is some merit to scaling in general, but I see very little in the precise way it scales.
I haven't dodged the question. What do I think would be a better alternative? How about any of these:
Despite what you say in the post you keep trying to link to (you did not input this code correctly, it appears), it still makes more sense than arbitrarily tying district costs to tech progress. For example, the most often repeated suggestion in the thread that I see is to scale district costs based on the number of districts of that type in your empire, or the number of districts in a particular city. Easy to explain from a flavor standpoint, even though you mysteriously describe it as "the hardest". What? Here: supporting a large scientific community that spans several cities requires significantly more infrastructure than is represented by building a bunch of laboratories and calling it a day. There, easy explanation as to why a Campus in your third city costs more than it did in your second. You're not just paying for zoning another Campus, you're paying for making sure the infrastructure in all your cities with Campus districts can properly coordinate their efforts. Or as for more districts in a city=more expensive districts, we can easily explain it flavor-wise by saying that obviously it's harder to continuously expand a city because you naturally go for the easy-to-develop land first, among other concerns. The first new district was naturally easier to build than the second, because the second has to have the infrastructure to properly work with not only the city itself but also the other district, and you need to pay for all of that infrastructure.
It also serves an important game balance feature in curbing ICS, while at the same time not unduly punishing expansion (if the numbers are right, that is). It encourages district diversity, something the game sorely needs more of, and means there's more to achieving a cultural victory rather than just necessarily spamming a Theater Square in every city. You should look for other sources of Tourism, like Wonders, coastal resorts, a Holy City, etc. to supplement your Theaters. Or maybe you can build a cheaper district now and get a theater square up later when your infrastructure can support it!
And perhaps more importantly to me, it ties the scaling cost of building districts directly to the fact of building districts itself, rather than techs/civics, which feels like a rather arbitrary connection (and yes, I have read explanations for it in the various posts, I simply don't see why those arguments are somehow more valid than what I just posted above). I don't have any problem with how Settler and Builders scale in cost, because it happens as you build more of them. That makes sense (from a game balance perspective at least) and doesn't encourage too many weird strategies. At best, it might encourage you to hold off making too many builders until you can get the policy to add extra builder charges. But as that's a specific policy unlocked at a specific civic, and not something like "builders get better with every single civic, so hold off until later", it's something you can plan around and make a strategic choice for. I don't find "not discovering new techs/civics makes districts cheaper" to be as compelling a strategic decision, by comparison.
As a wild, off-the-scope suggestion, what I'd actually like to do is remove maintenance costs from buildings, remove district production scaling altogether, and have maintenance costs assigned only to districts and cities cost maintenance based on the number of districts in a particular city (among other factors). This would encourage building up and getting the most out of your districts, because an empty district provides you with much less benefit-per-cost than a filled district. And continuously building cities and districts without first developing them would mean you got a lot less out of them than if you properly developed them. But that's not what Firaxis has done here, and I don't expect anything like it to happen. I'd just be interested to seeing how it played out, and adjust the numbers to see if I could get something that felt right (unfortunately, modding scaling maintenance costs is difficult). I suspect it'd put more emphasis (and drain) on gold and less on production, at the very least.
I can see the logic in introducing a sort of "production tax" to the game, however. While I think having districts with a flat cost would work out just fine, there is a certain logic to having scaling districts. But I'd argue that a different form of scaling would be more interesting and feel more connected to the process. It's more interesting if the cost scales up directly to which districts you build, where you build cities, or which techs and civics you choose. This is as opposed to the current scaling which is just "the more you advance, the more expensive they get". Boring, and frankly, backwards (things should get easier to build as you advance, not harder/staying the same, as has been pointed out many times).
Well, the point of introducing a new anti-snowball feature would be to replace the current, broken one. If it was enough to turn it into flat scaling with turns, that would be a better solution than the current one.
First of all, thanks for a really good read.
(and sorry for the slightly messy reply)
I think you're indeed giving some really good points here, and I mostly like the scaling maintenance costs for having districts in a city and, I suppose, also slightly for the amount of districts you have, as otherwise you're actually encouraging spamming cities and building very few districts in them to keep maintenance costs low. Then again, I suppose that wouldn't matter for someone like me as I tend to expand as fast as my empire can support anyways for the first 2-4 ages, and after that there's not that much space left to expand.
And on top of that, as you mentioned the districts scaling in production cost curb ICS, so maybe the implementation of both the maintenance-per-district and the cost-per-district-of-the-same-kind would make for a net neutral change, which would be fine in my opinion, as I like the current speed of expansion.
You're also giving a good argument why it (be it gold or production, really)
could scale flavour-wise between districts of the same kind, and I suppose that, in one way or another, it can be applied to every single district if I'm just quickly thinking about a number of them. Looking back to my
previous post (this time the link should be working, if not look up post #211 on page 11) the reasoning against this one was also the weakest. In fact, I remember a few months ago I even changed the game to play like this, though a patch came a few days later and I couldn't be bothered to change it again (I still don't know how to create a working mod so I'm working in the base game files...), so I just went back to the normal system and started to like it more.
What I also like about the maintenance-per-district system is that it goes back to the Civ IV system of maintenance costs that rise as you expand, but not
quite as front-loaded in the expanding as they are in IV, where you basically (at least on Noble and using my playstyle) expand a burst, then get your economy up again, then expand another burst, once again get your economy up, etc. It would be a pretty natural flow I think, as in that it won't draw a lot of attention from players* apart from "oh it's there", which is what I also like about the current district scaling.
One more thing, regarding what you mentioned about the logic of scaling district cost depending on how man you have already in your city ("Or as for more districts in a city=more expensive districts, we can easily explain it flavor-wise by saying that obviously it's harder to continuously expand a city because you naturally go for the easy-to-develop land first, among other concerns."), I would like to see two changes together on districts: The first that they can
only be built adjacent to already existing districts**, including city-center, so that you have a closer-packed city instead of just buying those two tiles and getting that 4 adjacency bonus campus in the third ring in the Ancient Era. The second is that the district cost then depends on the terrain you build it, with flat land being cheaper than hills, maybe a cost reduction if there's more districts adjacent, etc.
I think that, if the district cost system would be changed, the best would be to make a
dual change that they scale on both the amount you already built and the amount you already have in the city you're building the district, though I'm not sure if a mod can get this to work with the current possibilities.
Lastly, more regarding districts in general, I want to see more districts. A lot more. Like, 30 instead of 12, all kinds of hybrids between two or even three different yields, etc. And then I'd want to see changes in the yields all around (to balance all the stuff) as well as possibly a city range of four, all of this coupled with aforementioned changes in where you can build districts. Just changing the game up such that you're
truly building a city district by district and that the average city probably ends up with about 10 districts in the first, second and maybe even third ring. I think it's a bit much to ask for for an expansion though, maybe even for Civ VII. If VI turns out to be moddable enough after everything's released though... I'd love seeing a mod like that, and I'd love working on it myself.
Footnotes:
*Note that I am talking about in game here, not about diving into the code to figure out what causes the increased costs.
**This would probably exclude the Encampment, as it currently cannot be built adjacent to the city-center, and is indeed a bit of a "different" district. It probably shouldn't count as a district other districts can be built adjacent to additionally, to avoid people using it to jump far away fast. The same might probably count for a Harbor in the case of a non-coastal city.
