One of the silly things I find myself doing is leaving techs one turn from completion if I don't need them immediately to avoid the district and tile cost scaling. So instead I think this would work better:
Under the hood, ideally whatever they scale it off of will be easily computable with available information. It turns out that you can just grab the number of techs & civics a player has researched. Not to say the current method is perfect, but, the way they did it is relatively clean. It's only something to game if you know the formula (which is never explicitly put in front of the player) and even then, the benefit isn't that high compared to something simple like pre placing districts once you have the pop.
If anything, I feel the fact that players are sometimes willing to game cost scaling like this points to too many techs being effectively filler and low value. Not all techs need to be on the level of industrialization, but they should all do
something that makes you want them.
I think that's the point of district scaling
Districts, chop value, and unit & building cost all follow the same trend (go from to 1 to 10x between ancient and info era.) Chops follow the same formula as a district. The reason they scale it up is to prevent the absolute oppression that a tech lead would give you otherwise- a unit upgrade is +10
per era. With no cost inflation, simply unlocking the next era of units would basically be increasing your military power by +50%. Plus, you economy grows with tech & time too, so they have to tie the cost of stuff with city productivity and size to keep numbers sane. I think late game units are fine, although late game infrastructure is perhaps too costly since the scale of the benefits from buildings follows a much shallower progression.
Insofar as what
ought to be, the first thing to think about is whether it should scale continuously or based on some discrete factors. The tech scaling we have now does give a nice upward trend, but while in aggregate a player's economy grows continuously, per city productivity doesn't (it jumps at certain techs,) and this is usually where the big disconnect with players happens. Ex: It's the industrial era and suddenly my little size 5 town says it needs 40 turns to build a campus. What?!
I also happen to think the wrong thing is scaling: if you look at building costs, despite a minor tweak they made last year, all buildings (and units!) were originally priced based specifically on what column of the tech tree they appear in. Completely divorced from function. So, a Library cost 60
but a workshop cost 180
, despite both giving +2 yield. So it almost seems like buildings should be scaling and not districts! Because I hold other opinions on the district subject it would take a long time to come up with a well laid out idea on how it could be improved, but loosely I think tying things to government tiers and eras has better potential.
