Districts in Civ VII

[mitsho]

I don't think this is going back to Civ4. One of the main reasons for the districts was the intention to put everything on the map and not away on a separate city screen. I think that trend will continue. So while we (me included) here are advocating for districts-with-x-slots-for-buildings, I rather think we will see the abolishment of buildings. Put everything on the map. The big take away from the vanilla-civs to the newest civs seems to me that there are too many different types: Buildings, Infrastructure, Districts, Wonders. Infrastructure and Districts can be merged - and buildings can become upgrades to those that are very visually distinctive. Forges are only built at mines, granaries at farms, temples require a holy site that can be placed with some conditions fulfilled. Wonders then may be more project like, not necessarily linked to production. So, now, do we still need a building queue in the city? How can we simplify everything more and put it on the map?

 

[Zaarin]

Districts only make sense as a form of playing with terrain adjacency bonuses. Why would you want districts in the same tile?
Just remove districts altogether.
To be honest, i never liked districts anyways. They de-geographyse the game, make it arcade-ish.
I don't like districts and i don't like enourmous cities (map wise) a la Humankind.
I hope Civ7 has cities very small (like Total War, as in map size, graphically speaking), with vast expanses and tracts of land to go through.

I think the idea of districts was good--they're honestly one of the most fun aspects of Civ6--but graphically they need to make it clearer that districts represent smaller cities, not...whatever it is they're trying to graphically represent in Civ6.

 

[frutiemax]

I would probably get rid of the hex tile system and even get rid of the grid and opt for a free placement of cities/improvements. The maps would look more natural and this would open to new mechanics that were not possible in a grid system.

 

[Zaarin]

I would probably get rid of the hex tile system and even get rid of the grid and opt for a free placement of cities/improvements. The maps would look more natural and this would open to new mechanics that were not possible in a grid system.

I'm not sure a gridless 4X game would still be a 4X game.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I'm not sure a gridless 4X game would still be a 4X game.

Since Civ VI has blatantly modeled itself on boardgames, they could take a lesson from one of the best boardgame designers, Frank Chadwick. He and his Game Designer's Workshop crew put out an 18th century warfare/political boardgame decades ago called Soldier Kings. It had two mechanics that could be very useful: first, unlike most boardgames, there were no tiles, squares, or any other such feature on the map: all movement was point to point between towns and cities, so that the map consisted of a mass of city-points connected by lines representing 'roads' and all movement was strictly town to town and all battles took place either as sieges of the towns or field battles right outside the town.
In addition, to move more than one unit at a time they had to be grouped under a General, so the number of Generals was the number of Armies that were not immobilized in towns as garrisons. This idea has been used elsewhere, but given Civ VI's Great Generals and the arguments over stacking versus 1UPT, it's an idea that might be worth revisiting to thread the needle between Stacks of Doom and Scattered All Over the Map unit movement and combat.

The other way to get the 'no-tile' Appearance would be to use very small tiles, so that virtually everything on the map takes up more than one tile. This allows the kind of variation in terrain and infrastructure that looks more 'natural' than a larger and obvious system of tiles which, no matter what geometry you use (square, hex, dodecahedron, etc), still present an obvious regular grid of some kind. See the Anno 1800 game for an example of how 'natural' a map like this can look with modern computer graphics (and, by the way, that game seems, with all its 'natural' look, to present about the same degree of difficulty to my computer that Civ VI does, so the different appearance doesn't have to require another new generation of machinery to display it).

Either of these concepts would, of course, be a radical design change from any Civ before them, so they would have to present a whole bunch of advantages not available from any 'conventional' Civ Map to be adopted.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Since Civ VI has blatantly modeled itself on boardgames, they could take a lesson from one of the best boardgame designers, Frank Chadwick. He and his Game Designer's Workshop crew put out an 18th century warfare/political boardgame decades ago called Soldier Kings. It had two mechanics that could be very useful: first, unlike most boardgames, there were no tiles, squares, or any other such feature on the map: all movement was point to point between towns and cities, so that the map consisted of a mass of city-points connected by lines representing 'roads' and all movement was strictly town to town and all battles took place either as sieges of the towns or field battles right outside the town.
In addition, to move more than one unit at a time they had to be grouped under a General, so the number of Generals was the number of Armies that were not immobilized in towns as garrisons. This idea has been used elsewhere, but given Civ VI's Great Generals and the arguments over stacking versus 1UPT, it's an idea that might be worth revisiting to thread the needle between Stacks of Doom and Scattered All Over the Map unit movement and combat.

The other way to get the 'no-tile' Appearance would be to use very small tiles, so that virtually everything on the map takes up more than one tile. This allows the kind of variation in terrain and infrastructure that looks more 'natural' than a larger and obvious system of tiles which, no matter what geometry you use (square, hex, dodecahedron, etc), still present an obvious regular grid of some kind. See the Anno 1800 game for an example of how 'natural' a map like this can look with modern computer graphics (and, by the way, that game seems, with all its 'natural' look, to present about the same degree of difficulty to my computer that Civ VI does, so the different appearance doesn't have to require another new generation of machinery to display it).

Either of these concepts would, of course, be a radical design change from any Civ before them, so they would have to present a whole bunch of advantages not available from any 'conventional' Civ Map to be adopted.

I forget the exact details, but there is a way to split the traditional hexes in a grid up by 6 wedges to each hex. There was an Avalon Hill board game on the strategic level that did this, and it seemed to solve the old problem of whether terraign features should be along a hex border or occupy the entire hex