Does anybody use district workers/specialists?

[Victoria]

What I'm saying is working a Factory (1 citizen for +2 production) is a really desperate move.

All been covered in another thread however to clarify here the key points.
Working a factory is rarely a good idea, however working a campus is.
Once your city is grown to a sensible size ( working all its good tiles for example) then working more tiles is of much less use. Your city is often +4 food at this stage so why not put 2 pop in a campus for 4 science. A university gives you 4 science. It may not seem like a lot but 10 cities = 40 science.
Take that a step further... culture is harder to get so one may argue culture has more value than science... so placing 2 pop in a theatre could be considered more valuable.
I would place specialists in harbours and encampments because but
nothing else seems worth it,maybe a holy site if the pop are not doing a lot.

GPP from specialists seems OTT

Nice point on starvation @redfox85

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

I think Civ VI is balanced around having a few "big" cities and then lots of smaller cities. So, tall and wide.

That's why Specialists are so nerfed and why they won't link Great People to them. If they were strong, then you'd grow every city big. If they gave Great People, you'd never need to go wide.

FXS have only been willing to really buff tall via Governors - because the number of Governors are capped. So, for example, you can only have one giant science heavy Pingala city.

It would be fun if specialists were more... well, not more powerful. But maybe just more dynamic. But I do really like the tall plus wide design, and I think it's a major reasons this version of Civ is so much better than Civ 4 and Civ 6.

Anyway. Specialists aren't that bad. I particularly like sticking specialists into Harbour or Encampment buildings in smaller cities. You really don't need every city pumping hammers.

In fairness, the terrain limitations for districts already helps to create that balance, we don't need a Specialist Nerf to balance Tall & Wide (wide, btw, is still far too superior).

 

[acluewithout]

@Aussie_Lurker Terrain for Campuses is basically irrrelevant. You just build them in every city next to your city centre. Then you just get science from the buildings and from running projects. The Campus is way too powerful - comes too early and you can build too many. When I play, I never build more than three, otherwise the AI doesn't have a hope.

It'd be a bit lame just having a hard cap for Campuses - e.g. no more than three. But some sort of soft cap would be good, perhaps based on the total population of your empire and or government level ... whatever.

 

[Draco84]

I don't think I've used them more than a handful of times, but I'm not convinced they need to be buffed.

I've had cities I dropped just to place epic campuses with nothing else but coast tiles to work. Instead of wasting energy I dropped my pop in the campus. +2 science per pop is better than a little extra food for a useless city.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

If none of your cities have ever used a specialist slot, then that just means you're doing a good job giving your cities room to breath. Congratulations, you're good at Civ 6.

Civ 6 cities don't need room to breathe. Cities packed as close together as possible generally works better than spacing your cities out.

All been covered in another thread however to clarify here the key points.
Working a factory is rarely a good idea, however working a campus is.
Once your city is grown to a sensible size ( working all its good tiles for example) then working more tiles is of much less use. Your city is often +4 food at this stage so why not put 2 pop in a campus for 4 science. A university gives you 4 science. It may not seem like a lot but 10 cities = 40 science.
Take that a step further... culture is harder to get so one may argue culture has more value than science... so placing 2 pop in a theatre could be considered more valuable.
I would place specialists in harbours and encampments because but
nothing else seems worth it,maybe a holy site if the pop are not doing a lot.

I've had cities I dropped just to place epic campuses with nothing else but coast tiles to work. Instead of wasting energy I dropped my pop in the campus. +2 science per pop is better than a little extra food for a useless city.

Both of these observations basically boil down to that sometimes a Campus or Theatre or rarely another district slot is the best place to put a worker when you otherwise have that population in the city.

I'd still suggest, however, that it's rarely worth the effort to invest in growing extra population in the city so that you have an extra worker to place as a Specialist, and almost never worth the effort after the city hits size 10. That's why I feel you can safely add a buff to larger cities.

 

[Leathaface]

I never do since it is almost always better to work a tile. The only way I can see myself working them, is if I had to city with high population but all of the mines/lumbermills were used and I still had population to spare.

I might work a district then. But i've played Civ VI a lot and that hasn't happened yet. Which i'm OK with it TBH, though it's nice that it's there.

 

[Josephias]

I guess the devs really forgot specialists, like other have said. For me, the biggest flaw in the specialists' system is the lack of GPP, or rather GPP coming from the district alone or its buildings. Maybe just taking off GPP generation from the districts themselves and their buildings could work, but it guess it just would take too long to have one GP spawn, which could cause trouble mainly for the religion game. I guess I would balance that making that only the first of each district built in the empire provided GPP points, and bonus GPP could only come from specialists. That way, more districts in more cities meant more specialists slots for more GPP generated, but not more passive GPP without effort.

Imho, just moving the +1GPP from the buildings to the specialist Will do. You can still have a (slow) amount of GPP acquired via the district.

Or maybe just changing the GP wilcards to actually needing specialists -> this is no more +2/+4 free GPP per wildcard, but wilcards making the specialists provide GPP...


All in all, I think the problem is also the population formula. With 36 potential tiles to work (actually more around 20) it takes a long time before population can be considered both for specialists and workers… and you want to play the map, and you have a housing and an amenities cap.

Maybe an interesting idea would be specialists & workers being two different subsets of population - you can get a number of specialists that is a % of your number of workers (population), maybe based in the happiness status (amenities & similar). So in a content city you Will have an extra 25% population to be allocated as specialists, a happy one wil be a 33%, and an excited one will push it up to 50%. As amenities problems increase when you go wide (each luxury only covers 4 cities), this will make tall play still ideal for specialists, while not punishing wide that much, and the number of specialists normally less tan the number of available slots, so you need to consider were to place them.

 

[Breadsmith]

That seems a lot like how "Specialists" worked in Alpha Centauri. Now I want to Nerve Staple Dumfries.

They know what they did.

 

[KayAU]

Maybe an interesting idea would be specialists & workers being two different subsets of population - you can get a number of specialists that is a % of your number of workers (population), maybe based in the happiness status (amenities & similar). So in a content city you Will have an extra 25% population to be allocated as specialists, a happy one wil be a 33%, and an excited one will push it up to 50%. As amenities problems increase when you go wide (each luxury only covers 4 cities), this will make tall play still ideal for specialists, while not punishing wide that much, and the number of specialists normally less tan the number of available slots, so you need to consider were to place them.

This is another interesting idea. If I were to summarize the responses I have gotten, it is that specialists in their current form are rarely used, and if they are, it is generally done rather unenthusiastically, for a lack of better things to do with the workers. Replacing the mechanism with something else, which also serves as an incentive to grow your cities, would be a welcome change. It makes sense that a larger city can support more specialists, and it also makes sense that districts in large cities produce more than corresponding districts in small cities. Your proposal would take care of both issues.

I still would want those specialists to generate GPP, though.

 

[Hakan-i Cihan]

The specialists currently seems like an "appendix" from previous iterations which they forgot to remove or flesh out. In previous civs they gave much more benefits and the cities could grow much faster making them more obvious to use. I hope that there will be changes which would stimulate the use of specialists more. Therefore I would like to make a summary of possible options how to do this in main outlines (without explicitly defining the details):

• Buff the specialists (possibly gradually with tech/civic tree, through cards and/or wonders)
• Nerf tile yields
• Let cities grow faster
• Seperate population and specialists from each other (mentioned by @Josephias in post above)
• Free specialists (from cards, wonders or districts, example: the first of 2 districts in each city gives a specialist to use in a spot u would like, possibly also as policy card)

These are possible options that comes to my mind. Some options (2 and 3) are possibly less likely to happen.

 

[Lily_Lancer]

I almost always put people in Campus.
Except for Sumeria, whose UI ensures better yield than Campus.

 

[MrRadar]

I hope that there will be changes which would stimulate the use of specialists more.

This is the second game in a row in the wider franchise with 'specialists' of such kind, they've been made this dull already in 'Beyond Earth', so I don't know if there is much space for hope. Either devs are in some protracted consideration period what to do with them, or they simply decided that this was good enough and then forgot all about them which would be sad.

As @Josephias suggested, moving 1 gpp from buildings to specialists would do it.
And I particularly like your suggestion of nerfing tile yields, production first of all. As it is now, unqualified manual labour rules through the ages, just dig hills, chop trees and build high-tech Mars rocket parts just from planks and dirt. Factory? Who's she?
Aspects of industrialization, population concentration in cities are completely absent and even reverse - cities are fastest growing in the beginning and then just stagnate. Busy building neighbourhoods anybody? They're hardly ever necessary, except, perhaps, for the 'build over farms for gold' exploit.

Having specialists slotted in should bring major science, production, culture and gold generation buffs, without people those buildings are just piles of nicely put together bricks.

Also, maybe a cog shouldn't be added to the mines on mere discovery of Apprenticeship. Having a workshop should. The discovery itself is mere unlocking of the potential, but it requires further active effort to be utilised. The same with Industrialization and factories. Then +1gpp would only come with a specialist inside. And when you find yourself in need of specialists, suddenly the idea of completing that neighbourhood may seem less silly. For some alternative ways there may be cards added, sort of "Patron of Arts", "Patron of Crafts", "Patron of Sciences", etc. or some combinations thereof - respective specialists do not consume food, or alternatively, buff their gpp yields through blue cards.

 

[Josephias]

Also, maybe a cog shouldn't be added to the mines on mere discovery of Apprenticeship. Having a workshop should. The discovery itself is mere unlocking of the potential, but it requires further active effort to be utilised. The same with Industrialization and factories. Then +1gpp would only come with a specialist inside. And when you find yourself in need of specialists, suddenly the idea of completing that neighbourhood may seem less silly. For some alternative ways there may be cards added, sort of "Patron of Arts", "Patron of Crafts", "Patron of Sciences", etc. or some combinations thereof - respective specialists do not consume food, or alternatively, buff their gpp yields through blue cards.

I can’t say anything more than that’s genius. It hits clearly one weak spot: as tile improvements get better as the game progresses, there is even less incentive to substitute workers by specialists. But if you required that blacksmith in your workshop to take the extra cog from mines, in example, it would become a very interesting game of how much you are working vs. how much you could improve yields by taking one/two/three workers out to “administrative/logistic” (specialist) duties.

 

[pgm123]

It is a design flaw. If Great People points were generated by Specialist not buildings, you would certainly review your opinion on them.

Is there a mod for this?

 

[Infixo]

Is there a mod for this?

There is a mod that as part of its features removes GPPs from buildings and moves to Specialists (District Overhaul or something like that, check on CivFanatics). This is actually the easy part because there is a table for that (which btw is a proof that Specialists were supposed to give GPPs and somewhere along the road the devs abandoned this idea). The real question is: is AI capable of slotting properly Specialists to get those GPPs? And I am afraid the answer is "no" and that is the reason why devs abandoned the idea. Because building buildings is actually easy and AI does that "by default". So, tie GPPs to buildings and voila - no need to program AI to do more complex "thinking" like balancing the need of GP with the need of normal yields, etc.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/district-building-overhaul-mod.26770/

 

[Timodelphia]

Since we are in agreement that specialists have little value, how about we reduce the cost.

The idea would be to have a "specialist" awarded at a certain population point, for example one specialist for every six population in a city. They would not need to be fed and could be assigned or re-assigned into any district. This would provide a (minor) incentive to grow a city taller, but you would not "waste" a population on assigning to the district.

 

[Victoria]

sometimes a Campus or Theatre

Often once the city is adequate for the districts needed or more importantly possible in the timeframe to be of value.

 

[pgm123]

There is a mod that as part of its features removes GPPs from buildings and moves to Specialists (District Overhaul or something like that, check on CivFanatics). This is actually the easy part because there is a table for that (which btw is a proof that Specialists were supposed to give GPPs and somewhere along the road the devs abandoned this idea). The real question is: is AI capable of slotting properly Specialists to get those GPPs? And I am afraid the answer is "no" and that is the reason why devs abandoned the idea. Because building buildings is actually easy and AI does that "by default". So, tie GPPs to buildings and voila - no need to program AI to do more complex "thinking" like balancing the need of GP with the need of normal yields, etc.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/district-building-overhaul-mod.26770/

That mod (unfortunately) does too many things. But it's moot if the AI can't handle anyway. Oh well.

 

[Hatchie]

I don't think the assesment that specialists are overlooked or not cared about by designers is correct. If I recall correctly there is an Eureka for "replacing a farm with neighbourhood" suggesting the designers would like to simulate the historical fact that as the civilization progressed, people moved toward cities instead of working the countryside. I think the specialists are just imbalanced.

One was to fix them would be to upgrade them as you progress through civic tree - similar to how you stumble on upgrades for tile improvements. That way as you get around the industrialization, the improvements should be strong enough that you have more people than you need to work the tiles, you should be able to make cities tall enough and the specialists would start becoming worthwile. There could be around one upgrade for specialists per era starting around renaissance improving either yields or GPPs.

Around the Atomic era I think an average district with all the buildings should be around 2-3 times stronger in yields if filled than specialists compared to one with no specialists and even stronger in GPPs. That would be a good balance to make the taller civilizations stronger especialy for science/culture victories (which are traditionaly the more peaceful victories for taller civilizations). And it would reward the effort players put into developing a tall city