Does it make sense to have Ind. Revolution and Factories in a game without consumer goods?

Does it make sense to have Industrial Revolution and Factories in a game without a mass market for consumer goods?

Factories allowed to produce consumer goods at a rate several hundred times higher than in normal production. The workers earned more money and could afford buying more consumer goods forming a new mass market for factory produced goods and so encouraging further industrialisation.

In Civ 6 the effect of Factories on production is almost neglectible compared to other effects. Effect on population is non existant.

In 19th and 20th century factories allowed mass production of military equipment and supplies. However in Civ 6 demand for military units in late game is low since you have your experienced, upgraded core troops and damaged units heal on their own without using any kind of industrial output (no equipment, no supplies, no ammo).

 

I disagree, factories can offer massive production advantages if you can cover a lot of cities.

 

I'm hoping some sort of corporation/consumer good/maybe even low level 'crafting' (ala Imperialism or the like) appearance in the next expansion, but who knows.

In terms of effect on population: civ has really never had any sort of 'realistic' economic model: I.e. population growth has always been driven by 'food' in the game rather than trade/jobs/economic productivity etc, which is more how it happens in reality.

 

I would go further and say that due to the way production scales in Civ VI, the very concept of an Industrial Revolution having taken place in the game is ludicrous.

Production costs for everything in the late game are astronomical, and while some of this is somewhat reduced by IZs and Factories (although these districts are not generally considered priorities), Chopping, and other bonuses, you're still faced with the fact that building a functional district or mobilising a late game army will set you back dozens of turns. This is in contrast with the early game when the same things can be built much quicker. Production costs in real terms are significantly increased in the "Industrial" and later eras.

The relative abundance of gold strongly favours building your army in the ancient era, where it is comparatively speedy, and then upgrading them for a handful of gold. There is absolutely no attempt to simulate the historical mass industrialisation of warfare. It's a complete rejection of historical simulation which I'm not convinced is justified by the game mechanic, which isn't particularly fun either.

 

This is the problem with the production mechanic they used, where for every building, unit or whatever the cost depends solely on the place they can be found in the tech or civic tree.

 

I was thinking about Civ VII. And I was thinking, hmmm, what if you didn't place districts, but they occurred naturally? So, let's say you optimized your economy towards (or it leaned towards and you helped it along) heavy industry. Slowly, over turns, a district starts to grow that increases the city's production. And maybe you have a nice river, and a luxury resource? Maybe a market district pops up (different from a financial district, which would be a mid-game district). Trade routes would slowly create roads, but not by hex, they would fade in. And they would grow faster depending on city size, distance, trade goods available, etc.

Of course, multiple districts could be 'growing' at the same time, but by using policy changes and sliders, and that city's governor/administrator, you could make sure the industrial zone was hurried along. Maybe there's a coal mine nearby (+15% growth on all industrial zones for city center's within 6 hexes).

Anyways, the point is, and how it connects to your OP, is that all of these trade routes and districts are coming about because of human activity and human interaction. People are making stuff, and people are trading it. Right now, we only have natural resources. But in (my) VII, you would have manufactured goods as well. Besides, increased production is useful for making things that make things - buildings, districts, spaceports, cannons. So it makes sense that an industrial revolution would occur even if you didn't have consumer goods. You need steel. You need bricks. You need light. You need an army. You even need a machine to make machines.

As to game mechanics... instead of providing shields, IZ's, and each successive building, could increase production by a %. So maybe with a power plant it gets x2 production. +20% IZ, another +15% workshop (35%), factory is another 25% (65%), and pp gives +35%. IZ and workshop should only affect the principle. Factory extends 6 tiles, power plant extends 8, 10, or 12.

Ooooh, and without a power plant, if you play with day/night cycling, if you don't have a pp, your lights don't work. Screen gets extra dark.

Now that I think about it, that's how Galactic Civilization works. Most building give +% modifiers.

 

In real world factories allow you to produce all kinds of consumer goods to make people happy. In Civ there are luxuries, but for example cotton or silk each only make 4 x 2 population happy, which is not much in a world with population growing into billions. Cities with factories and trade routes connecting to cities with factories should produce amenities (and more gold).

 

Civ 1 had the %-modifier.

A %-modifier means that your city is predestined by the surrounding terrain. If you have only a few shields, there is no need for a costly +100% building.

Industrial Revolution meant that you could transport raw material from everywhere to everywhere (with ships, railroads) and manufacture goods in factories without limitations by terrain. Previous sources of energy for machines like windmill, watermill depended on terrain, but steam engines and power plants allowed to produce energy from coal everywhere.
(Industrial Revolution also enormously improved the production process etc. ...)

 

Yes, I have been advocating for this for years. Civ6 has the perfect framework for this with great merchants that produce unique resources like toys, jeans or perfume. What they need to do is change this into a corporation mechanism, where you can produce these advanced luxuries in your factories based on your available resources.

 

I'm pretty unimpressed with late game critical infrastructure in Civ. CI is described by the US government here: https://www.dhs.gov/critical-infrastructure-sectors

Basically, in the late game you can have a city without water/sewage service, electricity, or waste disposal and not suffer for it. I suppose there are arguments that those utilities are assumed to exist. But it's kind of a shame they don't show in Civ 6, given the importance of Districts. There are "power plants" but they don't do a whole lot and you can launch rockets without them.

Maybe I'm asking too much of the game.

 

It would need to be tied into player choices and gameplay impact, but it could be done, and it would help give a better sense of the development of your cities.

Remember how big a change it was in prior versions of civ when you started connecting your cities with railroads? Why couldn't they do that again with sewers, electrical lines, highways, etc.?

You could easily cap city size prior to investing in sewers, then see the size of your city soar. You could increase the yields of specialists with the connection of power lines, and hold off on those gorgeous new city graphics until you've completed the roll out of electricity. Tourism almost shouldn't even exist until railroads are laid and mines should be next to useless production wise until they're connected by railroads. Highways could dramatically boost the value of trade routes, etc.

It's funny given the amount of decisions that players make in Civ, that these types of things happen "behind the scenes" in Civ 6, because unlike a lot of Civ decisions, these infrastructure investments are ones that governments actually plan and implement in real life!

 

I think I'm happy with a lot of this stuff being abstracted. It depends on how much of a city-building sim you want Civ to be, but lest we forget, there's a whole genre of games dedicated to modelling this sort of stuff for a single city, let alone a whole empire...

 

Sounds like Victoria II to me.

 

I think they need to make things with a more exponential curve. Even things like housing needs to grow much faster - how a granary costs 65, gives 1 food and 2 housing, yet a sewer costs 405, has a maintenance of 2, and provides the same 2 housing, is just insane. Way too often I just ignore sewers because they don't give enough bonus, whereas you'd never see a huge modern city without a sewer in real life.

What they should have is that in the industrial age and later, cities should be expected to grow to the 30s and 40s in size. In that case, then you can make a sewer give, say, 10 housing. Or maybe a factory gives like 10 production to all cities within the area. If you do it that way, then you basically have no choice but to "industrialize" or else you'll be left far behind. You'd have to rebalance things - you're going to start running out of citizen slots at some point if your cities are size 40, as well as amenities too, but maybe that's where the other stuff mentioned here makes sense. You'd probably need to bring in corporations to spread and create more amenities, and maybe have to bring in some new ways to use citizens on the map to actually make it worthwhile to grow your cities that big.

 

e.g. see the following charts (older article from 2012)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...graph-shows-economic-history-world-Jesus.html

 

A size 40 city requires 20 amenities.
The amenities provided by luxuries are limited, e.g. on a map with 24 different luxuries, an empire in general can get 24 x 4 = 96 amenities from luxuries, independant of the empire size (10 cities or 100 cities or 1000 cities.) If you have 30 civs with enough luxuries, this would result in 24 x 4 x 30 = 2.880 amenities for the map, but a single empire would be capped at 96.
So in a game with 100 or more cities, the amenities from luxuries have an effect of about 1 amenity per city, which is equal to some civic cards. To allow empire wide big cities, there need to be more sources of amenities, e.g. the production of cheap consumer goods to keep the population happy.

Industrial Revolution started with a number of developments :
- Agrarian Revolution provided more food and allowed a larger part of the workforce to switch from farming to producing goods, moving from the land into the cities.
- Steam engine allowed to power machines independent from water (watermill), wind (windmill) or human/animal power (upkeep, food).
- Steam engine allowed RailRoads to transport large quantities of goods independent from waterways on ocean, river or canal to every place on land connected by railroad.
- Improvement of Production Process and machine tools improved output per worker often by a factor of several 100s, so reducing the prices for manufactured goods and allowing more people to buy those goods (mass market).

The availability of all kinds of food and consumer goods for a relative low price in an industrialized society should count as amenities as well as a source of income.

In Civ 6 I would change factories to allow different modes :
- factory for consumer goods : produces amenities and gold income (market) for several cities in 6-9 tiles radius. There might be different types of consumer goods so that more than 1 city builds a factory. The effects should be cummulative, so that different cities can produce different kinds of consumer goods and have a cummulative effect, maybe resulting in +5 amenities from all factories nearby.
- factory for military equipment : +100% production for military units in that city.
Each factory should be allowed to switch between these modes, e.g. switch from consumer good 1 to consumer good 2 or switch to war production.

To compensate the drop in amenities when switching to war production, there should be a patriotism effect giving maybe +5 amenities, which are reduced over time by war weariness.

Consumer Good Production might be realised as an endless project, giving amenities and gold per turn for the city and cities nearby.

 

amenities system itself is very strange. why only 4 cities can enjoy a particular luxury? it has no sense.
and how population size is connected with consumer goods? reality is, poor countries are more populated and grow faster.

 

This. Industrialization mainly is due to the +1 production for mines (industrialization) and lumbermills (Steel). There is no mention of the importance of railroads (expecially for warfare, moving infantry etc.), factories are not really important.

It would be really easy to implement large production gains & balance them with pollution and waste. A factory could give you huge amounts of production, but negatively impact the "health" of your city. Railroads could offer huge strategic advantages but also need huge investments. There could be social upheaval due to the loss of jobs etc.

 

and its relative effect is weaker than that of apprenticeship

 

Factories are designed in Civ6 following abstract rules like +1 slot, small increase in yields compared with previous tier building and area effect. Compare it with the rules for Entertainment District Buildings. It is an abstract game mechanic, not even close to real numbers. This is a problem in every Civ game. I remember modding Civ4 to allow factories with up to 20 slots and with increased yield per worker. At the moment +1 for Mines and Lumbermills is strong but factory and worker yields are neglectible, also there are too few slots for workers.
The Powerplant follows the same pattern as the factory and adds some more production, but again the effect per city is small and only the area effect makes it worth.
(Workshop +2, Factory +3, Powerplant +4)

Industrial output of a modern city with factories and powerplants in the game should be 10-100 times greater than that of a medieval city. Production per factory worker should be greatly increased.

And the future are automated factories (robots) which require only a small number of specialised human workers but have a huge output.