Early/Midgame Housing: Reintroducing the Cottage System

The humble cottage system was a favourite mechanic in Civ4, and many felt it deserved a spot in Civ5. In Civ6, there is a distinct cap on growth for tall cities- housing. Until neighborhoods, there's just not a lot of options outside of slamming down all the farms, and putting together an encampment+harbor to eke out a couple more. This really gimps the tall strategy in general, and devalues food for production. (As if grassland hills weren't good enough!) In turn, this affects the potential of the specialist economy and other tall focused play. There's also no generic gold improvement, only plantations and commercial hubs. This generally means that if you want more money, there's no trade off option- just build a CH, which you were going to do anyways for that trade route and those Great merchant points.

Here's a fun idea to fill that pre-industrial gap: Cottages!

A rough sketch:
Builders could place the initial cottage. It would give +1 gold, and +1 housing. It could then grow by either being worked for a number of turns (like in Civ4,) or a mini city project that could target it. (Queue the "develop cottage" project, and select the cottage tile to improve.)
It would improve into a village, giving more housing and gold (+2 gold, +2 housing.)
Lastly, the village could then grow into a town. The town would further augment the output to +3 gold, +3 housing. Once neighborhoods are unlocked, a city that places one over one of these improvements would get a boost towards the district: 25/50/75% production cost reduction (since they were already invested into the tile, and the marginal benefit is smaller than swapping out a farm.)

This gives a very nice progression:

• Cottage: +1 Housing
• Village: +2 Housing
• Town: +3 Housing
• Neighborhood: +4 Housing (assuming average appeal)

It might also be nice to roll the cottage's gold into the neighborhood tile as well. Or, neighborhoods could get the Seaside Resort treatment and produce a gold yield equal to their appeal. I would envision the cottage unlocking in the classical era, perhaps at construction or engineering. At economics, we could add +1 gold to the improvement line. In Civ4, there were also ways to boost the yield further: perhaps a policy or government could do that. (+1 hammer from democracy, for instance.)

To fill the role of the trading post, and not leave Kongo out of the fun, a cottage could be built over woods and jungle without destroying it. Finally, something to put on those non-banana jungle tiles. We could salivate at the thought of Chichen Itza sites just like we do for petra.
Further, this opens up a fun area for City center buildings to improve cottages and neighborhoods generally. Perhaps a hospital that provides extra food to those tiles. Public transit (I loved the graphic in civ 4!) could be a city center improvement that gives a nice boost to each neighborhood (+1 Amenity?,) and the graphic could be a little train line (industrial) or monorail (modern) lines extending out the neighborhoods, complete with little trains moving to and from the city.

While the proposed neighborhood gold change does give kongo a relative nerf, the mbanza is a little bonkers; it gives food, they get it in medieval, and it's half price. I think Mvemba would be just fine.

Shotgun thought: this would leave a huge opening for a new leader/civ to have an ability to make cottages (maybe restricted to towns only) like nubian pyramids, getting adjacency boni from districts!

What do you guys think- do you miss cottages? How would you help alleviate the midgame housing crunch, or implement a generic gold improvement?

 

Not a bad idea at all. If this were to turn up in an expansion, I'd strongly support it.

 

I don't mind the idea for housing, as there is quite a long stage of the game where it's very difficult to grow cities, but they don't need to give gold. Gold is already trivially easy to generate on any map, with any civ.

 

Maybe that is why we need more ways to *lose* money in the game. I have mentioned elsewhere that numbers of cities & distances from capitals could have a multiplying effect on the maintenance cost of your cities.....& maybe we could bring back the Civ4 concept of Social Policy (civics) maintenance costs too.