Enhancing Harbor ideas

[Lord Khorak]

A lot of food? More so than, say, the bounties available through agriculture or animal husbandry? A field that, even in the unfavorable terrain of ancient Greece, employed 80% of the population?

(I get that coast may need to be made more attractive in Civ6, but I feel like the arguments for it are way off base)

Yes, actually. The ocean STILL provides the majority of animal protein eaten by humanity, and that's after the modern day, America-led proliferation of industrial ranching. In antiquity the ocean was the single most reliable and effective source of protein you could get.

And your use of statistics is laughable. For starters, you're using the tiny microcosm of ancient Greece to counter the grand human preference for coastal habitation, and second, you're conflating manpower requirements with food yields and utility. 80% of people were employed in agriculture, fishing was meaningless by comparison! No, you're an idiot. Fishing didn't need the same amount of people to produce meaningful yields, and those 80% of people kinda didn't have much else to do all year round and/or had no access to the sea. Hell, the example of ancient Greece is especially ridiculous, since the oldest treatise that still exists on sea fishing is from ancient Greece and the Romans depicted Poseidon/Neptune as wielding a fishing trident. Ancient Greece is actually considered weird for having so few references to fishing when compared to everyone else ever.

I always come on to the internet with the best of intentions, but then someone says something so illogically stupid as 'the sea doesn't provide that much food', despite it being the most reliable and culturally evident source of protein in the history of the entire Moderator Action: <snip> PLANET, and how the hell do you respond to that with anything BUT telling someone they're an idiot!?

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[TehJumpingJawa]

It's part of a larger approach to making you make actual decisions about settling. Mountains for beauty, hills for production, plains for food, sea for commerce. I dont think it's really working yet, but it makes a lot of sense given the district move to specialised cities. Personally it's boring if all tiles are the same.

City specialisation is a nice idea.... but:

• Without an effective means of transferring localised economic outputs (food, hammers and to a lesser extent culture) between cities, it's never going to work as every city will need to be largely self sufficient in order to grow & build its specialisation. Trade routes could & should fulfil that role, but they're better utilised for growth (rapid construction of a new city's own industrial capacity to make it sense-sufficient)
• The game's win conditions do not encourage a balanced civilisation made up of specialised cities; they encourage a specialised civilisation made up of cities all focusing on the same resource.

 

[Phrozen]

Sea needs more resources really.

Oyster beds for a bonus resource.

Tyrian purple, caviar, and lobster for luxuries.

Several places major industry was trade in salted fish or later canned fish.

 

[TehJumpingJawa]

I'd like river mouths to be their own water terrain type 3/2 base, still eligible for resources, and perhaps have some wonders require them.

 

[Exodite]

It's part of a larger approach to making you make actual decisions about settling.
...
Personally it's boring if all tiles are the same.

While I agree on both counts I don't believe "avoid water like the plague" makes settlement decisions particularly hard.

I hope we can all agree on the following points.

• Production is the strongest yield in the game, by far.
• Food is second, partially due to necessity and partially due to it being the mechanic to actually grow your population.
• Every other yield is far down the line in priority. A nice bonus, perhaps, but not a reason to actually work a tile on its own.
• The ability to place districts, both due to the bonuses they provide through adjacency alone as well as the buildings unlocked is important to the Civ6 experience.
• The ability to improve tiles is quite strong. Late-game farms provide massive amounts of food as well as increased housing capacity. Mines add 3 production on top of the base yields, as well providing adjacency bonuses to Industrial Zones. And so on.
• Desert tiles are undesirable due to their low base yields, though they can still be used for district placement and can offer significant bonuses with the right pantheon beliefs or wonders.
• Tundra tiles are undesirable for much the same reasons. Without any resources they can't be improved and even Russia can't sustain any city on tundra tiles alone.
• Rainforest tiles usually have decent base yields 2F/1P or 2F/2P and usually offer a good mix of bonus and luxury resources. Base rainforest still suffer from not being possible to improve but in the worst case it can still be chopped for bonuses while allowing the underlying tile to be improved, or buffed through wonders or civilization-specific features (Kongo's Mbanza district or Brazil's adjacency bonuses for example).

Now for water tiles.

• The base water yield is arguably worse than tundra but better than desert. 1F/1G is roughly equal to 1F but water can't have hills or forest, which means tundra gets the nod due to production bonuses.
• Base water tiles cannot hold any districts aside from the harbor, which is good but very low priority.
• Base water tiles cannot house any improvements.
• There are no adjacency bonuses for base water tiles, nor any pantheon beliefs or civilization-specific bonuses to water tiles. (God of the Sea applies on to sea resources.)
• The water-based wonders are all very lackluster.
• Since ocean access is actively detrimental to city development and there's no need for actual ships to explore across the ocean you have no secondary reasons for wanting ocean access in any city.

I find that the land-based analogy to base water tiles are flood plains, or arguably marsh. However, these tiles have base yields of 3F and can house improvements (once you clear the marsh) and districts or wonders (marsh only, unless you're playing as Egypt). You're generally happy to work an early marsh for the food but come mid-game it's frequently better to clear for the significant farm bonuses or to house a district or wonder.

You'd not be particularly happy to settle a city where a significant part of the immediate tiles were flat desert or tundra, mountains or snow and yet this is exactly the same as settling a coastal city. Except unlike these other tiles mentioned you're getting absolutely zero bonuses from water tiles, and there's no bonus, pantheon belief or improvement that will help you.

As such I find that at a bare minimum water tiles should be 2F/1G and be possible to buff to 3F/1G, my proposal would be with an economic policy but it's quite academic overall.

Since even self-sustainable food yields wouldn't be enough however, because a city without decent production is a very sad sight indeed, I'd also like to see some kind of early non-food sea resources added to the mix.

Even then I'd expect little reason to settle coastal, rather it being less painful if you have to. Buffing the water wonders, introducing more of them, and giving reasonable bonuses from water tiles in other ways (adjacency, pantheon, whatever) and providing map scripts that actually encourage water exploration and navy-building are still very much required.

I always played Small Continents in Civ5 despite finding water lackluster because it, at the very least, forced me to explore the oceans for trade and relations. And I frequently found Small Continents to produce too large landmasses.

In Civ6 I see no reason not to play pangea maps, which I usually hate, because it's just not possible to utilize water in any reasonable way and the default continents map seem to only generate two continents which both span the entire north-south divide at maximum (Huge) size anyway.

 

[LanguishViking]

1. A Grain Ship Project which produces food.
2. Give coastal cities harbors as if they were unique districts (no pop requirement and half cost)
3. Give coastal tiles adjecency bonuses as if they were farms or districts or mines, possibly make this contingent on a coastal city.

 

[LanguishViking]

Exactly, the importance of coasts for human development is immense.

Densely populated regions in the Americas and Oceania are almost exclusively coastal. The major exception is the east of the United states where there's a connection from Chicago to New Orleans over the Missisippi and the artificial Chicago portage.
The situation on Europe and Asia is similar - most of the non-coastal population lives along the Rhein, Danube, Ganges and Yangtze rivers. Still, there is a bit more landlocked population, probably due to the long historical development of these regions allowing for better infrastructure like roads, railroads and canals.

No matter what, before the 19/20th century (trains, cars, planes) most of mankind was dependent on water-based trade and transport if they wanted to live from more than just subsistence. Even nowadays, being landlocked is almost a guarantee for a country to be poor. See this Wikipedia article: Click

The St Lawrence is navigable so Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Montreal and Toronto are technically coastal. Same for Memphis, St Louis, Cincinatti and Pittsburg on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

 

[DudewiththeFood]

I think one of the biggest problems is that ocean tiles can't be improved if they have no resource while one way or another, nearly every other tile in the game can be. Fishing should be a sustainable option for food which means either sea needs to have a base of 2 food or you are able to build fishing boats without having a fish resource. It's not like fish only exist in specific locations - only that there are more in those tiles. You'll need other sources of food like an actual fish resource or wheat/rice but a city that works exclusively sea tiles should be able to maintain its population.

The second part of making sea tiles worthwhile would be making the importance the seas have been for trade in history explicit. There's a reason that all important trading cities locations were coastal or on main rivers up until the industrial revolution when canals meant you could build a city anywhere and have it connected to water. Civ 5 doubled trade route yields and distance which would be represent this well. The commercial district having adjacency bonuses for coast would at least be a step in the right direction.

 

[Exodite]

Civ 5 doubled trade route yields and distance which would be represent this well.

I'm not so keen on that, it was bad in Civ5 and it's likely to be equally bad now.

Stronger ocean trade routes did nothing for the ocean itself in Civ5, it just meant you never built land trade routes.

The commercial district having adjacency bonuses for coast would at least be a step in the right direction.

Agreed.

I'd rather see a coastal adjacency bonus than one for the harbor specifically. Base ocean tiles need the buff, harbors don't.

Of course that's nowhere near enough but all the little things add up and currently coast/ocean tiles have nothing going for them.

 

[Chinese American]

There has to be incentives for the CITY CENTER (CC) to be settled next to the coast:

1. +1 Gold and trade route for CC next to coast. Another +1 Gold and trade route if next to river mouth.
2. Adjacency bonus for districts if CC is on coast. e.g. Commercial Hub grants city +25% gold output if next to CC that is on coast.
3. As suggested above, buildings that are only buildable if CC is at coast.

 

[LanguishViking]

I'm hoping someboyd with modding skills who can help me with some balance Ideas I have to fix this.

what I think needs to be done
- harbours in coastal cities count as unique districts
- tiles worked by coastal cities get adjecency bonuses from ocean tiles adjecent ot land tiles. (farms, mines and districts).

 

[thecrazyscot]

I've released an alpha version (http://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/improved-water-yields.603384/) of a mod which attempts to overhaul the Harbor and its buildings. I'd appreciate playtesting and feedback as I haven't had much opportunity to test it out.