Harbor Failure

[historix69]

Harbors as placable districts in Civ6 are a good idea and I think many players have wished to have harbors for years since the increased minimum spacing between cities made it more difficult to place cities on all coasts.

Harbors give access to the sea trade routes, allow to build (trade- and war-)ships, allow to exploit sea resources, ...

However in the last point a Harbor District can fail. If the city is placed 2 hexes inland and the harbor is placed on the 3rd ring of hexes on coast, the city cannot access most of the sea resources around the harbor since the resources are more than 3 tiles away from the city center. Now with the new loyalty system AI places many cities close to the capital, so in some cases abandoning the possibility to exploit most sea resources near their coast since all cities are inland.

The distance to exploit sea resources should be based on the position of the harbor, not of the city centre.

Here are some ideas for possible solutions :

0. Reduce minimal city distance
- Reduce minimal city distance (e.g. to 2) to allow more coastal cities on small / narrow landmass.

1. Extended city range with harbor
- A harbor is placed on coast near land OR on land near coast.
- A harbor extends the city range of workable tiles up to 3 tiles from the harbor.
- A city may have more than one harbor district with a minimum spacing for harbors to allow access to sea resources in all directions.

2. Fishing Village
- Keep Harbor district for normal cities as access to sea trade routes and as a ship yard (which needs the city production as input).
- Add a new coastal city type (Fishing Village) which is placed on coast near land (or on land near coast?), allows exploitation of sea resources up to 3 tiles away and has a smaller or no minimum city spacing distance, so that a major central city on a medium Island may be surrounded by half a dozen fishing villages.
- No buildings.
- Yields :
Gold, Faith and Culture (e.g. from pantheon) are added to the players global counters.
The big problem :
How to transfer food and production from harvesting sea resources from the village to the inland city?

3. Harbor sphere of influence
- To allow working water tiles, a harbor should culture bomb unclaimed coastal and sea tiles up to three tiles away.

 

[Victoria]

One for the ideas forum really
Allowing more than ring 3 to be worked is a bit of a fail to me for many reasons.
If you are 2-3 tiles inland you will only build a harbour for trade routes which is really the idea. The fact they can get adjacency from ring 4 to me is acceptable.

 

[MaryKB]

I agree with Victoria.

One of the advantages of your city being further inland is that you will likely have more spaces on which you can build Wonders and Districts. Plus I have found that, for the most part, land tiles are more valuable to a city than water tiles for citizens to work on. If you got to have all the advantages of a deep inland city, plus the sea bonus resources, that feels like it would be too much! The Harbor still does get the gold bonus from the adjacent fishies!

 

[historix69]

My main point is realism, not gameplay balance. Having a harbor and not being able to work the sea resources next to it because the city is inland feels wrong. In real life you would place another city there, but in Civ the minimum city distance forbids it in many cases.

Is there an advantage in Civ6 to have one big city compared to 3 smaller cities (except for the one big hub city for trade route buffs), e.g. one size 40 city against 3 size 13+ cities on the same land but using additional sea resources? (Consider you have 50-100 cities ...)
People often place cities inland because they are afraid of a surprise naval assault. Borders with other players may also play a role.

 

[Victoria]

one size 40 city against 3 size 13+ cities

None, in fact after about 13 you really are starting to go downhill unless you have a lot of valuable tiles...I have had a 21 city all grassland hills before, well not all but mighty fine all the same.

Yes I agree, a satellite city, sadly beyond current design limits. When does realism stop?

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

My main point is realism, not gameplay balance. Having a harbor and not being able to work the sea resources next to it because the city is inland feels wrong. In real life you would place another city there, but in Civ the minimum city distance forbids it in many cases.

In civ, you can't fish tiles more than 3 hexes from the city, which would come as a shock to my Newfoundland and Bluenose ancestors. Curses! Why is the Grand Banks so far from any land????

 

[Karpius]

My main point is realism, not gameplay balance.

I suppose on the one hand it is a bit of a design flaw that allows an inland city to create a harbor so far from the city center. But from a realistic point of view, it is not unprecedented that a major port city is only a port city and not a fishery or other maritime style city. The first example that comes to mind is Philadelphia (because I work there). Lots of shipping comes in and out of Philly, but there are no fishing boats going in and out, or crews heading out to harvest pearls or harvest crab traps or other maritime goods. Its all about the merchant shipping. The other activities take place in a number of towns and cities along the shore itself.

In game, if I want to work all those coastal resources then I place a city right on the coast. If I have a good city off the coast, but within reach of a harbor, then it may prove useful for naval building but I am certainly not counting on it for turtles or some such. Indeed, some of my best shipbuilding cities were placed in just such a way that there was excellent production value from land tiles, but I also built a shipyard to churn out lots of vessels.

Gotta take the good with the bad sometimes.

 

[Pomacanthus]

point #2 would be okay, but I'd make it as cities on shallow water tiles. Since we now have Water Parks, I now want to see what its like to have more districts on the water. Otherwise, I'd have to wait for a possible sci-fi civ in the future.

I guess there will be always at least an unreachable resource or two. unless maybe the barbarians will use them then. I wouldn't mind barbarian water outposts actually.

 

[historix69]

...
In game, if I want to work all those coastal resources then I place a city right on the coast.

It is one thing to place cities yourself and another to take cities from the AI. You cannot raze all the cities and settle continents completely new. But it is sad that AI sometimes misplaces their cities. A failproof concept for AI which prevents misplacing of cities and allows to exploit land and sea resources would be nice.

 

[isau]

I personally don't find this to be a flaw. IMO a city 3 tiles inland that happens to control 1 or 2 coastal tiles isn't truly a "coastal" city. It can be build a Harbor for those benefits, but for a truly coastal city the city center needs to be closer to the ocean. When Vanilla was released the balance was pretty poor in this regard but I do think it's gotten better with the addition of adjacencies between the City Center and the Harbor.

 

[acluewithout]

I agree it’s weird having a harbour next to sea resources you can’t improve or work. But Im afraid I otherwise can’t get on board with the OP.

I build a fair few harbours. I nearly always build them on coastal cities, because I find coastals pretty strong overall. So, I can usually work all the coastal tiles.

- I can usually get 2 or 3 with good production with some mines and a shipyard with good adjacency. Coastal is better because it boosts the adjacency of the harbour (gold) and shipyard (production). Ideally build on a river mouth for housing and then build a CH for good gold, ability to run Merchant projects, and further boost to Harbour (CH plus City Centre is an extra +1 for the Harbour).

- My other coastal cities don’t need production. They just provide gold, which is like production but I can spend it in any city I want not just the origin city. Water tiles and sea resources give gold, not production, which suits me fine.

- Having coastal cities leaves room inland for more cities that are more focused on production. So, I find coastal cities more ‘efficient’ that way, letting me have a more compact empire.

- My coastal cities are actually better at dealing with sea barbs, because if I build walls the city can attack, and so can ranged units garrisoned in the city. Coastals are actually pretty good at defending invasions for the same reason, and because you can harry embarked units before they land.

- Coastal cities are fun. Things I like to do: settle on one side of a bay and put an encampment on the other side; build an encampment on a point or groin reaching out to sea; settle on a 1 to 3 tile landmass and imagine it’s a cayman island; build 3 or 4 coastals on a larger land mass; squeeze a coastal onto someone else’s continent and run all my international trade routes from there.

I wonder whether Firaxis made a mistake allowing harbours to be built away from the city centre, although I get it allows for more city flexibility overall. If harbours had to be adjacent to the city centre (or were cheaper if built next to a city centre) people might build more coastal cities. But I actually think there’s enough incentive to build coastals already if you look hard.

 

[killmeplease]

in alpha centaury the player can work tiles beyond city limits with a crawler unit
in civ it could be a trawler unit to work seafood tiles off the coast

 

[MaryKB]

I wonder whether Firaxis made a mistake allowing harbours to be built away from the city centre, although I get it allows for more city flexibility overall. If harbours had to be adjacent to the city centre (or were cheaper if built next to a city centre) people might build more coastal cities. But I actually think there’s enough incentive to build coastals already if you look hard.

I like to think of districts as being smaller towns with a special focus. So as an example, to me Rome might be an inland city and its harbor would be like the port of Ostia.

 

[Karpius]

A failproof concept for AI which prevents misplacing of cities and allows to exploit land and sea resources would be nice.

With all the possible variables in choosing a city location you want the AI to choose the most optimal location in case the human player decides to capture it? Just because you or I might not like where the AI placed a city doesn't mean it was wrong for the AI. Sometimes you just have to accept what exists in the 'world' you are playing in. In fact, I view that as part of the game; dealing with what already exists and compensating where one can. Isn't that supposed to be part of the challenge? Or is it all supposed to be nice and neat and optimal based on what we feel is optimal?

 

[kryat]

My biggest gripe is that we should be able to move food around the empire like we can amenities. This would solve this issues with harbor cities by placing cities both on the coast to catch the fish, but then send the surplus to whatever city you want to grow. If you wanted a big coastal mega city, and small inland cities (like the New World), that’s fine, but if you want a large inland city and small fishing villages (like the Old World), that’s allowable too. Likewise, I want to be able to send food from my grassland farming cities to ones closer to hills and mountains.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

in alpha centaury the player can work tiles beyond city limits with a crawler unit
in civ it could be a trawler unit to work seafood tiles off the coast

I would love to see this mechanism introduced. Build a Trawler in a Seaport and then move it to an unclaimed sea resource outside of the control of any civ to gain the yield from that resource in the Seaport's City.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

My biggest gripe is that we should be able to move food around the empire like we can amenities. This would solve this issues with harbor cities by placing cities both on the coast to catch the fish, but then send the surplus to whatever city you want to grow. If you wanted a big coastal mega city, and small inland cities (like the New World), that’s fine, but if you want a large inland city and small fishing villages (like the Old World), that’s allowable too. Likewise, I want to be able to send food from my grassland farming cities to ones closer to hills and mountains.

Civ's economy has always been based on the idea that "Mayors Won't Share".

If you were creating an empire building game from scratch, I think you'd handle food much differently than Civ does, but after 6 iterations, the closest we've seen to resources being traded between cities are domestic trade routes that create extra food and production. Philosophically, it would be a big shift to move to a system where food and production are shared across all cities connected by trade route.

 

[MaryKB]

Actually isn't Kryat's idea basically what internal trade routes do? You can select policy cards, use governors (Magnus I think?), and such to get some fairly large food bonuses from one city to another. You have to use trade routes to actually transport the food!

 

[historix69]

With all the possible variables in choosing a city location you want the AI to choose the most optimal location in case the human player decides to capture it? Just because you or I might not like where the AI placed a city doesn't mean it was wrong for the AI. Sometimes you just have to accept what exists in the 'world' you are playing in. In fact, I view that as part of the game; dealing with what already exists and compensating where one can. Isn't that supposed to be part of the challenge? Or is it all supposed to be nice and neat and optimal based on what we feel is optimal?

I suppose you did not understand what I meant. I want to allow both inland cities and coastal cities so that a civ (human or AI) can exploit ALL resources nearby. Harbors in Civ 6 are a great addition to gameplay but they fail in realism if they do not extend working range for water tiles. If AI settles a coastal tile or inland is mostly based on numbers like the distance to existing cities, so if the nearest available settling spot is 3 tiles from water, AI will take it and so miss opportunity to exploit sea resources or secure a coastal water way. This is caused by the minimum city distance of 3 tiles, so it is an unrealistic artefact. In Civ1 you could place cities next to each other (allowing to create a canal for ships to cross 2 tiles of land.) So the minimum distance is rather new in Civ history.

 

[historix69]

Actually isn't Kryat's idea basically what internal trade routes do? You can select policy cards, use governors (Magnus I think?), and such to get some fairly large food bonuses from one city to another. You have to use trade routes to actually transport the food!

Civ 6 trade routes do not transport anything. They are boni to food, production, etc.
In my current game I run 50 trade routes from Rome to smaller cities, each providing ca. +5 Food, +5 Production and some Gold, that is 250 Food and Production per turn to the smaller cities.
You need some imagination to figure out how the 50 traders meeting in Rome somehow create such a surplus of 250 Food and Production per turn, when Rome itself has almost no food nor production since most tiles are occupied by districts and some wonders.

Since Colonization in 1994, players wait for a Civ game with transportable commodities.

Spoiler :