I'm really enjoying your threads.
I live only to serve
What do you think of Netherlands, Scotland, and the new and improved England? Can these civs reasonably keep up?
So it's a bit murky but there's really three camps.
Germany & Japan
The Dutch, England (Glorious Revolution represent)
Literally Everyone Else (honorable mentions: Rome, Aztec, china)
So basically the name of the game is aqueducts. Housing? Who cares about that? People can squeeze turnips. Those Aqueducts are pumping water straight into the blast furnaces.
So the best current way to boost IZs is to put them near aqueducts. Usually some scenario where you make a diamond out of 2 AQ and 2 IZ, that's an automatic +5 for both.
This is a nice pickup for Rome, as they were probably gonna build Baths anyways. The problem with your Khmer and Inca is that they want to put farms next to their AQ, and using them on IZs like that cuts into it.
Because of dams, this makes floodplains extra desirable. You may realize that AQs and Dams both synergize extremely well with rivers. This is why the dutch are so good. They almost always get the +2 pickup for river on their IZs, which is a big deal. Instead of 5-6 they get 7-8. Plus just being near rivers in the first place gets it extended to their campus and TS too. And they get +50%
towards dams. Not bad at all.
Scotland's +5-10% modifier is certainly nice, but they have no extra factory yield or way to boosted their IZ adjacency, so they have sunk a good bit. As an example, if you have a +6 IZ, that's gonna add up to 33 production with all the buildings. 33*1.1 = 36.3. But if you have a +8 IZ, that's already 41 production without the need for high amenities. So ecstatic scots are gonna need to be looking at ~60prod cities to even out with +0 amenity dutchies.
Why do I rank england with the dutch? because they not only get the +4 factory, but they also have
quadruple effective military engineers. What separates them from "everyone else tier" is how fast they can bolt together green districts. If you hustle science, you can keep expanding to good spots at the point which it'll be too expensive in those new cities to get green districts out quick; thus, having a ME support squadron is critical. Getting a start bias for iron and coal, which are extremly effective tiles for boosting an IZ (+1.5 for the mine and resource together) and they have a distinct edge. England is a lot more fit for purpose too with the gobs of coal they get.
Aztecs can boost all districts and are generally unfair, but their IZs have no qualitative edge. China has the one upside of getting canals basically at the start of the game, so they can build them super cheap and utilize some strategies involving canals. (For example, it's not that uncommon to find a floodplain river dumping into the sea where you can make a ring of City Center - Canal - AQ - Dam, and drop an IZ in the middle. China can leverage that canal boost right away.)
Then you have Japan. As this thread is a testament too, in the right terrain they can go nuts. Their AQ diamond is a natural +7, extending to +9 if they fill in the districts. They benefit more the more green districts you can utilize. And obviously this also extends to helping out all their other districts too.
Germany is like japan, but aggressively modified. The problem Japan has is that their super combines really only work on select rivers. When you have situations like mountains or oases, where you can't form an AQ diamond or better, you're kind of SOL: you're looking at an IZ surrounded by maybe 6 districts if there's no terrain issues, with an AQ, for a total of +8. Remember: the best way to boost your IZs is to have a +2 district touch multiple IZs at once. This is actually a huge restriction. If you look in my updated Hansa guide, you will see an example of a big 4 city cluster. See how the AQs are in the corners of that cluster instead of the center? Yeah, so that is impossible for Japan to utilize. Germany can just activate their Hansa Infinity Stone, and use CHs as the districts connecting all the IZs, leaving the AQs as simple supporting districts. The ease at which you can get +10
on a Hansa is simply stupid right now. (That banks up to 57 production already. The scots are in the dust.)
So IMO japan can situationally match or beat the Hansa, but Germany is just so much more flexible in the confines of real terrain, like how the dutch get a bonus just for doing what you should be doing, AND they can put together districts extremely quick like the Brits. Japan is still extremely good at production, though. Just look at the OP. Keep in mind that a 1 point difference in adjacency is 4 production total. Just the dutch river bonus can be twice as potent as a WotW factory's bonus.
