Has production scaling gotten worse?

[Tacgnol]

Man I could see having 8 cities up and running by turn 87 but having multiple districts in more than one or two is just, literally how lol.

But anyway as people have been saying the issue isn't with production being too slow, in isolation, I mean, I and I'm sure many others feel that way. But the problem is in relation to tech and civic scaling. They are just not even close to being balanced, at all, with a decent amount of development you will blaze through the tech tree from medieval to atomic in a few dozen turns. It's pretty ridiculous.

Like, okay, building districts takes a while but like, my city started building a commercial hub in medieval times and now it's the industrial age and we have factories and steam power and they're still working on it? Units aren't as bad, unlike districts I don't inherently feel their cost is too much and upgrading is always worth it, but they are still out of sync with the tech tree, if you start building mid-late game military in your low priority low production cities that aren't using trade routes, they'll be obsolete by the time they get built.

 

[joncnunn]

Units aren't as bad, unlike districts I don't inherently feel their cost is too much and upgrading is always worth it, but they are still out of sync with the tech tree, if you start building mid-late game military in your low priority low production cities that aren't using trade routes, they'll be obsolete by the time they get built.

Low production cities make poor military unit hand-bulding choices. What you actually want is one to three cities around the 75% percentile of production as designated military cities to be building military units and improvements to military when not building the units. Basically low production cities (unless made better by running a few internal trade routes from them) are better off just doing something like the cheapest city center improvements followed by placing commercial district and just improvements to that (and neighborhoods); they'll help the empire more by several of them combining to produce the gold to buy a military unit than extremely slowly building a few.

 

[GhostSalsa]

To me Civ V is becoming unplayable now because it is so formulaic.

And in my recent V Immortal game I threw my second city into a nice Petra spot to find Monty and Augustus right by it, desperately sold it to A as a bribe to war M, still got DOW'd by A and Wu together, had to fight them off, conquer M, reconquer my Petra city, and still built Petra there later...

Everything about the player making the game interesting for themselves still applies to V just as well as VI. Only, with the detail that every single reason that this was required in V, e.g. eras passing by too fast to have contemporary warfare, is still in VI, unaddressed and even more detrimental to immersion.

Production scaling should have been a priority design care; UI, unit balance, AI butthurtness, all these things that sucked about V when you considered the game by its own terms (not by the terms of "I wish it was more complex") -- these should have been priority design cares. they did terribly, they are fixing it terribly.

Having to finagle TR's to every new city is effective, but the meta-game is messy as with every tradeoff in the new TR and builder systems. OK, new cities need to exert a drain on the overall economy in some way: just implement a system that does that outright, like global happiness does, and make the accomplishment of the first district in the new city quick and painless. Why do I care? Because no civilization ever treated new settlements like mini Manhattan Projects! it's nonsense! VI should not ask the player to throw every historical metaphor under the bus to get anything done!