Increasing costs for districts etc.

[historix69]

In my current game, costs for districts like harbor are up from 60 base costs to almost 500 around turn 275 / 500. This makes it almost impossible to build districts in new cities since you cannot buy districts, only the buildings in districts. I know that there is a way to push these cities with internal trade routes, but it takes around 30 turns or so until trade routes can be reassigned and you would need many trade routes per city to see an effect. Currently I have 16 cities of which 4 are new founded (colonies for exotic resources) and another 3 are conquered and need to be adjusted. Number of trade routes is only 14 since harbors / commercial districts are so expensive that they take forever to build in the new cities. Actually I planned to found even more cities to prevent barbarian uprising in unsettled areas.

My income is around 600 gold per turn (thanks to a Great Trader and internal trade routes), but prices are high. Purchasing a worker costs already 500 gold (15% reduction applied for Trade Republik) which is almost 600 gold unmodified. In turn 1 my city with pop 1 and no buildings except the palace had an income of 10 gpt while a worker costed 200 gold, so I could buy a worker every 20 turns for one city. With the current income, I can buy 14 workers for 14 cities every 12 turns, so despite the high effort of building harbors and commercial districts, markets, banks, stock exchanges in most cities with pop between 10-20, the income per city has only slightly increased due to 250% - 300% inflation for prices.

On the other side research speed is so fast (5 turns per tech) that it is impossible to build all the new buildings and wonders in the core cities, e.g. a wonder still takes 20-40 turns for my core cities, a level 3 building between 8-14 turns. Modern military units take 4 turns in capital but around 10 turns in other core cities (single units, no corps etc.).

Question :
Is inflation based on number of turns, number of techs, policies, cities, districts, buildings or units built?
Does the high inflation imply that you should stick to 4-8 well placed cities like in Civ 5 and should avoid expansion / conquest?

 

[rschissler]

I agree, it is out of whack and should be adjusted somewhat. Surprised you didn't see the recent long thread about this. Some people think it needs fixing, while some think it is all fine and dandy. Here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...ict-cost-formula-still-kills-the-game.615080/

 

[Victoria]

Is inflation based on number of turns, number of techs, policies, cities, districts, buildings or units built?
Does the high inflation imply that you should stick to 4-8 well placed cities like in Civ 5 and should avoid expansion / conquest?

Civ 5 Does not work here, clear your mind... You need at least the number of cities as the difficulty level with more being better more often than not

The escalation costs you are talking about for districts are.....

=[60*(1+9*Larger of [100*(Number of Techs/67 OR Number of Civics/50)]/100] * 75%

The escalation costs for chopping are ....

Basevalue..25fp/50gold for bonus ...20 for features
=Base Value*(1+9*Larger of [100*(Number of Techs/67 OR Number of Civics/50)]/100)

My income is around 600 gold per turn

The answer therefore in your case is to chop them in as chopping scales with districts and you have enough money to buy builders.
Even better chop and increase tile production/population... the very high rate you see does not include city growth and terrain improvement

 

[Canadian Bluebeer]

All of this is why I play on marathon. I have time to do things before the next tech/civic pops.
Mostly.

I've had games where even on marathon, it was less than 10 turns per tech.
That was an odd one.

Later one, yes, new cities take forever to get a district, but at that point, they are more just excess population dumps,
or strategic "don't you settle here so you can bring troops into my lands to invade"
Either way, I don't care what the city builds.

 

[Leyrann]

When playing Civ 6, you have to remember at all times that production is a very important statistic, much more than in IV and V. You need to make sure to cover every city you have with an Industrial Zone (I do realize that's not always possible for new cities or conquered cities, however), and you need to mine the hills you have. If you have a city without any hills, then you need to plant some forests (preferably alongside rivers) and put lumbermills on them, or just deal with them having only low production and mostly use them to produce units.

Once you get the hang of it, turns to build districts in an average, developed city will stay roughly equal all game, maybe rise a bit. For new cities, just flood them with trade routes until they got their first district online, by that point they also have the population size (due to food from the same trade routes) that they can work enough tiles for decent production. And buy a builder or two.

 

[Victoria]

I build a few IZ at most, only when adjacency is good or for a +4/5 prod trade route or for science victories.. or if playing Germany

 

[historix69]

@Victoria
Thanks for your reply.

Chopping is a good hint. Unfortunately not all regions feature forests. When building a remote outpost on a group of islands like Hawaii (earth map), production resources are rare.
It would help to be able to simply buy districts like you can buy buildings. Or to mod the Aztec ability to use worker to build districts to all civs.

I continued the game and now it is turn 330.
I took over most of Eurasia in a colonial war to prevent AI from conquering my City States and to prevent religious conversion.
Future Tech #3 / Future Policy #4, Income > 1000

Production costs have reached the maximum value :
- normal districts 600
- district types rarely used 450
- aqueduct 500

- worker 198
- settler 300
- trader 160

I understand that the increase in costs is meant to slow down expansion of runaway civs and it is actually a good idea when compared to previous corruption / global unhappyness mechanics, but it also makes expansion into empty regions in mid- to endgame very slow for all players and those cities, especially when build by AI, hardly develop any districts on their own.
Conquering the core cities of your neighbours without destroying districts / buildings is more effective than building new cities in late game. The AI is frequently at war with each other in my game.

Add.:

The whole theme reminds me of "Rise of Nations" by Bryan Reynolds where the costs of most items were based on the current number of the item. Loosing items lowered the price for the item. However in "Rise of Nations" you mostly played on small maps for 15-60 min, you did not settle a planet earth.

To prevent a rush through the Tech-tree etc. by wide empires, I would limit the effect of additional cities to science, culture, faith by applying a logarithm to the sum of raw-sience, etc.,
e.g.
science = 10 * log (10, raw-sience)
A small nation with 10 raw-science would get 10 science, a wide nation with 1000 raw-science would get 30 science, which is still 3 times more but not 100 times more. New cities in a wide empire would no longer contribute a significant amount of science, etc., not even in the sum.

Tech costs could also scale down with number of turns played so that researching too far ahead is slowed down, e.g. to research renaissance tech around turn 100 would be more expensive than around turn 200. (Maybe by increasing all tech costs significantly and applying a 1% discount every turn for all techs so that tech costs would reach current values at their target number of turns, e.g. medieval tech in turn 150 (?).)
(Note : 1% every turn is different from 1% per turn.
1% every turn is equivalent to a modifier to Tech costs of 0,99 ^ n which is 0,366 for n = 100 while 1% per turn would already reach 0 after 100 turns (free tech).)

By adding an upkeep for districts and a rule that resources and districts must be worked by population to give any benefit, expansion would be directed to the more fertile (food resources) regions of the world. (That's already somewhat implied in current design by limiting number of districts by population.) Strategic outposts in barren regions would depend more on food by trade-routes.

I think by applying some of those ideas would allow to lower the increase in district costs (and other costs) significantly from 10 to maybe 4.

 

[Leyrann]

Just wondering, considering your turn time and the fact that you're researching future tech... Shouldn't you just go ahead and get a victory?

 

[historix69]

It is my first full game in Civ 6 so I use my dominance to get used to the game and learn how things work instead of finishing it asap, e.g. trying to build all wonders etc.
(Note : I bought it at release but shelfed it soon due to announced patches and the amount of learning involved, e.g. before placing your first city you should know about all types of districts and their boni and dependencies and the new wonders and their dependencies etc. This is a lot of work compared to other games where you just start playing and have fun.)

 

[Leyrann]

It is my first full game in Civ 6 so I use my dominance to get used to the game and learn how things work instead of finishing it asap, e.g. trying to build all wonders etc.
(Note : I bought it at release but shelfed it soon due to announced patches and the amount of learning involved, e.g. before placing your first city you should know about all types of districts and their boni and dependencies and the new wonders and their dependencies etc. This is a lot of work compared to other games where you just start playing and have fun.)

You don't need to do everything perfectly though. If you just think "what should I do now" whenever the game asks you to reseach a tech/civic, have to build something in a city, etc, you can probably beat Prince or King on your first try if you know older civ games. And after some experience, well I'm basically doing it that way, only really planning ahead when I have really good spots for certain districts, and I can beat Emperor without too much trouble.

 

[MyOtherName]

Workers, settlers, and traders have a cost that depends on the number of them you have previously built. The purchase cost is 4 gold per cog: there is no inflation in that conversion rate.

If you can't chop/harvest to produce them, think twice if you really need new districts late game: as the end of the game draws near you could focus your resources on things that contribute more directly to victory. Acquiring the great people that help with your victory condition is an easy to overlook way to spend your cogs (build projects to get GPP) and gold (patronage).

 

[historix69]

I usually play Civ games like a sandbox (player-type : builder)... have some challenges with neighbour civs, build wonders, build a huge empire with lots of cities even on remote islands without special resources ... winning fast would mean to abandon my empire so I usually delay victory and conquer/build some more cities ... as a builder the increasing costs are more relevant than for a player who wins asap and skips the last 5-10 cities he might have founded otherwise ...

As I wrote above : The mechanism is not so bad ... if you have a large empire, you usually have enough gold to purchase things.
So : It would help to be able to simply buy districts like you can buy buildings if you cannot chop. Or to mod the Aztec ability to use worker to build districts to all civs.

The interesting question now is :
Is there a special reason that you can buy buildings but cannot buy districts?
If you look into Districts.xml, you see that the classical city now is also a district, the city center district, and cities usually are founded by settler and never bought. So the devs might simply have forgotten to implement an option to buy non-city-center-districts. Or would buying a district (which might cost 2.400 Gold in end-game) destroy the balance?

 

[Siptah]

Buying districts would allow much more snowballing and I wouldn't like it. A district engineer unit could work if it costs as much as a duistrict + 1 Population, so comparable to a settler in some way.
Great People that can create a district from scratch (maybe including buildings) could be added as well.
My later founded cities usually grow quite fast though since I improve tiles and assign one or two Trade routes. I don't feel the dire need to reduce the cost. Make ist independent from Science, ok, but the cost is ok imo. I always play on epic though and might be more used to longier build times anyway, but it should scale well afaik.

 

[historix69]

Buying districts would allow much more snowballing and I wouldn't like it.

Buying districts would always be expensive, like 500 - 2.500 Gold per district on normal game speed with current increase in costs. And it will take some time to return this investment, especially during early game when trade routes and buildings produce less money. Chopping forests is far better to snowball than buying stuff in early game ...
I was thinking about buying basic districts like harbor, CH, IZ which allow a city to faster catch up in late game in case you don't have free trade-routes at hand. The option to buy certain districts could be enabled in mid-game (renaissance, industrial age) via tech, maybe via separate one-way-techs for those players who would like such an option.

Probably the spaceport should be excluded from buying since it is a requirement for science victory. (On the other side you can buy Great Engineers which help you with the space race, so why not buy the spaceport?)