Instant growth/production VS estimated growth/production

[Naokaukodem]

Currently we have had in the entire series intant growth/production.

Now there, it just annoys me when I recall a granary will take 60 turns to build when founding my second city for example as Rome. (free monument)

Earlier, this recalls me of silly AI tile assignment management. (which has always been true in the whole series)

Now, what if the game, not only indicates you the average production time according to actual and future growth, according to natural border expansion ? (without, say, taking into account tiles purchases and improvements ? That would immediately re-adjust the estimation) But ALSO when; say, a governor is placed into that city, it makes the best calculation for you ? Not only that would solve the silly assignment problem, because the programmers would have taken care of it themselves, but it would make a better sense of growth and production for the player.

Computers are more powerful, let's use them !

 

[rocksinmypath]

This would be more confusing than helpful, but if it was a useful feature, I don't understand the logic behind locking it behind governors. Also, I don't see the connection between growth estimation and improving tile assignment logic.

 

[Naokaukodem]

Thanks for the answer rocksinmypath !

I think I misexplained there. What's behind governors is not the estimation itself, but the actual optimal citizens assignment ! For example : in how much time can I build this wonder, is it best to let the city develop a little bit, say set it up on massive growth until there are 3 more citizens, or is it best to go full production without waiting ? (just examples, there could be middle grounds obviously) Now, all we can rely on is intuition, if we do not want to do boring calculations. (equations ?) However, a lot of the point to play Civ is intuition also, so maybe it wouldn't be so great to eliminate that part completely (for citizens assignment) and let the game play at our place everytime. Because some of the fun might be this sort of decision, well, I guess. But every player is different, so I thought it could be cool to have both possibilities.

About the connection between growth estimation and improving tile assignment logic, it's pretty simple in fact (if I got you correctly) : if you improve a grassland tile (farm), the growth/production estimation will change because the growth will be faster, and then another production tile could be worked faster. Hence the estimation of the current production changing. Same with a mine on a hill, obviously.

Well, in growth/production there's growth, but I don't mean to really have an estimation of several citizens births, only production estimation actually. (but that would take into account growth, that's what I meant)

And, I wouldn't think it's confusing, what I personnally find confusing is the actual system when you only have instant production : a new city with no production tiles worked "will" put 60 turns or so to build a granary, that's discouraging. Worse : if you have no production tiles, your granary will actually put 60 turns to finish, which is too much. That, is because I don't always pay attention to this kind of details when settling a promising fresh water city with for example good food and luxuries and often forget about it until prod is finished. With prod estimation, I could take the appropriate measures, for example send an internal trade route to it, or straight up buy production tiles. I would be more concerned about it, not only "alea jaca est" and basta. It might be to much personnal though I guess.
However, the optimization of growth/production through citizens tile assignments could be a real help for some (most ?) players, because in the state I feel it pretty hard to be totally sure of what we do.

 

[rocksinmypath]

You're likely forgetting to micromanage your new cities because you have many other things to attend to. The tile assignment mini-game as a very short shelf life. It's only really fun to play, I'd say, up until when you have two cities with around four citizens each. I don't think the solution to this problem is better automation. It requires a way to phase out the mini-game when the game's scale outgrows it.

I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of introducing a neolithic era (like in Humankind) to Civ. I won't get into too much detail because I don't want to steer off topic, but the gist is to have each player start a game with a "tribe" unit, which is essentially a walking city. Each turn, you get to move the tribe around mostly in search of good land where you want to settle your first city. At the end of each turn, you get to assign your tribe members to tiles surrounding the one the unit ends the turn in. You can choose to work high food tiles, for example, to quickly grow your tribe's population, which can it to work more tiles and, eventually when it grows large enough, split to spawn a new tribe. Eventually, you'll be able to settle your first city, and when you do, the tribe unit converts to a static city (like how a settler transforms to a city in Civ), and beyond this point, the tile assignment mini-game disappears for the tribe/city. It will still be available for your other tribes that haven't settled yet. This mechanism allows for a natural way of phasing out the tile assignment mini-game, right around when it should start to feel boring.

Post-settlement, the concept of population changes. Population is essentially a number of specialists a city can afford to hire. It's like how, in Civ, a city needs to reach a certain population to be able to build a new district. Each new specialist slot allows you to build a new piece of permanent infrastructure (similar to Civ's districts and buildings) that is much more powerful than non-permanent non-specialist infrastructure (e.g. farms). One pet peeve of mine is that, even in late stages of a game in Civ, an unimproved tile can be considered powerful enough (much more so than a specialist slot in a district building) that a significant portion of the city's population is doing something there. What are they doing? Picking berries and hunting wild rabbits in the 20th century? Unimproved tiles should be considered unused tiles, while tiles with either specialist or non-specialist infrastructure should be automatically worked.

There's an obvious question of balance with this approach. If all non-specialist tiles are worked automatically, what stops the player from spamming improvements everywhere? I think this can be easily solved by making improvements much more difficult to place. For example, in the early game, farms should only be placeable on farmable resources. With technological advancement (something like Feudalism in Civ), you'd be able to place farms on tiles next to farmable resources, and eventually even on tiles without adjacent resources. In the late stages of the game, even with lax placement requirements, you'd still face an interesting challenge of having to allocate the limited amount of land you have for the relatively powerful specialist infrastructure or non-specialist infrastructure that may help you grow your cities faster to be able to acquire more specialists, but obviously, as the game goes on, growth becomes less valuable.

Anyways, I don't think there's any reason why tile assignment should be a permanent fixture in Civ for the game to be fun. If anything, it just becomes an annoying feature as the game goes on, and that's even with it being automated already quite well in my opinion, and I don't think further automation will make the game more fun.

 

[Marla_Singer]

I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of introducing a neolithic era (like in Humankind) to Civ. I won't get into too much detail because I don't want to steer off topic, but the gist is to have each player start a game with a "tribe" unit, which is essentially a walking city. Each turn, you get to move the tribe around mostly in search of good land where you want to settle your first city. At the end of each turn, you get to assign your tribe members to tiles surrounding the one the unit ends the turn in. You can choose to work high food tiles, for example, to quickly grow your tribe's population, which can it to work more tiles and, eventually when it grows large enough, split to spawn a new tribe. Eventually, you'll be able to settle your first city, and when you do, the tribe unit converts to a static city (like how a settler transforms to a city in Civ), and beyond this point, the tile assignment mini-game disappears for the tribe/city. It will still be available for your other tribes that haven't settled yet. This mechanism allows for a natural way of phasing out the tile assignment mini-game, right around when it should start to feel boring.

I can see the gameplay interest about discovering the map early this way, but nomadism in pre-Neolithic periods wasn't about wandering around from a place to another to find some food. In Mesolithic and even Upper Paleolithic, most populations were semi-nomadic. Basically that means they only moved from a specific summer base camp to a specific winter base camp to follow the seasonal cycle of migration of game. In climates with sufficient food supply all year long, populations then permanently stayed where they were (making them sedentary).

Mesolithic was the period from the last ice age to Neolithic. From a historical perspective, it's characterized by the development of numerous technics (archery, trapping, sewing, carpentry, boat building) that were allowed thanks to better tools (microliths). Neolithic started with the development of agriculture and animal husbandry, so it's been actually always portrayed in the Civ series. What agriculture brought was mainly a demographic booming, populations growing much faster than hunters-gatherers. No matter how the game would evolve to make things fun, it shouldn't deviate too much from that in my opinion.

I would like it though if the game started before 4000 BC to better show that progressive evolution from the state of nature to civilization, rather than popping up one day with everything already there to develop your civilization.

Anyways, I don't think there's any reason why tile assignment should be a permanent fixture in Civ for the game to be fun. If anything, it just becomes an annoying feature as the game goes on, and that's even with it being automated already quite well in my opinion, and I don't think further automation will make the game more fun.

I guess districts have been made permanent because buildings are produced in them so you would lose them all in deleting the district, yet I agree this makes things very rigid, which is neither fun nor immersive.

 

[rocksinmypath]

I guess districts have been made permanent because buildings are produced in them so you would lose them all in deleting the district, yet I agree this makes things very rigid, which is neither fun nor immersive.

Sorry, I think I wasn't clear with that last bit. What I meant was that it doesn't make sense for the tile assignment mini-game to last the entire duration of a game when it stops being fun after maybe the first thirty turns. I think it's fine for specialist infrastructure to be permanent, although they don't need to be, because it forces the player to carefully think through their decisions. City planning is what many players find to be one of the strengths of Civ 6, and I don't think it would feel the same if the player were allowed to delete and rebuild districts freely. I think the distinction Civ makes between districts (relatively powerful and permanent) and improvements (relatively weak and temporary) is fine, but districts need to be much, much stronger than improvements, which isn't always the case, and unimproved tiles should be useless.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Sorry, I think I wasn't clear with that last bit. What I meant was that it doesn't make sense for the tile assignment mini-game to last the entire duration of a game when it stops being fun after maybe the first thirty turns. I think it's fine for specialist infrastructure to be permanent, although they don't need to be, because it forces the player to carefully think through their decisions. City planning is what many players find to be one of the strengths of Civ 6, and I don't think it would feel the same if the player were allowed to delete and rebuild districts freely.

Alright got it, thanks.

I think the distinction Civ makes between districts (relatively powerful and permanent) and improvements (relatively weak and temporary) is fine, but districts need to be much, much stronger than improvements, which isn't always the case, and unimproved tiles should be useless.

If unimproved tiles are useless, how do you feed your first citizens when you found your first city?

 

[Naokaukodem]

The tile assignment mini-game as a very short shelf life. It's only really fun to play, I'd say, up until when you have two cities with around four citizens each. I don't think the solution to this problem is better automation. It requires a way to phase out the mini-game when the game's scale outgrows it.

It's not about being fun to play, at least not for me, it's about having optimal play, although it may overlap. Some players will have best joy by doing the thing themselves, some others will be very happy that the computer does it at their own place as it is a bit complicated in fact. I don't think it stops with more than two cities with 4 citizens, you can have big cities like 10+ pop having both good potential food and good potential production. It's better seen in Civ5 more than in Civ6 IMO, but switching the default setting to full production or to full growth makes the landscape appear totally different inside the city, and you can imagine it's a huge difference too in term of growth or production. Granted, in some cases it will not change much, and you will earn only one or two turns of production, but it can be still enough to get this wonder before your opponents do.
I don't get your last sentence, are you admitting that the "mini-game" is still a problem "when the game's scale outgrows it" ? Seems pretty contradictory.

Anyways, I don't think there's any reason why tile assignment should be a permanent fixture in Civ for the game to be fun. If anything, it just becomes an annoying feature as the game goes on, and that's even with it being automated already quite well in my opinion, and I don't think further automation will make the game more fun.

It would not only solve the citizens assignment "mini-game", but it will give you more precise information on in how many turns you can build something. This information would be precious in my eyes, and I guess in many other players'. Granted, it would be mostly useful for new cities for that comodity only, but it's not like Civ wasn't about building new cities. (Xpanding)

What I meant was that it doesn't make sense for the tile assignment mini-game to last the entire duration of a game when it stops being fun after maybe the first thirty turns.

... and so it would be good if something would make it transparent for the rest of the game... you are pretty much contradictory again. And, scuse me but you stop founding cities after turn 30 ?

 

[rocksinmypath]

Alright got it, thanks.

If unimproved tiles are useless, how do you feed your first citizens when you found your first city?

That's a good question. I haven't worked out all the details yet, but you'd basically want to get a farm immediately in your first city. The best way I can currently think of making this happen is to just award the player a free farm in a new city, because otherwise, you're always doing the same thing immediately after settling your first city, and that'd be boring. But with this, there could be a problem with your later cities, which you should be able to settle without farmable resources nearby because you have other ways of feeding it. It could either be supplied food from other cities or exploit a different food source (e.g. via fishing).

I don't get your last sentence, are you admitting that the "mini-game" is still a problem "when the game's scale outgrows it" ? Seems pretty contradictory.

The "mini-game" and the "game" are different in this context. The game refers to a game of Civ you play, and I interpret Civ as a collection of mini-games, one of which is the tile assignment mini-game. The scale issue I'm referring to has to do with why I think late game in Civ feels boring. My current hypothesis on this is that, as the game goes on, more and more mini-games are introduced without any old ones getting thrown out. To prevent the player from feeling overwhelmed, there has to be a mechanism for either removing mini-games that are no longer fun to play or re-scaling them so they're appropriate for the increased scale of the game.

Another way to think about this is that, as your civilization grows, you should expect your role as its leader evolve. If you're managing a small tribe, it makes sense for you to concern yourself with what tile each member of the tribe works. As your civilization grows into a small kingdom with several cities, you'd expect your role to evolve accordingly. At this point, it'd be impractical for you to be giving orders directly to citizens of each city, and you should be focusing on tasks that befit a king. But in Civ, it feels more like you have some duties as a king, but you also still have duties as a tribal leader. In fact, it's worse than that because you're taking on the duties of multiple tribe leaders, not just one.

Obviously, as you pointed out, through automation, the game provides a way for the player to ignore the tile assignment problem if they choose to. I believe this approach of relying on automation is bad in general. At turn 200, with 20 cities and a total population of over 200, I could manually assign every single citizen in every single city. I could do it again next turn and the turn after that and so on. What stops me from doing that? There's no motivation within the game for me to not do that. Sure, I may not actually get a lot of benefit from doing this, but if I believe I can get even a tiny bit of edge, why shouldn't I do this? I have to bring into the game factors that are external to it in order to justify letting the game's automation system take care of tile assignment. When you say something in the game feels annoying, so you choose not to do it, you are implying that you used factors like time and physical/mental fatigue as justification for your in-game decision, but why should these factors be relevant in a turn-based game? Automation is just a crutch for a poorly designed feature, and improving automation won't make the game more fun.

 

[Naokaukodem]

The "mini-game" and the "game" are different in this context. The game refers to a game of Civ you play, and I interpret Civ as a collection of mini-games, one of which is the tile assignment mini-game. The scale issue I'm referring to has to do with why I think late game in Civ feels boring. My current hypothesis on this is that, as the game goes on, more and more mini-games are introduced without any old ones getting thrown out. To prevent the player from feeling overwhelmed, there has to be a mechanism for either removing mini-games that are no longer fun to play or re-scaling them so they're appropriate for the increased scale of the game.

Another way to think about this is that, as your civilization grows, you should expect your role as its leader evolve. If you're managing a small tribe, it makes sense for you to concern yourself with what tile each member of the tribe works. As your civilization grows into a small kingdom with several cities, you'd expect your role to evolve accordingly. At this point, it'd be impractical for you to be giving orders directly to citizens of each city, and you should be focusing on tasks that befit a king. But in Civ, it feels more like you have some duties as a king, but you also still have duties as a tribal leader. In fact, it's worse than that because you're taking on the duties of multiple tribe leaders, not just one.

Obviously, as you pointed out, through automation, the game provides a way for the player to ignore the tile assignment problem if they choose to. I believe this approach of relying on automation is bad in general. At turn 200, with 20 cities and a total population of over 200, I could manually assign every single citizen in every single city. I could do it again next turn and the turn after that and so on. What stops me from doing that? There's no motivation within the game for me to not do that. Sure, I may not actually get a lot of benefit from doing this, but if I believe I can get even a tiny bit of edge, why shouldn't I do this? I have to bring into the game factors that are external to it in order to justify letting the game's automation system take care of tile assignment. When you say something in the game feels annoying, so you choose not to do it, you are implying that you used factors like time and physical/mental fatigue as justification for your in-game decision, but why should these factors be relevant in a turn-based game? Automation is just a crutch for a poorly designed feature, and improving automation won't make the game more fun.

I'm just proposing a fast, easy way to deal with the problems the series have had in its entire lifespan, so likely to still be there forever. Yes that's patch. Over what already exists. And over what might exist in the future, but still need patches. Your proposition would completely discard citizens tile assignment. I don't think it is an obvious mini-game at all, it's pretty hard to do the perfect move everytime, or even anytime. So, for the sake of optimization, I propose this option. And this is not even for optimization first. That's for a better clarity for builds for small cities (or not so...), but it's maybe just me. Anyway, I don't think this is 2 problems, which are still annoying, to justify we change the whole game design philosophy. There is far more important issues to deal with, like the lack of true rise & fall of civilizations. (see my signature) That's not a technical issue that will make me reinvent the wheel. And to a technical issue, I propose a technical solution.