[NFP] (Newbies) One weird trick that made me a deity contender

Francel

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Most of you probably already know this, but if even one person finds out for the first time, I’ll feel justified.

1) District cost increases when more civics/techs are unlocked (up to 900%).

2) Cities are able to build more districts when they grow in population (1 pop = 1 district, 4 pop = 2 district, 7 pop = 3 district, etc)

3) Most importantly, you can lock in district cost at the lowest possible value by placing the district you want to build as soon as you meet the next population threshold. You can then go back to building whatever you were making. Finish the district later, and the cost won’t go up, despite tech or civic progression.

i was okay on immortal before I knew about this, but struggled with deity. My last 2 deity games have been cinches using this approach.

The game doesn’t teach you this either, afaik. Hope it helps, good luck, and sorry if you got to the end without learning anything new.
 
This is not new but good for people to know. To add to this
  1. If you play as Germany then you can place two districts early on and build them later. So twice as good on doing this.
  2. This can also help you to prevent strategic resource appear to block your district placement, but - i don't know if it's fixed, due to some bug if you were placed a dam and a niter pops up, then you cannot finish it. (normal behavior is you can finish it and you get the strategic resource even if you don't finish the district, but the case for dam/niter seems buggy).
  3. This does have some opportunity cost - the obvious ones are that
    • if you want to pivot your city to do something else, and you placed your district already, then you will have to wait
    • in the case of land shortage (e.g. sea map, or mountain heavy maps) you want to work some tiles before you place the district.
  4. The not-so-obvious one (important if you want to get your deity games sub T200) is that, it may ruin your opportunity to get the 40% off district discounts (it's kinda technical but read this), sometimes if you delay placement of your district until you finished some others, you get a better discount (e.g. if you want to place a theatre square in a game you built campus in every city but just 1-2 theatre square, you might have a chance to get 40% for the 3rd if you get things right, sometimes this may mean that you need to delay placement of the district).
As an example for 4, say you focus on science and are at 38 techs, and regular district cost is 292. And by unlocking two more techs the cost increases to 301, but you can finish a few district during this time, so you get 40% for a district you want - the cost will instantly become 180 (!!). This can mean shaving 5 turns in a city, or saving you a tree to chop.

P.S. project cost also increase as you progress but you cannot lock it (even if you started it already the cost still goes up, this is very painful for the Phoenicia Moving Capital project - it is very costly and takes a long time, and you unlock tech/civic in the mean time. I've seen the cost go from 400-ish to 540, it's so painful that you'd better chop it). Sometimes it is worth delaying unlock a tech/civic to fix the cost, and sometimes it is worth to complete a few cheap tech/civic to increase the gain from chopping. It's all about micro-management and for some that's where the fun is.
 
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Also if you have R&F/GS you can promote Reyna to Contractor and Moksha to Divine Architect to instantly purchase districts with gold or faith to bypass the district production costs. Comes late (except if you have SS!), but super handy for Science Victories to shave off a good 20+ turns off producing a Spaceport whereas with Reyna it’s ~7k gold and Moksha ~3k faith. While understanding the district discount maths might seem a little confusing this is relatively straightforward. :)
 
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