I do appreciate you taking the time to lay out your critiques, but I’m afraid I’m simply don’t agree with them.
My own counter argument is that you are basing everything on Rise and Fall mechanics and the developers have already said there are incoming buffs to coastal cities, and this buff will have the biggest direct increases to coastal based Civs.
I've addressed this. The argument you're making assumes that Phoenicia gains some particular bonus from being coastal. This is not the case. If coastal cities become more attractive, Persia will make as much use of them as Japan, Indonesia or Phoenicia. Phoenicia gains no yield bonuses from being on the coast - it just gets its harbours a bit more cheaply. The sum total of their value as a coastal civ is equivalent to the Royal Navy Dockyard. On the plus side this means they don't particularly care about settling coasts if those slots aren't available, but they don't have a magic advantage just by virtue of being 'coastal' you're imagining.
Nor do I think you successful refute the mathematical savings on the settlers. 50% is huge. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t build ancestral halls or use the policy cards. Harbours are essential to coastal cities, and half-hammer ones are an immense boon.
Once again, I'm going by the figures someone else tabulated. 50% bonuses are only bonuses to base production - they become relatively less useful the more 50% buffs you have. Since this is a buff to something that already has two 50% buffs available and widely-used, and has a significant set-up cost to get there, describing it as marginal is fully reasonable.
Settlers do get more expensive, but that’s the case for every single other civ, and the more expensive they get the better these bonuses become.
Once again, look back at the table. The bonus has diminishing returns, and hefty ones. I am of course assuming those calculations are correct as I haven't checked them, but ignoring actual figures and just repeating "wow, 50% looks like a big bonus" is not getting you anywhere.
And I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s been explained multiple times, just repeated.
How would you define an explanation if not a comment with supporting evidence? No one's yet refuted anything I've pointed out with argument, just said "I think it's wrong" with - at most - the spurious reasoning "you don't know what's changed about the game context".
And ultimately, we don’t know what the navel game will look like in GS, so your entire analysis is predicated on coast being weak. Which it may or may not be.
No, it's predicated on basic game mechanics and Phoenicia's abilities, which don't relate to how weak or strong X may be. Phoenicia has no major advantage for being coastal that makes them any better than England if coastal cities are good. Building settlers is something you do in one or two cities, so will be of no relevance to most cothons in your empire. Naval production likewise will usually be centralised, and as I've noted won't be extensive. So most Cothons offer nothing beyond being cheap, and Phoenicia has no other coastal bonuses. That doesn't change however attractive coastal cities are.
Similarly for naval units, we know how they work and we also know that physically coastal cities can't be attacked from all sides at sea, and that there's no need for more than about three supporting ranged units. So simply based on map constraints you never need more than half a dozen ships to take any given city. AI behaviour may have changed to make them spam more naval units, but there's no reason to expect that that I'm aware of.
The difference is everyone is dealing in potential, whereas you are critiquing the as-is, which we know is going to change
You say "potential", I say "unfounded speculation". Nothing anyone's suggested that may change - save a suggestion that Harbors may change position on the tech tree, for which we've seen no evidence - will make Phoenicia seem any better than it does now, and any change that favours coastal cities will benefit cities like England, Norway and Indonesia as much as or more than Phoenicia, as well as any other civ that doesn't have reasons not to settle on the coast (such as the Inca, as there will often not be many mountains there).
It is not marginal. You still build more cities than others by virtue of loyalty immunity on any continent you desire.
How often do you find that a real constraint outside Dark Ages? And once again you shouldn't be building
more cities than anyone - there's not much benefit to having excess cities in Civ VI. If you want an early expansion civ you want to be able to settle your dozen-at-max cities as soon as possible, you don't want the ability to settle more later. The Phoenicia bonus lets you do other things and still build settlers at much the same rate as anyone else - it does not let you get out earlier settlers.
Was that in one of the recent livestreams I haven't watched, or is this speculative? It will certainly be nice not to be constantly bothered by Harald telling me how much he admires my one trireme because it outclasses the rest of the world's navies put together. Admittedly I've seen some very late games in my games where coastal AIs will spam submarines, but even then they use them entirely defensively and that late in the game you mostly aren't building new units or capturing cities.
Coastal cities are more relevant. Navies are more relevant.
Once again this is an unjustified statement. It doesn't follow in any way that navies are more relevant because coastal cities are - that will only be the case if you want to attack them or if the AI starts building navies and actually goes on the offence with them.
The first 50% settler bonus is the most significant. The second one adds up. The third one even more so. For anyone to compete they need to slot a card and/or build an Ancestral Hall. That's already multiple opportunity costs that Phoenicia can either double down on or complement. No most civilizations are not going to slot Colonization very early unless they are building Settlers en masse. No most civilizations aren't going to build Ancestral Hall if they don't aim to go wide. How many of those players will be in the same game?
I'm not talking about civs in the same game as Phoenicia, I'm talking about general comparisons with typical player strategies. When you get down to it, a player could beat the AI civs playing a civ that has no bonuses or uniques at all, so it doesn't really make sense to consider a civ's bonuses in the context of how it fares against the AI.
For Ancestral Hall to be an opportunity cost the alternatives have to be attractive - pending any balance changes the present alternatives are so unattractive that Ancestral Hall is worth it for a free builder or two, you don't have to be going especially wide.
Phoenicia always has the settler bonus. Her mere existence on the map will force you to play differently, possibly suboptimally, to compete. You can't even let her get a foothold on your continent lest she start flipping your cities with her new capital.
You must experience more loyalty issues in your games than I'm used to. Being near a capital is only a problem for low population cities in a Dark Age (or a Normal Age vs. an opposing Golden Age) in my experience. It may be true that I'm underrating the value of the migrating capitals since it's not something we've seen before, but it doesn't strike me as being much more than a nod to Carthaginian flavour.
No cities don't want "same number of cities". They want the most cities but are forced to stop due to loyalty and safety concerns.
Once again this seems to speak to something you experience rather than anything general. The prevailing wisdom is that past a certain point the cost of investing in settlers and districts outweighs the value of having extra cities, with amenities as a lesser concern since positive amenities boost yields. Phoenicia does nothing to change that calculation.
See the best part about not having a reliance on particular yields means that you don't even need your unique if an opportunity arises.
That's much like saying the advantage of America having the P-51 is that it makes no difference if it never builds one. It's an acknowledgment that the unique simply isn't much good.
