[GS] Playing tall revisited

[Sostratus]

Campuses spam is not good for the game generally, and is the main thing that pushes the game to be a bit more “wide” than it should be.

To me, Culture (and Gold) should be the yields maximised by wide; and Science (and Hammers) should be the yields maximised by tall (with maybe some Science from Trade). But Campus Spam (and how it interacts with City States) makes both Culture and Science about wide.

There should be a break or limit on Campuses. I’d like to see empires only able to support so many globally, rather than automatically one per City, and each Campus and it’s buildings then also being very costly to maintain. I’m not sure what that “global campus capacity” should be based on though. Perhaps your overall empire wide Population, and then adjusted by other things like Government Tier, Wonders or Great People.

I think the +50% for 10 Pop type cards, particularly Rationalism, need a rethink. It really does just push you to have Campuses everywhere and every City at 10 Pop and no more. Although, if you couldn’t spam Campuses in every City, then Rationalism specifically might not be such a problem anymore.

I think the research resources of a civ type game, whatever they are, should be designed in such a way that you don't inherently limit empire types over the primary phases of the game. (Ultra late game where a player can "max out" everything is a different beast entirely and that's like saying coastal cities are strong because you can get seasteads+offshore wind on every sea tile...) This can be through the resource itself being limited in some way or through the modification of the research rate by playing with costs too.

ANYWAYS
As for resource advantages of tall v wide, the biggest issue in civ6 is cities essentially "cap out" in an area once the district is built. There's no opportunity to invest further. Without getting too ridiculous, if the "building tree" for cities was deepened at all stages of the game, then you'd have much more emergent diversity in games. You can't really build up Rome to a peerless imperial capital, and you can't intentionally create a true megacity like NYC aka "Meierhattan" because the next town over can also just have a bank and a shipyard. So once I get my win districts down its time to prepare more settlers.

I do think that we need to recognize that a tall empire should always lose to the same tall empire + a chunk of moderately developed cities for that era. Because the latter is literally "better." Doesn't have to be linearly superior but it shouldn't be worse. When you start making it so people leave the map empty, that's when players get roiled. Even in civ5, though, you could still leverage wide (though you needed religion.) It turns out a 4 city tall empire was critically weak to someone with competent ICS rolling in 20 tanks...

Well, I'd say that it's more of a symptom of a disease. Districts with adjacency bonuses were a cute idea lifted from another game, a game where city spam is well-checked. If you have game that lacks regulatory mechanisms for expansion, and then you set up winning conditions that reward specialization, what do you expect the player experience to be like? if you can rack up an adjacency bonus that eclipses the value of a library, you're definitely front-loading a low-pop city. Forget the library, go find another mountain range

I think districts and district adjacency is one of the best things about civ6. And the district adjacency works very well to do what it's designed for: players placing districts in high adjacency tiles.
The true problem of district spam is that the buildings are just so much better than the adj for everything except the Harbor+IZ, and then the building cards compound the issue. There's no scenario where it's a bad idea to throw down a campus, even in the middle of the snow, because you can just dump out the buildings and rationalism will hand you the pop equivalent science of a size 20 city. (Campuses have too many good sources of adj right now, though, that I agree with) Even though the harbor district, as an example, has phenomenal adjacency benefits, it's uncommon to build a harbor in a one tile lake in an otherwise landlocked city. Likewise, unless you need the factory or power coverage, building an IZ at +0 doesn't really make sense right now. Ideally districts would only go where they have good adj unless you were focusing that area specifically.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

The true problem of district spam is that the buildings are just so much better than the adj for everything except the Harbor+IZ, and then the building cards compound the issue. There's no scenario where it's a bad idea to throw down a campus, even in the middle of the snow, because you can just dump out the buildings and rationalism will hand you the pop equivalent science of a size 20 city. (Campuses have too many good sources of adj right now, though, that I agree with) Even though the harbor district, as an example, has phenomenal adjacency benefits, it's uncommon to build a harbor in a one tile lake in an otherwise landlocked city. Likewise, unless you need the factory or power coverage, building an IZ at +0 doesn't really make sense right now. Ideally districts would only go where they have good adj unless you were focusing that area specifically.

The main reason there's no scenario where it's a bad idea to throw down a campus is because science and culture are the required outputs for victory, while other yields (except for faith, which is a hybrid if going for a religious victory) are interim steps to ultimately get you science and culture. It's compounded by the science and culture districts also getting you the great people who most help you get more science and culture.

It's very difficult to design a balanced system around "choose which yield you want", when one set of those yields are the things you need for victory, while another set are things that help you get the first set. I'm reminded of the Family Guy scene where Peter Griffin has a game show choice between a boat or a mystery prize which, as Peter says "could be anything, even a boat!".

The best thing Civ 6 did in my opinion was split the tech tree into two parts. At least now there's some interesting choices between "how much science, how much culture".

The worst thing it did was make science- and culture-focused districts part of the new district selection mix. City building decisions should be around "how am I going to get that boat?", not "how am I going to get that boat? oh, I know! I'll take the boat". Either every city should come with a science- or culture-district free, and you choose what other districts to supplement it with, or no districts should be science- and culture-focused.

 

[Sostratus]

The main reason there's no scenario where it's a bad idea to throw down a campus is because science and culture are the required outputs for victory, while other yields (except for faith, which is a hybrid if going for a religious victory) are interim steps to ultimately get you science and culture. It's compounded by the science and culture districts also getting you the great people who most help you get more science and culture.

I was thinking about other games and past iterations of civ and how they tackle this. Mostly everyone is susceptible to science spam in some way. One thing civ players may recognize is the famous science slider in civ4. There, your science rate was tied to your commerce generation at large + how much gold profit you made. The more profit, the more you gold you could afford to divert to science instead of paying the bills. Now, this tradeoff is very elegant, but perhaps almost too on the nose with how the culture slider and eventually espionage slider came into play. There's little economic play outside of making science and culture (since only a couple civics could rush buy.)

In civ5, where everyone can rush buy with gold, everyone scrambled to get enough city connections and have trade routes going to pay for their buildings and units, but creating science wasn't anymore costly than doing anything else.

Civ6 has no such tradeoff; you can do all the science and all the culture and gold generation is almost wholly independent. If Civ6 had serious gold scarcity tied to your infrastructure, with perhaps a little more variation in means to generate it outside of spam CH/trade route, and campus/theater/scientist/artist upkeep was significantly higher than stuff like IZs, harbors, encampments, etc, then you're starting to develop an economy where you need gold to sustain primary yields and capability ( ,,,) and only the richest can do that while investing heavily into /. Or conversely, you can dump everything into / but you're really going to have to sacrifice your other things- military, industry, etc- to pay for it.

I really think gold scarcity would add a lot to civ6. It would leave a door open for really cool trade route gameplay and you could leverage diplomacy much more- if diplomacy can help you get more out of trade routes, or research agreements, or whatever, then peaceful players who are friendly essentially get a more efficient economy than warmongers, who either have to survive off plunder and capture, or "reform" their ways and downsize their military to support a domestic economy.

Otherwise balancing various aspects of "investing into existing cities or building new ones" type empire development is just a function of overall production and wide will win that, very convincingly.

 

[nzcamel]

There should be a break or limit on Campuses. I’d like to see empires only able to support so many globally, rather than automatically one per City, and each Campus and it’s buildings then also being very costly to maintain. I’m not sure what that “global campus capacity” should be based on though. Perhaps your overall empire wide Population, and then adjusted by other things like Government Tier, Wonders or Great People.

A limit on campuses would annoy me. I'd rather see again a situation where the flat yields they and their buildings give, were modified by population.

On/off switches at specific levels are often weak mechanics unless there's something special in game about hitting the threshold target. Otherwise it just makes for asymmetrical benefits that encourage non-intuitive tactics. A Pop 9 city getting no benefit while a Pop 10 city gets full benefit is an odd mechanic because there's nothing special you need to do in game to hit Pop 10 (versus 9 or 11, say). There's no particular reason why Rationalism couldn't have been written to give escalating bonuses as city size increases.

Agreed re rationalism etc.

I think the research resources of a civ type game, whatever they are, should be designed in such a way that you don't inherently limit empire types over the primary phases of the game. (Ultra late game where a player can "max out" everything is a different beast entirely and that's like saying coastal cities are strong because you can get seasteads+offshore wind on every sea tile...) This can be through the resource itself being limited in some way or through the modification of the research rate by playing with costs too.

ANYWAYS
As for resource advantages of tall v wide, the biggest issue in civ6 is cities essentially "cap out" in an area once the district is built. There's no opportunity to invest further. Without getting too ridiculous, if the "building tree" for cities was deepened at all stages of the game, then you'd have much more emergent diversity in games. You can't really build up Rome to a peerless imperial capital, and you can't intentionally create a true megacity like NYC aka "Meierhattan" because the next town over can also just have a bank and a shipyard. So once I get my win districts down its time to prepare more settlers.

I do think that we need to recognize that a tall empire should always lose to the same tall empire + a chunk of moderately developed cities for that era. Because the latter is literally "better." Doesn't have to be linearly superior but it shouldn't be worse. When you start making it so people leave the map empty, that's when players get roiled. Even in civ5, though, you could still leverage wide (though you needed religion.) It turns out a 4 city tall empire was critically weak to someone with competent ICS rolling in 20 tanks...

I think districts and district adjacency is one of the best things about civ6. And the district adjacency works very well to do what it's designed for: players placing districts in high adjacency tiles.
The true problem of district spam is that the buildings are just so much better than the adj for everything except the Harbor+IZ, and then the building cards compound the issue. There's no scenario where it's a bad idea to throw down a campus, even in the middle of the snow, because you can just dump out the buildings and rationalism will hand you the pop equivalent science of a size 20 city. (Campuses have too many good sources of adj right now, though, that I agree with) Even though the harbor district, as an example, has phenomenal adjacency benefits, it's uncommon to build a harbor in a one tile lake in an otherwise landlocked city. Likewise, unless you need the factory or power coverage, building an IZ at +0 doesn't really make sense right now. Ideally districts would only go where they have good adj unless you were focusing that area specifically.

Would population modifiers on the flat yields districts and their buildings give be enough do you think?

I was thinking about other games and past iterations of civ and how they tackle this. Mostly everyone is susceptible to science spam in some way. One thing civ players may recognize is the famous science slider in civ4. There, your science rate was tied to your commerce generation at large + how much gold profit you made. The more profit, the more you gold you could afford to divert to science instead of paying the bills. Now, this tradeoff is very elegant, but perhaps almost too on the nose with how the culture slider and eventually espionage slider came into play. There's little economic play outside of making science and culture (since only a couple civics could rush buy.)

In civ5, where everyone can rush buy with gold, everyone scrambled to get enough city connections and have trade routes going to pay for their buildings and units, but creating science wasn't anymore costly than doing anything else.

Civ6 has no such tradeoff; you can do all the science and all the culture and gold generation is almost wholly independent. If Civ6 had serious gold scarcity tied to your infrastructure, with perhaps a little more variation in means to generate it outside of spam CH/trade route, and campus/theater/scientist/artist upkeep was significantly higher than stuff like IZs, harbors, encampments, etc, then you're starting to develop an economy where you need gold to sustain primary yields and capability c5food:,,,) and only the richest can do that while investing heavily into /. Or conversely, you can dump everything into / but you're really going to have to sacrifice your other things- military, industry, etc- to pay for it.

I really think gold scarcity would add a lot to civ6. It would leave a door open for really cool trade route gameplay and you could leverage diplomacy much more- if diplomacy can help you get more out of trade routes, or research agreements, or whatever, then peaceful players who are friendly essentially get a more efficient economy than warmongers, who either have to survive off plunder and capture, or "reform" their ways and downsize their military to support a domestic economy.

Otherwise balancing various aspects of "investing into existing cities or building new ones" type empire development is just a function of overall production and wide will win that, very convincingly.

Very good analysis. In V gold was hard to come by, and VI has reversed that, while initially making production hard to come by. There was no way to build everything in most cities leading to interesting choices. That seems to be going out the window (unless there is something subtle I have missed) with production being ramped up in GS; so I wonder if they are wrecking their own concept on how VI should play...?

 

[Ownsya]

I think an easy solution would be to allow specialists to apply a multiplicative modifier on the district yields. Also, make it so that the final district building provides an unlimited amount of specialist slots.

I looked at a simple model of this where each new specialist applies x*5% modifier on top of the base +2 yield per specialist, where x is the number of specialists. So the first specialist brings +2, +5%, the 2nd gives +2, +10%, the 3rd gives +2, +15%. For a fully built district with a +1 Theater square you get a district yield of 11 culture. Then as you add specialists the yield increases as such:

1 specialist adds 2.55 culture, total = 13.55 culture
2nd specialist adds 3.1 culture, total = 16.65 culture
3rd specialist adds 3.65 culture, total = 20.3 culture
4th specialist adds 4.2 culture, total = 24.5 culture
5th specialist adds 4.75 culture, total = 29.25 culture
6th specialist adds 5.3 culture, total = 34.55 culture

In this kind of system the limiting factor then becomes food and amenities. Obviously the %modifier can be tuned, 5% might be excessive. Also, unlimited slots might end up leading to lame game play like highly specialized cities with a single district supported by many undeveloped satellites settled for amenities only, so there probably needs to be some cap. Maybe the final building unlocks 3-5 slots instead of just 1. But the point is that this kind of system, with some fiddling of parameters can be tuned to support Tall & Wide play. The two parameters for fine-tuning being the max number of slots per city, and the % modifiers that specialists get. Probably balancing it such that the benefits of reaching 20 pop in an existing city nearly match those of getting a new city to 10 pop, at least in terms of yields alone. The new city would benefit further from new land, resources, more/different districts, etc.

Alternatively, (and perhaps simpler) specialists provide +2 yield and add a district modifier of +5%. The subtle difference is that the modifier is now a district modifier that applies once to the total base yields of the district, rather than each specialist appyling a modifer:

District base yield = 11.
1st specialist, (11 + 2) * 1.05 = 13.65
2nd specialist, (11 + 4) * 1.10 = 16.5
3rd specialist, (11 + 6) * 1.15 = 19.55
4th specialist, (11 + 8) * 1.20 = 22.8
5th specialist, (11 + 10) * 1.25 = 26.25
6th specialist, (11 + 12) * 1.30 = 29.9

Same effect, just simpler formula to both apply and explain.

 

[Sostratus]

Would population modifiers on the flat yields districts and their buildings give be enough do you think?

I think the best thing within the limits of civ6 that you can do is try to tie the significant portion of your science & culture to population. Currently a library+uni give 6 . Perhaps each now give +0.25/. (likewise for amphi+museum.) Now a size 12 city gives +6, anything bigger is "winning." The problem with a population basis for science in civ games traditionally has been that:
-each city grows population independently
-more cities means more pops growing in parallel
-growing the Nth pop is more expensive than the N-1th pop, so distributed small cities gain citizens faster than equal # of large ones
I don't think there's a great, simple solution to how this fundamentally works. I would suggest what could be done is basically flatten the growth curve a tad (minor, its way flatter than civ5) but more importantly shift the growth modifer for housing by one stage. Right now you get half pop growth for being 1 below your housing cap, eg, 9/10. I would suggest making that point come at the cap itself instead. Why? because its almost impossible to manage since we don't get notified until we are at the cap, so players won't see they are at half growth. That's a huge debuff!! If you do that then you'd probably be fine to have burgeoning cities compete with little ones, because the big cities only pay the cost of actually building a campus+buildings a handful of times when it's cheap, rather than many many times when it's more expensive to build a campus. Wide pays an efficiency penalty without even realizing it! No anti-fun.

Very good analysis. In V gold was hard to come by, and VI has reversed that, while initially making production hard to come by. There was no way to build everything in most cities leading to interesting choices. That seems to be going out the window (unless there is something subtle I have missed) with production being ramped up in GS; so I wonder if they are wrecking their own concept on how VI should play...?

My sense is the devs didn't necessarily balance the game around the fact that you could and should spam certain districts. Oops! There's nothing inherently wrong with plentiful gold as a mechanic, but it means there's no break on empire management at all.

In this kind of system the limiting factor then becomes food and amenities. Obviously the %modifier can be tuned, 3% might be excessive. Also, unlimited slots might end up leading to lame game play like highly specialized cities with a single district supported by many undeveloped satellites settled for amenities only, so there probably needs to be some cap. Maybe the final building unlocks 3-5 slots instead of just 1. But the point is that this kind of system, with some fiddling of parameters can be tuned to support Tall & Wide play. The two parameters for fine-tuning being the max number of slots per city, and the % modifiers that specialists get. Probably balancing it such that the benefits of growing an existing city nearly match those of starting a new city, at least in terms of yields alone.

It is probably better to place any +% yield modifiers on the buildings themselves. This is so that the amount of science being generated at different points in the game can be controlled more finely. We aren't necessarily trying to just give tall cities more yield; the game pace is already extremely fast if you push science in the first place. It would likely be easiest to just make specialists worth 3-5 yield to cover this area.
(Why there is no 'unemployed citizen' in this iteration is beyond me. And no +X from all specialist effects. Such a missing piece.)

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Very good analysis. In V gold was hard to come by, and VI has reversed that, while initially making production hard to come by. There was no way to build everything in most cities leading to interesting choices.

For me personally, the biggest difference between playing 5 and 6 was that in 5 there was always something else my city needed right now, and choosing between those priorities of what to build next created a lot of interesting tension. You needed gold to pay maintenance on your buildings, you needed buildings to multiply the effectiveness of your people, you needed food to grow those people and production to build those buildings, you needed happiness for those people, etc. In 6, the decision tree shifted to "what do I need to trigger the next eureka / inspiration?" If your empire-wide gold income wasn't high enough to buy all of them, you had some choices to make in terms of which things gave you the most science/culture for your buck. But since pretty much everything I was buying or producing was for the one-time science or culture boost, the choices never felt as interesting to me as the engine-building decisions of earlier games. I'll give Civ 6 credit for radically changing the nature of economic decisions in the Civ-series, though. It wasn't to my tastes, but it was a bold shift, and I can see how it would appeal to some people.

I was thinking about other games and past iterations of civ and how they tackle this. Mostly everyone is susceptible to science spam in some way. One thing civ players may recognize is the famous science slider in civ4. There, your science rate was tied to your commerce generation at large + how much gold profit you made. The more profit, the more you gold you could afford to divert to science instead of paying the bills. Now, this tradeoff is very elegant, but perhaps almost too on the nose with how the culture slider and eventually espionage slider came into play. There's little economic play outside of making science and culture (since only a couple civics could rush buy.)

In civ5, where everyone can rush buy with gold, everyone scrambled to get enough city connections and have trade routes going to pay for their buildings and units, but creating science wasn't anymore costly than doing anything else.

Civ6 has no such tradeoff; you can do all the science and all the culture and gold generation is almost wholly independent. If Civ6 had serious gold scarcity tied to your infrastructure, with perhaps a little more variation in means to generate it outside of spam CH/trade route, and campus/theater/scientist/artist upkeep was significantly higher than stuff like IZs, harbors, encampments, etc, then you're starting to develop an economy where you need gold to sustain primary yields and capability ( ,,,) and only the richest can do that while investing heavily into /. Or conversely, you can dump everything into / but you're really going to have to sacrifice your other things- military, industry, etc- to pay for it.

I really think gold scarcity would add a lot to civ6. It would leave a door open for really cool trade route gameplay and you could leverage diplomacy much more- if diplomacy can help you get more out of trade routes, or research agreements, or whatever, then peaceful players who are friendly essentially get a more efficient economy than warmongers, who either have to survive off plunder and capture, or "reform" their ways and downsize their military to support a domestic economy.

Otherwise balancing various aspects of "investing into existing cities or building new ones" type empire development is just a function of overall production and wide will win that, very convincingly.

I just want to say how much I admire your dedicated use of icons to illustrate your posts. Very user friendly!!

 

[Loerwyn]

Tall is my natural style - a few cities managed well rather than a wide array of cities. To me, building settlers is production wasted from other projects (e.g. districts, wonders, military units), but I've found the game gets easier if you play wider. I don't know why, but it may just be you develop your cities in different ways to react to the map and external factors (e.g. a barbarian camp, a particularly belligerent Civ nearby). The way the game works, and Sostratus has been excellent in pointing this out, is that there is a height limit on the cities. You have a fixed number of buildings per district, a fixed set of options, and you have to go wide to have a balance.

I think cities would need to be adjusted to work at rings 4 and 5 for a taller game. I don't understand how the game processes the 4th and 5th rings, but I know enough to know that to go taller, you'd need a wider area.

 

[Victoria]

but I know enough to know that to go taller, you'd need a wider area.

It is a question of how tall. I had 10 pop 30 cities in a game and was not working every tile. I doubt I could have sensibly got much bigger quickly in the majority of cities.
I really did not need rings 4 or 5.
I really have 0 issues with tall being workable just feel that with ICS campus 1 should be more productive than campus 17

 

[Loerwyn]

It is a question of how tall. I had 10 pop 30 cities in a game and was not working every tile. I doubt I could have sensibly got much bigger quickly in the majority of cities.

Wow, those are big. Once the game progresses and your worked tiles improve, have trade routes, etc. then you find yourself not bothering to work tiles (especially in the fourth and fifth rings, as I think you don't get anything from them? I could be wrong - like I said, I really don't understand the interaction of those rings), so that is certainly a situation you can be in. I don't micromanage my citizens, beyond changing the focus of a city at times, so I can't imagine how you managed them!

 

[Victoria]

Wow, those are big. Once the game progresses and your worked tiles improve, have trade routes, etc. then you find yourself not bothering to work tiles (especially in the fourth and fifth rings, as I think you don't get anything from them? I could be wrong - like I said, I really don't understand the interaction of those rings), so that is certainly a situation you can be in. I don't micromanage my citizens, beyond changing the focus of a city at times, so I can't imagine how you managed them!

I did not really, just clicked a food preference often and built fisheries and food halls at +20 or more surplus food is required to get that fat fast enough... being Khmer helped also. Now fisheries have housing I imagine it’s easier as I was often limited by housing.
Rings 4&5 you can harvest... you would get luxe’s off them but as you need to switch cities to work the damn tiles in the first place it is an irrelevance as luxe’s are global not local.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

"Let's play tall" is a mod that lets you limit the amount of settlers that can be produced. It's not ideal, but it's at least something.

Personally, I HATE that Civ rules that "more is better". I mean, of course countries like China, Russia and the US have always been the best in the world when it comes to production, research, culture, entertainment, religion, etc. Let's forget all these countries like Korea, Japan, or Germany, Denmark, The Netherlands that are at least half the size of the aforementioned countries, and are doing much better on some of the aspects above.

I wish you'd be rewarded for developing a succesful civ, not a large civ. Currently I'm playing a game where I, by sheer luck, have enough space to develop. Standard map, and I have about 20 cities where the opponents have about half. I'm doing twice as good, even though almost all my cities are relatively unhappy.

Real life does not have Civ win conditions.

If it did, USA/China/Russia would, in fact, be better positioned to win them than Korea/Japan/Denmark. By a significant margin.

In game terms tall is a cancer concept that never should have existed. Incentivizes away from conflict, rather than towards it...a strict internal inconsistency in the design of Civ/4x.

 

[kb27787]

How about limiting the maximum amount of districts of a type that you can build based on the total population of your civ?

For example, by default you can build 1 campus, only once your civ grows to 4 pop can you build your 2nd campus. 3rd campus at 9, 4th at 16, 5th at 25, 6th at 36 and so on. This requires that to build that district in every city your average city size must not be less than the total number of cities you have.

This would incentivize more district variety without completely disabling a civ from having a clear focus.

 

[Scaramanga]

Real life does not have Civ win conditions.

If it did, USA/China/Russia would, in fact, be better positioned to win them than Korea/Japan/Denmark. By a significant margin.

In game terms tall is a cancer concept that never should have existed. Incentivizes away from conflict, rather than towards it...a strict internal inconsistency in the design of Civ/4x.

I think that's equating going tall with turtling.
Enhancing existing cities with buildings, wonders, and districts instead of building settlers and invasion units could result in a war declaration against you and a boost to defensive tactics and a favourable peace after destroying their units.
That said, if someone moves settlers in your direction or already forward settled you, action should probably be taken.

 

[kaspergm]

I really have 0 issues with tall being workable just feel that with ICS campus 1 should be more productive than campus 17

I still think key here is linking yields to population somehow. It's fine that campus buildings has some of their yield as flat yield, but a large or at least larger part should be connected to population within area. A University only increases science if there are people to attending it.

 

[acluewithout]

There’s some really interesting stuff in this thread. Very cool. Particularly @Trav'ling Canuck and @Sostratus

Just a few thoughts.

Trade-offs. Maybe Civ IV has stronger trade-offs via sliders, or Civ V did via less gold, but Civ VI does still have trade-offs between Science and other yields. The trade off comes from the district cap - you can only build so many districts in a city early, so you have to choose between a campus or encampment or commercial hub or whatever. In principle, increasing district costs should also create a trade-off, because you can only put down so many early / cheap districts, so I have to decide what those limited number of districts will be.

Part of the problem though is that you basically can always build at least two districts in a new city and Campuses are so strong, so you really can (and should) just always put down a Campus. And you can nearly always chop in one district in even marginal cities. So again, Campus spam. In other words, there’s no trade off become (1) you can always build a campus, and (2) a campus is clearly better and has no inherent downside.

Making Gold Maintenance more of a thing would certainly help improve the whole trade-off thing.

Campus Cap. Fair enough that people don’t like this idea. I’m only suggesting it though because I play my games with a self-imposed Campus cap, and personally I’ve found it makes the game more interesting because it makes you think very carefully about where you put your small number of Campuses, and forces you to look at other mechanics to catch-up on Science. But YMMV, I guess.

Making Pop more valuable. As I’ve said, I think Civ VI was meant to ditch tall v wide, and replace it with a game where you want tall and wide, ie a few big mega-cities and lots of small satellite cities.

Personally, I think that’s a pretty good design goal, although getting it right is tricky. It’s tricky, because at a certain point you can’t just make high pop = awesome. If you do, you end up with just every City being high Pop and lose the “a few big cities, lots of small cities” idea. This is one of the problems with Rationalism. It doesn’t really buff big cities, more pushes you to have every city at pop 10.

I think Governors were an attempt to get that balance right - Governors generally buff high pop cities, but you have a limited number of Governors so there’s an inherent break in how many big Cities you can have.

Personally, I think part of the problem is the Governors are too restrictive - eg you can only have one Science and Culture City via Pingala; one Gold City via Reyna. It would be better if you could get multiples of each Governor (within some sensible limit), so you had the option of multiple Big Science Cities etc. That way, players may be more encouraged to lean into a few “big cities” for science (instead of just one for Pingala), but still couldn’t just make all their cities big (because there would still be a limit on how many Pingala cities you can have).

Improved Citizen Yields. FXS basically uses the following mechanics for adjusting yields: bonus based on adjacency (districts, shipyard, coal plant), flat bonus (eg buildings (buffed by city states and power), trade, some cards), radial effects (coliseum, nuclear plant), percentages (eg wonders, cards, happiness), yield per pop (some Governors) and specialists (which are now buffed by tier 3 buildings).

I hope FXS don’t introduce any more mechanics, eg increasing base yield per citizen - what we have is more than enough.

On the other hand, I do think the balance between the existing mechanics could be tweaked a bit to make buildings less super powerful and pop more important. A good starting point might be: (1) get rid of city state bonuses for buildings (it’s a big reason buildings are too powerful), (2) make Rationalism etc buff specialists not the buildings themselves (cards are the other reason buildings are too powerful), (3) maybe have tier 3 buildings provide a +% in addition to buffing specialists.

 

[Ownsya]

I think an easy solution would be to allow specialists to apply a multiplicative modifier on the district yields.

It is probably better to place any +% yield modifiers on the buildings themselves. This is so that the amount of science being generated at different points in the game can be controlled more finely.

I still think key here is linking yields to population somehow. It's fine that campus buildings has some of their yield as flat yield, but a large or at least larger part should be connected to population within area. A University only increases science if there are people to attending it

(3) maybe have tier 3 buildings provide a +% in addition to buffing specialists.

Combining above thoughts/feedback into my previous suggestion:
Buildings provide a flat yield + yield/pop (or % modifier). Specialists provide flat yield + increase the yield/pop (or % modifier). The modifiers here would apply on the natural yield/pop of the city. So for science, the default is 0.5 science per citizen. Each campus building or specialist would increase this by some amount.

Any iteration of this, or even my previous suggestion as it originally was end up really leading to the same thing. If anything, I'd change what I said before that % modifier from specialists applies to district yields, to that the modifier applies to the entire city's yields (to include natural yield/citizen). This gives even more weight to the general population and not just the specialists. But in terms of in-game effect, there's little-to no difference beyond the values you'd set the parameters to from a modeling perspective. It's mostly "semantics" at this point.

@Sostratus did you mean by the above that the yields get boosted more gradually than a push to a final strong boost? Does it really make much of a difference whether it comes from the building or the specialist since each building does unlock a specialist slot?

EDIT:

It would be better if you could get multiples of each Governor (within some sensible limit), so you had the option of multiple Big Science Cities etc.

Now that I think about it, the above would in fact make specialists like lesser governors. I think that would be a good thing and it would cover other types of yields like production and faith as well.

 

[Sostratus]

@Sostratus did you mean by the above that the yields get boosted more gradually than a push to a final strong boost? Does it really make much of a difference whether it comes from the building or the specialist since each building does unlock a specialist slot?

Supposing such buildings had a primary benefit of per pop yield...
The difference in output for having a size X city work all specialists vs not becomes enormous if you give them both yield + %, because that bonus percent affects the pop output. This is where you have to be careful not to introduce too much science to the game. It's just very deterministic if, for sake of argument, say, the research lab just grants a 20% boost, and scientists give +3. Then you know, as a game designer, the level of "hard science" a city can produce if the player really focuses it, while leaving some room for "soft science" growth from citizen increases. That's essentially how the game is set up now with flat yields and the pop output. It also generally makes things complex because other specialists don't have the upside of a big pool of per pop yield to multiply, for example merchants or priests. I think that there is something to be said for having simple and clean game systems, which civ6 has many of.

As an aside I know as an engineer it's extremely difficult to not over design something to exactly solve the problem at hand. I also know in a game like civ the optimal numerical balance could be achieved with enough modifers, but I personally feel that takes away from the game aspect for many people. Hence I do try to be quite measured in discussions where changing things comes up.
(No criticism leveled, just my personal philosophy!)

As they say in Civ5, "A designer knows he has achieved perfection, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

 

[cvb]

Campus Cap. Fair enough that people don’t like this idea. I’m only suggesting it though because I play my games with a self-imposed Campus cap, and personally I’ve found it makes the game more interesting because it makes you think very carefully about where you put your small number of Campuses, and forces you to look at other mechanics to catch-up on Science.

Would you mind sharing your 'house rule' in detail? I would like to implement it as a starting point - especially as you have found positive effects already.


[Edit: quote in signature about perfection: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes, 1939]
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[The googles do nothing]

City building decisions should be around "how am I going to get that boat?", not "how am I going to get that boat? oh, I know! I'll take the boat".

One of the best analogies i have ever heard.