Poo Pooing Districts :(

[SammyKhalifa]

Merchants set up their stores at the crossroads of intersecting trade routes. Over time, these small merchant stores may become villages, which given enough time may become cities. The Civ series has never simulated this.

While that's true (though I would call that a trading post), they're more likely to set up their tents where all of the people are. The primo spots are in the center of town--under the protection of the local gov and their city walls if they're lucky--where all of the farmers in the countryside have to congregate to pay their taxes anyhow, or perhaps just outside the temple where the people meet to worship.

Nobody's right or wrong here. But to me it's easier to swallow that the people in the surrounding countryside are there but not numerous enough to count as one "population point" than it is to imagine that cities are being built in distinct modules.

But hey, the game itself sounds more interesting this new way, so whatever.

 

[steveg700]

Yes, there will be poo-pooing districts, at least until your civ unlocks sewers....

 

[marchueff]

Yeah, I agree. I don't understand how people are arguing FOR it for flavor, though.

I mean, I have a tiny village that's starting to grow. People want a church. I know! instead of putting it where people live, let's plop it over there across the river and on the other side of a jungle!

Oh well, thats one direction of thinking about development. But what the other way around? Sort of Chicken-Egg-Problem? What if there was the church first and people starting settling nearby? Attached two shots of the village i'm currently living in. The first one was properly taken around someday no cameras existed, the second one these days. As you can see, there is nearly nothing around the church back in the older days. Today there are at least some settlements. Even if my village is still pretty small (there is just a city center, a holy site, some farm improvements, some resorts and only a cattle resource), the city developed around the "holy site" (you can see the "holy site"/church at the bottom of the second picture).

 

[marchueff]

Nice 1st Post Marchueff... proving that Districts are based on real world examples
Oh and welcome to the forums

Thanks a lot, man.

I think Ryika and especially demidyad figured it out pretty well: it just an abstraction (even if it is not perfect - like an abstraction always is). And it is a big step ahead towards great gameplay. I really felt in love with that "unstacking cities" idea.

 

[Jabulani]

Yes, there will be poo-pooing districts, at least until your civ unlocks sewers....

You made my day

I am already picturing in my mind the official you tube trailer about that

 

[Josephias]

Civilization 4 did. It even used some of the same names. Yeah, you can start arguing letter-to-letter terms .

What was missing from Civ4 was the option to turn these hamlets-turned-towns into proper cities, and demoting existing cities into towns.

Would have been a great (and moreless historically accurate) way to rearrange your territory, instead of having to raze-resettle a city.

 

[dunkleosteus]

This is growing pains from the decision to implement districts as a way to gradually move away from Civ 1 - 5 's weird view of history where cities were this magical, discrete thing where everybody lived in a walled city, then it was all vacant unpopulated land until the next walled city hundreds of miles way. When in real history people lived everywhere and "cities" were not these concrete entities that either existed or didn't, they were just the name we gave to regions that had become more densely populated than others.

When I was thinking of my perfect historical 4X before Civ 6 was announced, a key feature was that every tile would have a population level. It wouldn't be this weird Civ thing where everybody exclusively lives in cities throughout history. The Civ 6 implementation of districts might have a few growing pains, as they try to fit it into the Civ system of settlers venturing off and founding cities in the wilderness, but it's absolutely a step in the right direction, and I was thrilled to see it announced.

I think you mention it later, but Civ has always represented the rural population with the tiles that a city works. The specialists and unemployed citizens are the urban population. Cities are important, especially historically. Even though the vast majority [citation needed] of a country's population will be rural, just by necessity because of inefficiencies in agricultural production, the real reason cities are so important is that you have thousands of people very close together. That's where you find technical innovation and advancement. That's where static businesses can thrive. Build an amphitheatre in the pre-industrial countryside and your audience is very limited: likely to the population of the local village at best. Build it in the city and you have literal thousands of people in walking distance. These buildings, the library, amphitheatre, arena, etc. are only useful because so many people have access to them. If an ancient city HAS a library, it's most likely located in the city centre. It would probably store important records of the politics and governance of the city and would need to be close at hand.

I'll agree that modern cities are more spread out. Ancient cities weren't.

 

[isau]

I think you are significantly overthinking this. A "district" does not mean there aren't any stores in other places. It's just a hub specifically for that type of activity, enough to give a bonus. You don't get any bonus for stores in other places because they are just what a normal city would have. You only get a bonus when you build an asset that goes beyond what any given city would have.

I always viewed building "a library" or "a market" to mean you build one really good one. The city obviously has to have other similar assets. But on their own not enough to give you any particular kind of bonus.

 

[demidyad]

I'll agree that modern cities are more spread out. Ancient cities weren't.

But ancient populations were more spread out. Only in the last six years of human history have more people lived in city hexes than other hexes. (Even in a modern, young country like the US - a real-life example of Civ's "settlers" system of population growth - it is only the last 90 years)

And [citation needed] here, but I've read that in pre-history, religious shrines would be built at a meaningful site and people would be drawn to the shrine, and a settlement would grow up around it. It's definitely a chicken-and-egg problem but the game design of Civ focuses on only the chickens, if that makes sense.

Following on from the point made upthread, the reason modern cities (in the Old World at least) are more spread out is because they are the conglomeration of multiple settlements - Stuttgart is the merging together of a medieval industrial hub, and a university city, etc, into one metropolis. In Civ 6 terms these were all "districts" that were founded in the medieval era, which we now refer to as a single city. It's not the case that the city of Stuttgart needed a new library in 1406, so they walked 100 km out into the wilderness and built a library. It's that what we now refer to as "Stuttgart" is the merging together of several historical districts.

 

[Josephias]

Following on from the point made upthread, the reason modern cities (in the Old World at leas ) are more spread out because they are the conglomeration of multiple settlements - Stuttgart is the merging together of a medieval industrial hub, and a university city, etc, into one metropolis. In Civ 6 turns these were all "districts" that were founded in the medieval era, which we now refer to as a single city. It's not the case that the city of Stuttgart needed a new library in 1406, so they walked 100 km out into the wilderness and built a library. It's that what we now refer to as "Stuttgart" is the merging together of several historical districts.

I'd add to that: there is also a wrong, modern, reasoning behind the sentence: "the (people of) the city needed a library". In middle ages, the count/graf/whatever the title was of Sttutgart may have needed a library for his court wiseman, then he would find an appropiate place to build it and move the court savants there. It might have been in the city itself, but it may have been as well in any other part of the county.

 

[Haggbart]

Realism issues aside, there is a very good reason that adjacency to city centre and other districts do not trumph the other adjacency bonuses. Anyone who played Endless Legend will probably remember how all their cities ended up looking basically the same because there was an optimal way to pack your districts close to level them up. The same would be the case here, and this is in direct conflict with cVI "play the map" philosophy.

 

[Olleus]

I've always considered there to be two different scales juxtaposed in Civ. One deals with the rate at which technologies are discovered and the map represents the entire world. Another where a turn is much much shorter than a year, and a tile much much smaller than a 100 miles, which deals with the scale in time and space at which warfare happens. Both of these use the same map and the same turn counter, its one of the abstractions which makes Civ great.

Cities before lived on the former scale, now they live on the latter.

 

[dunkleosteus]

I'm still having difficulty accepting districts. I liked the discussion about districts in older European cities as evolving out of seperate towns, but that isn't sufficient for me I think. In civ 6, districts are deliberately built as specialized urban zones. It sounds like the organic "districts" evolved out of existing settlements as they specialized. If for example there was a system where "towns" or "villages" could develop into districts, I'd be much happier overall.

Edit: I'm specifically talking about the ancient/classical world. From the medieval era onward, districts don't really bother me.

 

[Lord Shadow]

There's a number of abstractions in place.

We haven't carpeted the world in cities since Civ3, so a city in the later games represents a major city. Major cities gradually spawn secondary villages and towns, often specialized. This is less apparent in earlier history, but it's at least partly represented in Civ6 given district types unlock with technological development and can only grow in number according to the city's population size.

Buildings are also an abstraction: you can't take them at face value, and assume each city has only one library, one temple, one barracks, etc.

The only criticism I can agree with is the cosmetic side, since districts could perhaps be made to look more like parts of the parent city.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Having Civ 6 cities represent metropolitan areas makes plenty of sense on the scale of Civ. Look up Marshallian districts. Smaller outlying areas have specialized in supplying specific things to a central city for centuries if not millennia. If Rome is the city, then Ostia is the harbor and Tivoli is the bath. If Athens is the city, Piraeus is the harbor. If London is the city, then Canterbury is the holy site, Oxford or Greenwich is the campus, and Epsom/Twickenham/Wimbledon is the entertainment complex. If, say, Antwerp is the city, Ostend is the harbor and Bruges is the commercial hub. If Frankfurt is the city, Mainz is the holy site and Heidelberg is the campus. If Denver is the city, Boulder is the campus, Colorado Springs is the encampment, DIA is the airport, Vail/Aspen are the entertainment complex, and Commerce City is the industrial zone.