Production, the only yield that matters

[MagicCuboid]

Is this the case? I have a feeling they want maybe one or two pre-Industrial districts per city and lots and lots of farms.

It definitely feels like there's a defacto limit to the number of districts regardless of population in the early eras. This isn't so much a production problem as it is a territory problem. The borders expand so slowly that citizens would be left with nowhere to work.

As an extreme example, I'm playing a Germany game (Hansas + Commercial Districts are just incredible), and because he Hansa is free and they get an extra district anyway, I'm not even close to the limit on any of my cities. My capital has three districts and feels maxed out, but my limit is actually 4 or 5.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

You don't purchase tiles?

 

[MagicCuboid]

You don't purchase tiles?

I do, but I should probably have purchased more by now. I tend to be fussy about buying them without the 20% off policy slotted, but my culture game is weak so I don't get a lot of opportunities to quickly switch. I should say that I just signed peace after conquering like 4 cities, so I should be able to build a bunch more districts /now that that's done.

edit: I'm also trying to get lots of Farms up since I just researched Feudalism, so a lot of my empty space is going toward them instead.

 

[Grotius]

I'm glad I read this thread, because I now realize I've been placing my Industrial Zones suboptimally.

Question: does building more cities increase the cost of districts (or anything else)? I've read elsewhere that district costs scale with time or possibly techs/civics researched.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

It certainly plays a lot differnt from CIV5, so much is certain.
After a few games it actually gave me (a somewhat more balanced) Beyond Earth vibe: Get Commercial Districts (= Trade Hubs) up in every new city ASAP, then send trade routes to your capital to boost Production (and Food).
It also seems that an Industry District is a must-have in every city to reach proper production times. Which is sort of sad.

I'd argue that an early Mine or two (or a river Lumber Mill if you lack a hill) are a decent way to get an early P boost in new cities.
However, I'd agree that new cities are punished quite a lot by the district costs and it would be nice to have a basic +2P building, together with a policy card or an advanced Settler unit that would pre-build some basic Infrastructure in mid/late game cities.

 

[GKrause]

Played a bunch more in the last few hours, and I'm thinking more and more that the problem is really the timing of the tech and civics trees. To me, the main problem seems to be that you blow through the trees and everything costs way too much until you get apprenticeship and trade routes going. Maybe lowering the cost of holy site, campus, and theater districts slightly while increasing tech and civic costs would avoid the problem of having a ton of stuff you want to build without waiting 20-30 turns until you can make meaningful production with added bonus of having to not completely neglect science and culture district buildings if you want to progress through the trees. This might also have the added benefit of giving your production time to catch up to the really expensive production of the science victories by the time you get to them, though I haven't played enough late game to get a feel if the late game production costs might need to be scaled back a bit as well.

Thoughts?

 

[Esperr]

Played a bunch more in the last few hours, and I'm thinking more and more that the problem is really the timing of the tech and civics trees. To me, the main problem seems to be that you blow through the trees and everything costs way too much until you get apprenticeship and trade routes going. Maybe lowering the cost of holy site, campus, and theater districts slightly while increasing tech and civic costs would avoid the problem of having a ton of stuff you want to build without waiting 20-13ish turns until you can make meaningful production with added bonus of having to not completely neglect science and culture district buildings if you want to progress through the trees. This might also have the added benefit of giving your production time to catch up to the really expensive production of the science victories by the time you get to them, though I haven't played enough late game to get a feel if the late game production costs might need to be scaled back a bit as well.

Thoughts?

I dont know what they were thinking, but ive had cities with ruhr valley and four factory/plant bonuses hitting it that still cant produce space race projects in less then 13ish turns. I dont know if it scales or what, but everytime I go to try and win a space victory I either accidentally win a cultural victory or accidentaly lose a religious victory. Part of me thinks the projects scale.

 

[TruthfulCake]

Nah the space victory projects are just very expensive. I once got this combo of Great Engineer and Great Scientist that each boost the space project constructions by 100% on a spaceport. Got the projects launched every 5 turns.

But yes, hammer is very important right now, although the unit disbanding reward make it somewhat exploitable. You can literally go through most of the game just creating armies for conquest, and then sell them when you don't need them anymore to buy the buildings you didn't make due to fielding the military. So you'll never fall behind in military, and yet you have the buildings just fine. Much better payoff than juggling between making the buildings one by one and training units.

 

[kaspergm]

There does seem to be an odd asymmetry between food and production in Civ6. Food doesn't get a district that increases its production. Instead we have a growth cap by housing (and amenities) which is increased through buildings and the district. On the other hand, production gets a district that provides direct yields. Someone suggested removing the industrial district. I'm not sure if that's the right path to take, but maybe there needs to be some changes to it. For one, the area bonus of the factory needs to be toned down, because that just seems plain OP. Secondly, they could add some drawback to the ID, like lowering appeal in a radius around it (wasn't that originally a thing? Or was that just a figment of my imagination?). That would mean heavy production would have negative effects on your growth (less appealing neighborhoods for instance), which could be a small but nice incentive to not spam IDs in every city.

 

[rpgalon]

While food gets penalty from lack of amenities and housing, production gets huge bonuses from all kind of policies.

Honestly, I'm already tired of having to build comerce hub and industrial district in every city before I can build any other district. No matter what victory you are going for, they are the districts you should build first...

 

[Fierro]

How to increase technologies costs? I cannot find modifiers for science in XML files.

 

[genyl]

I totally agree

To make the problem worse science/civics advance is too quick therefore making campus/theathre not so important (unless you are going for cultural). Same for holy , largely irrelevant unless you are going for religious victory

 

[rpgalon]

You should only go for a Science/Culture focus after you have your traders/factorys/mines kicking in, otherwise you will feel like it takes forever to build stuff.

Focusing on Science/Culture gives little to no reward because the production cost of higher tech stuff you unlock goes up exponentially (each new era unit/wonder/building has like double the production cost of the equivalent from the era before it), so there is no gain in focusing on tech before production because even if you invest so much in culture/tech that you will unlock units/wonders a reasonable time earlier, you will lack the production to build it effectively anyway.

 

[steveg700]

But... it is. Not saying there isn't an argument for it to be changed but Look at the National College slingshot or pretty much the entire science behind chopping and whipping in civ4. Optimal strategies arise and you either make use of them or you don't. But I don't even think this is on that level of cheese, honestly - it's more like, say, Spamming cottages in civ4. Tons of people complained about that because they didn't like the way the landscape looked, i.e how their empire looked. But unless you're doing SE - you're going to need to spam cottages whether you like to or not, it's just how you scale properly. People were raising an aesthetic issue with a necessary mechanic of the game.

Well currently - Industrial overlap is pretty much necessary. While people might not like it, I have a hard time imagining that with a radius of 6 hexes that overlap, that it wasn't part of the design goal for people to make liberal use of that mechanic - Late game production was probably scaled with this in mind which is why many people are noticing that they get into the later eras and can barely build anything in a reasonable amount.

It doesn't matter whether I like the mechanic or not. It appears to be part of how the game is played.

One of the design goals of Civ VI that was expressed repeatedly throughout previews is to steer players away from the traditional style of cookie-cutter optimized play that makes Civ a game that's less about smart strategic and tactical decisions and more about dogmatically executing a script of rote moves. The challenges of previous Civ games wasn't about figuring out clever new approaches to gameplay; rather, the challenge was about how you could course-correct any curveballs the map threw at us to keep regurgitating the same hands-down optimal moves. I want to adapt to the game I'm currently playing, not the edition of the game I'm currently playing.

I don't see AI civ's building industrial districts in each of their cities, so I don't see the basis for concluding that this is intended design. I think the intent was for civic bonuses to play an important role in reducing productions costs by percentages. If so, maybe we need some early governments to offer more than one brown card slot.

 

[isau]

I'm wondering if some of these issues could be corrected with the addition of some new policy cards. Here are some of the ones I think should be considered:

- An early economic card that decreases the cost of Holy, Campus, Theater, and Entertainment districts
- An early economic card that allows you to purchase Builders with Faith if you have a Holy district
- A card that appears at the same time or earlier as the 2 foreign relations cards that gives +1 diplomacy point per city adjacent to an Ocean tile (ok this is a different problem but I still think that card is warranted)

The industrial zone problem is bigger. It's connected to an overall balance problem involving the terrain itself, where unlike previous Civs hills provide flat +1 production and are demonstrably better than flat tiles and ocean tiles are beyond terrible. The addition of Builders puts even more weight on the ability to constantly construct things.


One other big change I recommend: Settlers and Builders should be built by Food, not Hammers. That way food-heavy cities would be producing the Builders you need to then go improve Hammers. It would incentivize having multiple types of cities to keep the empire rolling.

 

[cephalo]

I think things should be cheaper in hammers, and more expensive in gold. I buy most of everything with gold to the point that I'm looking for goofy stuff to spend gold on.

 

[steveg700]

I'm wondering if some of these issues could be corrected with the addition of some new policy cards. Here are some of the ones I think should be considered:

- An early economic card that decreases the cost of Holy, Campus, Theater, and Entertainment districts
- An early economic card that allows you to purchase Builders with Faith if you have a Holy district
- A card that appears at the same time or earlier as the 2 foreign relations cards that gives +1 diplomacy point per city adjacent to an Ocean tile (ok this is a different problem but I still think that card is warranted)

Like I said, though, you'd either need another way to get a brown card slot, or just make the bonuses broader.

One other big change I recommend: Settlers and Builders should be built by Food, not Hammers. That way food-heavy cities would be producing the Builders you need to then go improve Hammers. It would incentivize having multiple types of cities to keep the empire rolling.

Maybe I'm misremembering, but in some editions gone by, didn't settlers actually involve pulling a unit of population off of the city where they were built? I recall actually being able to make settlers and send them existing cities to bolster their population. Different game, maybe.

 

[VTMatt]

I'd agree with the idea that production doesn't seem to scale properly for high-hammer cost items, and would benefit from a couple of %boosting buildings.

That being said, I like the mechanic of district bonuses stacking to other cities. I'm so far a pretty poor city planner, but I like the challenge of optimizing and planning my city layouts and synergizing them with one another. There's room for improvement though, the 6 tile cap, to any city within range seems a bit too small on range, and big on potential overlap. It really forces you to cram a few cities together to maximize that bonus. I think it'd be better if it were something like 'the production bonus adds to the nearest city within 10 (or 15, whatever) tiles" That way, I still need to plan where I want to put the district, and it does impact other parts of my empire outside of its home city, but I have more flexibility in where I put the next couple cities, they don't have to be on top of each-other.

 

[SHS`]

What if Industrial Zones also granted trade route like Harbour Zone and Commercial Zone, 'cos freight logistics right? Perhaps even Aerodrome/Airport... Then also being to re-assign trade routes at will...

 

[UWHabs]

Production to me only seem to "catch up" once you start getting factories and power plants up and running. At that point, if they are sufficiently overlapped, then you can start getting reasonable build times (ie. my cap building the spaceport in 16 turns - maybe a tad long, but still somewhat reasonable).

I'd like to see more bonuses and synergies. For example:
-Lumbermills and mines should get +1 hammer if next to an industrial zone. Industrial zone should also get the adjacency bonus if next to a lumber mill.
-Factories should maybe give something like +2 hammers to all cities within 6 tiles, but should also give a larger bonus to the city. Either something like +1 hammer per mine/lumber mill or even just something like +1 hammer per 2 pop in the city

I'd also be very tempted to completely change things around, so that units are never built with hammers. Maybe settlers, builders, and traders (as well I guess as naval units) are, but I think all other units you should simply either buy with gold, or if you want to "slow-build" them, the encampment should basically let you pay X gold per turn to build the unit there. The encampment project could then give you a boost to unit production, so that if you want to put your cities' production to units, you do it that way. I mean, given the crazy building costs, that's basically what I do anyways, since other than a handful of cases, I'm too busy building things in my cities anyways. and then at least if I can be "building" units at the same time as I'm continuing to build up the infrastructure in my city, then I wouldn't mind as much the longer build times.