Projects should cost money not production

[Victoria]

When a country wants to push science or the arts or any other high end project it costs money.

In Civ6 some insightful reviewers pointed out there is no money sink to keep money low and so people do all types of OTT things with their money.

With these things in mind (yes I know Civ is not real life) why are projects costing production not money?

I see no sense to it and I also see it would make the game mechanics work better.

Early countries did not rush to industrialization, they set up trade routes first. Rich countries with additional money pumped that money into various "projects". That money requirement may also push external trade routes and more civic cards.

 

[UWHabs]

When a country wants to push science or the arts or any other high end project it costs money.

In Civ6 some insightful reviewers pointed out there is no money sink to keep money low and so people do all types of OTT things with their money.

With these things in mind (yes I know Civ is not real life) why are projects costing production not money?

I see no sense to it and I also see it would make the game mechanics work better.

Early countries did not rush to industrialization, they set up trade routes first. Rich countries with additional money pumped that money into various "projects". That money requirement may also push external trade routes and more civic cards.

I think in many ways, I'd almost like to see money act as another local production mode. To me, every city should essentially have 2 production queues: one for production, one for money.
Buildings and districts would come out of the production coffers.
Soldiers and projects would come out of the money.
Wonders would have to be drawn from both.
You could, however, designate one queue to be applied to help the other one along, if you don't currently have anything worthwhile to produce. And maybe you can also have a way to simply designate the cash to be applied to the government coffers.

A certain portion of the money would have to go to any nation-wide expenses (trade deals, unit maintenance, etc...). You would likely have to eliminate rush-buying in that case, and any "banked" cash would simply be taken from first for future unit maintenance and other global expenses. This would also simulate a little bit the notion that in most cases, army training is much costlier in terms of training people than it is in terms of raw materials.

Maybe you could add in other situations as well that would prevent a city from funneling money back to the global coffers - anyone building a wonder would be drawn from last, to essentially simulate a little bit of the fact that that the entire empire pays when you try to build a wonder. Or if the city is still being occupied, then all their cash would go back to the government coffers and they wouldn't be allowed to build soldiers, projects, or wonders until they were no longer occupied. You would have to balance things more in my case, as cities would generally be running projects more often with the 2 queues if you didn't need more soldiers, and you would likely need some other changes as presumably building maintenance would come from the city coffers first, so you'd need more notions when a city is running a deficit or not.

 

[Amrunril]

I see where you're coming from in immersion terms, though concepts like gold and production are nebulous enough that you could make a compelling argument either way. In gameplay terms, though, having production-based projects is really important. It ensures that even a peaceful civ never runs out of things for its cities to build. It also provides an alternate way to invest in great person generation, where money-based projects would overlap a lot with the existing patronage system.

 

[RealAntithesis]

Really though, everything comes down to money (or more generally - wealth). The things that are produced in Civ 6 using production are generally those things that taxes are used to pay for in real life economies - such as military, libraries, museums, stadiums, universities, power plants, stock exchanges etc. Other things (except for maybe communist governments) are built by private industry such as factories, private schools and universities, trade goods etc but still need wealth to build.

If a building in real life takes ages to build, it's probably more an issue with funding (or other red tape/corruption), not because there aren't enough industrial districts within range (or, for some reason in Civ 6, because the player has just become too technologically advanced for their own good).

So really, money should be the thing that drives production and science, with how much roughly controlled by the government's monetary and fiscal policies (or direct political control under communist and dictatorship governments). This can be roughly represented by a slider that previous Civ games had.