Rebalancing suggestions

[WackenOpenAir]

Imbalances i want to fix:

• Conquest vs Building.
• Wide vs Tall
• Traderoutes
• Uselesness of some buildings/districts

In order of importance:

-make the buildings inside districts scale with population (like it was) so tall becomes a thing again. For example, base citizens provide nothing. A library makes them provide 0.5 science, citizen. A tier 2 building ADDS 1 to make it 1.5 per citizen. A tier 3 building adds 2.5 to make it 4. Same for gold, faith, culture. Numbers should be tweaked and balanced ofc.

-Dont have optional citizens slots with those buildings, instead, make them demand citizens to occupy them or they do nothing at all, higher tier = more citizens. For example, a library needs 1 citizen occupying it, a university 2, a research lab 3. No citizens in it = it does nothing. This way you can only fully develop 1 or 2 districts. This prevents big cities from being too OP with their scaling pop affecting half a dozen maxed out districts. And it would force specialization of cities which makes the game more interesting. It would be a strategic choise when to occupy these buildings and thus slow down your cities growth. City growth should probably be increased to balance things. This might replace the scaling cost of districts. I think the scaling cost is a bit silly.

-Make units significantly weaker (or cities stronger) and significantly increase the effect of encampments so that early conquest without encampents is very hard and conquest against city walls without encampments more or less impossible. Right now it is too easy to conquer your landmass on any difficulty level and go very wide that way.

-Increase adjacency bonusses, making the empty district a bit more productive and providing a bit more of a base before the scaling bonusses kick in while also making their placement matter a little more.

-Make it so a trade route is an effect of the tier 3 building in the commerce districts instead of the district itself. (while we still have a few in early game from other sources) Because of the above changes, we are likely to only want 2-3 commercial districts to tier 3, or maybe a handful if we like coins, so we dont get that crapload of trade routes. 5-10 trade routes is fun. 30 is not.

-Reduce the cost of aquaducts significantly so that settling off-river is a more reasonable option. Also allow multiple aquaducts to chain for longer distance.

-Disconnect border growth from culture, make borders grow a little faster. It is good if we still need to buy some tiles, but with cities growing bigger, we dont want to be buying 10 tiles for each city. Neither do we want to be fooled into building a monument in each city while it does almost nothing for border growth. (and it is nicer to use specialized cities than a monument in each city for cultural development)

-Weaken the civic that almost eliminates unit upkeep. We dont want buying tiles to be our only money sink. Make upkeep a thing again, both for units and for buildings. We need money sinks so that we need a few commercial districts and not build only those that are our victory condition.

-Change CSes 1,3,6 envoy bonus to: 1 envoy = bonus for tier 1 district building. 3 envoy = bonus for tier 2 district building. 6 envoy = bonus for tier 3 district building. That way you can no longer just go wide with only empty science / commercial districts and get shitloads of bonus. You also eliminate the very big luck factor in who scouts the CS first.

It should be so that every city grows to 1 or 2 specializations. That we need a few cities specialized in science and a few in culture to keep those trees going. We would need our regional industrial specializations. We would need a few commercial specializations to keep our balance positive. 1 or 2 military specialized cities could produce a small but highly effective army for defence. 1 or 2 fully developed holy districts could produce the units needed to defend ourselves against foreign religion. More fully developed military or holy districts could be used if we want to conquer / convert others. More fully developed districts are needed of whatever you want to be your victory condition. Wonders should interact with cities' specializations.

I dont suppose they read it, if they do, i dont suppose they would care much about my suggestions. But hey, the forum is here, so why not post it...
At least the stacking bonusses from IZ are removed, before that i totally had no hope for the game ever to be balanced. Good job on that first fix.

 

[Leyrann]

I like most of the ideas, but there's a few questions I have.

First off, why should having more cities mean they can't grow as big? I mean, there's countries that would be called "tall", like Japan or the Netherlands (though the Netherlands are actually the second biggest export country for agricultural good, so maybe not that tall after all), but a country like China, India, Brazil or the USA is very clearly both tall and wide, and incidentally they're either a superpower or about to be. I suppose the same also sorta counts for (the European part of) Russia. Once "more cities" means "smaller cities" something isn't right, except if you are looking at the same amount of tiles (and that's already in the game; if you build cities closer together, there's less space for farms, so you don't grow as big).

Second, I think that moving trade routes to the third building is too late, at least if there is no new option for earlier trade routes. I certainly agree CH is OP right now, but maybe it should be something like the first or second building. Or maybe (like it was in Civ5 iirc) have techs that unlock trade routes and then later on you can get additional ones with some buildings. And maybe (it would kinda make sense) also with Aerodromes.

PS I like your name btw.

 

[WackenOpenAir]

I happen to be from the netherlands. With our biggest city, Amsterdam, being about 800.000 citizens, i think we're neither tall, nor wide. Were basically a few size <6 cities bunched really close together

Anyway, that was a side note. FOr me its not about being realistic or anything, i care about how the game plays. That said, i am not saying your empire cannot be both tall and wide, but in the game it basically only happens if you "play for fun" and instead of winning when you can, keep extending the game longer. If you are playing at a level that is challenging and you try to win as soon as you can, you can opt to first invest in obtaining more cities by building units and/or settlers to conquer or build them. Doing this slows down the development of your existing cities (who need housing, amenities and food to grow bigger rather than spending their production on settlers and/or units) so it will be later in the game before they grow tall. By that time your wide empire has already gotten so powerful that you will already have won the game. The other choise would be to have a short expansion phase in your game and very soon start focussing on growing your cities tall. If after growing your cities big and strong, you would start conquering other cities, you will get wide in the end game, but most of the conquered cities will not be smaller and again, it would immediately be followed by winning the game. To relate to your real life example. The US has already won this game of civ a century ago, but they clicked "keep playing". Otherwise they would have never gotten that tall Its as you say, they are a superpower or about to be, meaning it is already game over. (unless indeed you have 2 of them, which i suppose could happen in player vs player, but as it stands is unfortunately unlikely in player vs ai. (balancing AI is another topic but that has been totally ignored for 6 civ games now, so no hope that is going to happen)

In previous civ games it has changed with every game. In the older versions usually we would build enormous amount of cities because there was little or no penalty to it. The developers tried to limit that in multiple ways. In civ5 i think the terms tall and wide were really introduced (not sure, i skipped 4) as this game really had 2 distinct choises. You could choose between 2 "government/civic" paths (well more, but only 2 were viable) 1 of them aimed at growing a wide empire (constructing 7-10 cities), the other aimed at growing a tall empire (constructing ~4 cities). While most players agreed that the tall option was the stronger one, it was quite reasonably balanced as both options were viable and it would depend on the map and difficulty level which of the 2 options really was the strongest. Now in civ6, we moved far away from balance again as it is very clear that wide is the way to go.

I agree, there should be some traderoutes from other sources to go with the very limited trade routes from commercial districts like i suggested. Indeed like civ5 i think there should be a handful of trade routes that you get trough the early-mid game and then another handful or so that you can add with the commercial districts.

 

[Leyrann]

For me, the problem with "tall vs wide" is that, in Civ5, going wide simply meant "we're going to punish you everwhere for wanting to expand in a 4X game". Building a city in Civ5 means: Techs more expensive. Policies more expensive. Less growth (happiness). Less production (happiness). Less gold (happiness). Weaker units (happiness). It just sucked to expand in Civ5. Yes, you could do it, but the only thing you were fighting was Global Happiness. And on top of that techs and stuff slowly drifted further away somehow.

There should be other balances for tall vs wide, that actually seem realistic. Maybe they revolt in the edges of the empire. Maybe there's corruption, like in old civs, etc.

Out of time now, so I'm gonna press post. One thing though, try out Civ4 + expansions. Much better than Civ5.

 

[WackenOpenAir]

I agree that it is no fun when the game is just trying to punish you. The developers are aware of that, and thats why they removed the old corruption function the cultural conversion of conquered towns was a disaster too. Civ 5 actually didnt seem so bad in that aspect. The most important aspect for me to stop expanding usually was running out of space to expand and conquered towns being very disadvantaged.

Civ 6 did away with all of it. Conquered towns are just as fine as the ones you settle and they are more easy to conquer than ever. I like the fact that they function as well as settled ones. I dont think conquering them should be so easy.

Meanwhile, in the old days you could grow your cities with not so much a problem. We had those visible food bars, each citizen would cost 10 more food and 1 more happiness which once in a long forgotten path was obtainable simply by a slider or by swapping a citizen to entertainer.. Now they made the curve more exponential to slow bigger growth, we need amenities which are harder to obtain, we need housing, we need to buy tiles to expand our city radius. All of that makes growing your city a pain in the ass. And for what ? There is no reason to do it really, a few virtually empty districts is all you need from your city.

So at the very least, there must be a reason to grow your cities big (hence the scaling with citizens)
Expanding wide must be more difficult (no easy conquest without encampents)

 

[Elucidus]

well amenities is basically happiness, and housing is basically health, both were used before similarly in the past. But I agree there should be a reason to build tall cities, just like there should be a reason to build wide empires. It really should come down to land area and probably policy effects to get the right bonuses for the right shape empire, in my opinion.