like
like
like
like
Oh sweet jesus..
@Ziad clearly you are a coastal player.... you feel Mali will not be able to match you in gold?
I think Victoria has just been buffed! Shame it does not count as adjacency.
Harbors are arguably the most versatile districts that provide tons of food, production, gold, and science with Free Inquiry. They also enable sea trade routes which can potentially double yields from trade routes. Any civilization that has incentives to settle on coast and/or with bonuses to Harbor construction will find themselves with self-sufficient cities with high population and gold generation. This is all to compensate for the loss of possible production, although the right pantheons and sea resources can reduce the deficit significantly.
Commercial city state bonuses are halved, but now provide them to both Commercial Districts and Harbors. So now a Harbor/Commercial District combination is more relevant and stronger than ever.
So yeah England definitely got buffed.
Mali's bonuses are all tailored to increasing the potency of their individual trade routes, based on the number of desert tiles. The problem with this is that it innately requires Mali to settle in unfavorable locations that have a lot of desert, so the yields are more compensatory than initially evident. Furthermore, it does somewhat discourage coastal settling as deserts are more frequently located inland.
Phoenicia's coastal bias and very strong navy will provide it near unrivaled control of the seas. This in turn will give Phoenicia both the power to double their trade route bonuses safely, while discouraging other civilizations from engaging in trade without Phoenicia's explicit support. A Mali can quite easily be shut down by a Dido if they try to exploit naval trade. You might be quite inclined to keep Mali down and destroy his trade routes if he tries to send them through the seas.
Phoenicia not only has settling bonuses for more cities (so more gold) and more trade routes, it also has a much easier time settling other continents, and you can acquire luxuries from across the world map, further increasing the breadth of available resources for both city growth and trade. Gold generation through trade deals will almost certainly be higher for the average Phoenicia game than Mali.
Regardless, I think Mali has a higher possible ceiling for gold generation overall, because they can always acquire more cities, have more possible trade route additions through golden ages, can safely build Harbors if not faced with naval aggression, and can always rely on railroads later in the game anyway.
However Phoenicia will be far more consistent as none of its bonuses require anything but coast, which is readily available. It also has a much higher early game potential with no actual maluses. It also has the potential to squeeze in some arguably broken combinations with Colonial Taxes and Casa for even more gold generation.
So in practice, I genuinely think Phoenicia can really compete with Mali. You just have to put a little more effort into it, but none of that effort is truly map dependent outside of severe edge cases (like Pangea with low sea levels), so your performance will generally be more consistent. I'm certain godlike Mali playthroughs will break the bank though.