Science yield will be much less important

[chaosprophet]

Only when we get to play the game that we will be able to tell how many of these you get at naturally, how many it's worth doing the eureka just for it or even viable. At least to me, seems like now deciding the optimal thing to produce is even more important with districts also being built in the city and workers having charges, so going out of you way to make units that you don't need may actually be a bad idea.

 

[Birdjaguar]

A bit over simplified, but here is how I see it:

Science should drive tech which drives weapons and construction capabilities
Civics should drive government style which should drive potential width of your empire
Culture should drive regional influence, happiness, and impact both science and civics
Food/housing/hexes worked should drive population

 

[Minor Annoyance]

It's possible many militarily useful advances will be from culture rather than science. Anything to do with tactics could be cultural advances. The stacking of units into armies seems a likely candidate.

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[SupremacyKing2]

It's possible many militarily useful advances will be from culture rather than science. Anything to do with tactics could be cultural advances. The stacking of units into armies seems a likely candidate.

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Yeah, I agree. Obviously weapons will still come from techs. So a swordsman unit would come from a tech like "iron working". But things that are more like social policies that affect your military will most likely come from civics. Something like "conscription" would be a civic IMO. So yes, things like promotions or armies should come from civics not techs. If I am right, I think this will create a good synergy between the tech tree and the civics tree. With science, players can get more technologically advanced units but they will need culture to really optimize them. It might also create a situation where civ A is ahead in science and has newer units, while civ B is ahead in culture and has older units but they fight better. It would be the comparison between a technologically advanced military that is poorly trained versus a guerilla force that is more seasoned and advanced in tactics.

 

[isau]

Eureka moments are actually one of the things that have me a little worried about gameplay. It all depends on how "natural" feeling the Moments are. What I don't want in the game is having to jump through a bunch of silly hoops to advance. Like this:

"The optimal strategy for the early game is to build exactly 3 spearmen, improve 3 tiles, create a gold mine and a silver mine, negotiate with two AIs, and place one city by the sea and another by mountains, and raid two barbarian camps. This ensures maximum Eureka Moments for the early era."

If Eureka Moments are natural and fluid they will be fine. However, I don't want to be in the position of memorizing a build path that simply consists of stuff like "Build 3 spearmen to advance." I think that would like being strangled by the experience system, similar to RPGs where to advance your Crafting skill or whatever you have to "Make 10 clay pots" whether you need them or not.

 

[ldvhl]

I think starting positions will be diverse enough that a set strategy like that won't be found frequently.

 

[ftl]

Yeah, the stated intention with the Eureka boosts is to ensure that the exact opposite happens - that the "optimal" path really depends on your location, your map, your strategy.

For reference - 3 spearmen in Civ 5 was a lot. Each spearman costs 56 hammers, so 3 spearmen cost 168 hammers, and the three of them would have a maintenance cost of 3gpt. For comparison, the Great Library costs 185 hammers. So if I go for building 3 spearmen, it's costing me basically an entire ancient Wonder worth of production! (A little less production, but has ongoing maintenance cost). Based on these numbers, unless I actually planned to use the three spearmen to wage a war soon or needed them to clear out barb camps, it would almost certainly be a waste of time to build them early just to get half progress on an ancient-era tech.

Obviously, these numbers aren't going to stay the same in Civ 6, but overall the ratios might hold. If that's the case, it looks like the boosts are not going to be worth going too far out of your way for.

Building cities by mountains and coast is also a reasonable example, because it's actually really constraining. My initial city is probably going basically where my starting location was... and it's really important for your second and third city sites to be good too... is it going to be worth it to specifically look for a city site by a mountain for the research boost? Probably not as important as placing that city by a river or by luxuries or strategic resources and amenities.

An individual boost isn't all that huge. It's 50% of one technology. That seems like it's not going to be big enough to do something like determine where you found your second city, it's not something to devote even half of the cost of a wonder to. (Unless you have a specific strategic reason to want THAT tech really fast, or unless you really are willing to devote a huge chunk of your empire's production to speed up your science, at the cost of developing whatever your actual strategic focus is. )

Some interview with the designer did say that the "single optimal strategy" issue was part of why they put in the Eureka moments in the first place, to give a player lots of things to react dynamically to and make sure a player *can't* just decide, at the start of the game, what path they want to take without knowing where they'll find themselves. Obviously, we don't know whether they've succeeded in their design goal until we try the game and see for ourselves, but they are clearly worried about your concern as well and are trying to address it.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Yeah, the stated intention with the Eureka boosts is to ensure that the exact opposite happens - that the "optimal" path really depends on your location, your map, your strategy.

For reference - 3 spearmen in Civ 5 was a lot. Each spearman costs 56 hammers, so 3 spearmen cost 168 hammers, and the three of them would have a maintenance cost of 3gpt. For comparison, the Great Library costs 185 hammers. So if I go for building 3 spearmen, it's costing me basically an entire ancient Wonder worth of production! (A little less production, but has ongoing maintenance cost). Based on these numbers, unless I actually planned to use the three spearmen to wage a war soon or needed them to clear out barb camps, it would almost certainly be a waste of time to build them early just to get half progress on an ancient-era tech.

Obviously, these numbers aren't going to stay the same in Civ 6, but overall the ratios might hold. If that's the case, it looks like the boosts are not going to be worth going too far out of your way for.

Building cities by mountains and coast is also a reasonable example, because it's actually really constraining. My initial city is probably going basically where my starting location was... and it's really important for your second and third city sites to be good too... is it going to be worth it to specifically look for a city site by a mountain for the research boost? Probably not as important as placing that city by a river or by luxuries or strategic resources and amenities.

An individual boost isn't all that huge. It's 50% of one technology. That seems like it's not going to be big enough to do something like determine where you found your second city, it's not something to devote even half of the cost of a wonder to. (Unless you have a specific strategic reason to want THAT tech really fast, or unless you really are willing to devote a huge chunk of your empire's production to speed up your science, at the cost of developing whatever your actual strategic focus is. )

Some interview with the designer did say that the "single optimal strategy" issue was part of why they put in the Eureka moments in the first place, to give a player lots of things to react dynamically to and make sure a player *can't* just decide, at the start of the game, what path they want to take without knowing where they'll find themselves. Obviously, we don't know whether they've succeeded in their design goal until we try the game and see for ourselves, but they are clearly worried about your concern as well and are trying to address it.

Very well said! Yes, I believe that's the designers goal and I really hope they'll be able to manage this. I have worries due to number of features they've thrown in - it could be very hard to balance. But hey, we'll have post release patches too.