Screenshot analysis!

Apologies for the lack of screencap but can anyone see what's on the angled screen at 1:09 in the art video? On first glance I thought it was part of a selection screen but it might actually be a leaderhead (maybe Qin Shi Huang?). I'm not sure.

 

It's the same Great Work/Artifact screen as from the previous shot. One way you can tell is by looking at the guy's sleeves.

 

Ah - yeah - you're right.

 

At 1:38 min mark in the walkthrough video, when builder builds a farm on rice resource, what is the icon that stands first on the right of the recomended build farm icon?

Spoiler :

 

We can only speculate. I asked in the stream they had about the E3 video, but the only (chat-)response was a general statement about how they can't talk about everything yet.

 

It seems pretty clear to be an icon of grains being harvested. I thought I heard some talk of grain resources being harvestable periodically, but that could just be my imagination. Otherwise, likely a paddy special improvement that would require special tech?

 

There has been some speculation about being able to reap and possibly re-sow grain resources on different tiles. In several of the videos, we see bonus resources moving around over the course of the game. It may mean something or nothing.

 

It makes sense to be able to remove a crop resource for a short-term benefit, and there is precedent in the form of being able to chop forests for a short-term production boost. But being able to re-sow is pure speculation; there is no precedent for it and it could pose serious game balance problems. As with terraforming, terrain and resource placement becomes irrelevant if you can move them around at will.

 

Agreed. I highly doubt that we will be able to re-sow, and frankly I wouldn't like this at all. It'd be too gamey.

 

How would it be too "gamey" for them to finally institute transplantation of resources, a thing humans have been doing in the actual world for thousands of years?

I would like to see a mechanism for moving crop- and livestock-based resources to new locations. Restrictions would need to be put in place regarding, for example, the terrain you could move them to. And maybe there shouldn't be a guarantee that they would "take" in the place you attempted to put them. It wouldn't do to allow resources to become so ubiquitous no one ever needs to trade for them. But Madagascar vanilla, Indian tea, Caribbean sugar plantations, Argentine beef, and the Wild West horse culture would not be possible if crops couldn't be replanted or livestock bred outside their native areas.

 

I don't question the importance of this aspect in our history, but for the Civ game it would greatly undermine the whole point of "playing to the map" mentality. It will make deciding on where to settle now or in the future that less interesting in my opinion.

I can just imagine pumping out builders and harvesting all the crops and bringing them back (successfully or not) to my cities, while the basis of such idea is historically sound, we have to think about how it would play out in the game, and I just don't see it.

It looks like it will be similar to chopping forests or clearing jungles. It'll give you a big food bonus for that harvest but lose the per turn bonus.

 

I agree with your concerns, but it *is* a possibility, given how we've seen bonus resources appear at previously empty tiles throughout the videos. I'm entirely aware it can just be artifacts of the videos being fake creations, but we can't rule it out either.

 

As with the question of placing fishing boats on empty water tiles: if you could do it, why wouldn't you do it on every available tile? If you could move crop resources at will, we would expect to see them on every farm tile.

 

There could be some sort of limitation, perhaps a 1:1 correspondence: simply move the resource somewhere it's more useful.

 

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying there's no compelling evidence for it. (There's very little at this point that one could say is "impossible".)

If you look at the screenshots and videos, there are lots of examples of unimproved crops sitting just outside civ borders. If you could relocate crops at will, we wouldn't expect to see this.

 

As well as a cool down effect !

 

Moving at will is different from planting at will. There could be a rule that you need a resource within range of a city in order to move it. With the strict competition of tiles in Civ6, it might work out. I'm skeptic about it myself, but it might be a good feature in order to overcome the frustration of poorly placed resources that may block good positions for districts etc.

 

Not saying it's in game, but if I were designing it I'd work it like this:
*Crops can only be moved from one place within your territory to another place in your territory (no stealing crops from rivals/neutral territory).
*Crop instances can be traded.
*Perhaps specific requirements for specific crops--wheat and maize are a lot more tolerant than rice, for example.

 

Totally agree, my thoughts exactly. 100% sure that's how it will be.

With the districts it would make sense for you to be able to harvest those for a short-term boost too, as is with forests.

 

Agreed, it's happened too frequently for it to be chalked up as map editor shenanigans. Perhaps there's a civ4-like mechanic where mines had a chance to discover a mining resource: once a farming resource is worked for a while (ie, the civ is knowledgeable about it) it can be "discovered" that a tile is particularly fertile for the crop.

Fwiw, that's how I have always justified unmovable/unpropigatable resources in civ games - it's not that wheat (or whatever) isn't grown on regular farm tiles, it's that the tiles where the "wheat" resource exists are just exceptionally productive spots for it.