Should districts be changed?

[Psychotronics]

There are some complaints I've been hearing a lot here: research is to quick and production too low. That means you sometimes (frequently, in my case) run out of technologies to research way before the end of the game. Units, buildings and especially districts, however, take too long to build. How many times have you noticed you needed to get one of your later cities an aqueduct or a neighbourhood, but then saw how long your city would have to stop because of it?
Of course I'd prefer to get more techs and a bit more production, but could districts, maybe, be free to build? They'd already limit which buildings a city would be able to build and, if needed, buildings could have their construction time adjusted not to break the game. Have any mods tried this yet? Do you think it's work?

 

[White Out]

There's a great mod, 8 ages of pace, which deals with just this problem.

 

[Amrunril]

I don't think districts should be free, but there's no real reason for them to scale as they do with tech progress. Removing this mechanic in favor of a more modest scaling with number of districts built (of a given type) would do a lot to improve the balance between production and science/culture.

 

[kruszelnicki]

I’ve started to consider if perhaps districts cost should scale by the number of districts in the city.

If I recall, district cost is 60 and scales with tech & policy progression (and possibly turn progression?)

Idea: district cost is 30 + (20*number of current districts in the city)

That way, any city would be able to get at least the first district up, even if they had limited production capacity.

This would however have the downside of making ‘going wide’ even stronger than going tall.

 

[Athmos]

Well, going wide should always be good in a 4X game.

 

[Amrunril]

Well, going wide should always be good in a 4X game.

Having more cities should definitely be better than having fewer, but growing and specializing cities should be important too. Without any sort of global cost scaling, it would probably be too appealing to, say, found 20 tiny cities and build the exact same 1 or 2 (victory condition specific) districts in all of them.

 

[steve_indy]

If you build a lot of aqueducts, it should get easier to build aqueducts, not harder. Just sayin'

 

[TomKQT]

I would say that I more often have a different problem - nothing to build in my cities. Maybe it's because I very rarely build military units, because you need just few to defend (and also to attack) and I also mostly buy units with gold. But as far as buildings and district go, I sometimes have to make projects, because I'm out of build options.
Sure, a new city created in the late eras has very long district creation times, this probably could be tweaked a bit.

What I however hate is how the district cost scales with researched technologies and civics. That's a punishment for something what always has been perceived as "being good in the game, playing it the right way". Civilization always was about advancing in the tech tree, but Civ6 punishes you for it.
It also brings the side effect that you should still watch your cities and place a district as soon as the pop limit allows it and then go back to building whatever else you need more at the moment. I sometimes have two or even more districts just placed with 0 hammers spent on them. This also requires usually to buy some tiles etc. I hate this, it adds to already a lot of stress in the game, because you have to watch so many things...
Scaling with number of districts already existing in the city sounds better and doesn't rush you anyhow at all.
But:

Without any sort of global cost scaling, it would probably be too appealing to, say, found 20 tiny cities and build the exact same 1 or 2 (victory condition specific) districts in all of them.

Yea, it would be probably hard to balance this idea. I think that Firaxis had to consider a lot of option and finaly selected the one which is in the game. I think all variants have their drawbacks.

 

[RealAntithesis]

Yea, it would be probably hard to balance this idea. I think that Firaxis had to consider a lot of option and finaly selected the one which is in the game. I think all variants have their drawbacks.

The two biggest drawbacks with the current implementation is that districts become ridiculously long to build later in the game and besides, the mechanic itself just doesn't make sense.

Civ mechanics need to make some sort of sense in the context of the real world which it places itself in, but Civ 6 in many ways has forgotten about this - Choosing instead to implement half thought through mechanics that don't really work and don't really make sense.