[GS] Should it be possible to achieve victory without ever using victory-specific districts?

[TheMeInTeam]

Can't imagine anything but religious being an issue when your last opponent is on a single, pillaged/besieged city.

With religious you'd need some way to get rid of opposing religions. You could get your own by just playing Arabia.

 

[Ludvig]

Spain can convert everything they conquer, right? Should allow you to put pressure on the last non-holy cap even if you would just be waiting ages to get a religious instead of domination victory. Or does it require a religious unit?

I like that the districts aren't required. Being locked into the exact same strat is more boring than having options. I'm not sure what sort of enjoyment I'd be gaining from having less options?

 

[kryat]

It does seem like there absolutely should be routes to victories without their respective districts. Otherwise, it’s just a competition to see who can build the most of them. These alternate routes through relics, pillaging, and golden ages make the strategy interesting.

Exception: there should be a greater need for encampments, but encampments should be cheaper.

 

[UWHabs]

It does seem like there absolutely should be routes to victories without their respective districts. Otherwise, it’s just a competition to see who can build the most of them. These alternate routes through relics, pillaging, and golden ages make the strategy interesting.

Exception: there should be a greater need for encampments, but encampments should be cheaper.

Yeah, I'd agree about the encampments. They just don't give you enough bonuses. I don't mind getting one somewhat early, but after that first one, I will almost never build one until it's the 4th or 5th district in a city. Maybe if their base was half price I'd built them more, or if there was something required about them (ie. could not purchase units in a city unless if you have an encampment), they're just not useful.

 

[kryat]

Yeah, I'd agree about the encampments. They just don't give you enough bonuses. I don't mind getting one somewhat early, but after that first one, I will almost never build one until it's the 4th or 5th district in a city. Maybe if their base was half price I'd built them more, or if there was something required about them (ie. could not purchase units in a city unless if you have an encampment), they're just not useful.

Agreed. I think they should be the price of aqueducts, be rushable with military engineers, and be required for building anything other than anti-cav.

 

[shaglio]

Agreed. I think they should be the price of aqueducts, be rushable with military engineers, and be required for building anything other than anti-cav.

Ouch! So no Warriors, Slingers, Archers or Scouts at the beginning of the game?

 

[lotrmith]

Yeah, I'd agree about the encampments. They just don't give you enough bonuses. I don't mind getting one somewhat early, but after that first one, I will almost never build one until it's the 4th or 5th district in a city. Maybe if their base was half price I'd built them more, or if there was something required about them (ie. could not purchase units in a city unless if you have an encampment), they're just not useful.

Try fighting a player in MP who built a couple encampments and earned a couple GGs against you who haven't. You have to be an era ahead in tech to stand a chance, which granted you may be as a result of building campuses over encampments, at least first. A pop 4 city can have a campus and an encampment.

 

[Caprikel]

Yes, more flexibility is a good thing in general.
Situations like getting most of your science through pillaging with Norway are great for allowing more gameplay diversity.
Rock bands and national parks requiring faith make it so faith oriented civs have more flexibility by being good at both religious and culture victories. Just spamming Theater Squares makes for a much less interesting game.
I do however agree that Encampments should be more useful for domination. A civ with lots of encampments shouldn't lose a war with a civ that just has more production.

 

[kryat]

Ouch! So no Warriors, Slingers, Archers or Scouts at the beginning of the game?

Scouts are probably ok. I think warriors and slingers probably are as well, especially to ward off barbarians. Anything more sophisticated though should require formal military training at, you know, a military camp.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Scouts are probably ok. I think warriors and slingers probably are as well, especially to ward off barbarians. Anything more sophisticated though should require formal military training at, you know, a military camp.

That wouldn't necessarily make the game more realistic, considering how long levies/conscription were a dominant part of armies in history.

 

[kryat]

That wouldn't necessarily make the game more realistic, considering how long levies/conscription were a dominant part of armies in history.

That’s actually exactly why in my first post I said anticav should be left alone. Even better would be to have a separate militia class that was weaker than standard infantry, but able to be produced without encampments.

 

[MrRadar]

That wouldn't necessarily make the game more realistic, considering how long levies/conscription were a dominant part of armies in history.

Levies are already an option, and conscripts could be some cheap weaker unit, built at the city centre and costing 1 pop, for more realism. But then after the war, surviving conscripts could be merged back into cities, refunding pop cost.

 

[The googles do nothing]

The design philosophy of Civ 6 is that nothing should be mandatory.

Well, you can't do a SV without a spaceport, which I would consider to be the SV district. There are lots of ways to get science. There's only one way to get to space.

Well, one exception.. Unless were including MP. I would argue that starting production is necessary.

To answer the question in the title, yes it should be possible.. If it would not it would limit the replay-ability for me.

 

[Hammurabbit]

I think there is something problematic with the relationship between science victory and domination victory. They are not different enough.

For domination victory keeping up with tech is imperative. If you become leader in tech it makes it even easier. I would say one of the best strategies for domination victory is to be the leader in tech. So investing heavily in science is important for domination, much more important than investing in barracks and military academies.

Going for science victory means you'll have to build space ports and space projects. That typically only takes a few cities to do that (2-3 space ports, a few more producing trade routes to boost production in them). So all in all, your empire could be very similar to an empire going for domination victory.

If you are going for domination victory you can easily spare a few big cities, far from the front, to not build military infrastructure and invest in space race as well. You anyway built your empire for good production and good tech. And as you conquer new cities your science and GP generation will become higher and higher which is great for space race.

This is quite different from e.g. religious and culture victory. These are require empire wide investments that doesnt help you in any major way with any other victory type.

I think there is a separator missing between military tech and regular tech. Perhaps require encampments and encampment buildings to build more advanced units?

 

[Karmah]

I think there is something problematic with the relationship between science victory and domination victory. They are not different enough.

For domination victory keeping up with tech is imperative. If you become leader in tech it makes it even easier. I would say one of the best strategies for domination victory is to be the leader in tech. So investing heavily in science is important for domination, much more important than investing in barracks and military academies.

Going for science victory means you'll have to build space ports and space projects. That typically only takes a few cities to do that (2-3 space ports, a few more producing trade routes to boost production in them). So all in all, your empire could be very similar to an empire going for domination victory.

If you are going for domination victory you can easily spare a few big cities, far from the front, to not build military infrastructure and invest in space race as well. You anyway built your empire for good production and good tech. And as you conquer new cities your science and GP generation will become higher and higher which is great for space race.

This is quite different from e.g. religious and culture victory. These are require empire wide investments that doesnt help you in any major way with any other victory type.

I think there is a separator missing between military tech and regular tech. Perhaps require encampments and encampment buildings to build more advanced units?

While I agree with 90% of what you said , I find that science and faith are equally important for domination. And that's what separates SV and Dom in my games. If I want to keep rolling around the times corps and armies comes into play , hard building nooby units to get swallowed by my level 3/4 veterans can only be done in a fast and reliable way once I have grand master chapel. When I dom with a non-faith generation advantage , I find I have to kind of pause until I have either upgraded or created corps. I'm talking this specific moment around the time of bombards and filed canons, your crossbow are busy in ennemy theory , where muskets are starting to lose their tankiness and that's when you want them all in corps. It's a pivotal moment. Right before the very last hour of glory of conventional units with uber horses and soon to be artillery , before planes makes them obsolete.

 

[Hammurabbit]

That actually reminds me of another mechanic that's works in the same direction, i.e. making science and dom-victory too similar.
The reason why you need these corps is (in my experience) because the city defence is getting stronger than what singular musketmen can handle. So by improving your science you are also automatically are making your cities more difficult to take, without having to put any effort in.
Again, someone investing in tech doesn't need to pay any extra to get a decent city defence. And if you are an advanced invader, you don't have to care too much about defending your newly conquered cities, they will hold off any low tech threat.

 

[AsH2]

The thread about Campus-less science victory got me thinking, if such a thing should be possible at all? Let's look, how things are.

Diplomatic and Score victories are a special case, so let's leave them out, the remaining four victories all have a specific district that is or can be directly associated with that VC.

Also, let's talk standard map settings – standard size, speed, 8 civs total, 12 CS, no cheesed up business, on the hardest difficulty – Deity.

Under such conditions Religious Victory is impossible without building at least one Holy Site – after some restarts and a lot of luck you may get to build Stonehenge and found a religion, but all other religious Wonders giving a few free religious units require a Holy Site or its buildings, so no way to have more missionaries and apostles, and passive spread from one city won't cut it. In my opinion, everything is sensible here, RV is a model pupil in this regard.

Cultural Victory without Theatre Districts is a bit different thing. It may also seem impossible or nigh on impossible, but World Wonders, walls, seaside and ski resorts, national parks, certain great people open up some avenues. Still, it would be very difficult and slow, and probably impossible in case of cultural AI present on the map, unless you make your cultural victory mostly military. Still the situation with the CV and it's shaky feasibility w/o TD seems sufficiently reasonable. CV is somewhere about A-.

Domination Victory without Encampments, is, alas, very much possible. Aside from generation of GGs for some help to speed things up, DomV is perfectly feasible without ever using an Encampment, and that is… outrageous, I think. Without specialised army buildings for training and military thought there should not be any proper army possible. A mere city w/o an encampment should only be able to produce some early militia, slingers, scouts, and some forms of city garrison or territorial troops later. But certainly not trained and battle ready troops. Encampment and its buildings should unlock the option to build more and more sorts of troops in that city, gunpowder units should also require an IZ and a workshop, and mechanised troops – factory coverage. D, back to year 1.

Science Victory without Campus Districts, is, again, no big problem, and achievable within reasonable time. There will be plenty of dubious eureka moments, then some blokes will sip some tea, watch thermal fissures steam, listen very carefully what merchants from foreign parts talk in their trading posts, then sum everything up with their peer citizens at a pub over a pint, and the course to the nearest habitable star system will be readily plotted. And those citizens don't even need to be overly prone to aggression and pillaging. F, back to the nursery.

This is probably the first Civ instalment where you can win science on the highest difficulty, maintaining high degrees of peace and without a single piece of science infrastructure. Now this is a real scandal, if there was one.

Civs 1-4 had commerce and sliders, allowing you to direct where your nation's efforts were going. Probably that was a better system, which maybe was worth keeping; it only needed more tinkering to solve rounding issues and binary research, if it was such a problem. Now flat yields from all sources allow for such hardly believable situations.

Maybe it would be better to bring back the idea of commerce for the science and replace the current science yields by, let's say, raw "data", a fraction of which could be processed by general population, but you'd need science infrastructure and specialists to actually process it more efficiently into "science" yield, which would allow you to move further in the tech tree? And for that advance to be efficient in more and more progressive eras, you'd need higher and higher level buildings and coverage (why Universities don’t have 6 tile coverage like other T2 buildings?). That way even if you get lots of data yields, they wouldn't take you far without appropriate infrastructure and people to interpret it. And no space programs for sure, if you neglect to build science labs and well powered factories.

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They unstacked the cities to encourage specialization, as I understand. But the possibility to achieve victory w/o some sorts of specialized districts, again, on the hardest level, shows that specialization is not so important. You can be very average and still prevail. I have nothing against this being normally achievable up to Prince or King. Emperor should make you sweat a bit, Immortal - sweat a lot, and to pull this off on Deity should require all your skill and also quite a bit of luck.
..

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I'll reformulate my question:

should victory specific districts be inconsequential to that kind of victory to the point that even on the most extreme difficulty you could achieve that type of victory without ever using them fairly comfortably, with most civilizations.

Not as a special case, not as a feat of skill, but just taking it a hundred or so turns longer, but still without serious threat of losing at one point or another.

The main offenders now, imo, are Encampments and Campus districts.
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Although really, if they wanted to "require" the districts, you could simply change the spaceport to be required to be built next to a university or research lab, and for culture, it might not be a terrible change to only let you produce them in cities with a broadcast tower. But I don't know how much those changes would really alter the victory types except adding in extra conditions to worry about.

No, I'm not here to talk about such additional artificial hurdles, but instead about some ways to find more meaning in specialisation and the way in which some yields are or could be generated.
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I do agree Victory Conditions (still) need some love - balancing tweaks and in some cases revamps - but the points in your reformulated question are IMHO a matter of AI failures.
Perhaps the best way here would be to alter all VCs to have both a straight-forward (that AI can handle well) and another that favour a diversity of playstyles.

I do enjoy this new district concept, but I think they would better make them generic in the first place and later (in-games) become specialized - kind of suggested in mitsho's post in the thread Would you like to see Civilization V’s art style back in VI? (and Boris Gudenuf's posts prior to and after) - or I'm afraid it would have grown old in Civ7.

Spoiler :

"The sprawling above only works if a current tile gets split into 5 smaller ones or something alike. I even now run out of tiles to build Wonders on. I could simply destroy a few infrastructures, but I don't like doing that. But that dilemma is what the creators of civ6 had in mind. Still, I like the sprawling. It makes sense.

Still, I think the adjacencies were the wrong way to go, but the district system is a good idea. I would propose a simpler system than that mentioned just before though:

1. Every district has 5 building slots.
2. If a district has a majority of one class of buildings, it becomes a special district (say a Holy Site), gaining bonuses and maybe coloured roofs. There also can be mixed districts, say workshop + barrack = bonus to siege units.
3. Some buildings may only be built on certain spots (Water Mills at a river, observatory next to mountain).
4. Buildings are movable, allowing the micromanagers to min-max their bonuses
5. Wonders take up 3 slots and are not movable, National Wonders take up 2 slots.

So the key point is that you don't decide on a district and then have empty districts lying around for a long time until you can build that tier-3 building, but rather you build districts when you need them. Totally agree on the walls though."

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Exception: there should be a greater need for encampments, but encampments should be cheaper.

It is cheaper if you use the veterancy card. The encampent district by design is not really ment to be spamed since its bonuses are Active rather than passive such as campus. It is however not a weak district but not something you probably want to have everywhere since to get the most out of it you need to build units. It is the second cheapest district to build up (only religious is cheaper). Its buildings provide a total of 8 production and 2 housing in additional to the experience it gives to units built in that city. If you add in the 3 specialist you get +6 production and gold with the gold probably being used to pay the maintain cost of the encampment. With CS the encampent buildings can get even more production but only for building military units

This don't consider that encampment also have a defensive purpose which can be quite potent in certain locations.

I think encampent mostly suffer from that upgrading is more efficient than building new military units since it have very low gold cost compared to normal purchase cost. Encampment would probably be alot more used if you could only upgrade one unit per encampent per era or something which mean you need several encampments to keep upgrading units and it also mean that you may need to build new units which would make encampment even better. It would also make upgrading more strategic since you would only be able to upgrade a limited part of your army so you would have to choice which units that is to recive upgrade.

I think there is something problematic with the relationship between science victory and domination victory. They are not different enough.

The current balance is that playing as if going for a domination victory will make it easier to win any kind of victory since investing into the military produce massive yields of return if you go on a conquest or pillage Spree. Since upgrading is better than building new units, getting to the next unit Tech is extreamly powerful since you can quickly and at low cost upgrade your current army which mean building an early army actually save alot of resource later as well as give some serious advantages early. Even if military simply slow down the enemy, it still help towards any victory.

This is quite different from e.g. religious and culture victory. These are require empire wide investments that doesnt help you in any major way with any other victory type.

I find the difference between victories to be rather small, Culture by itself help you advance the Civic tree which help you with any kind of victory and getting certain Civic card can greatly help you no matter what. I think Civ6Trader made a video winning a Quick science victory as Rome by using its Culture advantages. Faith is quite interesting since Argubly spreading religion is the least efficient way to use faith since spreading religion have really limited returns. However faith itself have many uses such as getting national parks or rockbands and rockbands is maybe the best tourism producer in the game with ability to give over 10k tourism per turn with luck and good management, Obviously you need alot of Culture to get them but at that Point faith is maybe the primary tourism producing resource, also land is very important for tourism production which leads back to miliary dominance.

Religious victory is basically a military victory in disguise since spreading religion give next to no return and the whole victory condition about majority religion can be speed up by capturing cities that don't follow your religion and military units can also be used to kill other religious agents.

Basically no matter what your empire will likely look pretty similar since the victory conditions have rather similar requirements.
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[oSiyeza]

a Rock Band so long-lived an durable, that it ran out of places to perform in the entire world!
Now I am intrigued - has anybody really had something like this?

You mean like the rolling stones?