Should the Civic Tree should have its own currency (Civic Points)?

[historix69]

Civ 5 and Civ 6 both use Culture :
- locally to calculate border expansion of cities and
- globally to buy/research civics.

In Civ 6 a lot of culture comes from monuments, population and number of districts, which is reasonable to allow all cities some border expansion. The consequence is that culture income scales with size of empire even when one does not build any cultural districts. Going wide in Civ 6 usually means to rush through the civic tree if you want or not, which feels strange.

By adding a new currency called "Civic Points" which originate from the Palace building and a special (philisophical) district, the mechanisms of border expansion and the Civic Research could be separated. To speed up Civic Research, the player would have to build the new district which would compete with the other districts for gold/trade, science, faith, culture/tourism, production, military units, happiness ...

 

[Manifold]

But to make culture something more important again, the cultural conquest of Civ4 should come back.

Yes, a Civic district and Great Philosophers should come with an expansion.
The buildings of the Civic district could be Garden -> Academy -> Newspaper publisher -> Comprehensive open WLAN network (Internet cafe)

 

[Amrunril]

There is some appeal to separating civic progression from border expansion. At this point, though I'd say that it's civic progression that's the core function of culture, while the impact on border growth is largely a carryover from past editions. Perhaps border growth should be affected more by things other than culture, but I'm not at all convinced that it needs an entire currency to itself.

 

[Manifold]

There is some appeal to separating civic progression from border expansion. At this point, though I'd say that it's civic progression that's the core function of culture, while the impact on border growth is largely a carryover from past editions. Perhaps border growth should be affected more by things other than culture, but I'm not at all convinced that it needs an entire currency to itself.

Is not it the other way round? Why is the construction of a museum good to research e.g. communism? But an amphitheater could bring people from outside to visit your city and feel related because it is attractive to be civilized, or?
The Civic tree fits better to philosophy general. It is more theory than art required for that progress.

By the way the Roman legion should get the ability to conquer adjacent tiles when they build a fort...that would fit to Rome.

 

[Amrunril]

Is not it the other way round? Why is the construction of a museum good to research e.g. communism? But an amphitheater could bring people from outside to visit your city and feel related because it is attractive to be civilized, or?
The Civic tree fits better to philosophy general. It is more theory than art required for that progress.

I wasn't addressing flavor/real world justifications in my post, simply noting that in terms of current mechanics, border growth used to be the primary function of culture, but, at this point civic, progression has become the more important application, while border growth is a somewhat less important legacy effect.

I think the underlying issue is that, as you and the OP have argued, it really doesn't make sense from a flavor perspective for fine arts to be the primary driver of political philosophy. On the other hand, it also doesn't feel right for art's primary game function to be border expansion, and it's really hard to think of infrastructure to link to philosophy. I'm not sure what the best solution is, but it does seem like something that needs to be thought about as the game moves forward, as I think the developers are keeping a lot of mechanical baggage from past editions without really thinking about how it fits together.