Spaceport Buildings.

[Cliomancer]

I find the Science victory a bit of a plod, waiting for the final rocket to go up and to win. How about some buildings that speed it up, similar to the spaceship factory.

Spaceports have space for one building from the below:
Satellite Relay Station
+20% towards production of Space Projects
+8 Gold

Advanced Materials Lab
+20% towards production of Space Projects
+4 Production

Deep Space Telescope Observatory
+20% towards production of Space Projects
+4 Science

Hydroponic Development Laboratory
+20% towards production of Space Projects
+4 Food

 

[stormerne]

Instead of spaceport buildings, how about an extra policy card in the Space Race civic? Call it Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This would be a separate card to the existing Integrated Space Cell (which already adds +15% Production toward Space Race projects if a city has either a Military Academy or a Seaport). Having two separate cards would force some trade-off choices about which cards to use in your government, as you may like to use both cards but may have to sacrifice something else.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory policy works like this:

• It represents a cooperative venture between spaceports and nearby campuses.
• One campus works with one spaceport, so if you have three spaceports, you would need three separate campuses to take full advantage of this policy.
• Each participating campus must be within 6 tiles of its spaceport's city center (or preferably of the spaceport itself), but doesn't have to be in the same city.
• Each participating campus must have a Research Lab.
• The policy diverts and converts x% of the campus's science output into production for the spaceport's city. The diverted science is deducted from your overall science output.
• The exact value of "x%" is as yet unknown and would have to be determined by analysis and balancing trials.

Toward the end of the game, if you are going for a science victory, you may not paradoxically need such a high science output. You may be using it to get the last tech for a Mars project, or you may be "backfilling" to get some skipped over military tech to protect yourself, but after that it's largely going to waste. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory policy puts that science output to good use by converting some of it to production.

Bonus: My guess is this would be far easier to implement by modders or developers as it doesn't require any 3D modelling.

Full disclosure: I don't find the Civ6 science victory a plod, at least not compared to Civ5. It's always interesting trying to squeeze the last bit of production from trade, or what have you, to synchronize the Mars launches from my three spaceports. And there's also massively boosting domestic tourism, to stave off a cultural victory by an opponent.