Switching cost mode for settlers/builders and districts

[historix69]

I wonder how the game would change when switching the cost mode for settlers/builders and districts? So far, settlers and builders become more expensive based on the number of built units of that type (or so) while district costs are based on social and technological progress (and average number built).

In the new system, settlers and builders would become slightly more expensive based on progress. Costs for districts would depend on Base Cost for that type of district and numbers of built/owned districts of that type, e.g. :
1st Campus : 100% base costs
2nd Campus : 150% base costs
3rd Campus : 200% base costs
...

Districts might be purchased with Gold.
Conquering a city may remove all districts (?).

The change should result in more cities settled but less districts built so that building a district becomes a more important decision. A run away civ could no longer build 100 Campi (?) and rush through tech-tree but instead would have only slightly more Campi than a civ with an average empire. This would make it easier to balance research costs.

 

[Sostratus]

I wonder how the game would change when switching the cost mode for settlers/builders and districts? So far, settlers and builders become more expensive based on the number of built units of that type (or so) while district costs are based on social and technological progress (and average number built).

If you're concerned about tall vs wide balancing, we must think carefully about this. FYI, the existing cost progression for things tied to the tech or civics tree (like districts and harvesting resources/features) scale by 10x at the end of the game. This is also close to true for how much military units cost.

The change should result in more cities settled but less districts built so that building a district becomes a more important decision. A run away civ could no longer build 100 Campi (?) and rush through tech-tree but instead would have only slightly more Campi than a civ with an average empire. This would make it easier to balance research costs.

This is a noble goal, but its a tough nut to crack. If we are concerned about runaway civs, then we want to look at modifying things like the penalty imposed on research a tech or civic in an era ahead of the world era. (Crank it up big league!)
The primary roadblock to your goal is that 2 civs with the same population split between their cities (say, 60) will both have roughly similar numbers of district slots (there is a free slot at one pop) but the actual number of copies of a district those civs can have is tied to their number of cities. We don't necessarily want to change it: a coastal civ may want to build a lot of harbors- maybe one in every city. A religious civ may want to have holy sites all over the place. Civs with Unique districts looking for fun. Fair enough- we don't want to ruin that type of gameplay! The goal is fun, after all.

So if we don't really want to mess with letting each city have the same district- it would decimate play style variety. Then we can go back to the physics underlying this: it's not actually about the districts, but their combined output. Having all the output of a district be on a flat per-city basis is incredibly tilting the scale towards many-city empires. (Each Library gives +2 science, etc.) You can see where this is going- the answer is basically to tie some level of district output to the population level. In this case, specialists. Specialists are a spurned middle child right now- simply helping them out would let civs with a handful of big, powerhouse cities compete with the guy spamming campuses in the tundra. This could mean: outright upping their yield, giving extra yield based on how many buildings are in the district, giving them GP points, adding some policy cards to help them out, etc.

The reason I mentioned we need to think carefully is because if you made settler like districts now, it will give huge incentives to early city spam- which is not really what we want, especially with the existence of Magnus' promotions and the ancestral hall. Also, from a general player intuition perspective, we generally expect that any given empire X would be inferior to an empire Y, which is identical except it has one additional developed city. otherwise we'll slip back towards 4 city tradition games, and no one wants that!

Back in summer 2017 I and others wrote some postings about tall vs wide balance ideas designed to help tall without implementing anti fun mechanics for wide like Civ5 did, it was a popular topic then. If you're interested in other discussion around wide/tall and how to help tall empires survive better: link link linkydoodledo
Albeit old, the points mostly still stand. Back then we didn't have governors though, who are a very big plus to tall cities- generally speaking.

 

[killmeplease]

why districts and settlers should become more expensive with time?
what purpose does it serve -- discourage late game expansion? force the early game ics?

i think it'd be better if there was some dynamic city limit but flat costs for everything