Myomoto
King
- Joined
- Oct 13, 2013
- Messages
- 610
Ok, so here's for a new and original topic on this board: Specialists!
I know specialists and their lacklustre yields in civ 6 is one of the pet topics here, but I wanted to try and do a basic take on how the math would work out if the majority of yields from district buildings were moved over to specialists working in the district. This is to combat the "flat" yields gotten from districts and their buildings currently for free, without having to spend any population to work the districts.
Such a change would increase the value of citizens living in a city (making housing and especially neighborhoods more desirable), as well as making high food yield tiles more valuable (as specialists consume food without generally producing it). The main motivation for this is to try and emulate the major periods of historical urbanisation centred around the Medieval and Industrial Era, where larger groups of people moved away from sustenance agriculture in order to practice a trade, which corresponded with advances in agricultural technology that allowed a smaller group of people to produce the food needed in society (this aspect is already reflected in Civ 6 by the farm adjencency bonuses that unlock down the civic/tech tree). The second point is to reward and make it desirable to grow cities tall.
I will focus on the Campus and its buildings as a case study. I will present the current buildings and their yields, and then the suggested simple changes below:
Current:
Campus specialist (Scientist), +2 sci
Library, +2 sci, +1 gsp, +1 spec slot
University, +4 sci, +1 gsp, +1 spec slot
Research Lab, +3 sci (+5 sci with power), +1 gsp, +1 spec slot, +1 sci per spec
New:
Campus specialist (Scientist), +2 sci, +1 gsp
Library, +1 sci, +1 spec slot
University, +2 sci, +1 spec slot, +1 sci per spec
Research Lab, +3 sci (+5 sci with power), +1 spec slot, +1 sci per spec
Now, we can compare how the science yield of a Campus district evolves with buildings added. I refer to this as tiers: Tier 1 is a campus + library, Tier 2 is library + university, and Tier 3 is library + university + research lab. The ongoing assumption is also that each spec slot is filled in the campus, i.e. the campus is always worked to full capacity. If we compare the current and new proposed systems we see the following (there is no bonus from power included here, as I didn't propose a change to this):
Very close to parity! While initially the new suggested specialist system underperforms a bit, it eventually meets up to produce the same total yields as the current one.
The key difference however, and the problem I set out to fix, is to make working your district more valuable, so how do the specialist yields look relative to the 'flat' bonus yields from the buildings in the new system?
Here I have calculated the yields directly from specialists and divided them by the flat bonus yields of the buildings. We see for the current system that specialists can give roughly similar yields to buildings (if neglecting power). For the new system, specialists would always be twice as productive as the flat yields however. That means your campus is significantly more productive if it is consistently staffed by citizens (again, making excess population more valuable).
The next point I want to address is how would the two social policies that affect district yields look like in a specialist focused game? I will again present the current versus my 'proposed' versions:
Current:
Natural Philosphy, +100% Campus adjacency bonus
Rationalism, +50% sci from buildings if city population is 15 or higher, +50% sci from buildings if district has at least +4 adjacency bonus.
New:
Natural Philosphy, Scientist specialists gain +1 sci and +1 food
Rationalism, each Scientist specialists gets the city's campus district adjacency bonus as additional sci yield
The goal here for the new Natural Philosophy (and similar cards) is to first of all to boost science output, but also to assist in running more science specialists without hindering city growth. The goal of the new Rationalism would be to give more incremental boosts to science at different population and adjacency levels, while maintaining the reward of good city/campus planning, as seen below:
The final cases would be the bonuses from the great scientist lines (Hypatia, Newton, Einstein), and the different tiers of envoy bonuses from city states. I have not analysed or come up with a major suggestion for an overhaul of this, but I think basically replacing most bonuses with +1 sci per specialist would suffice in terms of game balance.
I hope I have made a case for how an exceedingly simple change to building/specialist yields could give reasonable parity in terms of current science yields, but rebalance the game significantly in terms of rewarding actual development of cities, and managing citizens.
I don't expect Firaxis to implement these kinds of significant changes to the game's systems at this point in its lifecycle, but I would really appeal to them to at least give modders the capabilities to do it (getting great people points from specialists is apparently already partially implemented).
I know specialists and their lacklustre yields in civ 6 is one of the pet topics here, but I wanted to try and do a basic take on how the math would work out if the majority of yields from district buildings were moved over to specialists working in the district. This is to combat the "flat" yields gotten from districts and their buildings currently for free, without having to spend any population to work the districts.
Such a change would increase the value of citizens living in a city (making housing and especially neighborhoods more desirable), as well as making high food yield tiles more valuable (as specialists consume food without generally producing it). The main motivation for this is to try and emulate the major periods of historical urbanisation centred around the Medieval and Industrial Era, where larger groups of people moved away from sustenance agriculture in order to practice a trade, which corresponded with advances in agricultural technology that allowed a smaller group of people to produce the food needed in society (this aspect is already reflected in Civ 6 by the farm adjencency bonuses that unlock down the civic/tech tree). The second point is to reward and make it desirable to grow cities tall.
I will focus on the Campus and its buildings as a case study. I will present the current buildings and their yields, and then the suggested simple changes below:
Current:
Campus specialist (Scientist), +2 sci
Library, +2 sci, +1 gsp, +1 spec slot
University, +4 sci, +1 gsp, +1 spec slot
Research Lab, +3 sci (+5 sci with power), +1 gsp, +1 spec slot, +1 sci per spec
New:
Campus specialist (Scientist), +2 sci, +1 gsp
Library, +1 sci, +1 spec slot
University, +2 sci, +1 spec slot, +1 sci per spec
Research Lab, +3 sci (+5 sci with power), +1 spec slot, +1 sci per spec
Now, we can compare how the science yield of a Campus district evolves with buildings added. I refer to this as tiers: Tier 1 is a campus + library, Tier 2 is library + university, and Tier 3 is library + university + research lab. The ongoing assumption is also that each spec slot is filled in the campus, i.e. the campus is always worked to full capacity. If we compare the current and new proposed systems we see the following (there is no bonus from power included here, as I didn't propose a change to this):
Very close to parity! While initially the new suggested specialist system underperforms a bit, it eventually meets up to produce the same total yields as the current one.
The key difference however, and the problem I set out to fix, is to make working your district more valuable, so how do the specialist yields look relative to the 'flat' bonus yields from the buildings in the new system?
Here I have calculated the yields directly from specialists and divided them by the flat bonus yields of the buildings. We see for the current system that specialists can give roughly similar yields to buildings (if neglecting power). For the new system, specialists would always be twice as productive as the flat yields however. That means your campus is significantly more productive if it is consistently staffed by citizens (again, making excess population more valuable).
The next point I want to address is how would the two social policies that affect district yields look like in a specialist focused game? I will again present the current versus my 'proposed' versions:
Current:
Natural Philosphy, +100% Campus adjacency bonus
Rationalism, +50% sci from buildings if city population is 15 or higher, +50% sci from buildings if district has at least +4 adjacency bonus.
New:
Natural Philosphy, Scientist specialists gain +1 sci and +1 food
Rationalism, each Scientist specialists gets the city's campus district adjacency bonus as additional sci yield
The goal here for the new Natural Philosophy (and similar cards) is to first of all to boost science output, but also to assist in running more science specialists without hindering city growth. The goal of the new Rationalism would be to give more incremental boosts to science at different population and adjacency levels, while maintaining the reward of good city/campus planning, as seen below:
The final cases would be the bonuses from the great scientist lines (Hypatia, Newton, Einstein), and the different tiers of envoy bonuses from city states. I have not analysed or come up with a major suggestion for an overhaul of this, but I think basically replacing most bonuses with +1 sci per specialist would suffice in terms of game balance.
I hope I have made a case for how an exceedingly simple change to building/specialist yields could give reasonable parity in terms of current science yields, but rebalance the game significantly in terms of rewarding actual development of cities, and managing citizens.
I don't expect Firaxis to implement these kinds of significant changes to the game's systems at this point in its lifecycle, but I would really appeal to them to at least give modders the capabilities to do it (getting great people points from specialists is apparently already partially implemented).
