[GS] What aspects of the game do you feel are the most "overpowered?"

Pretty much everyone I know who plays civ6 at a less than deity/fast win level gets very excited about placing districts with good adjacency. As a fun generator, it is fantastic. And i also think that it's something the game should reward. Yes, some of it is luck based; but so it finding an amazing spot for petra or St Basils or Temple of Artemis; people love pulling those off. The district adjacency cards, for the most part, do very little compared to the monster Building cards. And two of the districts which lack building cards have buildings that tie with adjacency - the IZ's coal plant and the Harbor's shipyard - which are also very fun and rewarding to place. "He's doing so well because he placed his districts well!" is exactly what you want to promote.

I think the big problem with the abuse cases (like aussie or the seowon) is that almost every district's adjacency is fully available from turn 1. Campuses get full benefits from mountains and geothermal fissures immediately. They also mostly come extremely early. Whereas to get bigly numbers on the IZ, you require aqueducts and canals and dams to be unlocked, and also built to benefit from them. But IZs also don't show up until the middle ages. If they pushed back campuses 1-1.5 eras, and moved the +2 library as a city center building at writing (to mimic the monument) then you would remove that entire issue. You'd still need to address the campus buildings + card to break the back of campus spam, though.
Edit: Imagine in this alternate world that campus and some theater buildings improved the per pop science & culture output instead of grants tons of flat yield. Totally different ballgame even it it was adjusted to keep the game pace relatively similar.

Think of it this way.
A good IZ might be +6. In the middles ages, that's worth 2 mined hills or so. 2 pops basically. And you almost certainly had to get a aqueduct up to do that.
A +3 campus on the other hand, represents 6 worth of science yield (because it's a mere 0.5 per .) You can drop these down the second you have writing.
Add in craftsmen and natural philosophy. Now the IZ is equal to about 4 citizens, whereas the campus is at 12 citizen equivalent.

Campuses and theater squares are unbelievably pop efficient districts because they set districts' yields to roughly have = = = = = 1.5.
But no one here is saying IZs are problematic, even though they can with some ease develop far high adjacency than campuses ever will.

 

I don't know where you get math that says district cards are doing less than building cards for any civ with high adjacency, particularly relative to investment. It's not hard to get +6 campuses on the dedicated civs, which means that the district card is doing more until you have 10 pop and universities in every city. By the time Enlightenment hits, it's not hard to have generated more science from Natural Philosophy than you'll generate with Rationalism the entire game. That becomes even more true when you're looking at how long it takes to get universities up in anything besides core cities.

This is setting aside dream scenarios for Australian campuses or Brazilian holy sites where you're popping +9 or +12. A full classical monumentality is worth far more than Rationalism.

To be clear, I love the district minigame. I am disappointed in how under-developed it was and still is. The absurd cost scaling on districts also creates a lot of problems for gameplay variety.

 

Just want to affirm what’s already been said about Science in general, the policy cards, and the early CS bonuses (First meetings).

In general I think eras (Science/Culture) tend to move too fast, and not a product of game speed but as a product of systems that favor specific strategies to maximize those outputs. I think the game would benefit from turning boosts/inspirations into requirements rather than bonuses. That would encourage/force more rounded play styles and strategies, more buildings, more varied districts, more varied units, etc. To not completely block or force everyone to build everything, they could break up the tech tree a little, to offer multiple pathway options, reintroduce tech trading (and even tech boost trading), automatically grant boosts once half the civs have triggered them, and/or allow for researching through a boost at a significant penalty, or let research alliances trigger boosts.

 

Wait, who exactly has a lot of +6 natural campuses? You would need full mountain surround or luck with thermal vents. Am I missing something? I always assumed you could usually count on 2-3 with decent terrain. Hence Nat Philo vs simply having more libraries and unis tradeoff. I mean yes korea has +4 but they are a special case. (And aussie/brazil as mentioned.) Have I been blind to some super campus strat this whole time?! It's not those 3 civs that use campus spam and everyone doesn't. Literally every civ should campus spam.

As far as civ6 is designed, it might be easier to simply delay unlocking campuses and theaters. If you don't build those right away, your exponential growth ball becomes a lot slower.

 

A simple system that I think would work well would be to get X points per turn towards each tech and civic for each civ you know who have that tech / civic. Isolated civs would still fall behind, but connected civs would be pulled along without having to make as large an investment in science or culture themselves.

That changes the value proposition for investing in science and culture yield and would open up more interesting gameplay options, I think, especially if teamed with temporary mini boosts for the first X civs to research a tech, making the pursuit of each new technology a mini Wonder race.

 

Mount Roraima. Making Anti-Cav +14 against Cav lessened the importance of Resources enough that it's now (debatably) not OP

If Campuses had a +2 adjacency from Neighborhoods it would throw in a very interesting choice for how to place them.

 

See, that's what i thought when i noticed the updated ability tooltip:

But if you notice, it's not in the patch notes, and if we look in the combat preview:

The numbers align to it just being a +10 bonus, not +14.
Poor pointyboiis

 

Conquest. In Civ 5 I could take cities, but at some point you had to either stop or just raze everything because negative happiness would force you to. In 6 there is no reason not to take every city and everything just snowballs from there. Captured cities should give a double or triple amenities hit. You could spam entertainment complexes but it would at least slow you down. That and the AI is so bad at war that it just makes the game too easy.

Also steel. Just researching steel shouldn't give me impenetrable walls in every city the moment I research it and adding in an OP city attack. You don't have to leave behind any units to defend your territory after that as the AI just can't get them down. You should have to build them just like any other wall.

 

"Dedicated" meaning any civ with an Adjacency bonus for Campus (Netherlands, Japan, etc.). It might not be that many, but the outliers are the point of concern.

The comment about +6 was to demonstrate how irrelevant Rationalism is in comparison in the extreme cases.

Even just taking the average, though, let's say +3 from fissures, casual mountains, gov plaza. And you need +3 for Rationalism, anyways. Given just that, Natural Philosophy is gonna be way more impactful over the course of the game, much less as a relative addition when it matters. Natural Philosophy is gonna do the same thing for me if the campuses are split between +2 and +4 or if my city is 1 pop or 10. Rationalism will not. If I'm city-spamming or conquering, NP >>> Rationalism.

And Scripture/Craftsmen/Town Charters tend to be even more extreme in the relative potential yields. Combine Free Inquiry with doubling cards and you can pump out so much early science that you won't be getting enough 10-pop cities within a timeframe to make Rationalism matter. I don't even know the names for the Theater/ComHub building bonus cards because they see so little use in my games (seriously, what's even the point of building Banks?).

To circle back to the first paragraph, the biggest issue is that a library is a library. But a campus/theater/holy Site/comhub is far more variable. The existence of the extreme cases is what makes the cards an issue, but even for the average cases the adjacency cards are going to be far more relevant for far longer. Next time you play a full game, check my math - I'd put down fair money that running NP all game gives far more science than Rationalism.

If we're taking vanilla, also a different story.

 

I've been using Terra Mirabilis so long that I forgot in my previous post... unmodded natural wonders really need to be rebalanced. Some, like Roraima, are really good, probably OP. Some, like Cliffs of Dover, are pretty freaking bad.

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It's been so long since I've seen the Cliffs of Dover that I forgot how terrible they are.

On topic: Finding a relic in your first goody hut.

 

Civ offers all these interesting ways to get Science. But the Campus kind of snuffs them all out, because it's so easy to spam and so effective when you do.

The issue is it comes early, so you can lock it as a first district in every city, and then chop it in after Feudalism. Added to that, it gives so much science because of how easy it ISN to get adjacencies (particularly now with thermal vents) and City State buffs.

I'd prefer is Campuses didn't give flat reliable science at all, and instead we're just another tool for extracting science from your economy (eg maybe adding science to trade routes). It could have been fun and more flavourful to have to build Commerical Hubs and Holy Sites to get Science, with Campuses being only a late game thing or maybe only feasible if you make a massive investment.

But on the other hand, having a districts that just gives science and does so reliably makes the game a lot more accessible to newer or more casual players. It makes the game much more straightforward.

Rather than a massive overhaul, I'd be happy enough if they just toned down the Campus a bit. Get rid of thermal Adjacencies. Get rid of the City State bonuses. Tone down Libraries and Unis - eg nerf their bonuses entirely, and make it all their science only comes from specialists; or maybe they only give decent science if you have a Governor in the City and or with certain Policy Cards.

(By the by, if FXS pushed the Campus back then having a Library in your City Centre would be a bad idea IMO. It's already a bit silly spamming Monuments in every City, so having a Library CC seems like a backwards step. You'd also still be providing "easy" science, so what would you have achieved pushing back campuses?)

I'm really hoping all this +14 AC malarkey is because FXS are actively rebalancing all the units.

ie FXS might have been rebalancing already but didn't roll that out with the June Patch because they wanted to see how the changes to Rams, Cav and Resources worked first and or they weren't done yet.

 

For the record, the description of AC ability granting +14 has been in the files for ages. It's just never been visible before. My assumption is that AC was originally designed at +14.

EDIT: On second thought, I can't be absolutely certain of this. I know at one point when I was doing some modding I came across a reference to +14 AC. I believe it was the description in question, but I can't be 100% certain. It was definitely pre-GS, though.

 

Well, that would stuff my rather optimistic theory.

 

Steel giving city defenses instantly after you research it is certainly questionable. What's even worse, though, is that it gives you city defenses immediately after you capture a city. It's both nonsensical and frustrating to see a city in the center of a major battle instantly grow new walls. It's even worse in conjunction with nuclear attack. It's one thing for a single unit to be able to occupy a city with its defenses reduced to rubble. It's another for a single nuke and a single mobile unit to be able to be able to convert a heavily defended enemy city into a heavily defended friendly city.

 

The most OP mechanic by far is ICS.
Having 20* as many campuses does not provide 20* as much science in reality, it’s a mathematical law for gods sake.

The sad thing is, taking many cities should be a warmonger thing only but when you are doing so for a science or diplomatic victory it is a mechanic gone wrong.

.. and a hurricane, sandstorm or blizzard may not happen often in games but when it does it is just uncontrollably OP, especially hurricanes. Galveston took about 3-4 game turns to recover from it IRL, not 40-50 turns. But CS generally are so OP in the game I wonder why warmongers do not get negative influence with the CS rather than negative dip points (whatever they are)

 

To me, it's how much air superiority overpowers everything in SP. You can practically do anything in your games, be leaps and bounds behind a civ in any VC, once you get bomber, all you have to do is build a few of them and take just any cities you like,
even if they're at 120 defense. The bombarding aspect of bombers, along with the fact that the AI does squat about BOTH air unit and anti-air units, means you can turn just any game into a victory by just wiping out the offending civs.

So to me, air mechanics are the most OP aspect of the game

 

About unit upgrades: First off, I think the -50 % gold cost card is utterly imbalanced, but I think the problem with this goes much beyond the card alone. Of course one could remove the card, which would probably be good (or reduce the bonus and split and merge it into the cards for each unit class, which would also probably be good, thus making it less universal and more difficult to just play the swap-in-swap-out game). One can also argue that upgrading a unit should cost the same as buying a new unit of the same type, which may be true, but imo. the heart of the question boils down to: Why can't we upgrade a unit through production?

I mean, we can acquire new units either through production or through gold, but we can only upgrade old units through gold. Why is that? It seems illogical both from a realism and gameplay point of view. It creates an unhealthy balance where either unit upgrade will be extremely gold demanding - imo. current gold costs once you hit medieval are already high, the 250 gold to upgrade a Crossbowman take a pretty heavy duty on my gold reserves in most games, and buying new units is normally a luxury I can only afford in urgent situations - or alternatively we end up in a situation like now, where producing new units become extremely unfavorable, not only because of relatively low upgrade gold cost, but also because producing new units inherently means you lose the advantage of earned promotions.

So what I'm asking for is a complete rework on how units upgrade works. In order to upgrade a unit, you need to:

• Take it to a an Encampment or Harbor with a proper building (Baracks for melee units, Stables for mounted units, I'd like to see dedicated buildings for ranged units (Shooting Range) and siege units (Siege Workshop) as well.
• Pay the upgrade cost either in gold or in production.
• Wait a number of turns which could be a minimum of 3 turns or the number of turns it takes to provide the needed production.

 

I do understand the desire to not have cities that are contested get ripped back and forth, but this is extremely annoying. Especially if you have a real fortress of a city that gets captured - the pitched battle is over because the defender probably didn't bring enough siege weapons to hack down urban defenses.

The flat building yields for science/culture really promote ICS. It's unfortunately because they will probably overcorrect in civ7, when they have some really cool things you can do (like multiple aqueducts boosting an IZ) etc when you place cities close by.
If those research yields were tied to pop then it wouldn't matter how dense your city blanket is, since an area will support roughly comparable levels of population no matter what- there's only so many farms to go around.

Upgrading is already half the base gold cost as buying a unit. That wouldn't be awful but the -50% card is just too much. I know that being able to carry forward XP is a huge benefit but its something most people really like, unrealistic or not, And we want the game to be fun for people.
I do like that you need a gold economy to upgrade your military, separate from just building more units - since war mongers often neglect that side of things. Although to do what you suggest, one could simply allow a unit to stand on an encampment and have a "rush production" action for a unit of the same class- just contributing some % of its own base cost. So if you're building a melee unit, a swordsman could contribute some portion of 90 towards the unit being built. Pretty easy to do from a programming perspective and lines up with how builders, engineers, etc work now. Bonus concept: you could recover a few units of the strategic material resource too, say 5-10 iron. That way you could "scrap" old units like swords to raise material for knights, or what have you. Would work better if more units had material resource needs...

 

What I don't like about the current unit upgrade system is that it's BOTH cheaper AND retains the promotions to upgrade a unit rather than to build a new one. That's an inherent imbalance. I can see your point in a gold economy vs. a production economy, but for that model to retain balance, the cost to upgrade a unit would need to be MORE than the cost of a base unit.

I'm strongly in the camp that argues in favor of units retaining promotions on upgrade. Iirc. there was one of the older games (was that 4?) where they didn't, I hated that with a vengeance. Killed a lot of the fun of the game for me, that epic feeling of earning promotions on a high-level unit. I think from a logic/realism point of view, it would make sense to say that some promotions carry over while others don't. For instance, if you upgrade a Swordsman to a Musketman, you could argue that any promotion relating directly to melee combat would become obsolete. But of course, that's sort of a moot point in Civ6, where Musketmen are also considered melee, and promotions are pretty vague anyway (more relating to who you are facing than to what weapon you use).

I like the system you outline of a unit sort of "rushing" production of a new unit when upgrading through production, I could definitely see that working in the frame of the game.