What is a district, why is it so hard to repair?

[acluewithout]

@Victoria Good question.

I think @ChocolateShake suggestion sounds best - it’s a neighbourhood. I’d even go further and say districts are like pseudo cities or extensions of the city itself.

So, just like a city: they take up one hex, they provide housing (although for most districts this requires a policy card), they usually have a population requirement (although unlike the city itself they don’t reduce pop when founded), you can put buildings in them, and they’re permanent (can’t be removed like an improvement).

The game also emphasises that districts are mini-cities or an extension of your city by encouraging you to build them adjacent to your city and other districts - via minor adjacencies[0], major adjacencies between certain district types (eg city centre and Harbour), and counter spy ranges etc. Indeed, you can see the “districts are an extension of the city” most clearly with aqueducts and canals, which quite literally “extend” the city centre (either to reach freshwater or to allow naval vessels to pass).

On repair costs, I think pillaging buildings and districts are treated differently because pillaging a district is closer to razing a city, and so should be harder to recover from.

In terms of gameplay, the late game repair costs are too high as are building costs for districts. FXS recognised late game building costs were too high when the gave Governors the ability to buy districts gold or faith, but they obviously missed how rising costs also impact repair costs.[1]



[0] You know, I don’t know why Wonders don’t give a minor adjacency like a district? That seems like such an obvious win in terms of increasing city density and district planning. Oh well.

[1] My suggestion? Just like some Governor promotions let you buy districts with gold or faith to get around late game district costs, there should be a Governor promotion (eg Liang and her “reinforced materials” promotion) that lets you rebuild districts with gold. That would let you recover more easily and would synergies better with disaster recovery emergencies (which give you gold, so it makes sense you can use gold to repair), but wouldn’t trivialise repairs because you’d need eg Liang, you’d need to promote her, and you’d need to move her around to do it which would take time if you had multiple effected cities.

 

[iammaxhailme]

I think they're all neighborhoods of a sort, though I'm not sure if that really makes sense. I like the idea of them, and most aspects of their execution so far, though I think they need a little extra spice, like applying the barracks/stable model to the rest of them and expanding on it further.

I don't think high repair costs are justified for them, the escalating cost model is probably enough. Taking 38 turns to repair an industrial zone is way too excessive, especially in the late game once you have the power buildings setup. In one of my recent games as Sweden the AI wouldn't stop recruiting partisans from a neighborhood of mine that was close to my key industrial zone - they would beeline for it and keep pillaging it until I basically had to treat that neighborhood as a war zone :smile: I guess my spy was sleeping on the job.

don't get me started on recruit partisans. they should entirely remove that **** from the game

 

[Troy Bruckner]

don't get me started on recruit partisans. they should entirely remove that **** from the game

Belgistan and Paristan.

 

[ezysquire]

Agree for sure the repair times are too long. Fixed cost turn times FTW.

 

[mitsho]

The general problem I see with the specialization of districts and in this case that it was the Industrial one that was pillaged. While it may makes sense to have ones specific for certain playstyles like Culture, Science, Religion or Army, every city needs Production and every city needs Gold. A food district would not make sense either, as every city would build it. If the Industrial district would be truly good, the city would soon run out of things to build and free tiles to place wonder.

I would like to play a mod that collapses some districts together into a generic neighbourhood one where you can build chose which buildings to put in. Maybe the science victory district is the Industrial one and the science buildings belong in the generic district with a few production building (like the watermill) in the city centre.

But the district system as it is, is too restrictive for my taste and I hope they‘ll overhaul it for the next game. Repairing stuff for 35 turns is just no fun.

 

[kaspergm]

I don't even see why districts need to cost so much production in the first place. The "district" seems to me more like an organizational element (industry goes here, education goes there, etc.) than an actual structure in itself. I can buy an element of "production" going into the infrastructure, but imo. there should be far lower cost of districts themselves, and if necessary higher production cost of the actual buildings going into them (although in most cases, they are plenty expensive as it is). I would personally favor a fix number of turns to allocate - and repair - a district, possibly scaling with number of districts in the town. So first district always takes, say, 3 turns to allocate, with subsequent districts taking further time.

 

[King of Prussia]

I'll just make a sort post saying what i said before, district repair is far too long. making it quicker and adding more ways to accelerate it would be good.(builders and ME)

 

[UWHabs]

I don't even see why districts need to cost so much production in the first place. The "district" seems to me more like an organizational element (industry goes here, education goes there, etc.) than an actual structure in itself. I can buy an element of "production" going into the infrastructure, but imo. there should be far lower cost of districts themselves, and if necessary higher production cost of the actual buildings going into them (although in most cases, they are plenty expensive as it is). I would personally favor a fix number of turns to allocate - and repair - a district, possibly scaling with number of districts in the town. So first district always takes, say, 3 turns to allocate, with subsequent districts taking further time.

Yeah, I understand gameplay-wise why you have district costs and coast scaling, but part of me wonders how the game would play if district costs did not scale. It would be like having a district as simply a zoning requirement, so fairly cheap overall, where the buildings would cost more since they provide the infrastructure. You'd have to rebalance things, maybe change it up so that you needed a citizen to work the district to get the yields, but it would at least fix this issue above where it takes more time to repair a district than it cost to build it in the first place.

 

[Troy Bruckner]

I don't even see why districts need to cost so much production in the first place. The "district" seems to me more like an organizational element (industry goes here, education goes there, etc.) than an actual structure in itself. I can buy an element of "production" going into the infrastructure, but imo. there should be far lower cost of districts themselves, and if necessary higher production cost of the actual buildings going into them (although in most cases, they are plenty expensive as it is). I would personally favor a fix number of turns to allocate - and repair - a district, possibly scaling with number of districts in the town. So first district always takes, say, 3 turns to allocate, with subsequent districts taking further time.

It's a game mechanic, but to me districts should be free to place since in real life it's just zoning laws creating an area for specific usage.

 

[Jaybe]

And zoning laws have no problems being decided on by a governor or head-of-state, implemented, and never have problems because of conflict of interest, personal greed, or power politics.

And things such as zoning laws never change. Never, I tell you!

I have no problems with district escalation in construction/repair costs, nor in what can be built IN them*. And the preceding sentence is a complete lie.

* Districts should be able to have one each of level 1, 2, and 3 buildings. Like a library, bank and a research lab. May not apply to encampment or harbor, which sort of shoots the whole concept down because of rule complexity the player may get confused.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

And zoning laws have no problems being decided on by a governor or head-of-state, implemented, and never have problems because of conflict of interest, personal greed, or power politics.

And things such as zoning laws never change. Never, I tell you!

I have no problems with district escalation in construction/repair costs, nor in what can be built IN them*. And the preceding sentence is a complete lie.

Good old Zeno: "Disregard this statement because all statements from this source are false." - a Grad Student at my old university introduced that proposition to the central mainframe of the computer on a set of punch cards back in the early 1960s and shut down the whole system for a week - good times . . .

* Districts should be able to have one each of level 1, 2, and 3 buildings. Like a library, bank and a research lab. May not apply to encampment or harbor, which sort of shoots the whole concept down because of rule complexity the player may get confused.

We had a set of posts some time ago which brushed on the idea of having not three, but four or five building 'slots' in each District (probably not until Civ VII) and some buildings could be slotted into more than one District, such as a Workshop into a Commercial Hub or a Harbor District, or a Monument into a Holy Site. The District's type then, was defined by the Majority of Buildings in the District, and could be changed by tearing down and replacing buildings, Also, most adjacency Bonuses would be Internal, based on the combinations of 'extra' Buildings you slotted into the District instead of scattering the Districts all over the map to find 'adjacencies'. Just an idea for discussion (somewhere else!)

The current problem with Districts is that someone in Firaxis didn't think through all the interactions among the game mechanisms already in place and being added in Gibbering Storm. On the one hand, Districts are relatively hard to build and limited to one of each type per city and then limited again by city population, available adjacencies, and inability to convert, alter, or demolish and replace Districts. On the other hand, Natural Disasters all affect Districts but not Wonders, so your District can be trashed by flood, volcano, storm waters, etc. and there is nothing you can really do about it. You cannot quickly repair the District, you cannot replace it, you cannot substitute by anything else you do with that city. And if, as in the example, the District affected is the Industrial Zone, your city has a serious deficit of resources with which to do anything.

This is really lousy game design. Giving the gamer a random disaster that he cannot avoid by anything he does in the game except, perhaps, don't build any District on a flood plain, coast, tundra tile, or near a volcano - and then a tornado can still wreck the District no matter where you place it - introduces a mechanism of Utter Negative Randomness to the game that is simply Not Fun. In my personal view, it is no longer me playing the game, it is me playing against a Malevolent Programmer and the proper play is to find out where he lives, track him down and beat him to death with a GPU on a stick - or not play the game and do something useful with my time, like write up histories of obscure battles from even more obscure Russian and German archival documents . . ..

IF Natural Disasters are going to trash Districts - and having Natural Disasters that are real in-game disasters is not a bad idea IMHO - then the gamer and AI have to be given some kind of recovery mechanism that does not involve writing off any benefits from the District for a good percentage of the Era.
- And while we're at it, it wouldn't be a completely bad idea to have some (possibly only Long term) ways to modify or replace Districts in the game. I know of no "district" built or functioning in 2000 BCE that is still functioning in the same way with the same constructions in it - just visit Athens and look at the modern 'function' of the Acropolis or the Agora compared to their original District Functions - or that of the Roman Forum, or better yet and much more recent, compare the original Wal Street area in New York city - a Neighborhood next to the City Wall - with its 'District' function in the last 200 years.

 

[Gorbles]

Why is the assumption that "someone in Firaxis didn't think through X". In this case specifically, as your argument here @Boris Gudenuf seems to be that you find a particular set of interactions "not fun". Player frustration is a valid argument to make, but that is inevitable in any game with complex enough interactions to present a poor payoff to the player.

The advertised (like, significantly advertised) point of settling on dangerous terrain is the reward that comes with the risk. If that isn't paying off because of damage to Districts, why is the assumption "well they obviously didn't think about Districts at all when designing the weather systems in the latest expansion"? It's a really lazy assumption, to be honest. Far easier conclusions to draw are:

a) Disasters are too Disaster-y. Solution: lower the slider in your game settings. This is a mechanic that does exist and does impact negatively on players in an aggressively random manner (particularly in the early to mid-game, though in that case Tornadoes and the like are quite rare), but that is by design.
b) The risk is too high for the reward. Probably compounded by a tendency to avoid risk - it slows an optimal game down. And when you can't plan for it, that's doubly-frustrating. I agree with that. Solution: game balance (I don't think it's a design issue at this stage, I personally avoid settling on floodplains until I can reliably crank out Dams, because the risk ain't worth it to me. I think specifically in the case of floodplains they need some basic buff to incentivise settling / improving, because floods can happen from turn 2, effectively. However I'm not up on game balance so I don't normally make these suggestions).
c) Cities in certain cases are too dependent on certain Districts (like Industrial Districts to make up for a lack of raw Production). I think this is a problem, and again, I don't have any bright ideas on it. Mixing improvements on Districts is a neat concept, though.

Being unable to plan for a bad result is frustrating, no bones about it. But it's not necessarily lousy game design. XCOM is practically built on it. It's a cultural thing, basically, whether or not to accept it as valid stakes when starting a game. Maybe the franchise has gotten too good at allowing players to recover? Earlier versions could be much more punishing (not to mention offshoots like the weird but fascinating Call to Power. I blame a work colleague for this; he doesn't stop talking it up), and the personal expectations around this also have to factor in performance questions like how long it takes to reload a game, the convenience in restarting a game, and so on.

Certainly, the go-to response shouldn't be "someone hasn't thought this through", because quite honestly it means you haven't considered well enough the idea that the current implementation is at least intended, even if the severity of the effects are not. You touch on it in your last paragraph, and being able to replace existing Districts is actually another good idea (and feasible within the scope of this title than a theoretical other - I agree mixing and matching Districts is probably a concept for that future event), but you don't lead with this (in my opinion) far more sensible assumption.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Why is the assumption that "someone in Firaxis didn't think through X". In this case specifically, as your argument here @Boris Gudenuf seems to be that you find a particular set of interactions "not fun". Player frustration is a valid argument to make, but that is inevitable in any game with complex enough interactions to present a poor payoff to the player.

The advertised (like, significantly advertised) point of settling on dangerous terrain is the reward that comes with the risk. If that isn't paying off because of damage to Districts, why is the assumption "well they obviously didn't think about Districts at all when designing the weather systems in the latest expansion"? It's a really lazy assumption, to be honest. Far easier conclusions to draw are:.[/QUOTE]

IF One could specify some terrain on the Civ VI map as "dangerous" and therefore rewarding but risky, you would have a point. But that's not the way the system works:
You can't put Districts on a mountain, so that terrain is right out.
Put it on snow or tundra (not usually a good idea anyway) and it gets Blizzarded
Put it on any flood plain, it gets Flooded - sometimes every 3 - 5 turns, which I have seen happen in several games, all on "standard" (Level 2) Disaster setting.
Put it on the coast, it gets Hurricaned.
Put it ANYWHERE ON THE MAP and a Tornado or set of Tornados can hit it.

Want to explain to me where the risk/reward calculation is when everywhere is risky regardless of the reward? AND, more to my and this Thread's point, when recovery from Inevitable (or Near Inevitable) Disaster is glacially slow?

a) Disasters are too Disaster-y. Solution: lower the slider in your game settings. This is a mechanic that does exist and does impact negatively on players in an aggressively random manner (particularly in the early to mid-game, though in that case Tornadoes and the like are quite rare), but that is by design.
b) The risk is too high for the reward. Probably compounded by a tendency to avoid risk - it slows an optimal game down. And when you can't plan for it, that's doubly-frustrating. I agree with that. Solution: game balance (I don't think it's a design issue at this stage, I personally avoid settling on floodplains until I can reliably crank out Dams, because the risk ain't worth it to me. I think specifically in the case of floodplains they need some basic buff to incentivise settling / improving, because floods can happen from turn 2, effectively. However I'm not up on game balance so I don't normally make these suggestions).
c) Cities in certain cases are too dependent on certain Districts (like Industrial Districts to make up for a lack of raw Production). I think this is a problem, and again, I don't have any bright ideas on it. Mixing improvements on Districts is a neat concept, though.

Goody, we have specifics and, frankly, we are not that far apart on them.

a) Problem here is, and I admit this is personal, that I like playing with Natural Disasters, overall. I think they are a great addition to the game, so I am not going to turn them off. I just think there are some balance issues with the ability to recover from disasters, specifically with Districts. I never said, because I don't believe, that even the Level 2/Standard Disaster setting is too much for the random but occasional destruction of Improvements or damage to units - hey, you camp your Unit on a Floodplain, you deserve what you get.
b) Floodplains: love 'em and hate 'em. I will Improve floodplains from the beginning - but I also try to keep a Builder handy to repair the virtually inevitable damage, because getting Great Bath is just not worth putting everything else in the game on hold to beat all the AI factions to it early in the game. I will not put a District on a Floodplain, until I can 'protect' it with a Dam - learned that the hard way! I will never worry at all about putting a Wonder on a Floodplain - or next to a Volcano, because Magically, they are Immune to Disasters. (The recent fire at Notre Dame makes this game mechanic particularly Ironic). As in games and life, you weighs the risks and takes your chances.
c) The concept isn't mine, it got thrashed out by several people. Making Cities dependent for their 'success' on Districts in general and certain Districts (Industrial Zone high among them) in particular might be considered Bad Design, but not to me: cities are fragile: unlike the game, many of them have collapsed and disappeared throughout history, or gone through massive fluctuations in population because of natural and un-natural 'disasters' around them - Rome going from 1,000,000+ population in 300 CE to 30,000 population in 600 CE after the aqueducts got broken up by invaders and the Imperial government left town springs to mind springs to mind - so we really have it easy in the game by comparison!

Being unable to plan for a bad result is frustrating, no bones about it. But it's not necessarily lousy game design. XCOM is practically built on it. It's a cultural thing, basically, whether or not to accept it as valid stakes when starting a game. Maybe the franchise has gotten too good at allowing players to recover? Earlier versions could be much more punishing (not to mention offshoots like the weird but fascinating Call to Power. I blame a work colleague for this; he doesn't stop talking it up), and the personal expectations around this also have to factor in performance questions like how long it takes to reload a game, the convenience in restarting a game, and so on.

Again, IF the game is 'built on it', then , assuming you are familiar with the game at all, you have (or should have) some idea what to expect, and you play the game because of, or in spite of, that. When being unable to recover from a 'bad result' is peculiar to only a part of the game and not others, and that part (Districts) is an integral part of the design of this particular iteration of the game, pardon me for coming to the conclusion that somebody wasn't paying attention.

Certainly, the go-to response shouldn't be "someone hasn't thought this through", because quite honestly it means you haven't considered well enough the idea that the current implementation is at least intended, even if the severity of the effects are not. You touch on it in your last paragraph, and being able to replace existing Districts is actually another good idea (and feasible within the scope of this title than a theoretical other - I agree mixing and matching Districts is probably a concept for that future event), but you don't lead with this (in my opinion) far more sensible assumption.

If the current implementation was intended but the severity of the effects were not, then you have just made my point: Someone was not paying attention, because the intended implementation's effect on the game was not foreseen. That is Bad Design, because it implies lack of play testing to check the results of the implementation. IF they actually planned to make Districts both integral to the game design AND wretchedly difficult to repair if damaged AND make damage virtually inevitable if you plan with their shiny new design concept of Natural Disasters, then I suggest that the Game Designer who came up with that is a spiritual descendant of the Marquis de Sade.
I have been part of professional Game Design groups, from Simulations Publications doing board games back in the 1970s to several very talented miniatures' rules and board game designers later, and none of them ever assumed that all the interacting factors in a game would be 'right' without testing them - and, usually, redesigning and retesting as required. Therefore, my conclusion based on the results of the Disaster Recovery numbers as applied to Districts in the game, that this particular aspect of the game was not Thought Through to include testing the numbers and their results, stands.

 

[Archon_Wing]

It now does, yes. If you see from my screenshot, 38 turns for a district and only 7 for a T1 building... and yet both give the same pillage benefit. This is my confusion, just what is in a district itself to give such good yields.

I think this is related to districts just being more expensive than buildings? Buildings never get more expensive but districts do.

Though personally, I did think a bit more about keeping more things intact rather than just wantonly mashing pillage.

 

[kaspergm]

Yeah, I understand gameplay-wise why you have district costs and coast scaling, but part of me wonders how the game would play if district costs did not scale. It would be like having a district as simply a zoning requirement, so fairly cheap overall, where the buildings would cost more since they provide the infrastructure. You'd have to rebalance things, maybe change it up so that you needed a citizen to work the district to get the yields, but it would at least fix this issue above where it takes more time to repair a district than it cost to build it in the first place.

I would do away with the flat yields of the district when no building is in it. I would rather see the district being instant or very cheap or has a flat "construction" time that has nothing to do with production, and then have the adjacency yield apply to the buildings in it rather than the actual district. Possibly a more refined system than we currently have, with multiply buildings in each district having different effects and adjacencies. For instance, in industrial zone, we could have a Workshop (adjacency bonus from and bonus to mines) or Water Mill (requires adjacent river and gets adjacency bonus from) or Lumber Plant (adjacency bonus from and bonus to lumbermills) as alternative T1 buildings. In the campus, we could see the Library (mixed science and culture per citizen), the Common School (increased science per citizen) or the Parochial School (mixed science and faith per citizen) as alternative T1 buildings. As suggested by others above, there could be crossover between districts, i.e. Library could go in culture district as well.

 

[Gorbles]

@Boris Gudenuf

I still disagree about the not thinking things through. Ignoring the slider because, yeah, it should be a valid mechanic throughout even if you're explicitly playing for the challenge, I want to focus on this risk vs. reward (and why you seemingly think that just because you're arguing it's too severe, this means the developers didn't think things through).

Some balance issues arise out of something not being thought through fully. Others happen purely because it's impossible to align test expertise with player expertise, especially in the wild (once released to the public). You see a variant of it between competitive players (which I am not, for the record), and other players.

Take your last paragraph, for example. You're bringing the impact of Disasters into the same sentence as Districts taking too long to repair. These are two separate potential issues. If you're designing this, it's your job to consider both, but the fix doesn't necessarily need to be on both. A fix to District repair costs (which has already been discussed) would break your chain of "if this and this and this, person X is some kind of a sadist". And scaling District repair costs is something that takes time to analyse (particularly with the changes to Chopping, and so on).

This is why I don't like "they didn't think this through", because it implies a great number of things, not least the notion that a game needs to somehow have perfect balance in order to excuse the developers themselves from attacks (or even grandiose assumptions, whichever you prefer. I'm not debating the offense, here, it's more the nature of respect). A game's design is only flawed if an aspect of that design cannot be sufficiently balanced within the constraints of the original design, right? There are a number of balance issues to be discussed here that don't relate to the design, any designer (it helps to have an idea of balance, and some developers are often both, but they don't have to be - I don't really want to guess). By assuming they haven't thought it through, as a default assumption, just trends to an initial lack of respect that makes it an overblown use of text (that I'm causing here, sure) to break down and get to the bottom of.

To get back to the core, risk vs. reward is a player psychology thing. It's very hard to analyse in a vacuum. Games development is also a business, so at some point somebody has to make the call to release the current state of the code out to the players. There has not been a widespread, unified outcry that Disasters ruin Districts, or even that Disasters ruin games. This is a specific case, which also relates to your own (understandable) frustration because you want to use Disasters in your games.

I don't really like speaking about my own expertise (mainly because people jump on me, or question it, haha), but I would say that despite your expertise, you need to understand the medium, and video games development is a far cry from a lot of other creative processes because of the demands of the business. That said, board games design is not my forte at all, so I don't want to assume any more than that. Happy to expand in a PM because we do seem to have design in common.

 

[ChenaRidge]

Perhaps a project could be generated that allowed each of the other cities in the civilization to contribute to reconstruction of the district. Certainly, that would replicate what happens with major disasters in real life.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

@Boris Gudenuf

I still disagree about the not thinking things through. Ignoring the slider because, yeah, it should be a valid mechanic throughout even if you're explicitly playing for the challenge, I want to focus on this risk vs. reward (and why you seemingly think that just because you're arguing it's too severe, this means the developers didn't think things through).

Some balance issues arise out of something not being thought through fully. Others happen purely because it's impossible to align test expertise with player expertise, especially in the wild (once released to the public). You see a variant of it between competitive players (which I am not, for the record), and other players.

Take your last paragraph, for example. You're bringing the impact of Disasters into the same sentence as Districts taking too long to repair. These are two separate potential issues. If you're designing this, it's your job to consider both, but the fix doesn't necessarily need to be on both. A fix to District repair costs (which has already been discussed) would break your chain of "if this and this and this, person X is some kind of a sadist". And scaling District repair costs is something that takes time to analyse (particularly with the changes to Chopping, and so on).

First, this thread is about "What is a District and Why are they so hard to repair", so District repair time is precisely the point of the Thread.
Second, Disasters are one of the causes of having to repair a District, so conflating Disasters and District repair times is a valid connection, in one sentence or several. I will cheerfully include every other cause of District damage, except that the other causes are Enemy Action from Civs/City States at war with you or Barbarians. In those cases, the gamer (or AI, potentially) has Options: don't go to war, or protect the District with defenses/Units. Against Disasters, the Options don't always apply: you have no choice but to build a Harbor on the coast and leave it vulnerable to hurricanes. Anywhere you put a District is potentially vulnerable to Tornados.

Being vulnerable to Disasters is not the point: that's the whole purpose of Disasters, I should think: give you a problem that has to be met and solved within the game - without problems, the game becomes, to me, meaningless, even though I am by no stretch of the imagination a competitive player in the sense of always wanting the maximum advantage to every aspect of the play of the game (frankly, I do a lot of Role Playing in every game, like marching a Settler half-way across the map to put a city next to Yosemite because I'm Playing Teddy Roosevelt and That's My Natural Wonder! - competitive: not even, but lot's of fun)
The point is that the game does not give the gamer a valid option to 'defend' or recover from the Natural Disaster in the case of a damaged District. As others have also commented, taking 30+ turns to repair a District, and tying up the city's Production for that entire time and getting no value out of the District for that entire time when Wonders are exempt from damage and Improvements or Units can be repaired in a turn or four is Imbalanced.

And, for that Imbalance to make its way into a Game/Expansion that supposedly was finished enough to be sold to gamers, means either that someone is a con man/crook, or the game design was not sufficiently tested to catch the imbalance.

Alternatively, that they thought the imbalance was justified and appropriate: this in a game that makes individual cities so important that every aspect of the game is built around them and their Districts and Buildings and Improvements, the number of Districts and Cities are restricted (by increasing cost of Settlers and limited districts by population) throughout the game - shucks, your cities are so important they won't allow Barbarians to take one, even when they have reduced its defense to zero!
Yet they will allow one to be crippled by a Natural Disaster without any recourse on the gamer's part, for a good portion of a late-game Era. And they will allow that to be incorporated into a 'finished' game.

Furthermore, because it validates my point, I think, this is not by any means the first instance of Imbalance in the game. From the time it was released the game has been 'tweaked' and modifications made to existing mechanisms and Civs because of outcry from the gaming public and numerous instances when the numbers just didn't Add Up. That's either evidence of Incompetence or Criminal Neglect or just missing the problem because of lack of testing and review.
I do not - repeat Do Not - think that Firaxis or any of their people are crooks or incompetent in their chosen fields. I do know that even the best game designers in the business cannot think of everything or put everything together in a game with multiple mechanisms, factors, and interactions and get it right every time, all the time.

So, let me modify my original contention slightly. It's not that they didn't Think It Through, it's that Someone Did Not Follow Through - with testing of the numbers and review of the results. Alpha and Beta Testing, as they are now called, hark back to Blind Play-Testing in board game design dating back 50 years. It's not a new thing, and it is (or Should Be) designed to catch just such Imbalances as we currently have in the interaction of Districts and Damage from Disasters.

It's not a Game Breaker - in my current game, I'm in the middle of a 30 turn repair of a District - built in a Flood Plain, got flooded before I got a Dam built: the Dam City was on a hill entirely surrounded by floodplains, so didn't have a lot of choices, took the risk, am paying the price: classic Risk/Reward.
BUT when all the Improvements, even the ones that were wiped off the map, were all completely restored in 3 - 5 turns by a single Builder, spending the entire city's Production for 30 turns on a single District seems a bit Imbalanced.

Which, I believe, is the real point of this whole Thread.

 

[Gorbles]

To which we get to the usual mistaken impression that QA exists to both catch and fix bugs. Or that if a bug or imbalance is reported it is immediately resolved. Like I said, I don't know board games. But everything you're saying seems to indicate they're nowhere near as constrained by (financial) capital as games development is. I don't want to estimate the size of the backlog in a game as complex as Civilisation VI, but I have read various reports of bugs / oversights per SLOC over the years. Bugs are inevitable, but let's skip over them, because neither of us are really arguing bugs - we're arguing balance. I mention bugs mainly because they come out of the same resource - QA and developer time - as balance does.

Balance is a lot trickier, and because it's trickier is why we as players often encounter imbalances. It could be some of the team thought the current implementation is too severe. It could be that the rest of the team didn't, or enough of whomever holds the social capital didn't, and so on, and so forth. The bottom line is it plays best in the wild, and this isn't the thread for me to go hard on Disasters design; I've taken up enough space as it is.

Like you say, the problem we're discussing isn't a dealbreaker. I say this process involves a lot of prioritisation on behalf of the devs, and those statements aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, they go hand-in-hand together, and present yet another obvious conclusion. That the developers are aware of a potential problem but still want to see how the playerbase deal with it.

Because the problem might not be District repair times. That might be intentional as a gating mechanic (especially compared to Builder speed). Otherwise you start having an impact on pillaging, and so on. Wheels within wheels, it's not just ever "Districts are hammered by Disasters", it's also "what happens if District repair is buffed to the other systems that interact with it". There's a whole suit of discussions that could be made if people just assume that maybe the system was intended to be as-is, even if that isn't working. That's why I push back against any variant of "the devs didn't think" because it (not that ironically) stifles more nuanced debate around the mechanics themselves. It's an easy way out. And that's to say nothing of "I'm not saying the devs are crooks but I'll keep using crooks in a two-way comparison". Someone in linguistics could have a field day with that

I mean, another interesting line of debate would be to poll people on the specifics of these cities that have 30+ turns required to repair a District. I don't think this is regularly the case you see, even in the lategame when handling things like the existence of Tornadoes is actually doable by managing your emissions. You can't control the AI, naturally, but complaining about Disasters specifically in the lategame when the lategame is where you get the most options to literally reset the world to zero (in terms of ecology, and also in terms of literal global temperature because Carbon Recapture is funny like that). I find the biggest stakes around Disasters is how hard to invest in Power Stations in the midgame (for a late definition of midgame) because I don't want to get stuck in too many wars and have an unsustainable economy to boot.

But eh. I personally think the issue lies more in District balance and Production requirements for cities, more than repairing the Districts themselves. I think damage to Districts should have a severe impact.

That said, I support a number of the changes in this thread (even the ones to the repair costs) mainly because I'm a huge fan of trying things out. And if it doesn't work out, I'm not going to say "well that obviously wasn't thought through", because as per the crux of my argument, these things need to be tried in the wild regardless, nomatter how many developers a company has, or how skilled they are!

 

[ehecatzin]

I agree in that the repair cost is often to great, I would like to see more options to deal with the pillaged district should it be pillaged into the ground, for example, being able to rebuild it as a different district, a park or new palace grounds (all via city proyect)