Why civ 6 falls flat... districts.

[ElGuapoCiv]

There are other ways to scale them. Think about it some. If you scale Districts according to how many of all Districts are built, then people will only make one or two Districts at all because they're the most powerful and simply not make any others. This will also punish wide play a LOT. If you scale according to how many of a particular District is built, then later on the unbuilt districts will be so cheap that you can just spam them wherever and all your cities start looking like each other more than they already do. And this will also punish wide play.

Just because you have an idea doesn't mean it's going to be good or that more players will like it. Think about it some. The devs specifically said they were stepping away from tall Civ play, so cutting wide play with these proposals is going pretty contrary to their stated design goals.

I'm very interested in proper solutions because the vanilla settings aren't ideal in my opinion.
There's a mod that completely disables scaling and sets each district to a constant cost of 90 instead of the basic 60. While that works well early on, I found that it caused problems in the late game because you could simply build districts in 1 turn.
The vanilla progression cost of 25 leads to problems with new cities later on that take like 30 turns to build 1 district.
In my "Civ6++" mod I use the vanilla system but decreased progression cost from 25 to 15. That is obviously not the most creative solution but rather a nerf of the vanilla settings.

Civ5 had a perfect balance between tall and wide play with both being viable alternatives. I feel like Civ6 is going too far (pardon the pun) in the "wide"-direction.
I'm thinking about a mixture of reducing progression cost and at the same time increasing output per citizen (science, culture...). The combination could both nerf the vanilla district progression and reward "tall" play.
Btw.: Just because devs want to step away from tall play, doesn't mean we have to like/accept/not mod it.

 

[Drakarska]

I'm very interested in proper solutions because the vanilla settings aren't ideal in my opinion.
There's a mod that completely disables scaling and sets each district to a constant cost of 90 instead of the basic 60. While that works well early on, I found that it caused problems in the late game because you could simply build districts in 1 turn.
The vanilla progression cost of 25 leads to problems with new cities later on that take like 30 turns to build 1 district.
In my "Civ6++" mod I use the vanilla system but decreased progression cost from 25 to 15. That is obviously not the most creative solution but rather a nerf of the vanilla settings.

Civ5 had a perfect balance between tall and wide play with both being viable alternatives. I feel like Civ6 is going too far (pardon the pun) in the "wide"-direction.
I'm thinking about a mixture of reducing progression cost and at the same time increasing output per citizen (science, culture...). The combination could both nerf the vanilla district progression and reward "tall" play.
Btw.: Just because devs want to step away from tall play, doesn't mean we have to like/accept/not mod it.

No, actually it didn't. Tall was the optimal play in Civ V for quite awhile until multiple patches and DLC reduced the horrendous penalties for going wide. Even then, going wide was still rough in base BNW, which is where the modders came in and resolved a lot of issues.

 

[ElGuapoCiv]

No, actually it didn't. Tall was the optimal play in Civ V for quite awhile until multiple patches and DLC reduced the horrendous penalties for going wide. Even then, going wide was still rough in base BNW, which is where the modders came in and resolved a lot of issues.

Okay, I wasn't considering MP because I'm purely playing against the a.i. and I loved the option to go either way without feeling punished. Can't argue with the MP balance.

You're right, my comparison was meaningless. Let me try that again.

Case A: Pottery, Animal Husbandry, Mining, Irrigation, then bee-line Apprenticeship. Currency is 6th tech and Apprenticeship is 8th.

• Commercial Hub costs 60*(1+9*0.08)=103
• Industrial Zone costs 60*(1+9*0.11)=119

Case B: Pottery, Animal Husbandry, Mining, Irrigation, then bee-line Machinery, then bee-line Apprenticeship. Curerncy is 11th, Apprenticeship is 13th.

• Commercial Hub costs 60*(1+9*0.16)=146, a 40% increase from Case A
• Industrial Zone costs 60*(1+9*0.19)=162, a 36% increase from Case A

BTW from the formula, every tech I research before locking down a district will inflate the district cost by another 9% of the base cost. A fully researched tech tree increases district costs to 10 times that of the turn 1 base cost.

I recently found myself using a dirty gamey workaround and I don't like it one bit: the current system encourages you to bee-line and on top of that, start research and switch to another tech 1 turn before completion of that tech. I had all my cities focusing on constructing all available districts that I wanted the city to have eventually. Whenever a tech was finished, the constructing time obviously went up. So I figured that I wouldn't let techs finish as long as there are districts under construction. The result: I had a handful of techs almost finished but not quite.
That seems to be very effective and can't be what the devs had intended initially. In single player you can restrict yourself from abusing the system, not so much in multiplayer.

It's a totally perverted system to discourage players from investing in research. Any argument made for "balancing research and production" falls flat when it comes to founding new cities later on. In order for them to get any district done, you have to abuse another part of the game: domestic trade route spam...

 

[Roxlimn]

Well the first three would usually be Commerce Hub, Entertainment Complex, and Industrial Zone. The third one will be Industrial because I don't want to wait for 10 pop to lock down my IZ, so I leave the allowance open. You're right about the significant boost to science and the fact that the locked cost is not directly increased by the Campus itself. But you've also ignored the need to have that population to be able to even lock down a district. Getting to Apprenticeship 15% faster does not mean I necessarily can lock those IZs down 15% faster, unless I delay those CH or EC so I have the allowance ready for the IZ. (EDIT: and -> or)

My idea has been that the IZ, CH, EC districts are the core districts I want in every city. I'm not teching for the Harbor at this point, but I may leave the district allowance open for the Harbor so that once I get my IZ locked down, I quickly catch up to Celestial Navigation and lock down the Harbors immediately. That's why I mentioned the Harbor in my district allowances but not in the tech inventory. The point is, it takes time for a city to grow, and unlocking the techs faster isn't going to help me lock down those districts faster; only population is going to help me do that.

Obviously with civs that have unique districts, this is much less of a problem, but those are the exception not the rule.



I guess we're comparing very different situations. You're talking about a situation where you have the population to lock down the IZ even if you had Campuses up and running (basically teching 15% faster) even though your cities are not growing any faster. While I'm talking about the situation where I'm getting the tech but my population isn't high enough (note how the Campus itself takes away one district allowance).

The idea of science being worse than production, in the end, is probably about balancing science so that things line up, and we minimize the time we spend with high district cost inflation. Your argument is that the inflation is taken care of with access to lumber mills and better mines and quarries. So it may really just be differences in gameplay experience, like how some of us see certain resources as rare but others will say "no those are everywhere for me".

As I said before, I'm going to try a game where I'm not delaying the Campuses, which basically means not prioritizing the EC before the Campus, and see how it goes. It may simply have been a knee-jerk reaction to the bad experience in my first game when I always prioritized having the Campus up as my first district. I also wasn't locking down districts back then on launch day, but building one only after another is finished. So a lot more probably gone into that very first game to worsen the situation, and then finding out that district cost scale on tech/civic progression made science stand out to get blamed for everything.

So my plan for the experimental game would be to get those Campuses with good adjacencies, lock down districts, use a balanced approach such as only have enough ECs to keep the population happy (catch up on the ECs later when pop grows further, as in a Just-In-Time amenities supply chain idea). In cities where there are no good Campus sites, prioritize CH and then IZ. Then see how it plays out.

I have to emphasize that +15% Science when your science is about 26 bpt is just ONE Campus with good adjacencies and no buildings. If you build multiple Campuses with good adjacencies, then you build Libraries, then pop Isaac Newton and use him, and then also use Natural Philosophy Policy - you could easily double your science output and go through the tech tree at breakneck speed. Then your pop fails to catch up and your hammers are not catching up and you end up with massive production costs. It's good to balance things out so you don't get too far ahead in any one aspect (except Faith - you can ignore that if you like).

I rarely find that I have need of ECs. Usually, Amenities can be solved through luxury resources before you get up to size 13+.

In general, I find two Campuses more than enough to advance far ahead of King AI science. We're talking Colonial War CB (two eras ahead) here, and with modest empire size. I'm not taking over my Continent or anything.

The inflation cost isn't just taken cared of with tiles and such. With a healthy trade network, you can have internal routes worth +5 hammers each so that also helps to mitigate the cost significantly. I've never been in a situation where I need 30 turns to complete a district. It's usually 7-15 or thereabouts and it's relatively stable game-long until I get Factories at which point the turn cost just plummets.

I recently found myself using a dirty gamey workaround and I don't like it one bit: the current system encourages you to bee-line and on top of that, start research and switch to another tech 1 turn before completion of that tech. I had all my cities focusing on constructing all available districts that I wanted the city to have eventually. Whenever a tech was finished, the constructing time obviously went up. So I figured that I wouldn't let techs finish as long as there are districts under construction. The result: I had a handful of techs almost finished but not quite.
That seems to be very effective and can't be what the devs had intended initially. In single player you can restrict yourself from abusing the system, not so much in multiplayer.

It's a totally perverted system to discourage players from investing in research. Any argument made for "balancing research and production" falls flat when it comes to founding new cities later on. In order for them to get any district done, you have to abuse another part of the game: domestic trade route spam...

If you're using domestic trade routes as coded in order to get your new cities functioning in a reasonable amount of time, er, how is that abuse?

 

[ElGuapoCiv]

If you're using domestic trade routes as coded in order to get your new cities functioning in a reasonable amount of time, er, how is that abuse?

The abuse is chiefly the "switch research 1 turn before tech is finished in order to not increase district cost". Any thought about that?

Now to the domestic trade route-abuse:
If I send 5 caravans to a new city and set them all on domestic trade routes (which btw grant too much production in my opinion), then I've multiplied the production capacity of the new city. I fail to see how that's realistic nor makes sense gameplay-wise (the obviously more important factor).

 

[Roxlimn]

The abuse is chiefly the "switch research 1 turn before tech is finished in order to not increase district cost". Any thought about that?

Now to the domestic trade route-abuse:
If I send 5 caravans to a new city and set them all on domestic trade routes (which btw grant too much production in my opinion), then I've multiplied the production capacity of the new city. I fail to see how that's realistic nor makes sense gameplay-wise (the obviously more important factor).

Yeah. An entire Civ focuses a significant amount of its resources to get a new city up and running. That's completely unrealistic. Wait... yeah. It is. Cities along trade routes never happen in real life. There are no such cities. Nuh uh. Yeah. Those cities are imaginary.

As for your one-turn "abuse," it's probably a marginal gain at best? It makes no sense to delay Industrialization to facilitate District costs. That tech will help, not hinder. And really? I'm not sure how else to scale the District cost so that they aren't just functionally free. My advice is to just stop trying to game it and play normally. It shouldn't be killing your game.

 

[Zuizgond]

I disagree.

A. If you build cities close to each other (which you should because of industrial and entertainment district), you don't have that much space.
B. Create 1-2 trade routes FROM the new city to your capital or other cities with high number of districts and your production will go way faster.

 

[spfun]

Tedious trade route spam is killing my games more than district cost inflation, though I think that could be tweaked to be slightly cheaper overall.

They took the absolute worst part of Beyond Earth and put it straight into Civ 6 with only a few minor tweaks. Did they not get enough feedback from Beyond Earth stating how uninteresting and not fun trade route spam was?

They could change it so you need a harbor and a commercial hub to gain 1 trade route though you start with 2-3 trade routes instead of 1. This encourages city specialization some more as not all your cities will start near the coast and thus you won't need to build as many commercial hubs leaving room for other districts. This current Commercial/Industrial spam and harbor when available is the opposite of city specialization. To many districts are too easy to delay, district balance is way off currently.

Trade routes should be good but a bit more rare than they are now. TR spam isn't fun firaxis, i was hoping you got that message loud and clear with Beyond Earth.

 

[UWHabs]

I still feel that the "perfect" trade route mechanism is that trade routes in your empire are a function of how many trading posts you have globally. So you start with 1 in your capital, you get 1 trade route. Once that completes, you get a 2nd trading post in the world, then you'd get a 2nd trade route slot open. Maybe the next trade route slot opens up at 4 trading posts in your empire (or however you want to scale it). What that means is if you only use internal routes, you'll never get more trading posts, meaning that you'll never be able to get more trade routes. But if you do end up trading with multiple cities later, then you can open up more. It would also have the interesting side effect - do I keep trading with one city for a bigger bonus, or take a smaller bonus that will complete a trading post, and potentially open up a new trade route for my civ? Similar to currently when you have to decide to take a smaller bonus to get a free envoy from a city state.

For districts, I think that a simple formula based on number of those districts that you build, plus maybe a modifier for era, makes sense. Then you might get a case where your 10th industrial zone would cost, say, 5 times more than putting down your 2nd theatre, so while you can still build new cities without a penalty, it probably makes sense to diversify your districts more when you spread out.

 

[ElGuapoCiv]

There is a setting to tie district cost progression to the number of existing districts. The vanilla setting is tied to techs/civics.

Both have their downsides. So I wonder, would it be somehow possible to combine the two calculation models? AFAIK you can only pick one and the method is hardcoded. It might be best if you would tie it 50% to existing ones, 50% to tech.

 

[orasis]

For my part I'm turned off by the idea of creating districts with hammers in the first place. It makes no sense to me, like if in a farming game you used your farm's lettuce bushels to make a pig-pen, it hurts my lil brain…

Districts (aside perhaps from encampment) should just unlock as you successfully grow each city's economy imo, and growing economies should require a balanced approach to money, health, culture; it makes you engage with the cities as "resource and people machines" that grow extra abilities on their own.

I agree w the OP that districts turn me off right now

That makes no sense whatsoever and I cannot even put into words how much I hate your idea of 'unlocking' districts as time goes on by magical money that is not backed by production of any sort.

 

[teks]

Civ5 had a perfect balance between tall and wide play with both being viable alternatives. I feel like Civ6 is going too far (pardon the pun) in the "wide"-direction.
I'm thinking about a mixture of reducing progression cost and at the same time increasing output per citizen (science, culture...). The combination could both nerf the vanilla district progression and reward "tall" play.
Btw.: Just because devs want to step away from tall play, doesn't mean we have to like/accept/not mod it.

Civ 5 had wide play?
That's news to me.

 

[steveg700]

Tedious trade route spam is killing my games more than district cost inflation, though I think that could be tweaked to be slightly cheaper overall.

They took the absolute worst part of Beyond Earth and put it straight into Civ 6 with only a few minor tweaks. Did they not get enough feedback from Beyond Earth stating how uninteresting and not fun trade route spam was?

They could change it so you need a harbor and a commercial hub to gain 1 trade route though you start with 2-3 trade routes instead of 1. This encourages city specialization some more as not all your cities will start near the coast and thus you won't need to build as many commercial hubs leaving room for other districts. This current Commercial/Industrial spam and harbor when available is the opposite of city specialization. To many districts are too easy to delay, district balance is way off currently.

Trade routes should be good but a bit more rare than they are now. TR spam isn't fun firaxis, i was hoping you got that message loud and clear with Beyond Earth.

?

A player chooses to build Commercial and Harbor zones, which unlocks trade routes. The player chooses to go into production and build them. Nobody's making anyone spam anything. Stop killing yourself.

Certainly shouldn't require people to have harbors. Not everyone can. Not everyone did.

 

[stormtrooper412]

Civ 5 had wide play?
That's news to me.

yup, it did, check out Acken's guide for a wide liberty game, or some such

 

[GhostSalsa]

To understand why something like a 40% increase in hammer cost for a "hammer generator" matters, especially for cities founded mid-game, remember back to stables and forges in V. Both gave a few extra base hammers and a 15% to land units, but the forge was usually an instinctual "no thanks" because those 45 hammers takes a new city 8 or so extra turns to build.

What can happen in 8 turns?

You can walk a settler to a totally different city location and rush-buy a food or production building in it with your 8 turns of global economic growth.

Even small tweaks to hammer cost for hammer generators fundamentally skew the logic of whether founding new cities nets you benefits within the same or even next era, and that disincentivizes contextual expansion.

When new cities take another half-era to grow, it piles all expansion into two types of rote processes: claim all nearby land early; wait until my economy gets to the vertical part of the bell curve and then grow wherever else I can. In either case, cities have very little life or character of their own, because they are all plotted for the same two or three global economic strats in every game you play.

V caused this piling in other ways, too (national wonder requirements and stacking something like 70% of tile bonuses into the first twenty turns of the modern era), but I was always obsessed with the core problem of stuff taking too long to build in mid-game expansions. And you were too even if you didn't realize it. Just ask when you ever built a Forge.

VI needs to make things intrinsically cheaper through mid-game or it won't ever balance out to anything besides "build x cities early, conquer x cities late."* That's not "playing the land," since you don't care about any land you find mid game. That's not "thinking on your feet", since you know before you reveal your starting zone you want everywhere decent. That's not anything the devs professed to want in the game and it's probably not anything whose in-game behavior they understood or tested before release.

Scaling production-generator costs up by tech leads us into a messy balance debate, but is not even relevant: whether you are skimming techs in the current system to get cities into productive mode, or cities just always take the same long time to get into productive mode, production penalties make mid-game expansion less rewarding than early and late game. They shouldn't be in the mix.

*something simple like, settlers include a growing quantity of "city merchants" who can rush buy things in the new city, and merchants are attracted by your empire's strength in discrete growth metrics (so a culture leader is just as attractive as a gold monger etc)

 

[orasis]

*something simple like, settlers include a growing quantity of "city merchants" who can rush buy things in the new city, and merchants are attracted by your empire's strength in discrete growth metrics (so a culture leader is just as attractive as a gold monger etc)

With all due respect... why not just let the game play on it's own?

There is a reason mid-game expansion is made difficult, there is a reason this is a 'strategy' game. In fact in every single era there is a 'punishment' mechanic that you must figure out.

 

[TehJumpingJawa]

Civ's fundamental mechanics have never encouraged city specialisation, because the mechanisms for transferring production have always been so weak.

Civ 6 is no different.
After Civ 5's global happiness, It might sound heinous, but global production might be a good way of encouraging specialisation.

 

[GhostSalsa]

Incredible that there is a boost for a Medieval Civic that goes, "have 6 farms."

In my game today I stopped and realized, that at turn 100 I only had two.

Yet I was swamped with busy work and rush-buying workers every third turn with my stupid high GPT, thanks to commercial districts.

Districts in their current state literally compete with the cities they supposedly serve. Tiles and buildings are ornamental and trivial, not to mention wonders. It sucks!

"Rumor has it Denmark has entered the Renaissance." Ah, human progress is reborn! Reborn from what? Been pretty steady economic growth since turn 70! Wow, look at all these beautiful districts and trade routes. Look at these many tasks! Every civ is already acting like a fully modern economy by turn 125. The game is all about playing the game. There is no dark age, just a huge huge bucket of hammers to fill with tiny, pathetic populaces that resemble in no way the romantic empires of the classical and medieval eras.

 

[Ikael]

The current formula for setting the cost of districts doesn't make any sense, as it punish you for... advancing on the tech / civics tree. I think that we all can agree that we should thata formula rework could be in order. As for what it could replace it:

- Make your base district cost start lower than it currently is so you can specialize your city early on, avoiding the mandatory "district industry first" build order, and use yields other than production such as housing as a a bottleneck

- Add a % district cost increase per district already present you the city so it scales up depending on your degree of urbanization / city size rather than punishing you pushing ahead in science or culture

- Ad a small, fixed base district cost increase for each district of the same type that it is already present in your empire so you specialize your cities and avoid ICS

 

[steveg700]

would propose the following:

1) Harbors and commercial hubs don't stack trade routes. The first one built grants the trade route, the second one boosts its effect (maybe even doubles it).

2) Certain districts synergize to make subsequent zones cheaper and perhaps more effective, and thus lend themselves to synergistic theming. Something like:

Harbors & Commercial Hubs
Industrial zones & Spaceports
Holy Sites & Campuses
Entertainment Centers & Theater Squares
Encampments & Airports

3) Don't let regional effects stack on each other. Instead, make more buildings reigional in nature, like universities and stock exchanges.