Why civ 6 falls flat... districts.

[johnny_rudeboy]

I think you're right about one thing OP. I don't specialize my Cities. They all get Commercial and Industrial. Then later Campus, and either Holy Site or Theatre Square depending on victory.

This is how I (and many others seems to) play. And it is rather boring really. I thought that civ 6 with the district system it would mean there is more specialised cities but I also had hopes that the trade system would be different. Today it is the different districts that give you food and hammers but I think the trade should generate a percentage of the food and the hammers the city produce.

If that was the case you could then settle a city on the flood plains or in the the middle of a hill free area of grassland or plains just to build farms. Then have other cities sending trade routes there to boost their own growth. And this is city who even do they produce a lot of food does not have to grow much since you put a cap on it with limited housing. I mean, that is often how it works in the real life. You have isolated areas producing food for crowded cities focusing on commercial, production and culture. Then you can have small satellite cities only focusing on science and a bit of culture. Like is so often the case.

So I would not mind of they fixed it so that building cities for special purposes was more common. I mean, to build a food city today it got to have a lot of production to build the building and districts that generate food in trades. And that is not how it should work.

And entertainment districts should get tourist boost from being adjacent to tourist beaches. Same with wonders.

 

[GhostSalsa]

After the mess of BE, I'm doubtful the mechanic of using TRs for cities to feed each other different things should even be in the game.

Yes this was was a huge feat of trade in Roman times as well as modern, but converting it to a task just leads to rote tedium. As opposed to the more elegant abstraction we have always had: the urban center of your city is fed by the farms outside it.

In V it was great because, TRs weren't economic role-playing but a simple game decision: focus growth on a city or have gold for your whole empire.

But I like the idea of farm-y regions automatically behaving like Food City States did in VI, without the tedium of trade routes in it. Like, meet the old requirements for city connection, then a city with a Wheat tile and Granary gives a +1 Apple to every city in the empire.

 

[steveg700]

This is how I (and many others seems to) play. And it is rather boring really. I thought that civ 6 with the district system it would mean there is more specialised cities but I also had hopes that the trade system would be different. Today it is the different districts that give you food and hammers but I think the trade should generate a percentage of the food and the hammers the city produce.

If that was the case you could then settle a city on the flood plains or in the the middle of a hill free area of grassland or plains just to build farms. Then have other cities sending trade routes there to boost their own growth. And this is city who even do they produce a lot of food does not have to grow much since you put a cap on it with limited housing. I mean, that is often how it works in the real life. You have isolated areas producing food for crowded cities focusing on commercial, production and culture. Then you can have small satellite cities only focusing on science and a bit of culture. Like is so often the case.

So I would not mind of they fixed it so that building cities for special purposes was more common. I mean, to build a food city today it got to have a lot of production to build the building and districts that generate food in trades. And that is not how it should work.

And entertainment districts should get tourist boost from being adjacent to tourist beaches. Same with wonders.

After the mess of BE, I'm doubtful the mechanic of using TRs for cities to feed each other different things should even be in the game.

Yes this was was a huge feat of trade in Roman times as well as modern, but converting it to a task just leads to rote tedium. As opposed to the more elegant abstraction we have always had: the urban center of your city is fed by the farms outside it.

In V it was great because, TRs weren't economic role-playing but a simple game decision: focus growth on a city or have gold for your whole empire.

But I like the idea of farm-y regions automatically behaving like Food City States did in VI, without the tedium of trade routes in it. Like, meet the old requirements for city connection, then a city with a Wheat tile and Granary gives a +1 Apple to every city in the empire.

If food went into a common supply, just like most other yields, then we'd scarcely need internal trade routes. And if inter-civ trade treaties were properly tied into diplomacy, we wouldn't really need external trade routes.

It would be great to be able to build farmbelt cities, and then have those farmbelts field your commercial and industrial cities, which might be out in tundra or desert pumping oil and digging up uranium. Then it's a shift from city-planning to empire-planning. Shouldn't the latter be what we're doing?

As it is now, trade routes don't even seem to be impacted by farms. It's the districts themselves that generate food. And it's food that comes out of thin air. So many things about this system still feel as tacked-on now as it was in Civ V (where it was pinned on to the game's tail end via an expansion). Trade routes are currently disconnected from tile improvements, diplomatic relations, and access to amenities. A city can send or receive an unlimited number of trade routes because, again, the benefits don't actually come out of any kind of finite supply.

 

[PeteBDawg]

One thing that I think hurts the system is theater and entertainment shouldn't be separate districts. They should be one district that you can build up in multiple ways - like for one city you could do a higher-amenity / less-cultural district with a stadium and an amusement park, and in another city you could go higher-culture / lower-amenity district with an symphony hall and an art museum, but building culture and building amenities could be connected - the way a commerce hub lets you connect building gold, food, and production all at the same time.

In general less of the time spent building the district should be in the district and more should be in the buildings. I'm guessing we'll probably see something of that in a future expansion, with more options on how to customize districts.

As it is, culture in general doesn't make sense in this game - it feels cobbled together from too many disconnected mechanics, and is a random throw-in too often. You can get way too much of it and move down the Civics tree without building any of the dedicated buildings associated with it. The connection between Civics, Religion and Science is blurry and not great. And I've also never liked tourism as the descriptor for cultural victory - it doesn't make sense that the ultimate achievement of thought and progress in the arts and humanities is Club Med. And it doesn't make sense for culture and entertainment to be separate if the goal is tourism anyway. People do look for entertainment when they go on vacation. It all just doesn't work for me as-is.

That's all from a roleplay standpoint, though, more than a competitive standpoint. Like it doesn't feel like you have much of an option to invest in culture if you want to do that because the district for it does so little.

 

[johnny_rudeboy]

If food went into a common supply, just like most other yields, then we'd scarcely need internal trade routes. And if inter-civ trade treaties were properly tied into diplomacy, we wouldn't really need external trade routes.

It would be great to be able to build farmbelt cities, and then have those farmbelts field your commercial and industrial cities, which might be out in tundra or desert pumping oil and digging up uranium. Then it's a shift from city-planning to empire-planning. Shouldn't the latter be what we're doing?

As it is now, trade routes don't even seem to be impacted by farms. It's the districts themselves that generate food. And it's food that comes out of thin air. So many things about this system still feel as tacked-on now as it was in Civ V (where it was pinned on to the game's tail end via an expansion). Trade routes are currently disconnected from tile improvements, diplomatic relations, and access to amenities. A city can send or receive an unlimited number of trade routes because, again, the benefits don't actually come out of any kind of finite supply.

In Civ 5 it was the same, a newly built city with a bought granary all of a sudden could give away more apples then it actually produced for it self just to stay from starving. Would be interesting if the food you took away from one city actually was lost for that city. But that would only work if you actually had it set up with bread baskets, corn belts etc.

 

[steveg700]

One thing that I think hurts the system is theater and entertainment shouldn't be separate districts. They should be one district that you can build up in multiple ways - like for one city you could do a higher-amenity / less-cultural district with a stadium and an amusement park, and in another city you could go higher-culture / lower-amenity district with an symphony hall and an art museum, but building culture and building amenities could be connected - the way a commerce hub lets you connect building gold, food, and production all at the same time.

Commercial hubs give food and production? Harbors do, but that's their bizarre mishmash nature.

As posted elsewhere, I would say certain districts should have affinities for each other: entertainment centers & theater districts, commercial hubs & harbors, holy sites & campuses, industrial zones & spaceports, encampments & aerodomes. They grant each other a bonus even when not adjacent, and the presence of one district makes building the other cheaper to build.

 

[Wintervoid]

These are the changes I would experiment with:

Scale District cost to the amount of cities in your Empire.

Reduce the contribution of Population to Science by 50%.

This would make Campuses more attractive, as well as give specific advantages to going wide or tall.

I considered scaling costs based on number of Districts already present in a city, but in my experience, with Trade Routes and Factories, it is pretty easy to get Districts built relatively quickly in a large empire. Population may also be a good factor for scaling.

 

[steveg700]

These are the changes I would experiment with:

Scale District cost to the amount of cities in your Empire.

Reduce the contribution of Population to Science by 50%.

This would make Campuses more attractive, as well as give specific advantages to going wide or tall.

Do we need to make campuses so attractive that they become as ubiquitous as science buildings were in Civ V? Right now, they can provide an edge. Maybe an edge is what districts should provide.

 

[dexters]

Well most of the buildings in Civ6 provide flat bonuses; the % bonuses are mostly gone. I like this as the % modifiers tend to create really insane modifiers.

I usually ignore holy sites and downrate Theatre districts in most of my games on Immortal as science and commerce is key. This isn't so much Campus districts being ubiquitous but the need to overcome AI advantages. You can win with minimal effort in theatre districts by conquering later on a Civ with lots of culture/artifacts and then adding in theatre districts later on.

 

[mnf]

I've been thinking, if districts are simply fixed cost, no scaling at all, wouldn't it make the game more "fun"? Instead of worrying about not having enough production and getting districts that take 30 turns to build, any new 2 pop city could easily finish a district in 15 turns or less. We're still gonna run into problems building the buildings if we don't have good production, but instead of each city spending perhaps 50-80 turns of the game building its districts, it can spend 20-30 turns only in total, and spend time building other more interesting stuff like buildings and units and even wonders.

 

[steveg700]

I've been thinking, if districts are simply fixed cost, no scaling at all, wouldn't it make the game more "fun"? Instead of worrying about not having enough production and getting districts that take 30 turns to build, any new 2 pop city could easily finish a district in 15 turns or less. We're still gonna run into problems building the buildings if we don't have good production, but instead of each city spending perhaps 50-80 turns of the game building its districts, it can spend 20-30 turns only in total, and spend time building other more interesting stuff like buildings and units and even wonders.

Well, I think there's a feast-or-famine quality to it. As much as folks complain about production bottlenecks, I certainly hit thresholds where I don't have any new buildings to build and I don't want to spam more units (that I'll have pay maintenance costs for) and a wonder isn't in the cards. That leaves projects, which are fine, but I think in the end making it super-easy to build districts is going to just leave players working on lots of those projects.

New cities can finish districts in 15 turns or less later in the game. Just need to have trade routes ready to send back to your production centers.

 

[drubell]

In my mind, districts should only start having increased costs depending on how many districts are already developed in an individual city.

For example, I honestly think that your first district should cost little to 0 hammers at all. If that city has a district, then each consecutive district should be more and more expensive. This makes it so you have a system where you can realistically specialize districts (a city might have 3-4 districts) without having to spend most of your game building one.

What really sucks is when you get a city in the midgame but it's fairly worthless because the hammer cost to build ANY districts in that city is so high that it can't be done without sending in production from trade routes. But if the increasing hammer cost is directly related to how many districts exist in an individual city, then you don't have that issue so much.

And the opposite of the spectrum is currently true as well. If you already have a well-established few cities from the beginning of the game, you can easily get away with putting every district type in your cities at the end if you have industrial zones supporting it. If the plan was to create specialized cities, this system doesn't support it either.

 

[johnny_rudeboy]

In my mind, districts should only start having increased costs depending on how many districts are already developed in an individual city.

For example, I honestly think that your first district should cost little to 0 hammers at all. If that city has a district, then each consecutive district should be more and more expensive. This makes it so you have a system where you can realistically specialize districts (a city might have 3-4 districts) without having to spend most of your game building one.

What really sucks is when you get a city in the midgame but it's fairly worthless because the hammer cost to build ANY districts in that city is so high that it can't be done without sending in production from trade routes. But if the increasing hammer cost is directly related to how many districts exist in an individual city, then you don't have that issue so much.

And the opposite of the spectrum is currently true as well. If you already have a well-established few cities from the beginning of the game, you can easily get away with putting every district type in your cities at the end if you have industrial zones supporting it. If the plan was to create specialized cities, this system doesn't support it either.

Bingo.

As I said in an earlier post, playing now is about settling up to 6 cities and grow them tall and into do it all cities and beelining so you can build commercial and industrial districts first of all. Then have a bunch of crappy cities to get resources who never develop due to the high district cost.

They need to make changes in the scaling cost for building districts (and when they do they can make it cheaper to upgrade units and building units but put a cap for how many units you can have at the same time depending on what buildings you have in your encampement/harbour district).

 

[Morningcalm]

The problem with districts is they are all or nothing--if you want production boosts, you pretty much have to have the Industrial District; as you can only get truly minor production bonuses from policies and trade routes. That unhinges the game. Rather than encouraging specialization, Civ VI FORCES it, which is as irritating as the building maintenance costs of Civ V base because it restricts player choice and creates frustration rather than an interesting strategic wrinkle.

 

[ElGuapoCiv]

In my mind, districts should only start having increased costs depending on how many districts are already developed in an individual city.

For example, I honestly think that your first district should cost little to 0 hammers at all. If that city has a district, then each consecutive district should be more and more expensive. This makes it so you have a system where you can realistically specialize districts (a city might have 3-4 districts) without having to spend most of your game building one.

What really sucks is when you get a city in the midgame but it's fairly worthless because the hammer cost to build ANY districts in that city is so high that it can't be done without sending in production from trade routes. But if the increasing hammer cost is directly related to how many districts exist in an individual city, then you don't have that issue so much.

And the opposite of the spectrum is currently true as well. If you already have a well-established few cities from the beginning of the game, you can easily get away with putting every district type in your cities at the end if you have industrial zones supporting it. If the plan was to create specialized cities, this system doesn't support it either.

However, doing that would effectively kill tall play once and for all. Civ6 is already heavily catering towards wide play. Ideally both approaches should be viable and well-balanced.
I had good experiences with a flat +25 cost increase per district copy in your empire. This eliminates the rubber band mechanism of vanilla and at the same time forces you to think before building a district. If you go heavy on districts in your capital and second city, then you will have trouble affording districts in newly built cities later on. It encourages you to only build what you really need lest the cost increase becomes prohibitive later on. It is a slight boost towards tall play and discourages from district spamming.

Basically everything is better than the rubber band mechanism Firaxis employs. Punishing you for being ahead in tech is a lazy solution. I haven't found a way yet to tie the cost progression to both number of districts in a city and in your empire. It seems that you can only pick one model.

 

[mnf]

Also I'm thinking that some people don't think the current costs are a problem because they may be locking down the cost. Trying to play the game without locking down, i.e. only place the district when you want to build it, then they will cost a lot more.

As for scaling by number of local districts, as long as the scaling doesn't end up with costs exceeding the current situation, it will actually be an improvement for tall play. For example, we know that at Standard speed, district costs start at 60 and increase by 25% per additional district, you're still looking at the 10th district costing 440 production, which is about the same as if you have researched everything up to and including the Modern era.

This table below shows the current scaling (left) compared to a compound scaling of 25% per additional district within a city.

Spoiler :

So as long as the scaling factor is suitable, it will still be an improvement to the current global scaling for tall play.

 

[Victoria]

The lockdown has to go. It is encouraging dull play.

It is clear the current mechanic causes big issues early game where the only way to play is the same way. It also means any cities founded after about turn 150 will struggle to get decent without a lot of help.

If we think for a minute that an IZ is not a factory but a huge area of factories we are not talking about every city ina civilization. Equally a campus is not just one university but a group of universities. The IZ, campus and theater districts (theater district is an area for the elite and cultured as opposed to an entertainment zone for the masses) should be mutually exclusive. If you build one in a city you cannot build the other one. This idea of an IZ in every city is damaging my lungs.

If you remove the lockdown you stop people racing for the damn CZ and IZ and ensuring they have settlers out there ASAP to catch that lockdown.
You then need to get the cost scaled better. something like 120 * (game turn/100) With the exclusive 3 zones you do not have to punish cities for multiple.