[R&F] Why does the late game lack production?

[Sykes179]

Does anyone dislike projects, or is it just me? I think they detract from longer term strategic planning, knowing that I don't really need any T3 buildings whatsoever, sort of ruins things for me. Truth of it is, I actually ignore them by and large, and just build the buildings anyway. Kind of like overflow. I mean I use it, but not particularly often. I could do without overflow and projects in their entirety.

It's either that or I don't much care for scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the build options for projects, and overflow takes too much time away from my war planning.

I don't like, projects and rarely use them. Perhaps if there's nothing much else to build or if I really want a great person.

In general I think it's unreasonable to expect new mid/late game cities to produce like old cities. I tend to use later cities for dos ific purposes such as gaining specific resources or providing a haven for healing units in a war or giving naval access to a part of the map.

It does mean that spreading your empire early is critical.

 

[mitsho]

It‘s kind of tied to the problem of specialised districts. Production isn‘t a goal in itself or tied to a specific victory condition. It‘s used for everything else. And while the commerce district and thus gold is flexible, production is localised. You would want to have a little bit of it in every city, while having a few specialised ones for building wonders or units. At least that is how it was in previous civ games. But how do you build a „little“ production with districts and escalating costs? That seems to me to be a central problem of the conception of civ6, making it a problem for the casual as well as the optimization player... But everything I could add here belongs in Ideas & Suggestions.

One fix I could see is an industrial age city center building rather than boosting the industrial ones. Maybe a railway station getting boosted by factories?

 

[kaspergm]

Well, I think the best way to look at it and see when you get Industrialization. Usually by the time I get it, it's more past the halfway point and there's probably like 100 turns left at most. and the last 30-40 aren't going to be producing anything that important that isn't on autpilot. So adding 3 production.... yea.

I think it's important to realize that depending on playstyle, post-industrial game plays out in two radically different ways. I think most "competitive" or "ttw" players will always build a lot of campuses as soon as possible. I realize that is probably a pretty much universal optimal strategy in the game as it is now. However, I often find myself trying for a religion, which means I'll have to go for an early holy site or two. This decision alone has a pretty massive impact on gameplay, as this means second district will be a competition between campus, encampment, commercial hub/harbor and theatre square (and entertainment complex), third district will be a competition between what remains of those plus industrial zone, etc. Since I am also overly fond of commercial hubs and industrial zones (again, in terms of what would optimize my ttw.), this means I'm often shockingly low on campuses even by late renaissance era.

My point with this is, by industrial era game is far from "almost over" for me. Of course I may be a singular case of this, but my guess is there are many "non-competitive" players who find themselves in similar situations. I do think it goes to the credit of the core game design that you can win the game (at least up to immortal, which is my current difficulty level) without going all-out on science, and that you can actually pull through with different strategies. But this obviously also makes it very hard to balance the game between the different game styles. Maybe it's not really a problem, maybe scaling down late-game production costs will make late buildings relevant for "slow" players, while "fast" players will not care either way. But I do feel the fact that going for a religion is so crippling is something that needs to be addressed somehow, but I guess that's a discussion for another topic.

 

[acluewithout]

Well, I think the best way to look at it and see when you get Industrialization. Usually by the time I get it, it's more past the halfway point and there's probably like 100 turns left at most. and the last 30-40 aren't going to be producing anything that important that isn't on autpilot. So adding 3 production.... yea. ...

I agree with that. There's not much going on in the late game, and certainly not much to build really. I use 8-Ages of Pace and cap how many campuses I build to stretch things out, while still letting me try to play optimally (or optimally within some sort of confined strategy). But, yeah, I'm generally just running projects from around Industrial as well.

I think Civ VI shouldn't stop at the Information Era - it needs to go into the near future. That's tricky without getting silly (eg Giant Death Robots). But once you get your super production cities on line, there should be some time to do something with them.

That said. Just extending the tech tree (or even just adding another Era) isn't going to extend the game. The reality is that, playing optimally, you can end the game much earlier than Information era. And that's part of the problem with production as well.

... One fix I could see is an industrial age city center building rather than boosting the industrial ones. Maybe a railway station getting boosted by factories?

Yes, I could see that. The game needs a few more city centre buildings anyway. I can see how, having introduced districts, FXS chose to move all the buildings that matter into those, but it leaves your actual "city" feeling a bit lame. Something like you're suggesting would be cool.

 

[Archon_Wing]

I think it's important to realize that depending on playstyle, post-industrial game plays out in two radically different ways. I think most "competitive" or "ttw" players will always build a lot of campuses as soon as possible. I realize that is probably a pretty much universal optimal strategy in the game as it is now. However, I often find myself trying for a religion, which means I'll have to go for an early holy site or two. This decision alone has a pretty massive impact on gameplay, as this means second district will be a competition between campus, encampment, commercial hub/harbor and theatre square (and entertainment complex), third district will be a competition between what remains of those plus industrial zone, etc. Since I am also overly fond of commercial hubs and industrial zones (again, in terms of what would optimize my ttw.), this means I'm often shockingly low on campuses even by late renaissance era.

My point with this is, by industrial era game is far from "almost over" for me. Of course I may be a singular case of this, but my guess is there are many "non-competitive" players who find themselves in similar situations. I do think it goes to the credit of the core game design that you can win the game (at least up to immortal, which is my current difficulty level) without going all-out on science, and that you can actually pull through with different strategies. But this obviously also makes it very hard to balance the game between the different game styles. Maybe it's not really a problem, maybe scaling down late-game production costs will make late buildings relevant for "slow" players, while "fast" players will not care either way. But I do feel the fact that going for a religion is so crippling is something that needs to be addressed somehow, but I guess that's a discussion for another topic.

I'm far from playing optimally myself and I never meant that it was end-game. But I'd speculate the numbers are even worse since people are finishing on turn 150~ So I think that's somewhat independent of playstyle. You can just keep track of the numbers in your own games and I would hazard a guess that the numbers will always be underwhelming. If you're pulling 100 production from the city, the boost from IZs will be very small in comparison and it only gets worse if you're going higher. It's just annoying ever since I found out that by not building Ruhr Valley at all that I would produce more stuff overall. :S And the same would go for a religion much more ; it really just feels like an extra handicap.

 

[Sostratus]

Game is balanced around Industrial Zone stacking. Then they removed IZ stacking and didn't change anything for a long while.

Sure, Magnus helps in the city where he is stationed,

I love that so many Civ Fanatics now see the truth of this original balance. It's interesting to see how much of a difference Magnus can provide in a city- often I can see 30-40 extra production in his city. (Disclaimer: I build IZs everywhere.) This is important to keep in mind: that's a 20-40 production boon in every city we had access to under the original rules.

But towards the OP,

- I don’t think the problem is improvements. Mines etc. generally give good production, and they increase well as you research techs. Lumber mills are perceived as a little underpowered, but I don’t think they are - they are good on hills / with rivers, and also let you keep appeal which has some use mid or late game.

- IZ and its buildings seem very underpowered. IZ just doesn’t have strong enough adjacency and the buildings giving flat production is problematic. I think IZs are the big problem really, particularly given there is no card to multiply building yields (and I think there would be balance problems if there were). FXS tried to buff IZ and IZ buildings with Magnus, but it doesn’t seem to have worked.

Mines are phenomenal improvements. In fact, Civ6 makes hills the optimal terrain, because hills yield the normal amount of food. With the changes to farms, a player can generate crazy amounts of food on a small plot of flat land anyways.
A developed late game city usually sees 2-4 big sources of hammers:
-mines
-t3 gov't bonus
-maybe magnus
-maybe trade routes if you stack a few in one city

Let us dig into the first two. Mines scale throughout the game at key points. The impact of +1 bonuses usually overshadows the accompanying IZ unlocks in most cases. By Industrialization, you're looking at 4.5 prod per mined hill on average. The limit on this is how much food you bring in and how many hills you have. Why does this matter? Because even early game, your city can almost exclusively work mines!
Gov't bonus. Assuming you run the legacy card, two governments in particular are very strong for raw production- Democracy and Communism. Democracy's +2 prod per district in a big enough city- say 20 pop, would be about 12-14 prod. Not bad. Communism needs the guvna but would provide 24 production in the same city. Beefy!
Magnus' ability can provide a similar scale benefit to communism, or ~2x more if you actually build the power plants.

So where's the hole in late game? Well, as people have mentioned in past threads on the issue:
Population grows semi-linearly throughout the game.
IZs are one per city.
t3 gov'ts scale with pop.

Mine output scales with population (number of mines worked) and tech (upgrades.) into the industrial era. With their later buildings, IZs can provide an additional 2ish mines per city if you have coverage. By themselves they usually are worth maybe 1 mine, sometimes 2 unless you play germany, japan, or the netherlands (and run the +100% adj card.) Okay, so, while costs are growing linearly all the time, once you hit late game (industrial onwards) you suddenly stop getting qualitative improvements to your industry and are stuck with ones based on population.

You're literally chained back to an agrarian economy because the only way to keep up is to exploit replaceable parts and shove bread into your citizens until they are bursting with octuplets.
Most cities don't have this terrain, but even if half of workable tiles were mines, you'd be at about 2.3 prod/citizen. (One citizen works a farm, the other works a mine.) Then you'd add in the 0.66 prod/citizen from democracy (2 prod per district, which costs 3 pop) or 1.2 per citizen from communism (only applicable in governor cities, but you don't need that many production hubs.) Now, if you put that together, best case we are getting about 3.5 production per citizen as long as we have mines, only 1.2 once we run out. Here's what it looks like, including the maximized work ethic belief:

Basically, there's a really big offset right away: there's IZ coverage, the IZ itself, maybe a trade route. Then the city grows and you work those wonderful hill tiles. But at some point, pop 10 in this graph, you run out of mines. Now you can only scale on raw population. Not good. Work ethic is the only main way around this, since it scales infinitely. Nothing like getting +30% production and +36 production from population in megacities of the glorious people's theocracy. What we are complaining about is that we pass that kink in the graph around the industrial modern, but cost growth never stops. Pre r&f, there was no growth in production after that kink! You can raise the offset (build an encampment, a shipyard, more trade routes) but the scaling is fixed.

But hey, if you really focus on production, you can have tons of cities churning out over 100 production per turn with the right civs. The core cities can be spitting out 200+. Where's the issue? Well, the issue is that playing the game to the limit means chops and campuses, not IZs and mines. (And stacking colonial taxes, Amundsen scott, Casa del Cont, amenity boost, dark age cards, etc...)

Solutions: if people think this is a problem, then we have a few levers to pull. The first is arithmetic vs geometric growth phases of the game. In the early game, your cities are growing and you are increasing the number of cities. Geometric. After a point, you usually stop founding new cities, so you have just linear growth of population. Arithmetic. One could divine ways to shift that tipping point later. This doesn't impact the number of turns it takes to build something, just how much you can do in a period of time.
The next thing is change the cost scaling to match production. I won't go into this but there's probably an optimal number of turns a late game item should take to build, perhaps it could be rebalanced around that.
The last thing is to change how production scales. For a lot of personal reasons, I'd lean towards this capacity coming from districts and policies, not inherent boosts; it wouldn't be very exciting if we adjusted per-citizen yields to include 0.5 production in addition to 0.5 science and culture. Even expanding the veterancy card to other districts would be helpful.

I think the legacy bonuses of democracy and communism should be mechanics that come in via districts and policies, because they make the two governments lack a 'je ne sais quoi' intangibility to their flavors.
Example: factories give a home city bonus of prod per pop, power plants give a home city bonus of prod per district. Communism gets some terrain oriented bonus (mines & quarries produce more hammers) and democracy gets something district oriented (IDK. Conditional adjacency boosts? get off my back.)

TL;DR the current meta is not conducive to production times, game balance isn't conducive to production times. I love hearing how people struggle with and get around this differently!

 

[kaspergm]

TL;DR the current meta is not conducive to production times, game balance isn't conducive to production times. I love hearing how people struggle with and get around this differently!

I'd love to say I understand everything you wrote, but there were some points lost on me because of the language barrier. But I'd like to hear more about your views on possible adjustments to production and the impact they would have. For instance, would it make game better/worse to add another production boost to mines in late game - at Steel or Chemistry, for instance?

Personally, I have modded game to decrease late-game building costs, decrease district cost scaling, and also add AOE to workshop yields. I haven't gotten around to adjusting unit costs yet, but will look into it at some point. These adjustments work well for me.

 

[Socrates99]

Another problem is the production is killer for newly founded cities. Late game I have to use the governor to buy districts just so they finish in less than 50 turns while my core cities are running 250-300 production each. Game just isn't well balanced overall. So many things have terrible ROI.

Such is the fate though of people who play Civ as an optimization puzzle. Most people are playing to have fun that doesn't require an Excel like love of math. Not sure what Firaxis should do. Spend time appealing to the 1% of those who play the game at its limits or just make a game that is fun for everyone else. I know where the money is though.

Isn't that the balancing factor to ICS? It's not a great limiter but it does make founding those late cities less of a no brainer.

I do have to agree with other posters though. I think the problem started with IZs overlapping being op and then removed later without much balancing of costs. Personally I liked the overlapping. The game sped up at exactly the time you needed it to. Now those last couple eras drag on far too long. I get why it was removed but I kind of wish it was back like it was at release. Production costs made more sense and it you plopped down a new city in range of a few IZs it was so quick and easy to develop.

 

[kaspergm]

I get why it was removed but I kind of wish it was back like it was at release. Production costs made more sense and it you plopped down a new city in range of a few IZs it was so quick and easy to develop.

I'd rather see an in-between solution. For instance, each building adds some local production and some (less) regional production. For instance:

• Workshop: +2 production in city, +1 production in all other cities within 6 tiles
  
• Factory: +4 production in city, +2 production in all other cities within 6 tiles
  
• Powerplant: +6 production in city, +3 production in all other cities within 6 tiles

With stacking, this would still be less than the original IZ boost, but still a significant boost compared to how it is now. Of course, one could play around with other "intermediate" solutions, for instance regional effect is same as local (as now), but each additional IZ after the first only adds half the product, or regional bonus decreases gradually with distance similar to how it works for loyalty pressure.

 

[Socrates99]

I'd rather see an in-between solution. For instance, each building adds some local production and some (less) regional production. For instance:

• Workshop: +2 production in city, +1 production in all other cities within 6 tiles
  
• Factory: +4 production in city, +2 production in all other cities within 6 tiles
  
• Powerplant: +6 production in city, +3 production in all other cities within 6 tiles

With stacking, this would still be less than the original IZ boost, but still a significant boost compared to how it is now. Of course, one could play around with other "intermediate" solutions, for instance regional effect is same as local (as now), but each additional IZ after the first only adds half the product, or regional bonus decreases gradually with distance similar to how it works for loyalty pressure.

I'd be all for it. Wish I could write a mod like that. I muddled a little bit with modding in V but haven't really tried to dive into VI. I'm lazy I guess.

Really like the idea of 1 cog being added with the workshop. That would be small but nice in the midgame.

 

[Archon_Wing]

I'd do....

Industrial Zone

Workshop : +4 Production (reduce cost to 125 production)
Factory: +4 production to cities in range, +10% production to this city. (reduce cost to 300 production)
Power Plant: +5 Production to this city, +10% production all cities in range with coal (But -1 housing in the city and -1 appeal to adjacent tiles) or uranium (But -1 Appeal to adjacent tiles). Reduce cost to 500 production.

Ruhr Valley: +50% production to this city. +2 range to buildings in this city that have a area effect.

Power Plants and such need to be insanely powerful to even consider building at their point in the game, and I fear even with these changes, many fast players are still going to ignore them anyways, but maybe someone can get mileage out of them.

Encampment

Stable: +1 Production, 1 housing, +10% production to making cavalry units
Barracks +1 Production, 1 housing +10% production to making melee and anti-cav units
Armory: +2 Production, +10% production to making siege and support units., -10% upgrade costs to units in the city
Military Academy: +3 production, Gives all units a extra promotion, +2 housing

Alhambra: Add 10% land unit military production

Military Engineers only require an encampment.

Encampments I think are pretty single note, and while Great Generals are great, this could add some incentive to building them.

Aerodome

Aerodome only required for bombers. Fighters can be made from the city, but require 2 aluminum

Commercial Hubs gain +4 adjacency for being next to an aerodome

Hangar: +3 Production, +25% production towards making Air units
Airport: +3 Production, +10% Gold to this city, +10% tourism to all cities within 6 tiles.

Tying units behind a district kinda blows, so I think it should be made more consistent with the other military districts-- it should make your life easier. By tying only bombers to the Aerodrome, this also gives fighters more of a thing to do while still putting in some incentive to build these things. And Aerdomes being only military is kinda lame, so this makes it more versatile.

Unit Costs
Scout: 25 Production
Spearman: Remove maintenance
Pikeman: 170 production, 2 maintenance

Reduce everything Renaissance and beyond by about 20% and -1 maintenance.

Modern and beyond wonders should be cheaper too by a bit.

Most costs I think should be scaled back. The spear line has been a meme so not too much to talk about that, but spearmen costing 1 maintenance and getting rekt by warriors is stupid, and also scouts being more expensive than warriors after Agoge is sorta silly too.I hope maybe people will build spears at a minimum to up to pikes (lol)

Other

Policy Cards do not apply to chops.
Chop Scaling increase across eras reduced by 90%
Campus and Theater Projects reduced to 10% of production
Holy Site, Harbor and Industrial Projects increased to 20% of production
All ancient/classical military production cards are halved (other eras remain the same)
Professional Army policy changed to gain a promotion when you upgrade a unit. (no more cheap upgrades)

Basically, here, I think if running projects is better than building something, then some projects need to be nerfed. Maybe people will run weaker campus projects anyways, but I think it'd help to consider something else. Meanwhile, some other districts like Holy Sites just have too weak of yields.

I also want to tone down the "ancient army spam and just upgrade" meta that exists. Early era units build too fast and are too cheaply upgraded making it basically a mistake to hard build units after the start.

And I also think chopping shouldn't scale very much. Sure chopping later in the game should give more, but maybe keeping improvements could be more competitive.

 

[acluewithout]

Power Plants and such need to be insanely powerful to even consider building at their point in the game, and I fear even with these changes, many fast players are still going to ignore them anyways, but maybe someone can get mileage out of them.

Agreed. I think there are lots of ways IZ and buildings could be buffed. But this is the core point.

Professional Army policy changed to gain a promotion when you upgrade a unit. (no more cheap upgrades).

Agreed. Get rid of cheap upgrades. Good suggestion for PA. I also like the idea of the card just giving +%xp.

I also want to tone down the "ancient army spam and just upgrade" meta that exists. Early era units build too fast and are too cheaply upgraded making it basically a mistake to hard build units after the start.

Agreed.

And I also think chopping shouldn't scale very much. Sure chopping later in the game should give more, but maybe keeping improvements could be more competitive.

Chopping is a core part of the game, and I don't think that should change. But the current scaling is a bust. Chopping just shouldn't work with +%prod cards at all. It should only scale with specific techs and or when using certain policy cards. And scaling should basically stop at the industrial era - no more chopping forests for spaceships.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Yea chopping should still be good. It's just that right now you're basically settling new cities to chop....and that is silly. Post Magnus, I don't even look for fresh water at times.

I actually don't have a problem with chopping spaceports. But chopping a bunch of random things that have nothing to do with it and using the extra bits is silly.

 

[acluewithout]

I love that so many Civ Fanatics now see the truth of this original balance. It's interesting to see how much of a difference Magnus can provide in a city- often I can see 30-40 extra production in his city. (Disclaimer: I build IZs everywhere.) This is important to keep in mind: that's a 20-40 production boon in every city we had access to under the original rules.

But towards the OP,


Mines are phenomenal improvements. In fact, Civ6 makes hills the optimal terrain, because hills yield the normal amount of food. With the changes to farms, a player can generate crazy amounts of food on a small plot of flat land anyways.
A developed late game city usually sees 2-4 big sources of hammers:
-mines
-t3 gov't bonus
-maybe magnus
-maybe trade routes if you stack a few in one city

Let us dig into the first two. Mines scale throughout the game at key points. The impact of +1 bonuses usually overshadows the accompanying IZ unlocks in most cases. By Industrialization, you're looking at 4.5 prod per mined hill on average. The limit on this is how much food you bring in and how many hills you have. Why does this matter? Because even early game, your city can almost exclusively work mines!
Gov't bonus. Assuming you run the legacy card, two governments in particular are very strong for raw production- Democracy and Communism. Democracy's +2 prod per district in a big enough city- say 20 pop, would be about 12-14 prod. Not bad. Communism needs the guvna but would provide 24 production in the same city. Beefy!
Magnus' ability can provide a similar scale benefit to communism, or ~2x more if you actually build the power plants.

So where's the hole in late game? Well, as people have mentioned in past threads on the issue:
Population grows semi-linearly throughout the game.
IZs are one per city.
t3 gov'ts scale with pop.

Mine output scales with population (number of mines worked) and tech (upgrades.) into the industrial era. With their later buildings, IZs can provide an additional 2ish mines per city if you have coverage. By themselves they usually are worth maybe 1 mine, sometimes 2 unless you play germany, japan, or the netherlands (and run the +100% adj card.) Okay, so, while costs are growing linearly all the time, once you hit late game (industrial onwards) you suddenly stop getting qualitative improvements to your industry and are stuck with ones based on population.

You're literally chained back to an agrarian economy because the only way to keep up is to exploit replaceable parts and shove bread into your citizens until they are bursting with octuplets.
Most cities don't have this terrain, but even if half of workable tiles were mines, you'd be at about 2.3 prod/citizen. (One citizen works a farm, the other works a mine.) Then you'd add in the 0.66 prod/citizen from democracy (2 prod per district, which costs 3 pop) or 1.2 per citizen from communism (only applicable in governor cities, but you don't need that many production hubs.) Now, if you put that together, best case we are getting about 3.5 production per citizen as long as we have mines, only 1.2 once we run out. Here's what it looks like, including the maximized work ethic belief:
View attachment 502845

Basically, there's a really big offset right away: there's IZ coverage, the IZ itself, maybe a trade route. Then the city grows and you work those wonderful hill tiles. But at some point, pop 10 in this graph, you run out of mines. Now you can only scale on raw population. Not good. Work ethic is the only main way around this, since it scales infinitely. Nothing like getting +30% production and +36 production from population in megacities of the glorious people's theocracy. What we are complaining about is that we pass that kink in the graph around the industrial modern, but cost growth never stops. Pre r&f, there was no growth in production after that kink! You can raise the offset (build an encampment, a shipyard, more trade routes) but the scaling is fixed.

But hey, if you really focus on production, you can have tons of cities churning out over 100 production per turn with the right civs. The core cities can be spitting out 200+. Where's the issue? Well, the issue is that playing the game to the limit means chops and campuses, not IZs and mines. (And stacking colonial taxes, Amundsen scott, Casa del Cont, amenity boost, dark age cards, etc...)

Solutions: if people think this is a problem, then we have a few levers to pull. The first is arithmetic vs geometric growth phases of the game. In the early game, your cities are growing and you are increasing the number of cities. Geometric. After a point, you usually stop founding new cities, so you have just linear growth of population. Arithmetic. One could divine ways to shift that tipping point later. This doesn't impact the number of turns it takes to build something, just how much you can do in a period of time.
The next thing is change the cost scaling to match production. I won't go into this but there's probably an optimal number of turns a late game item should take to build, perhaps it could be rebalanced around that.
The last thing is to change how production scales. For a lot of personal reasons, I'd lean towards this capacity coming from districts and policies, not inherent boosts; it wouldn't be very exciting if we adjusted per-citizen yields to include 0.5 production in addition to 0.5 science and culture. Even expanding the veterancy card to other districts would be helpful.

I think the legacy bonuses of democracy and communism should be mechanics that come in via districts and policies, because they make the two governments lack a 'je ne sais quoi' intangibility to their flavors.
Example: factories give a home city bonus of prod per pop, power plants give a home city bonus of prod per district. Communism gets some terrain oriented bonus (mines & quarries produce more hammers) and democracy gets something district oriented (IDK. Conditional adjacency boosts? get off my back.)

TL;DR the current meta is not conducive to production times, game balance isn't conducive to production times. I love hearing how people struggle with and get around this differently!

Some random thoughts:

- I agree mines are strong. That’s one reason I think IZ buildings should give housing and amenities, so you can have more pop to work more mines. Giving IZ some non-production yields would also make them feel stronger more generally, because they wouldn’t suffer so much from everyone just comparing their cost v production per turn.

- I like the idea of Tier 3 Governments buffing production. It’s one of the few things the game does to creat a feeling of an industrial revolution. I wouldn’t move their buffs to other systems like IZ buildings. If anything, I’d maybe have these governments give boosts to factories and powerplants.

- I don’t think it’s a problem that mid and late game cities can’t get districts up easily. I think the real issue is that mid late game cities don’t have any value beyond having districts. I really like the district mechanism, but cities themselves should still matter.

- You can definitely work around the drop in production / increased costs etc. And maybe boosting production late game should be hard. Mines are good, it one problem after the ancient / classical era is that, really, there’s not a lot of strategy in getting them. Spam Builders, chop and or place mines. Done. To make the game engaging, there needs to be more skill / planning to get late game production, whether it’s judicious use of governors and cards or careful city, district and building placement.

- Following that point, I think the original idea of IZs was good. Some strategy around initial placement as you maximise adjacency, and then strategy late game as you try to maximise regional benefits. Again, I suggest factories and power plants giving regional housing and amenities to basically re-invigorate this design idea, by making the regional benefits more useful.

- A big question (which a few posts have hinted at) is “what should mid and late game cities actually be building?”. You need an answer to that in order to answer “do mid late game cities lack production?”. I feel like they lack production, but I personally don’t have a clear idea what cities should be building late game (other than science parts if you’re going for a science victory). Mostly I just buy units and buildings with gold (and quite enjoy that).

 

[Cagarustus]

I have a view that the late game will be the thrust of a new expansion and that there will be some more production bonuses around this time.

At least I’m hoping.

 

[Cerilis]

I like the idea mentioned earlier with the citycentre station building. Why not integrate it with the IZ! Instead of the factory and power plant giving a regional bonus based on tiles, they give a production bonus (stacking, so not too high) to every city with a railway station (maybe the city also needs to be connected somehow? )
Alternatively, the power plant could also be connected to another building instead of the station, which is associated with electricity.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Game is balanced around Industrial Zone stacking. Then they removed IZ stacking and didn't change anything for a long while.

Maybe late game building/unit costs were set with IZ stacking in mind, but it definitely wasn't balanced. Production was the bottle neck to science victories in the early game, before Reyna and National Society, and the only way to deal with the crazy production costs of Mars components was to have IZs in every city around your Spaceport, or have enough gold to buy the great people who give you free components.

And frankly, restoring the stacking system wouldn't solve anything. It would make circular empires functional as long as all cities build an IZ, while Chile-like empires would be doomed to a lack of interlocking IZs. That's an issue with the current system and the amenity circles, too, but it would be so so much worse under the original IZ system.

Better to keep IZs as they are, I think, and deal with the root cause of people's concerns: why it takes forever to hard build a new military unit or build a district in a new city.

TL;DR the current meta is not conducive to production times, game balance isn't conducive to production times. I love hearing how people struggle with and get around this differently!

Great post. Bottom line to me, though, is that Civ 6 doesn't require that you build anything in the second half of the game. Until that changes, it's pre-mature to speculate on what level costs should be set to properly balance the production of irrelevant things.

 

[acluewithout]

I’d hate to see stacking return. I agree it would really fix late game production bottle neck anyway. My bigger issue though is that I think a stacking type mechanism is just kind of lame. Not strategically interesting at all.

As an aside: although I think IZ and its buildings should be buffed, I don’t think buffing them would actually solve late game production either. I think buffing IZ would maybe make building them more worthwhile and more fun overall. But they’d still not really solve the problem with late game production.

... Bottom line to me, though, is that Civ 6 doesn't require that you build anything in the second half of the game. Until that changes, it's pre-mature to speculate on what level costs should be set to properly balance the production of irrelevant things.

As I said above, I’m not real sure what you’re supposed to be building late game (if anything). You can build late game wonders, but these rarely have any real impact and are mostly vanity. I guess Air Force or serous naval like Aircraft carriers, but these units just aren’t needed. A few extra spies could be handy, I guess?

Seriously. Communism and Democracy both give significant production boosts. What did the designers expect you to spend that production on?

 

[kaspergm]

- I agree mines are strong. That’s one reason I think IZ buildings should give housing and amenities, so you can have more pop to work more mines. Giving IZ some non-production yields would also make them feel stronger more generally, because they wouldn’t suffer so much from everyone just comparing their cost v production per turn.

I am strongly against this kind of balancing approaches. It may make the game more balanced, but it will also completely kill immersion for me. It's not like people live in factories and power plants, and it's certainly not like people are happy to have factories close to them. And considering the whole health and pollution aspect, Industrial Zones should give negative housing, if anything.

Personally I am a strong proponent of specializing the districts in their specific branch, and balancing them as such. As I see it, the reason why Industrial Zones are currently underpowered is because: a) Upgrading units is many times more economic than building new units because late game units are too expensive, b) gold is generally readily available and can be converted into production through governors, c) chopping + Magnus makes production available by other more effective means than through Industrial Zone benefits and d) late game buildings are generally irrelevant for victory which reduces your needs for late game production. On top of this, fairly low benefits of industrial zone buildings.

Of course one can make Industrial Zones more attractive by giving them all sort of other yields, but that is treating the symptom rather than treating the problem.

 

[acluewithout]

I am strongly against this kind of balancing approaches. It may make the game more balanced, but it will also completely kill immersion for me. It's not like people live in factories and power plants, and it's certainly not like people are happy to have factories close to them. And considering the whole health and pollution aspect, Industrial Zones should give negative housing, if anything.

I think having factories and powerplants give housing and amenities benefits makes sense. Factories lead to more commercial and consumer goods, which improves (material) happiness (hence amenities), makes closer living more possible (housing), and more people will want to live in the city because more jobs from the factory (so housing again). Powerplants mean electricity, which again creates more (material) happiness and allows people to live together even more closely (housing).

I don’t think housing actually represents “accommodation”. It represents health, desirability of living somewhere etc. I get people don’t want to live next to or in a factory or power plant. But they do like living in cities that have jobs, cheap goods and reliable electricity.

I think the mistake is the one eyed focus on hammers which the IZ and IZ buildings have.

Of course one can make Industrial Zones more attractive by giving them all sort of other yields, but that is treating the symptom rather than treating the problem.

Agreed. I think IZs need a buff because they’re currently just not fun. But it won’t fix the underlying problem with production.

What I find interesting though, is that some people seem to be positioning the problem as being more about the cost of late game “things” and or a lack of late game “things” that are worth building. I hadn’t thought of it that way, which is a very interesting thought.