Why the district cost increase is an irreparably flawed mechanic and what we would need instead

[Tomice]

I'm well aware that there are several threads already discussing the district cost increase.
Here's the TLDR of why I consider it valid to open another thread about it:

1. The district cost increase discourages playing the game as intended - by discouraging the use of the fancy new mechanics that were advertised before release.
2. It instead encourages using cheesy, unrealistic and clumsy-to-use exploits.
3. Worst of all, it fulfills no desirable purpose - it's not the ICS-counter we believed it to be.

----------> It's a flawed mechanic that shouldn't be fixed or balanced, but completely cut or replaced.

In various threads I've seen attempts to suggest fixes to the mechanic. I want to question why it's even in the game and if we were better of completely removing it.
It clearly feels like a very restrictive mechanic. Strong restrictions in a game should only happen to counter undesirable developments, otherwise they turn out to be pointless annoyances.

So here's what civ players usually want as an ideal state of balance:

• Your civilization should develop naturally by adapting to the terrain available.
• Expansion towards new spots and development of existing cities should both be equally important.
• Smaller, but well-developed (tall) empires should be able to rival wide empires, a large number of cities alone shouldn't be the most important requirement for success.
• Development of your empire should be full of meaningful, interesting decisions
• You should have to adapt your strategy towards the map and your rivals
• Last but not least, the ideal strategies should still feel like actually developing a nation (immersion)

Examples for stuff we want to limit/restrict, which shouldn't lead to success:

• Founding of huge numbers of underdeveloped cities without caring for the underlying terrain (ICS)
• Creating a huge number of units that flood the map and break the movement system (1UPT doesn't work with dozens of units in a small area)
• Focusing only on a single aspect of the game being the ultimate recipe for success
• Repetitive, map-independent strategies being most effective
• Unrealistic, unimmersive strategies (cheese)

Sadly, the current setup does little to encourage desirable gameplay. Even worse, it encourages a lot of "strategies" that don't result in fun gameplay:

• Don't just try and Don't It doesn't discourage us to mindlessly spam cities ASAP even in the worst locations. Quite the contrary, due to the fact that the district price increases as the game progresses, it actively encourages us to build as many cities as possible, as early as possible. It therefore directly counters the less controversial settler and builder cost increase. It actually some form of ICS.
• The huge production eventually needed for districts also counters a terrain-adapted careful city layout, because all that eventually matters is the 6-tile-radius effect of production districts.
• City specialization is frustratingly slow due to high district costs, therefore unrewarding.
• We're discouraged to progress through the tech/civic tree ASAP. Fulfilling eureka quests is bad for your overall success!
• We feel forced to used cheesy tactics such as switching research 1 turn before it's unlocked or putting districts down to lock their cost, then go build something else.

Since I've seen such issues come up time and again in the modding subforums for the various community patches, I really want to encourage my fellow community members to not just take a mechanic for granted.
Think about what positive or negative effects it achieves and if it fulfills a necessary role.
Don't just try to fix a mechanic by looking at itself alone. Consider what it does to the whole game, to the whole experience.

In this sense, I'd like you to reconsider what the most commonly mentioned alternatives would achieve:

• Making the district cost dependent on number of districts already build:

It would only put an unrealistic cap on the number of useful, productive cities while not protecting beginners from founding too many cities that they eventually can't build up properly. It turns going wide into a trap that's not easy to see without experience. Only your core cities would eventually still have a chance to build any new district in reasonable time.​

• Making the district cost dependant on the number of districts already built in this city:

It would make it pointless to develop large cities, you'd be better off having numerous cities with only a single district - wide or even ICS would be the way to go.
​

So my humble conclusion: There is nothing good to be achieved by ever-increasing district costs.
If we wan't to counter any of the exploits/undesirable strategies mentioned above, we need to find a new mechanic.

 

[Biz_]

i'm not really a fan of any artificial cost changes or rubber-banding. they tend to mask balance issues instead of actually solving them. delaying how fast people win is not better than just letting the game end faster

they're just prolonging games and trying to restrict strategies (like civ5 expansions did). from what i hear, this game is made by the same people who ruined civ5. they seem to have some agenda to funnel us towards diversified/balanced builds instead of letting players find the best strategy for the situation. the current implementation of the cost-controlling formulas might not work as intended (which should surprise nobody), but their goal seems to be to discourage optimization.

there are rare instances where a game does cost-increasing properly (eg. rise of nations), but that's an example of carefully controlling the pacing and flow of a fluid, dynamic game.
civ6's formulas just feel arbitrary, like the people who made them don't even understand what effect they'll have on how we build cities.

the funny thing is they already had a bunch of ways to discourage city spam from previous games, all of which were much more historically appropriate and balanced. and they ignored every single one

 

[Cymsdale]

The more I think about district scaling the more I just hate hate hate the mechanic. It just seems like such a baffling mechanic, and the strategy it drives makes no sense. Let's put aside the whole "pre-place" exploit to lock it in at the lowest cost and look at the optimal strategy for techs.

If you are not immediately benefiting from a tech at the moment you research it, it is harming the growth of your cities. The ideal situation is to finish a tech only at the moment you want to start taking advantage of it.

To optimize your research, you should be stopping all research on a tech one turn before completion and switch to another. Only finish a tech at the moment you want to use it, or at the moment you want to start research on another tech it is a prerequisite of.

You might get into a moment where you have to finish a tech if you want to or not. At this point choose the tech that will open up options that provide the highest beaker count among them, because then you have more room to 'spread' the beakers out without finishing another tech.

Apply the same strategy to civics as well.

Avoid Eureka on techs you don't want.

 

[CaiusDrewart]

Yeah, I am also completely puzzled by the decision to have districts escalate in costs based on tech. What is this accomplishing? Well, it discourages me from settling new cities in the mid-to-late game, because they'll never be able to build anything unless I chop forests. It discourages me from trying to tech fast, and completely discourages me from backfilling techs I don't need at the moment. Beelining specific techs, usually production techs, becomes the best play. Why is any of this good? These are literally all bad consequences. Not to mention it's just incredibly frustrating to have districts take 50+ turns to build in the late game.

I also think the mechanic is very unfriendly to new players. To maximize your production you need to lock districts into place as soon as possible, even if you intend to build other things first. The game doesn't tell this to new players and I don't see how they would possibly figure it out.

 

[Tomice]

I also think the mechanic is very unfriendly to new players. To maximize your production you need to lock districts into place as soon as possible, even if you intend to build other things first. The game doesn't tell this to new players and I don't see how they would possibly figure it out.

I'm very sure the "pre-placing" is an exploit, not a feature.

 

[manu-fan]

Yeah, I agree. But I'm having fun on Prince just totally ignoring increased costs and teching and civicing to my hearts content. Yes, I do get Districts up, with increased costs, which doesn't really bother me as I have so many cities I can produce tons of other stuff at the same time.

 

[CaiusDrewart]

I'm very sure the "pre-placing" is an exploit, not a feature.

Ah, that's interesting. Didn't know that. I guess I can believe it, these are the same devs who didn't see a problem with the combination of unit selling, 100% production policies, and Scythia, right?

 

[Uncle_Joe]

I am ambivalent about the scaling costs but one thing it does do (for better or worse) is force you to balance going heavy on Science early in the game. So now you CAN drop a few Science Districts early on and soar up the tech tree, but that comes at the cost of higher district costs so it might not be the best plan in every situation.

Of course I think it would be better if it took into account the total cost of the techs researched, not the total number so it didn't make it so much more attractive to beeline techs but it still functions as a deterrent to overly investing in early Science.

So, I like the more delicate balancing act that it creates, but I would prefer if that balance came from a bit less obtuse condition.

 

[Wulf38]

ICS is a thing that will tend to happen in any civ game where you have a lot of buildings that produce flat, passive output without need for a citizen working them. Naturally people want to cram in as many cities as possible to get the flat output as many times as possible. Part of the reason Civ 4 solves this problem so effectively is that it has very few buildings with flat output, and instead has lots of multiplier buildings.

Maybe the solution is to cut down the passive output from districts, and instead significantly buff output from specialists, so you won't get the full benefit from districts unless you can find the food to fill them. Adjacency bonuses could even be multipliers on output instead of flat increases.

 

[Beorhtric]

I'm well aware that there are several threads already discussing the district cost increase.
Here's the TLDR of why I consider it valid to open another thread about it:

1. The district cost increase discourages playing the game as intended - by discouraging the use of the fancy new mechanics that were advertised before release.
2. It instead encourages using cheesy, unrealistic and clumsy-to-use exploits.
3. Worst of all, it fulfills no desirable purpose - it's not the ICS-counter we believed it to be.

----------> It's a flawed mechanic that shouldn't be fixed or balanced, but completely cut or replaced.

Yes
Yes
Yes (mostly)
and No.

And in a moment why:

Although first there are a couple of things I feel need to be covered off.

Firstly, it is worth remembering that this is game is a complex system and that things are interconnected and a change in one are has impacts in many others, so looking at district scaling costs in isolation isn't a good idea, any "fix" needs to be considered in the context of the game as a whole.

The reason I mention this is because - secondly - there is one other part of the game that has an impact on the "problem" of district scaling, as has been mentioned in other posts costs scale with number of technologies discovered, and currently the tech rate (the speed at which we the player discover new technologies) in civ 6 is far quicker that it has been in any other civ game I've played. Now I'm no skilled civ player but on previous versions of the game I've generally hit Industrialisation around 1600-1700 AD, in 6 I'm hitting it around 900-1000. The result of this (in my eyes) is that district costs are scaling much faster than perhaps they should be. This undoubtedly skews our perception of the scale of the district cost issue.

So back to the topic in hand:

Why do I disagree that cost scaling is a "flawed mechanic that shouldn't be fixed or balanced, but completely cut or replaced"? For the answer to that lets go back to the op's list of "what players want"

So here's what civ players usually want as an ideal state of balance:

• Your civilization should develop naturally by adapting to the terrain available.
• Expansion towards new spots and development of existing cities should both be equally important.
• Smaller, but well-developed (tall) empires should be able to rival wide empires, a large number of cities alone shouldn't be the most important requirement for success.
• Development of your empire should be full of meaningful, interesting decisions
• You should have to adapt your strategy towards the map and your rivals
• Last but not least, the ideal strategies should still feel like actually developing a nation (immersion)

Examples for stuff we want to limit/restrict, which shouldn't lead to success:

• Founding of huge numbers of underdeveloped cities without caring for the underlying terrain (ICS)
• Creating a huge number of units that flood the map and break the movement system (1UPT doesn't work with dozens of units in a small area)
• Focusing only on a single aspect of the game being the ultimate recipe for success
• Repetitive, map-independent strategies being most effective
• Unrealistic, unimmersive strategies (cheese)

I've highlighted the point that is most relevant, meaningful choices. What we build in our cities should be a meaningful choice. That means there should be a cost to everything we do - whether that cost is measured in trems of "yields" (gold, food, etc), game time or simply not being able to do that other thing. If we could build everything instantly and for free where's the challenge?

When it comes to city infrastructure development (i.e. the build queue) we think of cost in terms of production a campus district for example costs 60 production (standard speed), but actually the cost to the player isn't "production" but time.. the time his city is going to spend building it, the time his city can't be spending building something else.. that's where the meaningful choices are made. As our cities and technology develops the amount of production each city produces goes up and thus the time spent building that campus district goes down.. it's gets cheaper for the player.

The majority of districts become available very early in the game when our cities are less developed and so production is low thus the cost of building districts early in the game needs to be balanced such that the time cost is not to prohibitive. Later in the game when we have more technologies which bring more buildings to help our cities grow and that increase production per turn then the production rate has gone up significantly, and building that campus district has gone from a meaningful cost to trivial. It has stopped being a meaningful choice.

From my point of view building districts should always be a meaningful choice, That means they should always have a cost to the player - i.e. take a number of turns to build. This should be done not to hamper the player as he progresses through the tech trees, or to slow down empire growth later in the game.. but to give them a meaningful choice over what they want to build next.

Therefore yes.. district cost in terms of "production" should scale but in terms of "turns" they should not (a little bit of fluctuation is ok, but being 5 turns to build in 3000BC and 50 turns in 1500 is clearly not).

 

[Ryika]

• Smaller, but well-developed (tall) empires should be able to rival wide empires, a large number of cities alone shouldn't be the most important requirement for success.

No, that's usually not what I see people arguing for, it's some people who want that, and a lot of people who are against it. People on average do not want small empires to be viable, people want medium-sized empires without having the game turn into an exercise of ICS.

Civ 5 tall is dead, let it rest in peace.

In this sense, I'd like you to reconsider what the most commonly mentioned alternatives would achieve:

• Making the district cost dependent on number of districts already build:

It would only put an unrealistic cap on the number of useful, productive cities while not protecting beginners from founding too many cities that they eventually can't build up properly. It turns going wide into a trap that's not easy to see without experience. Only your core cities would eventually still have a chance to build any new district in reasonable time.​

You can't just take the basic idea and then name problems as if you were the first one to ever mention them.

There are good solutions to these problems; for starters you just add some increased scaling of production throughout the game and that's not a problem at all. Add 2 Policy Cards that give proper modifiers for District Production (50% in the early-midgame, 100%-or-so later on, excluding the victory and military districts) and the amount of districts of every type that can reasonably be constructed goes up dramatically over time, while the main goal - making it so districts have varying investment costs so that players are encouraged to also construct the slightly weaker ones - is still in place. Because again, the goal is not to make "good" districts "too expensive to construct", the goal is to create an imbalance between district costs so the ones that are weaker or less important to your strategy become cheaper in comparison, the longer you ignore them. That's how you get around nerfing strong districts.

Not sure what you mean by "trap" anyway, going too wide too early is supposed to not be a strong strategy anyway - because again, most people don't wants ICS to be viable. This "trap" must exist in some form. However, I've played around with increasing district costs by as much as +25 for every district constructed, that's of course overkill for the desired goal, but even that is still very playable. You just alter between districts and over the course of the early- and midgame build a few of all of them, then when your newer cities have grown and gotten some good production tiles you also get the "good" ones in those cities.

The one problem with such a large number is of course that district costs spiral out of control later on, but nobody is saying district costs should increase by +25, and overall, the solution to that is really easy - you hardcap the maximum production a district can cost to, let's say, 600% of its original cost. With the +100% production towards districts they would then cost 3 times as much as they did originally (assuming no other %-modifiers are being used), which, given the increased production that becomes available over the course of the game, is perfectly reasonable.

 

[Frank327]

It's pretty obvious that the district costs should've scaled with the number of cities you have. That would've balanced wide vs tall where tall could build really powerful centralized cities fairly easily while big empires would have trouble building all the powerful districts in every city and would have to stick to specialized cities that have one or two districts.

Also districts are already limited by terrain space and population. To make districts the most hammer-intensive part of developing your cities is strange.

 

[Cymsdale]

It's pretty obvious that the district costs should've scaled with the number of cities you have.

Hells to the no.

 

[Deggit]

It seems like in every Civ game, there is one mechanic on launch that just shows ZERO understanding of city economics.

In vanilla Civ V it was the maritime food bonus. They fought ICS throughout the entire design and then, seemingly as an afterthought, there's a mechanic where if you ally with the right city state, POOF you get a flat "per city" bonus that makes your city tiles the best tiles in the game. It's like they didn't even understand this would trigger massive ICS.

Just as a starting point for rolling this back, what would happen if the district costs were completely flat & constant throughout the game?

 

[Tomice]

Civ 5 tall is dead, let it rest in peace.

I fully agree. I actually meant what you mean.
4 cities was some kind of hard cap in BNW for playing efficiently, while it should actually be the lower limit for a competitive empire.
Not growing beyond 4 cities means that the whole settling and developing - which is the core of a civ game - mostly happens in the early game. This creates a huge risk of having a boring mid- and lategame and therefore isn't desireable. But then again, an 8 city empire shouldn't automatically be worse than a 12 city empire.

You can't just take the basic idea and then name problems as if you were the first one to ever mention them.

I did sound a bit too arrogant in my momentary frustration and I'm sorry for it.
I would have changed the exaggerated thread title after posting, but it doesn't seem possible in the new forum.

There are good solutions to these problems; for starters you just add some increased scaling of production throughout the game and that's not a problem at all. Add 2 Policy Cards that give proper modifiers for District Production (50% in the early-midgame, 100%-or-so later on, excluding the victory and military districts) and the amount of districts of every type that can reasonably be constructed goes up dramatically over time, while the main goal - making it so districts have varying investment costs so that players are encouraged to also construct the slightly weaker ones - is still in place. Because again, the goal is not to make "good" districts "too expensive to construct", the goal is to create an imbalance between district costs so the ones that are weaker or less important to your strategy become cheaper in comparison, the longer you ignore them. That's how you get around nerfing strong districts.

Not sure what you mean by "trap" anyway, going too wide too early is supposed to not be a strong strategy anyway - because again, most people don't wants ICS to be viable. This "trap" must exist in some form. However, I've played around with increasing district costs by as much as +25 for every district constructed, that's of course overkill for the desired goal, but even that is still very playable. You just alter between districts and over the course of the early- and midgame build a few of all of them, then when your newer cities have grown and gotten some good production tiles you also get the "good" ones in those cities.

The one problem with such a large number is of course that district costs spiral out of control later on, but nobody is saying district costs should increase by +25, and overall, the solution to that is really easy - you hardcap the maximum production a district can cost to, let's say, 600% of its original cost. With the +100% production towards districts they would then cost 3 times as much as they did originally (assuming no other %-modifiers are being used), which, given the increased production that becomes available over the course of the game, is perfectly reasonable.

The system you describe would be better than the current one, that's for sure. I might even grow to like it.
Your suggestion aims to limit going both tall and wide at the same, which is a good thing. We don't want the game to be first and foremost about achieving an early advantage (settler spam) and then harvest the automatically snowballing results. The possibility that civs who had some bad luck or lost a war may catch up eventually is crucial for an interesting lategame.
I also like that it forces you to build a variety of districts and reconsider build orders as the game progresses.



To make a counter suggestion, I'm asking myself - why should the inflation of production costs be limited to districts, settlers and builders?
Why shouldn't all production costs go up equally for all produced items?
I mean, if we want to limit overexpansion and runaway civs, why isn't there some kind of production cost increase based on the score?
The score represents (or should represent) your overall success, number of cities, number of techs, number of units, ...

Why not create "inflation" based on your overall success?
This would both eliminate the problem of stuff becoming too cheap as you progress. It also automatically balances the game if a civ lost a war or otherwise falls behind - items get cheaper again.

This would also be realistic - large, successful empires tend to become bureaucratic, making it more complicated to achieve goals.
And it would look less punishing than Civ3 corruption&waste, simply because your production stays the same, only prices rise.

 

[civplay]

Doesn't chop go up with techs though? So it balances out. Like tbh I rarely actually notice a huge increase in district cost. I try to keep my districts together, so you have to chop down the forrests anyways. I usually chop than place the district exactly where I chopped, and its done in a few turns. The district mechanic does exactly what you want it to do. You have to expand reasonably. It maintains a balance between tall and wide. Basically, I've been finding that I build my second city right away, develop both cities, then try to get up to 4-5 cities, then develop, then go for another wave of expansion. So far I think it works pretty nicely, where you'll be behind if you don't expand fast enough or expand too slowly.

 

[Jarms48]

I really hate how it's implemented currently. It just promotes you to either spread your research out and not actually finish it; to keep district production costs down, or to place as many down as your population allows before you start teching up, or lastly, promotes people to beeline certain techs; to again limit the increased production costs.

I think production prices should just increase by the amount of districts built, say 1%-2.5% per district built (depending on game speed).