Yield Balance and Pre-Launch Prediction

[civfanatic4sure]

In Civ6 single player, the most dominant yield was Culture. No matter the VC, early Culture delivered the greatest return. Paired with high Faith generation, you could steamroll any setup (see: Khmer). Of course all yields had some varying degree of value. You still needed Food, Production, etc, but Culture was the clear winner. As much as I'm hoping for absolute balance, a meta always emerges as superior. Not to mention trying to balance a game with so many variables is near impossible. Maybe the reformulated yield setup and game design (e.g. the age system & legacy paths) will work together to keep imbalance in check and deny a highly dominant meta from emerging, allowing for more competitive approaches to the game. We just don't know, but until we find out...

What do you think will emerge as the most valuable yield?

Side Note: The beauty of Civ is that playing the game to RP and enjoy the world always has a place, and it will take a front seat at launch, even for the maniacs like myself who always lean towards optimizing. Here's to hoping the game design can keep the RP world building fun rolling as long as possible for the sickos.

 

[Siptah]

For once: Gold. Having to buy buildings in towns, and requiring gold to upgrade towns to cities seemingly make it very important. Much more so than before, where its use was limited to rush buying and unit maintenance - which still exist in civ7 and the other uses are just piled on top.

Happiness is a bit of a black box to me. It could be very important to overextend or chain celebrations and amass policy slots. Or it could be rather pointless. I also suppose that the balance might change after some patches here.

 

[Krikkit1]

Given we’ve seen
building maintenance of and $
and
specialist maintenance of and food
I’m split between and $
…it really depends on what the penalties are when they go negative

 

[Vincent_lacruz]

In Civ6 single player, the most dominant yield was Culture. No matter the VC, early Culture delivered the greatest return. Paired with high Faith generation, you could steamroll any setup (see: Khmer). Of course all yields had some varying degree of value. You still needed Food, Production, etc, but Culture was the clear winner. As much as I'm hoping for absolute balance, a meta always emerges as superior. Not to mention trying to balance a game with so many variables is near impossible. Maybe the reformulated yield setup and game design (e.g. the age system & legacy paths) will work together to keep imbalance in check and deny a highly dominant meta from emerging, allowing for more competitive approaches to the game. We just don't know, but until we find out...

What do you think will emerge as the most valuable yield?

Side Note: The beauty of Civ is that playing the game to RP and enjoy the world always has a place, and it will take a front seat at launch, even for the maniacs like myself who always lean towards optimizing. Here's to hoping the game design can keep the RP world building fun rolling as long as possible for the sickos.

Sure, gold is bound to be important, but remember that towns will convert all production into gold. At the same time you will need that gold to improve said villages, so most of it will go into it.

Culture will also still be important, since it will unlock you civ powers. Without those you will not be able to use the full power of your civ, nor build the special buildings/improvments.

Science will still be important, but you can't be as much left behing unit levels as in the previous games. We still need to see the difference in unit tiers, but it won't be at the level of a knight steamrolling swordmen...

Food and production, well you will still need them. But for cities food will be far less required, since your towns can provide it to them (so will slotted ressources, in some way). Production will be very important for cities, you need to produce a lot in them after all.. For town, obviously, it will be the opposite (although some specializations can send the town production, so in some case a production heavy town will be usefull)..

Hapiness will be important. It will give you high production during celebrations, as well as civic slots (so more production). You will also need qui a lot of it if you want enough specialists in you cities, or even mor settlement than your limit.

Influence is a versatile ressource. It will help during wars through support, will give invaluable spying capacity, and yields through endeavors. It is also the only way to gain city states. So I think it will be a rather important ressource, especially since it will be hard to gain it (no tile influence yield, only buildings and civics).

In conclusion, I would put the order of importance as follow: influence > hapiness /culture > science > gold > food/production

 

[Gori the Grey]

I too won't be surprised if the answer turns out to be influence.

At least at first, I think everyone will feel as though it's the most precious commodity, when they realize that things that they used to be able to do with the other civs for "free," they now have to pay for.

 

[GeneralZIft]

In Civ6 single player, the most dominant yield was Culture. No matter the VC, early Culture delivered the greatest return. Paired with high Faith generation, you could steamroll any setup (see: Khmer). Of course all yields had some varying degree of value. You still needed Food, Production, etc, but Culture was the clear winner. As much as I'm hoping for absolute balance, a meta always emerges as superior. Not to mention trying to balance a game with so many variables is near impossible. Maybe the reformulated yield setup and game design (e.g. the age system & legacy paths) will work together to keep imbalance in check and deny a highly dominant meta from emerging, allowing for more competitive approaches to the game. We just don't know, but until we find out...

What do you think will emerge as the most valuable yield?

Side Note: The beauty of Civ is that playing the game to RP and enjoy the world always has a place, and it will take a front seat at launch, even for the maniacs like myself who always lean towards optimizing. Here's to hoping the game design can keep the RP world building fun rolling as long as possible for the sickos.

Eh? I thought it was production. Civ6 Production and Science was a killer combo. Or faith and production if you had that one belief.
In Civ7 I assume it will continue to be Production.

 

[gdr_willter]

I too won't be surprised if the answer turns out to be influence.

At least at first, I think everyone will feel as though it's the most precious commodity, when they realize that things that they used to be able to do with the other civs for "free," they now have to pay for.

Actually you always needed some compensation for that things. Gold, alliance, or even envoy and diplomatic favor which were the same things with influence.

 

[The_goggles_do_nothing]

I suspect it will be culture because the Civ cultural tree bonuses are generally very good and will help you achieve the Legacy goals. Influence will be a wild card. Good benefits with Influence but require the other civ to have influence.

 

[pokiehl]

My guess is Culture or Happiness.

 

[Lord Yanaek]

In Civ6 single player, the most dominant yield was Culture...

Not so sure about that. A small amount of early culture is extremely powerful to unlock better governments faster but you don't need that much. The same could be said about faith : a small amount of early faith is extremely powerful, if only to get that free settler, but that doesn't make faith the dominant yield.
Science, while not the strongest early yield, is very important later (as in every Civ game before) for any victory but religious (even for culture victory, science is of utmost importance in order to reach flight earlier rather than later).
Production is very important, although gold (or faith with the correct beliefs/buildings/governors) could easily replace it for everything but science victory (and even then, buying some GP could solve the issue of low production). Rush-buying units, buildings and even districts (with the help of the right governor) is often more efficient than using production because it's immediate.

All things considered, Civ6 is quite balanced as far as yields are concerned, at least the latest iterations of Civ6. Different yields are more or less important for different victories, and that's a good thing. The only yield which isn't very important is food because growing large, well developed cities, is terribly sub-optimal compared to spamming plenty of backwater towns. A few specific civilizations can benefit from high population cities, but for most civilizations a moderately large capital is enough if there's a large number of "trash" cities to support it. You just need enough food to reach the threshold for 2-3 districts and that's quite easy, even without unique districts.

I would love for food to be more important in Civ7, and i think large cities will be more viable (maybe they will finally strike a balance between the Civ5 tall meta, and the Cuiv6 wide meta) but i think the most important yield, at least at launch will be Influence. You'll need that to do basically anything, and every victory will benefit from it.
Need more science? You can "buy" that with influence.
Want to go to ignore diplomacy and go to war? You need influence or you'll get crushed by war support.
Want to simply develop your empire? You're sure to annoy some AI in the process so better save some influence to reject sanctions ...
Without influence you'll simply have no control over the game, the game will be playing you and not the other way around.

Hopefully, they will balance it after a couple patches, but i'll be sure to produce plenty of that thing during my first games.

 

[TheGhostEnthusiast]

Food seems pretty important now that it gets you the tiles you can build on and your tile improvements and the seemingly valuable Specialists. Of course, without good Gold or Production you can't get as much out of those tiles, so we'll see.

 

[ggmoyang]

I guess it would be production - getting a lot of buildings in a city seems to be quite important.

 

[Acken]

The balance is almost never between the yields directly but between the options giving those yields. The goal isn't to make 1 gold = 1 prod = 1 culture. The goal is to make sure the +X culture option is not always the best choice and that in some cases you can also make good use of the +Y gold option depending on the Civ, terrain or objective you have. In general, CIV is at its best when there is good synergy opportunities between your terrain and your choices.

Also, for "interyield" balance you need to actually have a choice to make. As an example, influence doesn't seem to be a very common yield that you can choose to increase so even if it is important there won't be a lot of time where it will be at the expense of another. Influence looked very valuable for that early boost in culture presented in the streams but it also looked mostly passively accumulated.

For civ7 it is almost impossible to really predict at this stage which options will systematically be viewed as the best.

 

[Seek]

My guess is Production:
1: Legacies and Victories are almost entirely reliant on production, whether to house GWs, build units and commanders, or to build the final Victory Projects.
2: Overbuilding requires a large amount of reinvestiture of production every era.
3: Production now = food, as very new building adds a population. Whether this is meaningful is too early to say, but it’s worth noting.

Happiness seems to be extremely high priority also, as it allows for more specialists and settlements. Edit: and of course Policy Slots!

 

[Krikkit1]

My guess is Production:
1: Legacies and Victories are almost entirely reliant on production, whether to house GWs, build units and commanders, or to build the final Victory Projects.
2: Overbuilding requires a large amount of reinvestiture of production every era.
3: Production now = food, as very new building adds a population. Whether this is meaningful is too early to say, but it’s worth noting.

Happiness seems to be extremely high priority also, as it allows for more specialists and settlements.

New buildings don't add population??
Buildings+New population are the two separate ways to acquire blank tiles... put a new pop on it or build a building on it

Also buildings have both Happiness and Money maintenance costs.

 

[King Flevance]

One thing that makes it harder to tell is the amount of yield you can now get per tile. The highest yields possible before were in the teens and maybe broke 20 in hyper absurd scenarios. The highest average tile tield was 8-10. Civ 7 is boasting 40+ tile yields. 20+ looks pretty common.

I always vote food because it is essential to gaining all the others but towns actually seem to have mitigated the food yield necessity within a city.

Influence is an interesting guess. I am not sure which yield, if any, will pull ahead. You could make a reasonable argument for them all. I am partial to science, but gold is certainly more flexible.

 

[Krikkit1]

One thing that makes it harder to tell is the amount of yield you can now get per tile. The highest yields possible before were in the teens and maybe broke 20 in hyper absurd scenarios. The highest average tile tield was 8-10. Civ 7 is boasting 40+ tile yields. 20+ looks pretty common.

I always vote food because it is essential to gaining all the others but towns actually seem to have mitigated the food yield necessity within a city.

Influence is an interesting guess. I am not sure which yield, if any, will pull ahead. You could make a reasonable argument for them all. I am partial to science, but gold is certainly more flexible.

One thing about science (and culture and happiness) is any accumulated advantage in it it doesn't carry over age transitions, gold and influence do.

 

[Seek]

New buildings don't add population??
Buildings+New population are the two separate ways to acquire blank tiles... put a new pop on it or build a building on it

Also buildings have both Happiness and Money maintenance costs.

They do, but I’m now not sure if it’s all new buildings (overbuilding definitely doesn’t count) or just a new Urban District derived from constructing a building. I suspect the latter, so it’s fair to say a portion of building Production is Food.

Having trouble finding definitive proof one way or another due to the woefully low-information City screen, but just compare any city or town’s pop with the number of Improvements. It’s particularly clear in the latter portion of the antiquity stream before specialists come into play.

 

[Seek]

One thing about science (and culture and happiness) is any accumulated advantage in it it doesn't carry over age transitions, gold and influence do.

Since Cities become towns at age transition one could argue gold doesn’t fully carry over as well (barring Economic
Legacy golden age).

 

[Siptah]

Since Cities become towns at age transition one could argue gold doesn’t fully carry over as well (barring Economic
Legacy golden age).

While I can't answer if you loose any gold from your coffers, this is one of the reason why I think gold is more important than before: at the start of the next age, you want to have as much as possible at your hands to get some towns (back) up to cities asap.