Post GS... my ideal civ6 : mechanically, a game that doesn't really have any innate forces pushing you to one playstyle or another. You have to play the map and your civ to get the most out of a game.
I'll break down 3 key areas and hopefully focus on a guiding philosophy more than specific changes:
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Empire level
IMO, the best thing about civ6 over civ5 is that building an empire is way more fun, with the new districts and wonders and how you can work with terrain. It feels good to see a city site and imagine where you'd put things to make it a good city. Petra, ruhr, St basils, Huey- players get excited when they see this.
Taking that idea into the fact that yes, civ6 is currently a wide empire game, I would make a few tweaks.
The overarching idea is that you really aren't punished or rewarded for number of cities, you'll be punished for having
total population. How you choose to do that is up to you. You may want to go the "siberia: approach and leverage the fact that you can have more terrain, more resource deposits, etc. You may want to take the "manhattan" approach and concentrate your citizens, because you can maximize the efficacy of your infrastructure that way. To make the manhattan approach valid, the game obviously needs some adjustments. My five points for tall:
- Revamping t2/t3 district buildings to be more dynamic and reward taller cities (for example: instead of giving innate science and powered science, the innate bonus becomes +1 science per specialty district in the city.)
- Expanding neighborhoods and city center buildings. For example, adding more neighborhood buildings and mid/late game city center structures. The idea would be to boost the power of cities with neighborhoods (large ones) and the CC structures would be useful, but ICS strategies simply would be spending too much production building so many copies of them.
- National wonders. For each specialty district. Some would come early, some would come later, but they would have both powerful effects in the home city and most would have regional auras so that players willing to invest (these would be expensive!) could make a very powerful core of super cities if they wanted. Maybe have some fun and throw in a late game "Arcology" NW for super growth/housing in one city!
- Specialist economy- many people talk about it, but the essential problem of districts being one per city could be alleviated by letting larger cities slot specialists to effectively "give them more campuses" etc.
- Policy cards. Every policy card except for god-king and autocratic legacy is a wide card. New cards, especially to support some of these features, need to be added so that the gameplay is balanced and more importantly so players see them- and start thinking about how they could stack them! "If I built 3 neighborhoods and the public transit building, slotted that card, and got in range of the ironworks, this city would be so powerful!" Type of thoughts.
The idea of all this is that once you get into the middle ages and you've hopefully planted a few cities down, you have a strategic choice: should I invest my resources in building more cities, building up the cities I have, or building an army and going to war? See 'combat' for the third option. But if these are loosely balanced, with early game being a little better to expand and late game being a little better to build up, I think we could have a full ecosystem of viable strats. Also, taking away the free amenity every city gets (first 2 pop are free) and replacing it with giving the palace extra amenities. Life is hard. But I would say a smaller empire should be around 6 cities for it to be competitive on a small map.
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Combat
Obviously right now war is amazing. But a big part of that is that the Ai is bad at defending. That's not what I will focus on here. Instead, I'd like to look at the unit classes. My personal opinion, but each unit class should have a compelling raison d'etre, and for the most part unit gaps are tamped down a little. This is because it's almost impossible to have unique unit classes when sometimes your 'counter' is an era ahead and sometimes an era behind.
By highlighting class characteristics, which from my point of view would be inspired by RTS games over pure realism, then we can finally get what the devs wanted with the system in the first place: forcing players to consider diversity in their units.
What am i talking about? Well, let's look at mounted units. Currently, Heavy cav is the best unit type: they cost the same or barely more than a contemporary unit, they hit harder, and they move faster. Why use light cav outside of horsemen, especially in GS, where the huge gaps in upgrade lines will be plugged for mounted?
An example of tweaks here might be:
Heavy cav: The big boys on the block, they are the strongest unit class, and they have good mobility. They are the premier unit to crush enemies in the field. However, they are expensive to build (in prod and resources) and maintain. The nation that can afford to field such a force will be feared indeed!
Light cav: focusing on speed, these units are faster than heavy cav. While they don't have the same strength in direct combat, they excel at pillaging enemy civs and taking out ranged and siege units. A good commander will need to protect his back line from flanking cavalry- lest they chew up his vulnerable units. Light cav can all move after attacking to highlight their mobility.
Mounted generally: All mounted units face the lack of defensive terrain bonuses, and a tough penalty when attacking cities (-10 to -17.) They certainly can rip through an enemy army- but once you've ground them down to their garrisons, you'll need to bring in more suited units to take all their cities.
Some unique attributes are emphasized with innate bonuses, some are in their promotion trees.
And so on with other units- touching costs, where they appear on the tech tree, maintenance, strength, etc.
The theory is that in any given era, it actually makes sense to build any particular unit available if that unit class is needed on the field. None of this spearman being beaten by horses nonsense, or pikes costing more than knights do.
To mitigate conquest without changing combat, I might make it more expensive to hold on to occupied cities. Not by making them loyalty flip, but require more amenities and gold to keep up and running. It's expensive to be King of all the known world! This way, warmongers need to think about their economic base, giving a vulnerability outside the battlefield.
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Fundamental Imbalance fixes
- Spamming science and culture is extraordinarily strong because of all the advantages you get. I think this is not ideal mechanically. So I would ramp up penalties for players researching things ahead of the current world era, and give large discounts for players trying to research things behind the current world era. The idea is that as long as a player doesn't neglect any area too much, they can focus on different things and never be totally screwed. For example, right now, mali can go all out gold and faith, but it won't matter if they play a good korea. You simply cannot afford to buy twice the units because the koreans are an era ahead of you. Ideally this system would keep most players with the same overall population within an era or so of each other. (being reduced to one city will really screw over a player, being absolutely massive will still be good.)
- Upgrade costs are completely out of line and make upgrading existing units immensely cheaper than building new ones. Upgrades would become a touch more expensive than now (from ~2:1 ratio to more like 3:1,) and the upgrade card would be removed: instead offering a discount on strategic resource consumption to upgrade. (So upgrading a knight to a cuirassier might only require 10 niter instead of 20, but you still have to pay the gold.) It would be cheaper to upgrade than buy but it wouldn't be so cheap that you should build more units than you need early just to save on upgrade costs later.
- To chop or not to chop: chopping is amazing, even with the fix to overflow. It just keeps ramping up while resources stay the same. I would add a smattering of city center buildings like some of the ones in civ5 to give a shot in the arm to bonus resources (think the old stable, forge, mint, etc.)
- Lastly, coastal cities currently are not so good. Hopefully some of the GS changes help fix that, but I might be tempted to extend some of those bonuses sea routes get into domestic trade routes for them.
Nitpicks: no stone unturned- little details like oil wells counting for IZ adjacency, carrier fleets getting more air unit capacity, stuff like that. And fixing the remaining typos in the game.
Ultimate, in-a-nutshell takeaway:
-Any empire size can work: if you can afford to hold onto it! (This may mean how to control half a continent or how to deal with overcrowded cities!)
-Military units are balanced but have their advantages and disadvantages. Spamming knights won't be the game winner it is now.
-Any focus can work: food, production, gold, science, culture, religion, war- there are ups and downs of emphasizing each area. Yes, this includes science.
I love civ, this is just how I see things.