The good news is that this kind of thing seems like it'd be fairly easy to mod.
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CIV6: Thinking more on District Cost Scaling
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November 2nd, 2016, 10:57
(This post was last modified: November 2nd, 2016, 10:58 by lossofmercy.)
Yeah, I am not a fan of the scaling. It makes the game feel slow and it doesn't make sense in anyway.
(November 2nd, 2016, 06:08)BRickAstley Wrote: You already have that with the limit on number of districts by city size mechanic Not really as you can have 3 districts with size 7 which doesn't take much work. As the CS-benefits work for districts there is no real drawback for having as many districts as possible. Todays timeconsuming building (if not holding back research deliberately) you have to make decisions between district building and Units/Wonders/Buildings. Make districts easy and cheap to build and they become the one right choice to build anytime possible.
Ok, but... what's wrong with that? Why not let cities have any district they want?
I think the bigger problem might be there isn't enough other important tiles or resources because of the trader. Like maybe make food much harder to grab? If you had to farm 3 farms to populate every district, the game would naturally limit how many districts you can build. (November 2nd, 2016, 11:55)Rowain Wrote:(November 2nd, 2016, 06:08)BRickAstley Wrote: You already have that with the limit on number of districts by city size mechanic I don't really think the cost scaling is what holds you back from spamming districts. I mean, generally speaking, you want Commercial Hub in every city for the TR and you want Industrial in most cities for the overlapping production bonuses. Beyond that, even if the cost to build never changed, all the rest are pretty situational. I don't really mind some cost scaling - the increase by eras is heavy-handed and encourages "queuing" but that's more because the game doesn't have production decay and has cost snapshotting, two features which probably should be patched out. But basically, you're going to want Harbors in all your coastal cities regardless of whether they take 10 or 20 turns to complete, because TRs are that strong. You're going to want some Holy Sites if you're playing a Religion focused game. You'll want some Entertainment Districts if you're amenity constrained and not at all if you aren't. You'll want Theatre Districts if you're going for a culture game and not at all if you aren't. You're only going to want a Campus or two because even managed optimally, Science outstrips Production. Encampments are primarily good for later era Army building and the production bonus they give to TR, and because of that last fact, might be the district most likely to be spammed if the costs are static and not built much if they're dynamically increasing. Neighborhoods and Aqueducts are like Entertainment - useful to relax constraints but certainly not every city, every game builds. Not for nothing, but it doesn't help that many of the best modifiers come simply from building the district, rather than a building nor that the buildings themselves are supposed to be mitigated by their maintenance cost but gold is so easy to get that it is irrelevant. I guess to me the best way to balance the districts is 1. To make the choice of district vs tile improvement meaningful. Obviously a well-developed district should always be better than a tile improvement but the cost needs to be sufficient to make you think about payback horizons. 2. Make building units more valuable by making upgrades much more cost-prohibitive, making it a real decision whether to constantly upgrade your units rather than building new ones. 3. Making wonders slightly better across the board and have less restrictive building scenarios. I don't have the game solved by any means but the game right now basically for the first 100 or so turns, you mostly build units, settlers, workers then you switch to getting your TR steroids going by getting the right districts built and building traders. Then you accelerate to your win condition. Assuming not using unit selling exploits, there's little incentive to build anything more than the occasional unit from there because your ancient and classical army just trivially upgrades for the rest of the game. Likewise, other than an early holy site if you're pursuing religion (dubious as a strategic choice in a non-religious victory game given how much the AI prioritizes spreading theirs hither and yon) there's little reason to build any districts until you've gotten yourself to that t100-ish point. Anyway, the TL:DR here is that the costs are only one piece of the puzzle that's lacking. I think some slight boosts to tile yields, probably at various techs in the tree; a slight easing of the district increase costs, probably by making the curve steeper - ending in the same place it does now but starting a fair bit lower; a tweak to the availability of gold, between TR yields, unit selling and AI manipulation; and a moderate rebalance pass on the wonders. Those things together probably mean you're making a lot more interesting decisions about what to do with your cities. I suspect this will become more apparent in a month or so when the T-hawk types figure out whatever the optimal city layout is - I'm almost certain there is something approaching one in the current state of the game.
I've got some dirt on my shoulder, can you brush it off for me?
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