One of the things I'm learning as I play into the mid-game now is that trade routes are a lot more important than I initially realized. It really is amazing how much production seemingly explodes when you place some factories in Industrial Zones with adjacency bonuses and run domestic trade routes between the cities.
I haven't decided yet if I like this or not. It seems pretty powerful though if I can figure out the proper way to plan for and run routes. One of my great puzzlements early on was "why do I care about some of these districts when they're so expensive," and it's nice to start to get some answers to that as I experiment with them. Just would have been nice if the Civilopedia was less terrible, and it wouldn't have taken me so long just to understand this basic concept.
(October 31st, 2016, 14:27)scooter Wrote: One of the things I'm learning as I play into the mid-game now is that trade routes are a lot more important than I initially realized. It really is amazing how much production seemingly explodes when you place some factories in Industrial Zones with adjacency bonuses and run domestic trade routes between the cities.
I haven't decided yet if I like this or not. It seems pretty powerful though if I can figure out the proper way to plan for and run routes. One of my great puzzlements early on was "why do I care about some of these districts when they're so expensive," and it's nice to start to get some answers to that as I experiment with them. Just would have been nice if the Civilopedia was less terrible, and it wouldn't have taken me so long just to understand this basic concept.
I think food > production when it comes to trade routes. As I discovered in the Adventure, how much food a city produces doesn't matter that much when you can get anywhere from +4 to +10 (!!!) food from a trade route. I expect you could do better with a bit more knowledge on how the trading system works. This lets you grow any city on the map relatively quickly if you assign traders to maintain it. Later on when Industrial Zones start churning out production from trade, I started getting stuff like +8 Food, +7 Production, +2.5 Gold. With a stack of 20 traders your land becomes irrelevant aside from the adjacency bonuses. It's just a matter of getting them into a city. With growth, you can work more hill tiles which are low in food. With hill tiles and industrial zones, you start producing things really quickly. Once this happens it's just a matter of waiting around to win.
The main reason why I think it's stronger is that you never have to build farms. Ever. Aside from resources needing a farm, I built one useless farm. It's completely taking out a problem with getting a populated city and saves you time and worker actions. Traders are also really cheap so it's not like you're making much of an investment in them. The main penalty for building them is that you have to reassign them every time they complete a route which drags on the more traders you build. Four traders need reassigned, o wise leader, can you spare the time to tell them to go back and steal magical food from the same city they've visited for the past hundreds of years?
Just as an example, (minor spoilers for the adventure)
I had a city (Leeds) in the Adventure who had almost no growth potential. It was stuck at size 3 or 4 but had quite a few desert hills to work if they had the production. My original plan was to land Petra there but I didn't make enough of an effort. However, about the late Industrial Era phase I began putting traders in Leeds. At the end of the game, Leeds was at size 10 and still growing and was able to produce the average district in about seven turns.
(October 31st, 2016, 14:27)scooter Wrote: One of the things I'm learning as I play into the mid-game now is that trade routes are a lot more important than I initially realized. It really is amazing how much production seemingly explodes when you place some factories in Industrial Zones with adjacency bonuses and run domestic trade routes between the cities.
I haven't decided yet if I like this or not. It seems pretty powerful though if I can figure out the proper way to plan for and run routes. One of my great puzzlements early on was "why do I care about some of these districts when they're so expensive," and it's nice to start to get some answers to that as I experiment with them. Just would have been nice if the Civilopedia was less terrible, and it wouldn't have taken me so long just to understand this basic concept.
I think food > production when it comes to trade routes. As I discovered in the Adventure, how much food a city produces doesn't matter that much when you can get anywhere from +4 to +10 (!!!) food from a trade route. I expect you could do better with a bit more knowledge on how the trading system works. This lets you grow any city on the map relatively quickly if you assign traders to maintain it. Later on when Industrial Zones start churning out production from trade, I started getting stuff like +8 Food, +7 Production, +2.5 Gold. With a stack of 20 traders your land becomes irrelevant aside from the adjacency bonuses. It's just a matter of getting them into a city. With growth, you can work more hill tiles which are low in food. With hill tiles and industrial zones, you start producing things really quickly. Once this happens it's just a matter of waiting around to win.
The main reason why I think it's stronger is that you never have to build farms. Ever. Aside from resources needing a farm, I built one useless farm. It's completely taking out a problem with getting a populated city and saves you time and worker actions. Traders are also really cheap so it's not like you're making much of an investment in them. The main penalty for building them is that you have to reassign them every time they complete a route which drags on the more traders you build. Four traders need reassigned, o wise leader, can you spare the time to tell them to go back and steal magical food from the same city they've visited for the past hundreds of years?
Just as an example, (minor spoilers for the adventure)
I had a city (Leeds) in the Adventure who had almost no growth potential. It was stuck at size 3 or 4 but had quite a few desert hills to work if they had the production. My original plan was to land Petra there but I didn't make enough of an effort. However, about the late Industrial Era phase I began putting traders in Leeds. At the end of the game, Leeds was at size 10 and still growing and was able to produce the average district in about seven turns.
Farms are still useful, just not really until Feudalism and really Replaceable Parts. At that point, they can feed a ton of mines and/or citizens working the districts.
There's no doubt that the internal trade routes are too strong, though. Once you get midgame, put Commercial Hubs and Industrial Zones everywhere and you have a ridiculous number of TRs criss-crossing your empire generating food, production, gold, etc, its really just a trivial matter of pursuing whatever victory condition you desire. This of course means that your TRs aren't really ever at risk of being pillaged if you've planned your settling remotely well. Ultimately, I think international routes should be stronger than internal routes so there's more of the risk factor involved.
Still, its not terrible - if you get to the point where you can safely do what I just said, you've probably navigated the early game well enough that you were going to win anyway, no different than the progression to victory in any other game.
I've got some dirt on my shoulder, can you brush it off for me?
Guys, if you get a chance, could you open the attached save and check if you can see the rivers. I don't want to shout 'bug' until I'm certain, but I'm not seeing any rivers when in normal map view. Can see them in strategic view. Wondering if something's wrong with my system, or if it's an actual problem
(October 31st, 2016, 22:15)Gaspar Wrote: Farms are still useful, just not really until Feudalism and really Replaceable Parts. At that point, they can feed a ton of mines and/or citizens working the districts.
There's no doubt that the internal trade routes are too strong, though. Once you get midgame, put Commercial Hubs and Industrial Zones everywhere and you have a ridiculous number of TRs criss-crossing your empire generating food, production, gold, etc, its really just a trivial matter of pursuing whatever victory condition you desire. This of course means that your TRs aren't really ever at risk of being pillaged if you've planned your settling remotely well. Ultimately, I think international routes should be stronger than internal routes so there's more of the risk factor involved.
Still, its not terrible - if you get to the point where you can safely do what I just said, you've probably navigated the early game well enough that you were going to win anyway, no different than the progression to victory in any other game.
There was a post on the r/civ subreddit yesterday that was arguing this same thing from another side; of course the main workhorse of your empire turns away from tile yields to districts and trade routes, it's more historically accurate.
(October 31st, 2016, 22:15)Gaspar Wrote: There's no doubt that the internal trade routes are too strong, though. Once you get midgame, put Commercial Hubs and Industrial Zones everywhere and you have a ridiculous number of TRs criss-crossing your empire generating food, production, gold, etc, its really just a trivial matter of pursuing whatever victory condition you desire. This of course means that your TRs aren't really ever at risk of being pillaged if you've planned your settling remotely well. Ultimately, I think international routes should be stronger than internal routes so there's more of the risk factor involved.
Still, its not terrible - if you get to the point where you can safely do what I just said, you've probably navigated the early game well enough that you were going to win anyway, no different than the progression to victory in any other game.
This doesn't seem like a problem at all if the AI is competent enough to get to this phase of the game and knows how to run trade routes. I haven't played on a high enough difficulty to know if this is true.
I get that it's a bit of a departure (I don't know how TRs worked in Civ5) for the series to de-emphasize tile working late and shift towards a trade route + district economy, but I don't know if it's overpowered as much as it's just the way the game is designed - to force you to think about them early and plan for them. Towns were "overpowered" in Civ4, but it took a long time, some planning, and some sacrifice to get them fully weaponized.
(October 31st, 2016, 22:15)Gaspar Wrote: Farms are still useful, just not really until Feudalism and really Replaceable Parts. At that point, they can feed a ton of mines and/or citizens working the districts.
There's no doubt that the internal trade routes are too strong, though. Once you get midgame, put Commercial Hubs and Industrial Zones everywhere and you have a ridiculous number of TRs criss-crossing your empire generating food, production, gold, etc, its really just a trivial matter of pursuing whatever victory condition you desire. This of course means that your TRs aren't really ever at risk of being pillaged if you've planned your settling remotely well. Ultimately, I think international routes should be stronger than internal routes so there's more of the risk factor involved.
Still, its not terrible - if you get to the point where you can safely do what I just said, you've probably navigated the early game well enough that you were going to win anyway, no different than the progression to victory in any other game.
I had written up a reply to this and was going through a bit of city growth mathematics when I realized I had no idea how much the city itself produces in regards to yields. One thing led to another and I made the exciting discovery that specialists in the game... exist! I didn't know that at all. Which, in hindsight, I totally should have since you made reference of that.
What exactly do they produce?
+8 Gold for a Commercial Hub
+8 Culture for a Theatre District
+6 Science for a Campus
+6 Production for an Industrial Zone
(I had no faith district (or whatever it is) to check.)
You have some outré, less useful specialists in such things as Encampments (+2 culture) and Royal Navy Dockyards (+4 Culture, +2 Gold iirc). The basic district specialists seem to me quite good. +6 Production is better then a late game mine and I can't even think of anything else to come close to the rest of the yields. Aside from internal trade routes, of course. I bring this up because being able to support specialists to work these tiles seems like a worthwhile investment. If you focus on getting Feudalism and getting farms set up to support them, it would make your cities really quite powerful. Especially when it comes to going for an early cultural or religious (presumably - a faith district can't be that out of line with the others) victory. The problem would be putting together enough housing to support the population.
Although I'm hardly swayed by the fact that it would be worth putting up farms to work mines. If you're in a food crunch and can't work as many mines as you'd like, it seems to me that you'd rather build an Industrial Zone to take advantage of the traders when they come online quicker rather then try and grow up your population then add in the district once you cap from farms. Barring a dreadful frozen or desert start where every city has no food.
(November 1st, 2016, 08:54)Ichabod Wrote: Speaking of the civilopedia and mistakes, is this true:
Do you mean the first part or the second part ? The first part is definitely true
I mean the second part, about it taking more turns to build, in the case you have a jungle/forest. I'd imagine losing the chop yield was bad enough, but I don't really think that part is accurate.
