CIV6: Thinking more on District Cost Scaling

[Staltran]

But if you build a new city, you can build a library for the same price as the previous libraries. In VI the campus price will have risen, and the later buildings are still more expensive.

[scooter]

Building more libraries has never resulted in libraries costing more. You could still always build them cheaply because they're libraries. Why would they get more expensive. You're talking about base cost.

A university is the same thing as a second library.  It just fools you into thinking it's something different by having a different name.

The university is irrelevant. It's a separate building that happens to have the same modifier, but it's not a replacement. Most cities build libraries, but few build universities because their payback horizons are totally different.

Civ4: I build a new city 300T into the game. I want to run some scientists, so I build a 90h library just like I did 220T ago.

Civ6: I build a new city 300T into the game, and it no longer makes sense to build basic districts in it due to the scaling.


Anyway, I agree with Gaspar that the goal is to limit expansion by making later cities worse at paying for themselves than new cities rather than some misguided attempt to limit districts. This just feels like a crappy way to do it. I have a feeling when the meta for this game sorts itself out you're going to see a lot of people stopping at a precise city count (8 or 9 maybe?) with a precise spacing and district placement unless this changes. Once districts get to a certain expense level, new cities contribute basically nothing so why invest in them? And if this doesn't change, I fear Civ6 won't have much replay value. One Right Move and all that.

[Rowain]

In Civ4 you have Money as limit the and scaling happens with Money as via Inflation/citycount. In Civ 6 this scaling happens via hammers. In Civ4 you break through the stranglehold on expansion via Currency. In Civ6 you can get productive new cities later in game if you utilise the tools (= traderoutes) accordingly.

But Civ6 as Civ5 has not the goal to cover the whole map with cities. The time of the fishing-villages /completely filling the land is over. And I doubt they will bring them back in any of the next iterations. The casuals (=Main market) is happy with managing 4-6 cities they have no interest in running 20-30 city empires. (Just look at all the moaning about how time-consuming lategame turns are in Civ 4 that happens in all our Pitbosses ).

The not filled up Map has the advantage that you can get a missing lategame strategic resource by settling a otherwise not that contributing city which is needed as the resources are not evenly divided.

If you want filled Maps + continual settling of cities then stay in Civ4. And I fear that is also the solution if you want balanced MP-games at least at the current state.

[Gaspar]

In Civ4 you have Money as limit the and scaling happens with Money as via Inflation/citycount. In Civ 6 this scaling happens via hammers. In Civ4 you break through the stranglehold on expansion via Currency. In Civ6 you can get productive new cities later in game if you utilise the tools (= traderoutes) accordingly.

But Civ6 as Civ5 has not the goal to cover the whole map with cities. The time of the fishing-villages /completely filling the land is over. And I doubt they will bring them back in any of the next iterations. The casuals (=Main market) is happy with managing 4-6 cities they have no interest in running 20-30 city empires. (Just look at all the moaning about how time-consuming lategame turns are in Civ 4 that happens in all our Pitbosses ).

The not filled up Map has the advantage that you can get a missing lategame strategic resource by settling a otherwise not that contributing city which is needed as the resources are not evenly divided.

If you want filled Maps + continual settling of cities then stay in Civ4. And I fear that is also the solution if you want balanced MP-games at least at the current state.

The thing is, managing a 50 city empire in Civ6 wouldn't be as time-consuming as a 25 city empire in Civ4 because most of the city level micro is obsolete except at the highest levels. You don't have game long worker micro either.

I get the sense that Civ6 is actually after something closer to filled maps than Civ5 was. The trick is finding the balance between settling a billion size 5 cities (i.e release Civ5 ICS) and not wanting you to settle. The problem is there is not really enough stuff to do with your production so if they didn't have a hard brake on settling of some variety, ICS would be a one right choice. And I'm still not entirely sure that something close to that isn't the optimal play here, we don't really know because we're not at high level play on these boards yet and the reddit/CFC types are abusing the horseman economy exploits so hard that any conclusions they come to aren't really relevant to a community which avoids exploits.

Anyway, I think we're all mostly agreeing on what's going on here, just not on 1. How much of it is intentional and 2. Whether or not it leaves a good strategy game in its wake.

[HansLemurson]

I agree with Sullla, though given the other systems currently in place I don't think it would be crazy for district costs to go up slightly based on how many of the the same district you've built previously. That's a bit of a tax on building lots of cities, and a bit of a failsafe against particular districts being undercosted and therefore spamworthy.

I think I can agree with this.

"The more of X you build, the more X costs" is a cheap and lazy way of balancing systems without really trying, which is vitally important when working in densely interconnected systems where it is impossible to test every possible combination.

Having costs scale based on something unrelated and out of your control however (you cannot stop research or culture growth) feels too much like being punished for success.  I'm not even totally sure what science is even FOR in this game.  It doesn't seem to actually improve my empire all that much.

[SevenSpirits]

Science is for reaching apprenticeship.

[Borsche]

Science is for reaching apprenticeship.

You're definitely selling it short and I vehemently disagree.



Science is also for reaching Industrialization.

[rho21]

So to paraphrase, science is there to let you get more production, which offsets the extra costs imposed as you gain science and as you build more copies of a thing? I guess that explains why there's cost scaling by number then: it's to nerf the minimal science strategy.

[HansLemurson]

So to paraphrase, science is there to let you get more production, which offsets the extra costs imposed as you gain science and as you build more copies of a thing? I guess that explains why there's cost scaling by number then: it's to nerf the minimal science strategy.

Technophobia OP.

[Brian Shanahan]

I agree with Sullla, though given the other systems currently in place I don't think it would be crazy for district costs to go up slightly based on how many of the the same district you've built previously. That's a bit of a tax on building lots of cities, and a bit of a failsafe against particular districts being undercosted and therefore spamworthy.

I think I can agree with this.

"The more of X you build, the more X costs" is a cheap and lazy way of balancing systems without really trying, which is vitally important when working in densely interconnected systems where it is impossible to test every possible combination.

Having costs scale based on something unrelated and out of your control however (you cannot stop research or culture growth) feels too much like being punished for success.  I'm not even totally sure what science is even FOR in this game.  It doesn't seem to actually improve my empire all that much.

The way the cost scales is also intuitively wrong as well, because in real life the more x gets built the more it scales down in cost (except in corner cases using lots of very rare materials), because you're getting better at building ig, you're finding the tricks that allow you to shave costs without losing utility or durability, you('ve a knowledge base to pass on to the new hires, &c.