Districts Suck

[CivNut123]

It used to be that if you wanted to build something, you went to your city, and you chose an option to build it. As long as you had the technology and the production, it was yours.

With districts that is all gone. You must have a district before you can build something? Districts take 30 turns to build?

So what, you say? Well, consider that there is a population limit imposed on building a district. A city that doesn't have that district can't build anything related to that.

That means, for example, if your city simply needs an entertainment item, you are @#$@#'d. You can't build anything of that type.

How is this not a major reduction of the game?

Conclusion: Your ability to construct simple items has been taken away. Perhaps because "districts are new", the user base has failed to complain enough about this!

[hopsblues]

All you all's need to get your production levels up. My districts are under 20 turns to build. Then like 4 for the next thing within it.

[Captain Giggity]

Originally posted by CivNut123:

It used to be that if you wanted to build something, you went to your city, and you chose an option to build it. As long as you had the technology and the production, it was yours.

With districts that is all gone. You must have a district before you can build something? Districts take 30 turns to build?

So what, you say? Well, consider that there is a population limit imposed on building a district. A city that doesn't have that district can't build anything related to that.

That means, for example, if your city simply needs an entertainment item, you are @#$@#'d. You can't build anything of that type.

How is this not a major reduction of the game?

Conclusion: Your ability to construct simple items has been taken away. Perhaps because "districts are new", the user base has failed to complain enough about this!

I hear ya. It's much slower than Civ 5 which makes it a bit tedious. Personally I'm not touching the game again until all the DLC's and updates are out. Hopefully then the broke AI is fixed and they've balanced the game out.

[Al Capwned]

I didn't like them at first but they're starting to grow on me.

[Corgisaurus]

Looks like I just broke my previous record. 200 Turns for an Aerodome District anyone? No wonder Aztecs are so good.

[Matthew]

I agree, districts as they are currently implemented are a failed idea.

There are a few problems with them. First, the buildings each offer are locked behind the high, up front production cost to build the district. And that cost progressively gets higher, presumably to ensure the cost can never be trivialized and always a significant investment. The problem is, since building improvements are seperated by district, you can no longer improve cities in a balanced manner. If you build a science district, it will be ages before you get around to building an entertainment district or culture district. To put this in perspective, imagine if in Civ 5 you needed to build a library, university, and reserach lab BEFORE you can build a colosseum or amphitheatre. That is essentially how Civ 6 plays out.

This is why the current meta has broken down to just spamming industry and commercial zones, because if you are forced to eat the high production cost just to be allowed to build simple improvements, you may as well get the production (and indirect production through trade-routes) ones first.

More to the point, the only reason why the production costs are artificially inflated is to try and extend the game after it has been overly simplified. Districts are already locked by city size (every 3 after the first), so if the player could build a district in a reasonable amount of time, then they have nothing left to do but spam units they don't need and clog up the map even more, just while waiting to be allowed to build another district. So the cost needed to be high just to give players something to do (that something being waiting for a district to finish, so fun!) This problem didn't exist before, because you had a constant trickle of improvements you could build as you moved through the tech tree, rather than this forced lockout by districts.

Another problem with districts is it has removed all value from the map. Regular tile yields have been increased to make up for districts taking up some of the tiles themselves, but as a result there are no longer "good" and "bad" city locations. Previously, a location with a few grassland tiles and a couple hills while the rest is flat desert would be a poor city location. You could settle there, but it would never be a great city. But now, you just place all your districts on the flatland desert tiles, work the handful of increased regular tiles, and that city location is no different than any other. Add in the fact that you are pumping additional food and production into it through a trade-route (you DID build a commercial district first, right?) and there is no discernable difference between that city location and another. The same goes for the supposed excellent city location: All that grassland and production tiles? Half is going to get covered up by districts anyway, so they may as well have been desert or tundra.

The result? The map no longer matters. You just spam cities anywhere and everywhere without care, because they will all progress at the same rate regardless.

But wait! you say, how about all that complex city planning? Give it a few games, and you will see it doesn't exist. The adjacency bonuses are insignificant other than maybe a science or faith district surrounded by a ton of mountains. For everything else, you just plop down on your ♥♥♥♥♥♥ tiles you don't want to work anyway (such as desert). Any small gains you make through careful planning (+1 culture from an adjacent wonder lol) you will completely overshadow by spamming out more cities, more trade-routes, and more industrial zones.

The base idea of districts is not bad, but they are just terribly implemented. What they should have done is left the idea of districts as a late-game improvement. The early game should have been left alone, leaving reasonable production costs on improvements available everywhere, so they didn't have to force these artificially high production costs and limited charge workers just to keep players busy. It would also maintain value of tiles on the map. Then in late-game, the idea of high investment, specialized cities makes more sense. They would be essentially super tiles, allowing for more powerful improvments, a reward for developing a city since they would be difficult to acquire otherwise. So instead of this ICS mess we got now, players would WANT to develop cities in good city locations, so they could make cities strong enough to build and invest into districts. It would also help solve the long-established problem in the franchise of late-game getting boring. Districts would have been a new layer of city development and progression in the second half of the game.

But alas, we are stuck with the mess we got now. Unfortunately I don't foresee any major overhauls to the system outside of an expansion (paid, of course). So just keep spamming those commercial zones and trade-routes in the meantime I suppose :/

[andyapolis]

Originally posted by SamBC:

Originally posted by Sol†eria:

30 Turns? I've played games where an Aerodome would take almost a 100 turns to build if not for Aztec's builder abilities.

It's okay at the start. It's the INFLATION that's the problem. District costs should take into account that new Cities DON'T have the production to churn them out at ridiculous costs; especially at late eras.

Yeah, the way costs are scaled simply on how far you've progressed in the tech/civic trees really feels off and gets in the way. It would be better to scale based on the number of districts built, or the number of that district built, or some combination.

I'd wouldn't say it's off, I'd go with just plain stupid. I like the idea of the district system, but they failed on implementation as with so many other features in the game. As civilizations progress and discover new technologies, construction becomes easier and takes less time. That's a basic historical fact. In reality, it should take LESS time to construct things the more advanced a civilization is. The penalty makes no sense and should be removed. Especillay since it doesn't seem to be much of a hinderance to AI.

I see the district penatly as just another example of what I view as one of the biggest problems with the game, that it wasn't ready for release. Instead of making sure it was balanced and the AI could manage it's cities, the "fix" for this was to handicap the player.

[Sapient_Pest]

Originally posted by hopsblues:

All you all's need to get your production levels up. My districts are under 20 turns to build. Then like 4 for the next thing within it.

Completely meaningless statement without also specifying how many cities you've settled, how many other districts you've built, how far along in the tech tree you are and what speed you're playing on.

District production costs absolutely, without a doubt, spiral way out of control way too easily. I build my cities in such a fashion that heavily emphasizes production, and even in a city in the late-game that has +150 production on standard I've had districts take longer than 20 turns to build.

If your district is taking 20 turns to build in an even above-average production city either your empire is puny, you're still playing early game, you've barely built any districts up to this point or you're playing on a faster speed. There's no way you're clocking in at over 200+ production with every city - super-well placed Petra cities with trade routes won't even typically break that.

EDIT: And this doesn't even touch-in on the fact that the cities that need to build districts the most: your nascent settlements, are always the most ill-equipped to actually expand. This causes a meta where it's ICS and at-least queue districts ASAP or pay heavily for it in the long run.

The current system is bad.

[SamBC]

Originally posted by Matthew:

I agree, districts as they are currently implemented are a failed idea.

There are a few problems with them. First, the buildings each offer are locked behind the high, up front production cost to build the district. And that cost progressively gets higher, presumably to ensure the cost can never be trivialized and always a significant investment. The problem is, since building improvements are seperated by district, you can no longer improve cities in a balanced manner. If you build a science district, it will be ages before you get around to building an entertainment district or culture district. To put this in perspective, imagine if in Civ 5 you needed to build a library, university, and reserach lab BEFORE you can build a colosseum or amphitheatre. That is essentially how Civ 6 plays out.

The whole design intent is that you don't build everything in every city. So you're never going to get balanced development in every city in every area.

[Corgisaurus]

Originally posted by Matthew:

I agree, districts as they are currently implemented are a failed idea.

There are a few problems with them. First, the buildings each offer are locked behind the high, up front production cost to build the district. And that cost progressively gets higher, presumably to ensure the cost can never be trivialized and always a significant investment. The problem is, since building improvements are seperated by district, you can no longer improve cities in a balanced manner. If you build a science district, it will be ages before you get around to building an entertainment district or culture district. To put this in perspective, imagine if in Civ 5 you needed to build a library, university, and reserach lab BEFORE you can build a colosseum or amphitheatre. That is essentially how Civ 6 plays out.

This is why the current meta has broken down to just spamming industry and commercial zones, because if you are forced to eat the high production cost just to be allowed to build simple improvements, you may as well get the production (and indirect production through trade-routes) ones first.

More to the point, the only reason why the production costs are artificially inflated is to try and extend the game after it has been overly simplified. Districts are already locked by city size (every 3 after the first), so if the player could build a district in a reasonable amount of time, then they have nothing left to do but spam units they don't need and clog up the map even more, just while waiting to be allowed to build another district. So the cost needed to be high just to give players something to do (that something being waiting for a district to finish, so fun!) This problem didn't exist before, because you had a constant trickle of improvements you could build as you moved through the tech tree, rather than this forced lockout by districts.

Another problem with districts is it has removed all value from the map. Regular tile yields have been increased to make up for districts taking up some of the tiles themselves, but as a result there are no longer "good" and "bad" city locations. Previously, a location with a few grassland tiles and a couple hills while the rest is flat desert would be a poor city location. You could settle there, but it would never be a great city. But now, you just place all your districts on the flatland desert tiles, work the handful of increased regular tiles, and that city location is no different than any other. Add in the fact that you are pumping additional food and production into it through a trade-route (you DID build a commercial district first, right?) and there is no discernable difference between that city location and another. The same goes for the supposed excellent city location: All that grassland and production tiles? Half is going to get covered up by districts anyway, so they may as well have been desert or tundra.

The result? The map no longer matters. You just spam cities anywhere and everywhere without care, because they will all progress at the same rate regardless.

But wait! you say, how about all that complex city planning? Give it a few games, and you will see it doesn't exist. The adjacency bonuses are insignificant other than maybe a science or faith district surrounded by a ton of mountains. For everything else, you just plop down on your ♥♥♥♥♥♥ tiles you don't want to work anyway (such as desert). Any small gains you make through careful planning (+1 culture from an adjacent wonder lol) you will completely overshadow by spamming out more cities, more trade-routes, and more industrial zones.

The base idea of districts is not bad, but they are just terribly implemented. What they should have done is left the idea of districts as a late-game improvement. The early game should have been left alone, leaving reasonable production costs on improvements available everywhere, so they didn't have to force these artificially high production costs and limited charge workers just to keep players busy. It would also maintain value of tiles on the map. Then in late-game, the idea of high investment, specialized cities makes more sense. They would be essentially super tiles, allowing for more powerful improvments, a reward for developing a city since they would be difficult to acquire otherwise. So instead of this ICS mess we got now, players would WANT to develop cities in good city locations, so they could make cities strong enough to build and invest into districts. It would also help solve the long-established problem in the franchise of late-game getting boring. Districts would have been a new layer of city development and progression in the second half of the game.

But alas, we are stuck with the mess we got now. Unfortunately I don't foresee any major overhauls to the system outside of an expansion (paid, of course). So just keep spamming those commercial zones and trade-routes in the meantime I suppose :/

Wow all that was exactly what I was thinking about. You can't really build Campus or Theatre Districts first because the the inflated costs even from the mid game onwards makes constructing Industry Zones/Commercial Hubs absoluletly imperative.

That and Great People are somehow mostly earned through production these days has made Production the new Science. You can see why players are appalled when they limited the regional effects of buildings to just one. This move totally ignored why players were stacking those effects in the first place.

You make distcricts cost inflate at disgusting rates, you give AI bonus production to Wonders(which they're not supposed to have}, you make city projects the main Great People generation method and then you shoot players down for focusing on production? What sort of game balance is this? FIX those issues,not remove the player's solution for them.

The whole idea of how each subsequent district/wonders you build makes a city less and less productive because of the tiles they consume makes the idea of "distict bonuses" seem like a joke. They advertised it like it is so important but really, the +2 Bonus science you get from sacrificing a +5 Production and 1 Food Mine is really more of a loss than a gain.

[postpaleo]

I think it would be a huge help if there was a city view option, when in the build screen, to see what tiles are doing what. To be able to see what the distracts are doing for the tiles without the city clutter. As it stands it is very hard to get good information at a glance, especialy if you build citys close to each other.

The option to build a distract or to go the old way, build what you want, where you want, or be able to do both. Again, may be a benifit if you tend, or are forced, to build citys on top of citys.

The ability to get rid of started, but not finished, distracts.

Time building the distracts, well depends. As long as the distracts themseleves act like a building, they should cost you the time/hammers. If they don't, they should be able to built damn near instantly.

[arakiel]

I actually like the districts, but don't understand why they cannot be removed later in the game, especially when accidentally misplaced (not finished). There could be progressively bad penalties for removing a district ("Don't take away our beloved religious district!"), and require time to remove. Think of them as tattoos. Painful to get, even more painful to remove.

[krabdr]

I'm in agreement with OP, Matthew and Solteria. I have but a few things to add. First, given the long production time of the base districts in the mid game, one should be able to purchase them with gold or with an engineer. It's pretty ridiculous the length of time required to build these basic elements.

Second, the Aerodrome as a district is very poorly implemented. In previous versions of Civ, you could build an airport in a city on a new continent, then airlift stuff in within a turn or two. In Civ 6, if you're conquering another continent, aerodromes are worthless. It can take 40-60 turns to build the base aerodrome, then you have to build a hangar, then an airport, but only after the appropriate cultural advance. This can take over 100 turns if you capture a poor production city or build a new city. It's actually cheaper to just purchase new units with gold rather than attempt to airlift them. The effect of the aerodrome on tourism isn't well explained so why make them? I really liked how airports and airlifting was handled in Civ 5.

Third, district buildings are pretty boring, essentially adding a only few pips of production or gold to the city's coffers plus some GPP. I've won science victories focusing almost entirely on industrial and commerce districts and little else (King and Emporer level), and that's pretty boring. I've since added in the "Additional Buildings" mod and it adds a lot more fun things to build.

Although not related to districts, I've also found it ridiculous that builders are so expensive in terms of gold or production. Seriously, you get 3-6 charges depending on your cultural developments. I don't mind the micromanagement of the builders, but I dislike that they cost more than military units and that they have so few charges for their cost. That doesn't make sense when compared to military units that last the entire game and essentially get upgraded with appropriate research findings.

[dpokerface]

I like districts. I also like that they're part of the unstacking of cities, which forces you to plan, allocate, and specialize more than in Civ 5.

High production costs were part of Civ 5 too, even for new cities late in the game. Patience is part of the experience.

[Grzemek]

I like the idea of districts. It's cool that I have to sacrifice the tile and population limit to build specialized things in the city.

The thing is WITHOUT districts, your city is absolutely ♥♥♥♥. As in, the infrastructure common for all cities, in the city centre, is nonexistent (monument and granary, the rest is a joke). There should be a bit more City Center buildings.

Also, given how horrendous built times are, regardless what you build save for units, you NEED to focus on production-increasing infrastructure first (Commercial Hubs and Harbors, Industrial Zones to lesser extent now, but if you get some sweet sweet adjanceny bonuses, it might still be worth to build them densely). So how does it specialize your cities if you need to do everything to squeeze extra production? Wow, AoE stacking is removed, so I will just slap Encampments and Industrial Zones in 3:1 ratio for hammers instead of spamming Industrial Zones. But guess what my Faith city will have - Commericial Hubs, Harbors, Industrial Zones/Encampments and then Campus/Holy SIte. Guess what my Culture city will have - Commerce, Harbor, Industrial/Encampment and then Campus/Theater. Wow, removing AoE stacking really helped me efficiently specialize my cities! That 10-40% wonder reduction or 40% Science Victory projects cost definitely addressed the issue. Because Science projects weren't rushed with Great People in 4 turns or so on Standard speed anyway!

Firaxis created false production costs and its increases to maintain the illusion of being busy throughout the game instead of giving meaningful things to do in cities: giving reasonable common infrastructure and reasonable way to specialize cities further. That's not how you provide players with choices. State that districts will specialize cities and then have THREE buildings TOTAL per district? With TWO points of yield per specialist? With everything costing ludicrous amounts of hammers? This is a joke.

I also dislike that you can't purchase disticts with gold.


In general, nice idea, but poorly implemented. Clearly someone wanted to push the game out to start making money. Nothing wrong with making money, but there is definitely something wrong with YOLO releasing ideas that are nowhere close to refined state.

[Lady Grey]

Whenever I build a new city, I always send a Trader there to send out to bring in food and production. This greatly improves the build time for that first District. It's usually easy to buy all the buildings after it is complete (gold rains down in this game), then just start on the next District. New cities can be functional in just a handful of turns, even in the late game. Late enough in, it's easy enough to send 2 Traders to boost new cities and get them going really fast.