<\/div>I LOVE building wonders. Lots of them.<\/p>\n
When managing a tall empire, it’s immensely useful to have cities cooperate. If I’ve got 4 well-established cities and one new one, then I like to use my booming economy to bootstrap the new addition. My big cities bank up money, and then my little town can plow through the first five or six critical items. A new city needs a lot before it’s useful: Some basic defenses, a building to boost growth \/ food output, a builder to tend the land, an economic building so the place doesn’t drain my coffers, and a factory-type building to get production up. The exact build order depends on the terrain and what stage of the game you’re in, but if you’re building tall then cities need to be robust.<\/p>\n
Productivity tends to compound. The stronger a city is, the faster it can grow, which means a little boost at the start can have a massive impact on the city over the long term.\u00a0 I actually think this is part of the strategy. I think that “What build order will maximize my growth in this city?” is a more interesting question than, “How many cookie-cutter cities can I cram into this peninsula?” So I want my big cities to help the little ones, until the younger city is large enough that it can begin to specialize.<\/p>\n
My problem is that in Civ VI, this type of cooperation just isn’t possible under normal circumstances. That dinky city needs to grow on its own. Even if you’ve got a complex civilization with a booming economy, there’s very little your government can do to help the city along. You can’t just use your enormous GDP to prop up your new \/ recently conquered cities.<\/p>\n
(Actually, there are a few special abilities that slightly get around this. But they’re all very situational and none of them are available until the mid \/ late game. By that time, the tall player has fallen far behind.)<\/p>\n
Even when dealing with the stuff you CAN buy, the game is designed to make this process as unhelpful as possible. Let’s say my new city just spent an agonizing 10 turns trying to make a spearman. I’m 2 turns from finishing it, but then some barbarians come knockingWith the spearman they produced for free in their primitive camp with no population, no tools, and no economy, but don’t get me started on the outrageous bullshit that is “barbarians” in this series.<\/span> and I suddenly need that spearman RIGHT NOW. In the old games, I could spend a little bit of coin to knock out that last 16% and get the unit done this turn. In Civ VI, I can only buy an entire NEW unit for full price. That means I’ll be spending 100% of the money to make this unit instead of the little bit needed to finish the one I’ve been working on. Then in 2 turns the second spearman will pop out, and now I’ve wasted a ton of money on an additional unit I don’t wantUnits can cost upkeep per turn, so you don’t want more than you need.<\/span>. That is SUPER annoying. I suppose I could cancel production, but either way it means that I’ve just wasted an agonizing 10 turns of production.<\/p>\n This gets really bad when it comes to wonders. In the old games it was possible to make some sort of helper unit – a trade wagon, or some other non-combat thing – and sacrifice it to complete a wonder. So I can have city A begin building the Great Pyramids, while cities B, C, and D pump out helper units to hurry the process along. There’s a bit of loss in the process – spending 100 productivity on helpers won’t translate into 100 units of progress on the wonder – but it’s worth it. Hurrying a wonder like this also cuts down on the risk that another player will finish off a particular wonder juuuust<\/i> before you, which is a brutal<\/b> setbackOnly one of each wonder can exist at a time. So if someone else ninjas the Hanging Gardens from you, then you won’t be able to finish it. On lower difficulties you get some of your costs back, but the greater loss is the sheer TIME you invested in building the dang thing, and the opportunity loss from NOT building a bunch of other stuff that could be benefiting you right now.<\/span>.<\/p>\n Consider the situation where City A has a massive productivity output, but no use for a particular wonder. Meanwhile, City B is the PERFECT place for this wonder, but it has such a low production output that it would literally take half the game to construct it. If cities can help each other, then I can use this to strategically place wonders exactly where I want them.<\/p>\n But Civ VI doesn’t let you do this. Not only does this make the game less interesting for me, it also further punishes the player for building tall. If I have 30 cities and one of them spends 30 turns on a doomed wonder project that gets ninja’d in the end, then that’s a loss of 3% of my total economic output for that time period. If I’ve only got 5 cities, then I just wasted 20% of my output. Ouch.<\/p>\n Also, the wonders in this game are far more numerous and their bonuses are smaller. They just aren’t the game-changers that they used to be. You can argue that this makes sense from a simulation \/ balance perspective, and that’s fine. But this was one of my favorite things to do, and it’s now a lot harder, riskier, less rewarding, and offers the player less flexibility in terms of clever tricks to optimize progress.<\/p>\n At the start of this series I mentioned that I played around with some cheats. I’ve never done that with a Civ game before, and I found it to be both amusing and informative. So here are a couple of things I observed while using a cheat mod<\/a>.<\/p>\n 1. The Game is less prone to rubber-banding than I assumed.<\/b><\/p>\n
<\/div>What I Learned From Cheats<\/h3>\n
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