Raiding and pillaging

I have finally finished my second full playthrough of the new Civ 6 expansion Rising Storm.  The first time through my main takeaway was that Rock Bands are ridiculous, but this second run has taught me that much of the late game stuff added in Rising Storm is totally worthless.  Rock Bands are great, but Research Labs, Stock Exchanges, Broadcast Towers and the like are pretty much wasted space.

There are three big reasons for this.  The first is that recently pillaging was changed to be more powerful than before.  You can pillage two ways - first, by pillaging things like mines, farms, and camps.  Those can be easily repaired by Builders once you take a city, so you should pillage all of them.  This is incredibly powerful, and with the right policy in place you can easily get 400+ of a resource from a single pillage.  This makes perpetual war highly efficient, because your front line is forever piling up huge income gains as well as territory.  This can be abused by endlessly fighting city states or building cities near enemy territory so they flip and you can pillage and recapture them over and over.  The other way to pillage is to destroy buildings in districts, which also generates huge returns, but is harder to repair.  You can't just endlessly flip city control or repair with Builders to fix that.

So if you want big incomes, you shouldn't be making endgame buildings, you should make cavalry units or coastal raider sea units.  Pillage your enemies mercilessly, because destroying their stuff crushes their economies as well as enriching you far beyond what any mere buildings of your own will create.

The second reason endgame buildings suck is that the science and culture trees are simply too small and too cheap.  I keep ending up in situations where I am researching techs every 2-3 turns, and so building infrastructure that won't pay off for 40 turns is silly - the game will be over.  I also think that 2-3 turn research is a huge problem because it makes the game feel ridiculous when you make a fresh, new unit and it can barely get to the front line before it is obsolete!  I find I usually have tech times in the 10 turn range at the beginning of the game and that feels like an appropriate pace, and at endgame it feels far too rushed.  I am definitely going to go back to modding the costs of techs and civics so that the final ones cost 5 times as much, and the ones in between cost moderately more.  This won't mean 15 turn tech times of course, because having more time between techs gives you more chances to build infrastructure and grow city size, which offsets it somewhat.

Changing tech costs and pillage rewards is easy.  What is more complicated is fixing the third problem, which is that endgame buildings are garbage.  I like to think of buildings in terms of how long they take to pay off after they are built, assuming all yield types are equal except for gold which is half as valuable.  (This isn't perfect, but it is what the game assumes, and it isn't crazy.)  Early buildings like Water Mills go as low as 26, most good buildings like Libraries are in the 36 range, and there are some buildings like Workshops that are in the 95 range, which makes them truly miserable.  Even a Workshop might pay for itself if the game goes long enough though, but endgame buildings both have a limited time window to pay off and also are hideously inefficient.

Example:  The Research Lab gives 3 science, and 5 more science when powered by a power plant.  It costs 580 to build, and 6 maintenance a turn.  It takes 97 turns to pay itself off.  That is far, far too long.  A building that has tons of prerequisities and which can only be around for a short number of turns before the game ends should have a spectacular payoff, not a slow, sad grind to a disappointing finish.  You should build exactly one Research Lab to get the eureka, and then ignore them until the game is over.  Other endgame buildings are similarly disappointing, and honestly I don't know why they are made to be so weak.  It is quite reasonable to argue that a University is superior to a Research Lab straight up, and the University is 43% of the cost.

When I unlock a powerful endgame tool I don't want to think "Oh, that is so much worse than all the other good stuff I already have.  I guess I will build it if I am goofing off and have nothing good to do."  I want to think "I need to get those up in every city NOW."  I also want a game where building huge, developed cities is useful.  Right now the ticket is to spam settlers everywhere and put up a Library and a University if there is time.  That is far more efficient than endgame buildings.

The other problem with endgame buildings is the whole power system that supports them.  You have to carefully place Industrial Zones so that all major clusters of cities are powered if you want to use those endgame buildings, so the payoff for getting fuel, building power plants, and organizing your empire should be significant.  Instead you are actually better off just ignoring all that entirely and building units to steal from your enemies who are foolish enough to build that juicy infrastructure.  Commercial Hubs, Campuses, and low levels buildings are good, and the rest can burn.

I am going to fix this!  When I was modding the base game I greatly improved endgame buildings for similar reasons, and I can work with the power system to do the same sort of thing for the new versions.  I don't want to make it so that you *have* to build big to win, but I want the stuff you unlock to be powerful and exciting.  I want those huge cities with massive investments to really shine.  Time to get to work.