Coal is bad

One of the things that irks me about Civ 6 lategame is that the modern buildings are really bad.  You can build a University for 250 production and it gives you ~6 stuff per turn.  Then you build a Research Lab for 580 production, and it gives you 2.5 stuff per turn, or 7.5 stuff per turn if you power it.  The problem is that even if you assume that powering it is free, 7.5 stuff per turn for 580 is a miserable rate... and powering it is NOT free.

To power it first you need an Industrial Zone nearby, and that IZ has to have all buildings built.  Then you have to get coal, and you have to feed in 1 coal / turn just to power the Research Lab.  The coal itself could be sold to the AI for minimum 10 gold, and burning the coal gives you a -.33 penalty to your Diplomatic Favour because you are creating carbon emissions and people hate that.  That Diplomatic Favour could be sold for 15g / favour, so each coal you feed into power costs you roughly 15 gold.

All this means that even once you build a power plant and a Research Lab you still end up paying 15 gold to get that extra 5 science.  That isn't good!  When you arrange for power and build the Lab and do all that setup you should get paid off, and instead you just end up with a trash building and the option to trade gold for science inefficiently.  Yuck.  If you value gold at the standard rate of 2 gold = 1 science, a fully powered Research Lab actually produces a net value of ZERO.  It costs a ton of production to make, and is no net benefit at all to your civilization once it appears. 

You can power buildings somewhat more cheaply by using oil or uranium instead of coal, but because oil and uranium are critical for military uses, cost more, and come much later this isn't much of a solution.

Now, you might decide that the only thing you care about is science, and so you will throw any amount of gold at it to make more science, but if this is your plan you should be buying settlers and slamming libraries and universities down, not building stupid Research Labs.  This definitely holds true for Stock Exchanges, which produce so little gold that you lose money by building them if you have them powered, and if you don't power them they are technically doing something, but it is so little that they should never be built.  Broadcast Centers actually have a use because you need somewhere to store music, but they are otherwise just as miserable as the rest.

One thing the designers of Civ 6 really wanted was to make climate change a big deal.  They initially aimed to do this by making rising oceans a huge problem but this has a flaw that we see in the real world too - nations each recognize that everyone else is pumping emissions, so they see no point in stopping their own emissions.  Local benefits and global costs leads to a tragedy of the commons.  The new strategy of putting in diplomatic penalties for CO2 emissions is a solid one, because you can sell that Diplomatic Favour for a lot of money.  It imposes a local cost, and that is one people pay attention to.

The trouble is that they ended up making all those late game buildings worthless.  The cost and penalties of burning coal are so high, and the benefits are so small, that you should just never bother and you should just run projects to finish off the game, selling all your coal to fund buying new cities or units.  It also means that you should spam cities in every spot you can to build the early buildings because big cities with lots of production run out of reasonable things to do.

The modern buildings need huge buffs to be competitive.  Obviously you can win games while building them - you can win all kinds of ways.  What I am looking at though is optimal play, aiming for the fastest and most efficient wins.  I also like the idea that when you unlock a new thing it should be *good*.  You should be excited to build it!  When I unlock Stock Exchanges I giggle because it isn't even clear I should build them even if they were free... and they are decidedly not free!

I ended up more than doubling the effects of the late game buildings just to make them have a solid return on investment and also be worth powering.  The Research Lab, for instance, went from 3 science base, 8 when powered, to 11 science base, 19 when powered.  When you look at those numbers they are HUGE compared to the earlier buildings, which is appropriate since the cost is also huge in comparison. 

My current theory is that buildings that cost 15 gold to power and produce 8 stuff are okay - this means that powering your empire and burning coal like crazy is a reasonable option but not required.  Doing so means you lose Diplomatic Favour because people hate your emissions and you have to buy (or avoid selling) your resources, but you do get a reasonable amount of stuff in return.  If you refuse to power via coal though you can still run an empire with more money and Diplomatic Favour to compensate.

I like the idea of powering buildings, and setting up infrastructure to create an amazing late game civilization.  But in order for that to work the numbers have to support it, and right now in the base game they just don't.