New tricks for me

A new patch is coming for Civ 6 and I am excited about many of the announcements.  Two things they are trying to address in particular are the excessive cost of endgame buildings compared to their effects, and the power level of specialists.  They are heading in the right direction with building costs for sure, lowering the costs of the top buildings, but they haven't done nearly enough.  For example, the Research Lab is getting its cost lowered by about 25%, which is definitely good, but it is still heinously inefficient compared to the lower tier science buildings.  It is still well within the 'build it if you are just messing around before victory, or if you have truly nothing decent to do' territory, and I want more than that.  Unlocking endgame buildings should feel powerful, but the Research Lab is less than 25% as efficient as the University which comes before it, and that is pathetic.

However, I will give them credit that they are trying to change, they are simply doing it tiny steps at a time instead of getting to the right spot all at once.  Better than nothing.  At any rate I will continue tinkering with my mod using their new production costs and altering the outputs of the endgame buildings to work with them.

One other thing you will note on the Research Lab is that it now buffs Citizen yields.  This is a nice improvement because specialists were almost totally worthless in the old version.  They gave 2 of their thing, so Campus specialists gave 2 science, for example.  This is instead of working a tile though, so it was terrible.  Tiles are almost always vastly better than this, usually giving 4 stuff even in the early game, so getting to slot in a specialist to get 2 stuff is garbage.

We don't have all the details yet, but it looks like they intend to have specialists remain at 2 stuff, but get a buff from these buildings so they would produce 3 stuff at endgame.  Of course at endgame tiles produce ~6 stuff, so specialists are still basically trash, only good if you deliberately don't want a city to grow, or if your city is so big you can't even work any more tiles.

The bright side is that now modders will be able to easily drop these bonuses to specialists onto other buildings!  Previously I had simply altered specialists to give 5 stuff instead of 2, which meant that they were quite good in the early game (you still can't use them that much though, because otherwise your cities won't be able to make enough food) but they were fairly mediocre in the endgame.  However, with this new tech I will be able to start off specialists at 4 stuff, and upgrade that through the tech tree, just the way that tiles get better as you advance.  It will mean that specialists can be a solid choice throughout the game, something you can do but don't have to do.

Firaxis is also attempting to buff Canada.  Pre patch I think Canada is actually worse than a blank civ, because their tundra start bias is a serious disadvantage and they have a collection of terrible bonuses.  However, they are getting a slight buff to the point where I think they are better than nothing at all.

I decided that 'barely better than nothing at all' isn't good enough!  I am going to add +1 food to all Tundra tiles to the Canadian arsenal, which means they actually really want to be on Tundra and can build excellent cities in that environment.  Their cities elsewhere will be totally vanilla, but at least Tundra will actually be good for them.  Want to play a diplomatic game where you can build great cities in territory no one else wants?  Play Canada, they do that well!  This is my hope, at least.

So all told this patch is a bunch of good ideas in the right direction, just not taken quite far enough.  Could be worse.