A classroom on a mountain peak

In Civ 6 the way you advance your scientific understanding is to live near huge mountain ranges with lots of geothermal vents nearby.

This makes no damn sense.

Lots of things in games make no sense, so that isn't necessarily a problem.  However, it also feels silly and bizarre, and *that* is a problem.

The way you make most of your science in Civ 6 is to plant down Campus districts.  In human history you find the greatest centres of knowledge and innovation by looking at places with large amounts of trade and people.  Big cities, basically.  However, Civ 6 Campus districts get huge adjacency bonuses from geothermal vents, mountains, and in the latest patch, reefs.  They want to emphasize that you can learn things by examining natural features, sure, but it feels awkward.

Holy Sites also want to be near mountains, but this feels right.  You don't situate your religious and spiritual places in the middle of a city in a flood plain, you put them near amazing natural wonders and majestic mountains, the better to impress people.  Feels good.

But Campuses?  They should want to be next to all the people doing all the things, the better to gather all the knowledge.

I suspect that when the designers were building the game they wanted to avoid mountains being terrible.  A good way to do this was to make it so that Holy Sites and Campuses got big bonuses for being near mountains, so the fact that mountains are unworkable tiles would be made up for by big science or faith generation.  For Holy Sites this totally worked, not so for Campuses.  As patches have progressed they have added more and more science adjacency bonuses to Campuses and this has warped the game in strange ways.  There is basically no way to get big science aside from Campuses, and all the other ways of getting science are extremely weak, so Campuses are needed everywhere.

In my most recent game my first city had a +4 Campus adjacency, and my next two cities had +6 and +5 adjacency locations due to mountains and geothermal vents.  These numbers are enormous, as most other districts in that era would be sitting at adjacencies of 0-2.  I shredded the science tree, and it made the game feel terrible because I couldn't build anything before it was already obsolete.

Campuses are too good, the adjacency bonuses are too large, and it all feels silly.  I want to make baseline science generation a bit better and Campuses a bit weaker, and I want to make Campus adjacencies more sensible.

I have a few options.  The first one I came up with is to remove or reduce most of the current adjacencies and just make Campus adjacencies much worse.  I would trash the adjacencies for mountains and reduce the bonuses from geothermal vents and reefs to +1 instead of +2.  (Reducing mountains to a 1 per 2 adjacency isn't possible for technical reasons.)  This would push Campus locations towards city centres and reduce normal adjacencies to 0-2 in the early game, rising to 3 in really good locations with a lot of infrastructure.

The way to make Campuses want to be in big urban areas is to replace all of their current adjacency bonuses with a full adjacency bonus from all districts.  Right now they get a 1 per 2 rate on districts, but I can easily up the rate to 1 per 1, which would mean that every city could have a good Campus regardless of location - all you have to do is build your other districts beside it and you are good to go.  3 adjacency bonus would be no problem in every developed city.  This feels sensible to me from a immersion perspective, but does mean that you basically don't care about terrain because the optimal science strategy is to simply put cities close together and build huge globs of districts with campuses in the middle.  This is a change to Campuses, but not a nerf - they still get really powerful, though you can't yahtzee quite so hard in the early game.

That second option feels thematically good, but doesn't address the power level of Campuses.  The first option reduces overall science output in the game dramatically, so it needs to be offset by a small increase in the base science rate from population.  I think I like the lower power version better.  It is fun to build huge numbers, but the game is warped by just how huge those numbers are, and other districts don't get that like at all, at least not without significant planning and investment.

And finally I will be able to stop feeling silly when I rush to plant a centre of learning in the middle of the wild, surrounded by rough, unusable terrain.