Makers Quarters are so good, and they benefit from so many things, that I find that I am building them constantly.  Carpets and carpets of builders quarters should not be the way to play this game. 

Why they are so good

They are good for a number of reasons, but the big one is that production seems to be the best yield to over produce in cities.

-Food works on a threshold basis and its pretty easy to hit the abundance or plentiful thresholds without a whole lot of farmers quarters. Once you've hit that threshold, you don't need to work that hard to keep up with the increasing food demands of the population. If there were more tiers of food surplus, or if the surplus food actually did anything (besides fill the agrarian bar up) this would make food better, or at least more interesting. I also think, with the way cities grow exponentially, that growth is really fast right now, and you should have to build more farmers quarters to really grow.

-Gold is nice to have especially if you are doing a purchasing build (I think you need to pick carthage to make it work, but when you are making 3.5k on turn 100 its kinda nuts) so I don't know if its truly bad to overproduce, but market quarters suck. Most of your income is coming from lux resources, or harbors, or trade. Not these quarters. They give very little gold, and have an adjacency bonus with food quarters, which you already aren't building a lot of. Just build harbors and you are set. The fact that there are no upkeep costs in the game, also means you can ignore gold if you are doing a production build. You will still make some almost passively from trade, and can save up to have a bank account to emergency buy units, but you never have to increase your gold income to keep up with raising upkeep costs. Districts and units could probably use some upkeep cost in addition to the gpt of markets being buffed in some way.

-Science is always nice to have, but science quarters only give a little bit when compared to a lot of the other sources in the game. Schools give science on a per pop basis, the zhou EQ is godly. There's a tier one tenet that gives 10 science per territory. I'll hold my tongue a bit, because I realize just how powerful having a tech advantage is military wise, but other than that it doesn't seem fantastic. A lot of late game infrastructures don't seem like need to have things, when my cities are perfectly fine building makers quarters. And even if I do want one of those later things, its easy enough to just build the science infrastructure in cities and build minimal quarters.

Production is also so common on terrain its crazy. Its practically everywhere and in very large quantities, so there's way more spots where a makers quarter is a smarter idea than a market or a science quarter. If there was more parity in map yields this would work better.

The infrastructure and adjacency bonuses makers quarters get area also insane. It feels like not only are there a ton of infrastructures that add prod to almost all of the terrain, there's none that add gold or science to terrain. I'm stuck with gold per city center while prod gets infrastructure that keeps giving it even more powerful adjacency bonuses, and it just spirals out of control.

I hope the balance between yields is looked at so the game doesn't become a production race all the time, which is a problem a lot of 4x games run into.

If anyone thinks they aren't that good I'd love to hear it, but so far I just keep building them cause they seem by far and away the best option 90% of the time

    100% agreed for everything in this. Reducing Industry on tiles is a good solution. One thing I would do would be to remove the base +1 Industry and more importantly, the base adjacency bonus (+1 Industry per adjacent Makers quarter). Market Quarters could do well with an infrastructure that gives extra adjacency from, say Artisan's and/or Harbors.

    To be fair, this problem might not be fixed until all mutual adjacency, including from infrastructures, for Maker's, is removed. Mutual Adjacency is twice as strong as normal adjacency, since you get it on both quarters, and quite dull, since that means you can just spam one quarter. (I'm fine with this for Farmer's, since the growth from food is a step function, making it less spammable.) This is a rather large change, but hopefully it will encourage more varied city plans. For a possible replacement, the Maker's quarter could receive adjacency from Strategics, either in general, or just for the corresponding resource for the infrastructure (i.e. Bronze for Forges).

May just need to tune the numbers so that each additional quarter of the same type costs more exponentially (it already does I think, but make it moreso).

Outside the broken war civs, you should really give Egyptian - > Mayans a try if you want to play sim city :D

100% agree on the food mechanic; really odd that they have flat thresholds of 10, 50, (and sometimes 150) for food in this game - totally unlike their other games. That "extra" food should really go... *somewhere*

Totally agreed. Market quarters are really bad. The only thing that produces good is luxury (except special districts and water tiles). However you can always extract luxury from artisan quarters. So basically market quarters need to purely rely on adjacent bonus. However, market quarter only gain adjacent bonus from farmer's quarter, which is completely useless as food over 150 is nonsense. I have a city over 900 food and still have 1 population due to mass training of armies.

My suggestion is: districts gain 1 adjacency bonus from all districts, as Japan in civ6. In the meantime, add some tiles that naturally generate gold but are not luxry, such that your market quarters can actually exploit some gold for you instead of completely waste some tiles.

I agree that, makers quarters should have their ajacency bonus with other makers quarts removed. If you gave them an ajacency bonus with markets, then you'd want to build markets more, and there would be more of a puzzle to designing cities.

It's not fun if all the prices of the puzzle are the same like it is currently. I also think adding a couple of anomalies with gold is a good idea. So far those seem to only add FIS.

Perhaps there should be diminishing returns over time. 

Or maybe a limit on number of quarters one can build based on population number.

I am surprised that there is no cap on quarters and EQs, Endless Legend only let you build one per every two population for most factions.

8roomsofelixir wrote:

Or maybe a limit on number of quarters one can build based on population number.

I am surprised that there is no cap on quarters and EQs, Endless Legend only let you build one per every two population for most factions.

Well, this would sort of make sense, but the quarters are dictate the population cap in a city in some way. I would imagine finding the pop/quarter ratio for that cap is either very hard or just impossible. 

This also doesn't really solve how good the builders quarter is compared to all the other generic quarters. True, some EQs outshine it (the muhgal one and the tueton one are kinda nuts) but you'd still be building an extreme amount of these things 

Have any of you done enough reps with different strategies to have a firm idea what's busted relative to everything else? I haven't, have played a few coastal gold games, and 3.5k gold per turn on turn 100 is nowhere near the ceiling. So if that's nuts, I don't know. In my most recent game, Phoenicia -> Carthage -> Byzantines -> Dutch gave me 45k gold per turn and 1.5k science per turn on turn 90, and it would be easy to do better than that by aggressively expanding to as many islands as possible as quickly as possible and by placing districts more carefully. So can some of you guys post total yields for different turn cutoffs? 

blackwell wrote:
Well, this would sort of make sense, but the quarters are dictate the population cap in a city in some way. I would imagine finding the pop/quarter ratio for that cap is either very hard or just impossible. 

I am not sure I follow what you mean. Population in Lucy Opendev really grows like weeds: Find a costal territory with a river, build your city on the river, build a harbor, and build all the food-buffing infrastructures, but don't build any other quarter, you will easily have a population increase every turn or two. Since population is so easy to grow I don't find a cap related to population number unrealistic.

LeWhetherMan wrote:

Have any of you done enough reps with different strategies to have a firm idea what's busted relative to everything else? I haven't, have played a few coastal gold games, and 3.5k gold per turn on turn 100 is nowhere near the ceiling. So if that's nuts, I don't know. In my most recent game, Phoenicia -> Carthage -> Byzantines -> Dutch gave me 45k gold per turn and 1.5k science per turn on turn 90, and it would be easy to do better than that by aggressively expanding to as many islands as possible as quickly as possible and by placing districts more carefully. So can some of you guys post total yields for different turn cutoffs? 

I've done a bunch of games, including a similar merchant game (although I went Korea instead of Dutch) and I do think that build is very powerful. But that build is powerful because of stacking a bunch of bonuses, and the Dutch EQ being a bit broken. There is a lot of broken stuff in this build, like the horde cultures, or everything about the Muhgals. The reason I highlight makers quarters is that typically 4X games do have an elevated importance of production compared to other yields, and I think there are multiple contributing factors making them so powerful, and they aren't one off balancing things like how much gold the Dutch EQ makes, or how big the Carthaginian discount is.

8roomsofelixir wrote:

blackwell wrote:
Well, this would sort of make sense, but the quarters are dictate the population cap in a city in some way. I would imagine finding the pop/quarter ratio for that cap is either very hard or just impossible. 

I am not sure I follow what you mean. Population in Lucy Opendev really grows like weeds: Find a costal territory with a river, build your city on the river, build a harbor, and build all the food-buffing infrastructures, but don't build any other quarter, you will easily have a population increase every turn or two. Since population is so easy to grow I don't find a cap related to population number unrealistic.

The thing is there is a soft cap to population in a city based off of the number of work slots, so its sorta tied to quarters, as those are by far the most common way to raise the number of work slots, and the soft population cap for your city. The other thing is, if you add this cap, it doesn't make me want to build market quarters or science quarters over makers quarters, it just prevents me from building makers quarters. (It might make farmers quarters better but I find it pretty easy to hit the max growth rate anyways.) I also find hard caps clunky, but right now the soft caps for building a bunch of districts are production scaling with each subsequent quarter, making industry even more important, and stability which I've found I can just ignore for the most part with how the thresholds work. Idk what the exact solution is, but I think removing the adjacency bonus is a step in the right direction.

This problem balancing task is maybe the most important one in my opinion to make Humankind the best 4X game for the next decade.

Beyond tweaking the numbers for each district, I believe that introducing upkeep for districts can go a long way. So far only stability is slowing infinite makers quarters spam down. In my playthroughs it went; spam 4-5 makers quarters; build common quarter if needed; build infrastructure if available. As mentioned above in this thread science, food and money buildings were barely a part of expanding my city.

To break this snowballing spiral I think a few starting points (partially mentioned in the thread) could be the following:

• Increase necessity of Farmers' quarters; Higher food requirements for fast city growth; Higher food upkeep per population; Lower intrinsic food yields on exploitation; Lower food yields for river infrastructure.
• Increase necessity of Merchant quarters; Introduce gold per turn maintenance for districts; Introduce gold per turn maintenance for infrastructure; Increase adjacency bonuses.
• Induce necessity to specialize cities; Have significantly higher infrastructure prices for higher tiers; Ramp up district prices more siginificantly.

Ideally it'd be cheap to get the basics of a city running including lowest tier infrastructure and a handful of cheap districts before prices ramp up. After that I believe it should be hard to reach a production levels that let's you inta-build all newly researched infrastructure. If it requires a few more Merchant quarters and Common quarters to maintain your cluster of 10 Maker quarters it would make production choices more interesting.

I could imagine building a Coastal Commerce city to generate the money needed to maintain my Heavy Industry Captial while each needs to sacrifice some production to keep healthy food supplies going for it's ongoing growth.

Having cities with high Production (1000+) is not intrinsically an issue in my opinion as long as there is something cool to do with your production besides spamming more Makers' quarters.

Overall I am super impressed with the state of the game at such an early stage. I wish the Amplitude Team best of luck! There are very few things that I want to see more than you having a fantastic success with the release of Humankind. I hope all the balancing works out and that the game can be as challenging as possible!

Great suggestions!  Production has always been a very strong playstyle in 4x so I wasn't overly surprised with how strong it is in Humankind but I agree its probably too strong.  Or at least we need to buff the other FIMS to compete.  I've played through 4 games focusing on each FIMS and production seemed king while influence felt the weakest.  Here are a few suggestions:

- Food - Have the overflow do something (increase stability, increase FIMS by a % like a well fed buff, etc.)  increase thresholds or create some incentive for maximizing food in an empire beyond what is currently there.  Create a migration aspect similar to ES2's spaceport mechanic.

- Influence - I'm assuming this mechanic isn't finished yet but I had little to do with all of my Influence when maximizing it.  I covered the map with influence but I couldn't capture territories or receive any buffs or anything.  Where is the peaceful conversion / culture flip mechanic?  Could we get a migration or enemy FIMS drain % if we cover our enemies in influence?  Can we have something else to spend it on?  Diplomatic schemes? or buyouts at the bare minimum.  This playthrough felt very weak compared to the other FIMS.

- Production - Covered well in this thread.  It should be strong but shouldn't be king of all strats please.  It is also king in ES2 and was hoping it could be avoided in Humankind as the optimal strat.

- Money - Can we call it currency or gold or something besides money?  Money seemed like the weakest selection out of the thesaurus haha but maybe that's just my opinion.  Money is actually a strong playstyle but market quarters are very weak.  I agree that the map should have commerce bonuses we should exploit more and they should have more synergy.  I mostly used the unique districts for way more gold than the markets could ever compete with.  I actually destroyed markets for the unique ones since they were so much stronger.

- Science - I need to explore the unique districts more but the base science district just feels kind of medium.  Could we get more synergy or perhaps letting the base FIMS come through on a science district?  For example, sometimes you get nice food/prod tiles that you don't want to override, what if science or markets could just be a bonus on top of those bonuses.  So you could get base yields PLUS the sci/gold.  If that's too strong, maybe reduce it by 50% and then get sci/gold on top.  It would then be a 3/3/5science yield or something or 3/3/5gold.

These were just some of my thoughts after 4 playthroughs, what do you guys think?

The problem is food is far too easy to get and this happens in fact due to a bug (?) with luxuries which give +1 to any tile producing a resource instead of a district producing resource. To give an example 3 saffron goods give 1 food yield ocean tile 4 foods, and given 2 distance that harbor provides this is completely crazy numbers. And if you have saffron and harappans the numbers quickly start to get ridiculous.

Speaking of "Production is too common on terrains", after several rounds of Lucy Opendev I realized that the game does not really have a "desert" terrain - the closest barren terrain is "stone field" which still provides +1 production and can be improved by infrastructures (the only real barren terrain is "sterile" which is snow-covered tiles near the poles of the map). As a result there is always productive tiles for a Makers Quarter to exploit. On the other hand, I don't think there is any terrain or tile modifiers that add money/gold, not a single one.

IMHO if we remove production/industry yields from these terrains and make them true "desert", as well as adding terrain features that can yield money (luxury deposits, perhaps - it confuses me that Market Quarter doesn't receive an adjacency bonus from luxuries), it can also balance things out a bit.

8roomsofelixir wrote:

Speaking of "Production is too common on terrains", after several rounds of Lucy Opendev I realized that the game does not really have a "desert" terrain - the closest barren terrain is "stone field" which still provides +1 production and can be improved by infrastructures (the only real barren terrain is "sterile" which is snow-covered tiles near the poles of the map). As a result there is always productive tiles for a Makers Quarter to exploit. On the other hand, I don't think there is any terrain or tile modifiers that add money/gold, not a single one.

IMHO if we remove production/industry yields from these terrains and make them true "desert", as well as adding terrain features that can yield money (luxury deposits, perhaps - it confuses me that Market Quarter doesn't receive an adjacency bonus from luxuries), it can also balance things out a bit.

Some luxuries, such as coffee, do provide money. Market Quarters do receive +1 Money from being adjacent to a Artisan's Quarter (the quarter used to extract luxuries). I would like to see deserts added, but I don't see how they would help with balance.

8roomsofelixir wrote:

FlamingKetchup wrote:
I would like to see deserts added, but I don't see how they would help with balance.

As I said, currently there are too much terrains that can provide industry, turning some of the terrains - such as stone fields (+1 industry) and rocky fields (+3 industry) - into barren terrains by removing their industry yield would make Makers Quarter less favorable, since there will be less crazy placements that can give you a +18 industry on one quarter. Still, this can only nerf the Makers Quarter a little bit, in the grand scheme of things all the mechanisms of Makers Quarter (self-adjacency, industry-yielding infrastructures, etc) need a proper re-examination.

I wouldn't remove the existing terrain, as I like the variation it has. Reducing Industry yields on terrain only nerfs the early game, as 7 Maker's Quarters in a Hexagon provide +24 Industry from adjacency alone, and that's without any infrastructures. With a forge it is doubled.

@valmighty  Hmm I agree that pop is not as important as it should be and that production is the dominant winning strategy but I disagree with your suggestions.  They sound a bit too much like civ 6 and I want to see Humankind do something different and push the 4x franchise forward and not just rehash old mechanics.  I think what I'm hearing from your thoughts though is that you want the other districts to matter and I think that could be a better way to go as oppose to just nerfing production or penalizing the player into making other districts.  I'd rather them buff the other playstyles so that we want to build EVERYTHING but we cant haha and then it's more fun to see what we choose or specialize. 

Production should be a strong playstyle but so should the others.  Production is the strongest in ES2 and I was hoping they wouldn't repeat their mistake.

It would be interesting to see Adjacency substituted (partially or completely) for with District levels, similar to Endless Legend. To make it more interesting each district could have a different level up requirement.

The simplest changes that the devs can do to fix FIDS balancing issues are to make everything you can build or buy more expensive than it is now (in Industry prod or Money), starting at the Medieval era. Then slow down the population growth, starting again in the Medieval era. Science does not appear to have any major balancing issues, at least not in my playthroughs. The devs then don't need to mess with game mechanics and district adjacency, and risk creating new balancing issues. All they would need to do is to increase the initial cost value of items and lower the growth value for population for each era. They do only have four months before final release so wholesale changes should be out of the question. The rapid population growth to me is the main issue, since it leads to spamming military units to lower overpopulation (which can be done easily since units have no maintenance cost besides the initial population cost). Hamlets barely help when I have a city growing by 1 pop every turn while a hamlet increases the population threshold by 4 while taking 4 turns to build. Constantly fighting overpopulation before midgame in a 4X game is definitively odd. 

danisans wrote:

The simplest changes that the devs can do to fix FIDS balancing issues are to make everything you can build or buy more expensive than it is now (in Industry prod or Money), starting at the Medieval era. Then slow down the population growth, starting again in the Medieval era. Science does not appear to have any major balancing issues, at least not in my playthroughs. The devs then don't need to mess with game mechanics and district adjacency, and risk creating new balancing issues. All they would need to do is to increase the initial cost value of items and lower the growth value for population for each era. They do only have four months before final release so wholesale changes should be out of the question. The rapid population growth to me is the main issue, since it leads to spamming military units to lower overpopulation (which can be done easily since units have no maintenance cost besides the initial population cost). Hamlets barely help when I have a city growing by 1 pop every turn while a hamlet increases the population threshold by 4 while taking 4 turns to build. Constantly fighting overpopulation before midgame in a 4X game is definitively odd. 

Generally agree, at this stage of the development, a series of tweaks here and there would be most achievable option, scaling the cost/upkeep should be an adequate way - on the other hand I still believe that the terrain yields and Market Quarter adjacency would better be reexamined, since an upkeep mechanism will not reduce the OP-ness of Makers Quarter nor reduce the weakness of Market Quarter fundamentally.

Speaking of overpopulation, if I remember correctly, in the past Steam/Stadia Opendevs there was a scaling stability penalty on overpopulation - see the table in this post - and I definitely encountered instability caused by overpopulation in Stadia Opendev; however I didn't encounter anything similar in Lucy Opendev. IMHO bring in (or bring back) this mechanism could counter the overpopulation a bit; and if the same mechanism can be applied to quarters, that can probably slow down the quarter spam - which is part of the problem - as well.

I agree that all costs should go up, and increase more exponentially over the course of the game, along with slowing down population gains. Its just too easy to get to the max growth rate of one pop per turn. However I think production quarters do need some specific nerfs even if this happens. If costs are high, you are still building a bunch of production quarters because they are currently the best way of building stuff in the game, regardless of cost, and you really need to build stuff. Lowering pop growth speed does buff farmers quarters, market quarters and numbers on a lot of infrastructure need to be looked at though.

danisans wrote:

The simplest changes that the devs can do to fix FIDS balancing issues are to make everything you can build or buy more expensive than it is now (in Industry prod or Money), starting at the Medieval era. Then slow down the population growth, starting again in the Medieval era. Science does not appear to have any major balancing issues, at least not in my playthroughs. The devs then don't need to mess with game mechanics and district adjacency, and risk creating new balancing issues. All they would need to do is to increase the initial cost value of items and lower the growth value for population for each era. They do only have four months before final release so wholesale changes should be out of the question. The rapid population growth to me is the main issue, since it leads to spamming military units to lower overpopulation (which can be done easily since units have no maintenance cost besides the initial population cost). Hamlets barely help when I have a city growing by 1 pop every turn while a hamlet increases the population threshold by 4 while taking 4 turns to build. Constantly fighting overpopulation before midgame in a 4X game is definitively odd. 

You should have far more Industry just by spamming Maker's. Overpopulation should NOT be an issue. I disagree with the scaling costs up, as stuff already scales incredibly fast in this game. Rather everything should be scaled down. The game needs far more than just number changes, there are fundamental issues with certain things, such as the adjacencies.

FlamingKetchup wrote: 

You should have far more Industry just by spamming Maker's. Overpopulation should NOT be an issue. I disagree with the scaling costs up, as stuff already scales incredibly fast in this game. Rather everything should be scaled down. The game needs far more than just number changes, there are fundamental issues with certain things, such as the adjacencies.

Building costs do scale sort of quickly, but my production goes up faster that the scaling on costs. That's the problem. The one thing that feels alright is tech, but even then it's pretty fast if amplitude intends for games to be around the same speed as EL (300 turn limit.) This might be because it's an open dev and costs are low so we can experience everything, but I do feel like I am blitzing though the eras, getting to early modern by turn 70 without making too much effort

Valmighty wrote:

The problem with Humankind is that pop bonus is very little compared to the exploitation. In other 4x, pop is needed to exploit whatever tile we need to use. Humankind doesn't behave that way and that's okay. But it become such huge problem when Humankind belittle the usage of pop. Pop only produce miniscule of resource compared to exploitation. This makes people:

1. Focus on production carpet
2. Worker is negligible

This only encourage one playstyle, that is do the production as much as you can, as early as you can. Everything else can follow. There will be no specialized cities, there won't be need to grow pop, no need to balance science and food, and even money is pretty much useless early on because there's no upkeep and you will shower in money in late game because everything is cheap when you have tons of production.

I actually disagree, the population is very important and in later stages 1 pop worth quite a lot and due to luxuries and infrastructure. As for exploitation it's far easier to simply build a few hamlets than multiple maker quarters.

But I do agree that since there is no maintenance there is no reason not to build/buy something.

And FYI the best game that I had is actually the one where I almost did not use any maker's quarter at all. Phoenician->Dutch.

There are just too many ways to get huge amount of resources since AI does not provide adequate opposition.    

danisans wrote:

. Science does not appear to have any major balancing issues, at least not in my playthroughs. 

Probably because you did not focus on science, you can easily get 1000+ science by the beginning of the last era, without even trying to focus on science.

MumbaUmba wrote:

And FYI the best game that I had is actually the one where I almost did not use any maker's quarter at all. Phoenician->Dutch.

There are just too many ways to get huge amount of resources since AI does not provide adequate opposition.    

TBF the VOC warehouse is busted and its own problem. Really strong infrastructure, quarters, LTs, etc are fun and all, and are one of the things that make amplitude games unique, costs just need to reflect the fact that these things are in the game.

While I can agree that makers quarter spamming is undesirable, I have to point out 2 things.

1. Self-Adjacency is not the cause of this problem

I can confidently tell you that the only difference between makers quarters with self-adjacency and ones without is the way you put them on tiles. Terrain adjacency, exploitation-focused approaches, more labor intensive economy, you name it. The result has always been spamming makers quarters unless there's a serious exploit on legacy traits or emblematic quarters. At least self-adjacency doesn't make you look around the map to find the best spot for industry-rich tiles (or terrain adjacency) every time you want to put a new one, since you can just put one next to an existing industrial cluster.

2. Players spam makers quarters to delay the decision and save up for the future

It's not like players deciding not to build farmers, markets, or research quarters even though these things are very paying. They spam makers quarters because they are given some industry to spend and all the other options are just plain bad or insignificant. Food is too easy to get and hit super growth. Money is always nice to have but markets quarters don't produce much money because devs wanted to emphasize trade routes. Science is at least bit hard to get but research quarters aren't really paying and you run out of things to research very soon. It's not makers quarters are so good that eating up all the surplus resources. It's the game progressing so fast and stopping at the end of the EM era, making all but industry useless.

PARAdoxiBLE wrote:

While I can agree that makers quarter spamming is undesirable, I have to point out 2 things.

1. Self-Adjacency is not the cause of this problem

I can confidently tell you that the only difference between makers quarters with self-adjacency and ones without is the way you put them on tiles. Terrain adjacency, exploitation-focused approaches, more labor intensive economy, you name it. The result has always been spamming makers quarters unless there's a serious exploit on legacy traits or emblematic quarters. At least self-adjacency doesn't make you look around the map to find the best spot for industry-rich tiles (or terrain adjacency) every time you want to put a new one, since you can just put one next to an existing industrial cluster.

2. Players spam makers quarters to delay the decision and save up for the future

It's not like players deciding not to build farmers, markets, or research quarters even though these things are very paying. They spam makers quarters because they are given some industry to spend and all the other options are just plain bad or insignificant. Food is too easy to get and hit super growth. Money is always nice to have but markets quarters don't produce much money because devs wanted to emphasize trade routes. Science is at least bit hard to get but research quarters aren't really paying and you run out of things to research very soon. It's not makers quarters are so good that eating up all the surplus resources. It's the game progressing so fast and stopping at the end of the EM era, making all but industry useless.

Self-adjacency certainly doesn't help, and discouraging the player from using any other adjacency for Maker's is a problem in of itself. The player should be looking around the map for a good place to place Maker's, instead of just using self-adjacency. I definitely agree with the second point, the other yields/basic quarters should be better investments. I say Growth should be based around turns per pop. The current system, with exponential pop growth, may be more realistic, but it doesn't make sense gameplay-wise. Instead of food being no growth, growth, and super growth, Food could reduce the number of turns per pop by one for each x amount up to a certain limit (i.e. each 20 food above 10, up to 90, with a base of 6 turns a pop at 10-30). High Stability could also grant a turn per pop reduction. For Market Quarters, there could be a trade route capacity, and Market Quarters grant it (either +1 Trade route capacity base or +1 per adjacent Luxury). Not sure what to do for Research Quarter's, perhaps they could get adjacency from strategic deposits.

FlamingKetchup wrote:
Self-adjacency certainly doesn't help, and discouraging the player from using any other adjacency for Maker's is a problem in of itself. The player should be looking around the map for a good place to place Maker's, instead of just using self-adjacency. I definitely agree with the second point, the other yields/basic quarters should be better investments. I say Growth should be based around turns per pop. The current system, with exponential pop growth, may be more realistic, but it doesn't make sense gameplay-wise. Instead of food being no growth, growth, and super growth, Food could reduce the number of turns per pop by one for each x amount up to a certain limit (i.e. each 20 food above 10, up to 90, with a base of 6 turns a pop at 10-30). High Stability could also grant a turn per pop reduction. For Market Quarters, there could be a trade route capacity, and Market Quarters grant it (either +1 Trade route capacity base or +1 per adjacent Luxury). Not sure what to do for Research Quarter's, perhaps they could get adjacency from strategic deposits.

I won't argue if you personally prefer scattered blobs over massive clusters for aesthetic reasons. But my point is, self-adjacency does not affect the composition of quarters in a city. Besides, I don't want to see complicated quarter puzzles when this game expects me to build at least hundreds of them. I would rather give puzzle elements to emblematic ones to reduce player fatigue.

Regarding how to fix the economy, I'm honestly not sure about that. But I would start with creating shortages in the first place, instead of messing with the way quarters work.

Satchmo333 wrote:

- Influence - I'm assuming this mechanic isn't finished yet but I had little to do with all of my Influence when maximizing it.  I covered the map with influence but I couldn't capture territories or receive any buffs or anything.  Where is the peaceful conversion / culture flip mechanic?  Could we get a migration or enemy FIMS drain % if we cover our enemies in influence?  Can we have something else to spend it on?  Diplomatic schemes? or buyouts at the bare minimum.  This playthrough felt very weak compared to the other FIMS.

I concur about the Influence. I think the Influence and Faith aspects are fairly opaque, and do not seem to have been fully developed at this point

PARAdoxiBLE wrote:

I won't argue if you personally prefer scattered blobs over massive clusters for aesthetic reasons. But my point is, self-adjacency does not affect the composition of quarters in a city. Besides, I don't want to see complicated quarter puzzles when this game expects me to build at least hundreds of them. I would rather give puzzle elements to emblematic ones to reduce player fatigue.

Regarding how to fix the economy, I'm honestly not sure about that. But I would start with creating shortages in the first place, instead of messing with the way quarters work.

Maybe standard self adjacency is ok, and promotes clustering them like a regular city. However, if one production is supposed to be worth one science or one gold (as the science and builder affinity abilities imply)  then makers quarters are still the biggest bang for your buck. 

i do agree that the main issue is that we need more shortages. Currently the costs do not scale fast enough to keep in front of the players exponentially growing economy

A similar issue occurs with the Khmer's ability to build a carpet of river tile districts with their special ability.  There should probably be a diminishing return for being adjacent to another of the Khmer's special districts.