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.