After watching a few streams I came to suspect the district placement mechanic would be far too micro-intensive.....

After two practice games, and one proper game, I've come to the conclusion that it is.

The problem is made worse by the extremely busy city tile graphics obfuscating the identity of the existing districts, making it unnecessarily hard to know where to put new districts.

At the very least, when placing districts the map needs to change to a simplified, colour-coded overlay, so that discerning the arrangement of existing districts is made easier.

I also think that queueing up districts needs to allow district placement that relies upon other planned districts, so in one set of actions I can place & queue up a whole block of districts that chain off one-another.

Though even with both of these massive improvements, I still feel districts are just too flavourless & repetitive for them to be so prominent in the gameplay loop.

Tbh I don't think I was ever going to love Humankind; it's embraced Civ5 & 6's unstacked cities; an addition to the 4x formula that I consider to be ill-conceived & unfun.

Balance is a joke to be sure, and the AI seems pretty inept. However, both these issues are fixable.

A core mechanic of the game such as districts being tedious isn't something that can be so easily corrected.

I believe one of the issues is that districts should be capped in some way. I know pop maybe is not the best idea to cap it cause military units cost pop, but some system to limit it. Even with a limit they could just buff them to make them more meaningful due to the restriction. 

I'd say rather than cap just have it cost more industry every new district, incrementally. Otherwise you incentivize food more than it already is.

there's a lens in game to color code the basic districts already. all uniques are white color which is not ideal, but it's good enough

kryton24 wrote:

I'd say rather than cap just have it cost more industry every new district, incrementally. Otherwise you incentivize food more than it already is.

That is why I am saying it should maybe not be based on population, but something else instead. Maybe have a cap based on era or have a global count that is shared between cities and it increase with different mechanics. That promotes tall vs wide than.

TehJumpingJawa wrote:

After watching a few streams I came to suspect the district placement mechanic would be far too micro-intensive.....

After two practice games, and one proper game, I've come to the conclusion that it is.

The problem is made worse by the extremely busy city tile graphics obfuscating the identity of the existing districts, making it unnecessarily hard to know where to put new districts.

At the very least, when placing districts the map needs to change to a simplified, colour-coded overlay, so that discerning the arrangement of existing districts is made easier.

I also think that queueing up districts needs to allow district placement that relies upon other planned districts, so in one set of actions I can place & queue up a whole block of districts that chain off one-another.

Though even with both of these massive improvements, I still feel districts are just too flavourless & repetitive for them to be so prominent in the gameplay loop.

Tbh I don't think I was ever going to love Humankind; it's embraced Civ5 & 6's unstacked cities; an addition to the 4x formula that I consider to be ill-conceived & unfun.

Balance is a joke to be sure, and the AI seems pretty inept. However, both these issues are fixable.

A core mechanic of the game such as districts being tedious isn't something that can be so easily corrected.

There's already an option to do that, to color code the city tiles.

As for unstacked, I believe Endless Legend did this way before Civ 5 and 6. It works extremely well and beautifully in that game, idk why it's so bad in this one..

I also agree that the district tiles must be way more distinct, its a pain when you want to attack an enemy district and have to  hover over every tile to see what district you are attacking.

TehJumpingJawa wrote:
when placing districts the map needs to change to a simplified, colour-coded overlay, so that discerning the arrangement of existing districts is made easier

Oh, yes, this please!

The lens already exists, turning it on automatically when putting down new districts should be trivial... but you can use the lens when doing so.