Now we have a positive production feedback in the game - an increase in production leads to an even faster increase. Developers see this problem, and have tried to solve it using new formulas for calculating the cost of the quarter. But, as for me, this did not solve the problem, but only slowed down the pace of the game. Therefore, strategies through food and gold do not work in the game for this reason (they also do not work due to the binding of the number of specialists to the number of quarters and unbalanced redemption for money) - these strategies do not give positive feedback, and each trade or agricultural quarter will be built longer and longer.

I propose to rethink the formula for calculating the cost of quarters. Now every (!) quarter increases the cost of the next. I propose to make the cost of quarters depend only on the number of industrial (!) quarters. In this case, you will build a certain number of initial industrial quarters and then you can switch to building other quarterss without suffering an increase in the price of the district. This change will not destroy the importance of production - it will be needed for the construction of infrastructure, wonders and troops. Your opinion ?

P.S. Please cancel the limit of specialists and the exponential consumption of food by the population - this limits the strategy of playing through food.

I don't think building industrial quarters make positive feedback. As you said, cost of the quarter increases exponentially. Building maker's quarter increases the cost of quarter more than it produces at some point. In my case, I prefer building infrastructures and units instead of quarters and conquer/attach territories to the city. The only quarters I build are emblematic quarters(except garrison-types) and harbor and artisan's quarters. These alone already increase the cost of quarter too much.

I agree that the production of money is too low and requires too much investment compared to the industry. However money has its own strengths(liquidity, upgrading units, buying resources, etc), I guess it is somewhat appropriate.

And food consumption, yeah it is a real problem. Because of that exponential consumption of food, it is better to product units than building farmer's quarter or food-producing infra. 

Why not implement headwinds based on district soft caps? Similar to how influence suffers headwinds when you go over the city cap.

Every district beyond a certain number results in a city wide percentage based penalty to its resource. For example, in Classical era you have a soft cap of 6 industrial districts per city and every district beyond that causes a 5% penalty. Move on to Medieval and the soft cap becomes 8, and so on. You could also tie increases to specific era techs the same way city cap is in order to add another strategic decision to the mix. Next adjust the cap based on chosen civ, so an industrial civ gets a soft cap of 8 industrial districts during the Classical era instead of 6 to emphasize their focus on building. This results in yet another potentially interesting strategic consideration when choosing a civ; although as a downside it may devalue militaristic and expansion civs too much. On face value all of this would also devalue building tall therefore tying at least some of the cap to territory is also be necessary. So now maybe you start with a default cap of 3 in the classical era and each attached territory adds an additional district to the cap. Now there is another interesting choice between tall and wide as a result of the mechanic. 

It would be easy to implement in a UI (a simple x/x counter somewhere) and there are a lot of levers to pull to fine tune the balance. The downside is that it would likely take a lot of fine tuning to get the balance right.

The game does propose to rewrite history, not to change its physics. The manufacturing of goods remains central in the economy, support functions have grown, much for some of them, but they remain, in the end, dependent of very concret products. I feel that the game shows it quite well and that players may have a tendency to walk the known path more often than not. It is nonetheless very much possible to win a game without focusing on production and/or military, even at the highest level. That shows that other path remain viable. Moreover, focusing on production, as did the actual world for some time now, has pollution for consequence.

The game had to be slown down, it is still possible to finish very early without necessairly min-maxing and the end game feels very short in playtime if some end conditions are not removed.

The equation could be an in between, something like number of that type of quarter + number of makers quarters, and weight it the right way to have a good feeling of it being balanced? It would make the makers path more expensive without letting other quarters get to easy to build (adding new territories would make it to easy if they kept the same cost).

I do like the limit of specialists, it forces to make building decisions and is a bit of working around the importance of food (which would be a lot better if there's no requirements to fill slots of specialists compared to the gold+science way ).

I haven't fully thought about solutions, but to me, increasing the production cost is not the right way to go. 

Instead, they need to add an ongoing cost. Currently districts only have an ongoing stability cost (-10/district). They need to add some other FIMS cost in. That will make sure you have to build a variety of districts. Maybe some infrastructure will increase FIMS cost - so you can choose to build it and get benefits or don't build it to save ongoing costs.

There's already pollution. There could be a maintenance cost but then it would be a makers quarters + maintenance quarters/building/whatever, instead of the original build and other build would be more diluted, having to add the maintenance part to their mix.

Why not implement headwinds based on district soft caps? Similar to how influence suffers headwinds when you go over the city cap.

I like it and hope a developper will see it.

Speaking of soft caps, it could also be applied through the city cap not only being a somewhat limiting factor for the cultural production but also for the production itself. Each city over the cap could bring for example 5 or 10% reduction in production (and the reduction of influence should also be percentage based).

I'd really like to see more of a distinction of quality vs quantity when it comes to production (and also food), if only so that building more industrial districts isn't always the best choice, or at least that it should start giving diminishing results after a certain point.

"Efficiency" maybe? it could even be tied to other non-material yields, like Science and Influence . Like being able to discover new inventions that increase efficiency in you already existing districts, or spending ifluence to reorganize your working force allowing you a larger industrial soft cap/ discounts for future districts.

Tie it to the event system and we could have a bunch of interesting choices to take.

This of course is more a new mechanic for an xpack or large DLC, but it would be nice to see more options in how we organize our cities.