I was thinking a lot of what Humankind is missing after playing mp, and I think I can definitely say now. Of course, maybe game lacks some balance, but it will be fixed in future. The really what game is trying to do, but fully fails, is giving the opportunity to make your strategy and development different. Here what I mean.

The districts have different type of bonuses (from adjacency, from district itself and from specialist it provides), but there are no any infrastructure that could buff one type of this bonus and debuff another. Same could be told about civics. I mean if there were some different paths of building districts depending on its bonus, during game session there could be different flourishing cities for different cultural empires, which is the main goal of game. For example if you have chosen adjacency bonus then you will have cities with many clusters of same districts. While opponent could go through path of diversity districts and get bonus mostly from workers and different districts placed near each other. In this case common quarter could provide some additional workers and be counted as FIMS district, so it becomes valuable again. 

Another thing is building big cities less urbanised and small but highly urbanised. Today you can’t use it fully because of formulas of district cost, which lead you to spread only 4 territory cities.

Finally, different paths of development and special playstyle could be massively brought by civics. Huamnkind only gives buffes and afraid to give debuff. But making the right balance between buff and debuff will lead to different playstyles available for players. I mean there could be civics that fully convert your FIMS into specialisation around some of them, or buff the way you place districts and so on. The best example of such way is global trading civic.

I hope that maybe one day, humankind infrastructure, civics, districts and formulas will be rework in the way that gives different opportunities to develop in different ways. Nevertheless, nowadays game condition is really nice, but lack of different development your own culture leads to routine in the game

I think your analysis is correct.

I noticed early on release that all cities had roughly the same distribution of food/production/science. I was wondering, where is the Civ style where you focus one city on one thing? 

I think this is due to two causes:

1) Most of the bonuses coming from culture - meaning they are empire wide and affect all cities equally. If it's good to build a science district in one city, it's good to build them in all cities.

2) All of the terrain bonuses are pitifully small. Like just 1 extra science from a tile - and the district doesn't boost it, it just extracts it or not. This was mitigated a bit later by having some good bonuses on natural wonders, but the core problem remains.

Your other point about the inability of playing wide vs tall is also correct. The scaling costs make only one strategy feasible. I remember they did scale them back a little, but they're still very high. Also it was nice that they have scaling by type of district but it still creates a minimal difference - and also that itself forces you to build a variety of districts rather than specializing. (And personally, I've found the only way to make a dent is with some civics which provide -50% to garrison/common - only those seem to have a noticeable impact if you want those types of districts).

It's missing mechanics it ... had and that were removed?

Maybe you could choose after settling which FIMS city would specialize in, providing additional discount to those quarters and maybe an exploitation of that type to 'blank' quarters?

I'm not sure we could get buff/debuff incorporated easily into the game, that means balancing a lot of different chains and possibilities, with fingers crossing that none becomes too much of a meta, and then Colony thing, that provides all the infrastructure has to be... well, something has to be done with it.

DNLH wrote:

Maybe you could choose after settling which FIMS city would specialize in, providing additional discount to those quarters and maybe an exploitation of that type to 'blank' quarters?

I'm not sure we could get buff/debuff incorporated easily into the game, that means balancing a lot of different chains and possibilities, with fingers crossing that none becomes too much of a meta, and then Colony thing, that provides all the infrastructure has to be... well, something has to be done with it.

Can't you elaborate on the Colony plan? What do you think is wrong with it, exactly? I find it a very nice touch in both realism and gameplay, that you don't have to queue the damn pottery and everything else in the contemporary era.

neprostoman wrote:
Can't you elaborate on the Colony plan? What do you think is wrong with it, exactly? I find it a very nice touch in both realism and gameplay, that you don't have to queue the damn pottery and everything else in the contemporary era.

I mentioned it solely in the context of having infrastructure provide buffs and debuffs. Sure, we now have an option to remove some of it, but it still could make settling new cities a bit tedious.

There's nothing wrong with it in the game as it is, although I wouldn't mind if it would also provide a discount for existing cities, but maybe that's my devotion to Endless speed speaking.