Civilization VI Revolutionizing City Building With Districts
One of the staples of Civilization is that you have an entire city on one tile. Then, as you progress through the game and it’s scientific advancements, you’d watch your city evolve. But outside of giving it materials and resources, you never really helped your city itself grow. With Civilization VI, that will change.
For now, you’re not only building cities, you’re going to be building districts that allow you certain bonuses, and if used correctly, advancements in technology. This is a huge chance for the game. In an interview with IGN, the team at Firaxis described the district system:
“A science district, which we’ve called a campus, once constructed will allow you to put a library and a university and a research lab out on that tile. And now your city is sort of specialized toward being a really good science city,” says Lead Designer Ed Beach.
There will be 12 types of districts total, with only a handful available at start, and how you use them and where you put them is very important.
“Right out of the gate you’re going to get adjacency bonuses of science by putting a Campus next to mountains or jungle. If you put down a holy site you’re going to want it next to woods to get the bonus there. If you’re on the coast, obviously you’re going to want to build a harbor. But these take up tiles, so eventually you also have to think about feeding your people. You have to make sure you can still build farms and mines, and wonders take up whole tiles as well. You can’t have everything everywhere.”
“Every city is a handcrafted, hex-by-hex layout puzzle,” adds Beach,
This new feature will no doubt lead to many different takes on strategy and how players play the title. Civilization VI arrives October 21st.
Districts would be a pretty cool addition, I hope they will work like in Caesar III where you needed to have districts near most of the cities.
That would be an awesome addition. It makes the cities you create more alive, and not just a bunch of structures and some guards, while the laborers toil through the day. I think adding districts would be a welcome addition to the game, and I think it would even be better to instead of just adding one city after another, a city can grow large enough to be its own state. That would be pretty cool.
Definitely agree with you on this one. Personally, I haven't played with district thing, but I am looking forward to see how it will influence my gameplay experience.
I enjoyed being able to examine what my city looked like in Civ 3, and this sounds like a much more expanded, better version of that, with added improvements. It'll be cool to see an expansive city rather than just a model that occupies a tile, although I can already see myself throwing defensive units around when barbarians show up, as we'll have more ground to cover for our cities.
Interesting. I wonder what kind of bonuses that districts may offer relative to the capital.
This is just another reason why I love these games. Just by adding this little feature I think that it will significantly affect the strategy for building a city and thus make the game more challenging, more intriguing. I am usually not the best at that part of the game, either, so it will be an especially tough addition for me to master.
This seems to be an interesting mechanic. I wonder how this new District feature will affect game difficulty as far as strategy goes. The addition of a new city sector is comparable to new character classes in RPG games like World of Warcraft, in my opinion.
I really like this addition because it really adds a layer of personal choice when it comes to what direction you want to take your empire in. Add this to the Civic cards and you got a really good formula for personalized gameplay.
Civilization Beyond Earth tried this with the starting differences, but it always felt like it took too much away from the factions you were playing as.
I think I heard somewhere that certain buildings are restricted to certain districts, like you need a military district for barracks or some such thing. This means you have to sink more time and resources into a certain style and play, and as such you can't as easily be the jack of all trades which used to lead to a very bland empire flavor. You can't just focus predominantly on culture the whole time and then realize you have some money and suddenly decide to buy some barracks and armories and go conquer Venice. I really like this change, good on them. I just hope their isn't some caveat we as yet cannot see that ruins this gameplay feature on release and he have to wait a latter day Brave New World to enjoy the game.
I agree with this. One of the halmarks of this series is that they are able to add small features that expand the strategy of the game beyond what the previous version used without feeling like a completely new game. They go just far enough to make it feel fresh.
This is giving off a sim city vibe for me. This is a nice addition and will add more depth to the game. It is shaping up to be the ultimate Civilization game.
As a SimCity fan, I am glad that the developers of Civilization are taking a number from the Sims playbook. It'll be interesting to see how these two features compare.
Districts sound like a super cool feature. It doesn't sound overly complicated, but still complex enough to add new depth to the games mechanics. This is type of innovation that I want to see out of the Civilization franchise.
This ought to be a game changer. Something that by itself should make the game feel fresh, which is great. The only disadvanteg is that it could be "confusing for new players" to quote Valve. Hurray for game tutorials which all of us instantly skip, eh? Jokes aside, this is going to change a lot about the gameplay, from choosing the settling location, to which troops you train, to which Wonders you build and so on. I'm always happy to learn and adapt, which is what the Civ games have been about, after all.
That should be a fun extra. It will make the cities more real and more fun. It also gives the game more depth. Now it won't just be about adding one city then another and another.
We have lot of new features to look forward to in the civilization VI like:
From the looks of it, it would be pretty interesting because of these features and the multiplayer option as well.