Author: JNR13. Discuss this article in the forums!
I thought I had the tile yields figured out. Grass, Tundra, and Tropical provide 1 Food, Plains and Desert 1 Production. Vegetated and Wet don’t add any yields, but Vegetated Desert turns the 1 Production into 1 Gold. So far so good, but the Happiness yield confused me. It seems that it required adjacent water. Except when it did not. Maybe this city has a building granting Happiness on tiles next to mountains? But then why is it outside the borders, too? And not all tiles next to mountains have it. Nearby forests also seemed to play a role sometimes.
Then I realized what water, mountains, and forests have in common: They provide Appeal in Civ VI! So I started counting.
Below is the largest yields-on picture we have. I marked all water, mountain, and vegetated tiles in green. I circled all tiles giving Happiness because the yield indicator is a bit small. Then I added the adjacency count for all tiles (“+” indicates that more tiles outside the frame could provide Appeal). I wasn’t sure about world wonders, they could still grant Appeal, but no tile here requires its adjacent wonder to get over the threshold, so it’s impossible to tell.
It turns out that exactly those tiles with an Appeal of at least 3 do yield Happiness.
So this is it, I think I cracked the code. Appeal always felt like a prototype feature in Civ VI to me. Interesting idea, but still looking for its identity. Is it beauty? Is it health? It seemed to represent different things in different contexts and this changed as new content was added, too. I think the devs were still trying to figure out what direction to go with throughout the entire development cycle of VI. So I’m curious about what they will do in VII beyond this. I’m expecting a return of preservation mechanics in era 3 for it. I think they dropped the whole health aspect that was in VI in the form of negative Appeal from Marsh, Rainforest, and Floodplains. Some tiles here would not reach the threshold of 3 if the adjacent Marsh reduced Appeal. I like this streamlining of a common complaint for VI and hope that it will enhance natural preservation mechanics, letting us include wetlands and rainforests into national parks or so.
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