On Towards the Stars: Yields and Percentages
Urban Planning is one of the best cards in the game, change my mind
[This post is part of a larger strategy guide for Civilization 6]
Percentages over Absolutes
A good friend of mine once told me that Urban Planning (+1 production in all cities) is a bad card because it gives so little production.
If you agree with that take, sit down and listen up, this section is for you.
Resource yields are the foundation of your empire. More yields are always good. But the absolute amount of yield is only important when comparing against how your opponents are doing. For most mechanics, the relative yield is way more important.
Technologies, civics, infrastructure, units — the cost of everything scales as the game goes on. That means you need more yield just to keep the same pace of production. It also means that in the early game, a few points of yield can be game changing.
So why do I love Urban Planning?
When the game starts, you might have cities that generate only 4 or 5 production per turn. Urban Planning means you're getting a 20-25% production boost in every city.
In the early game, a lot of small boosts are really powerful.
Early monuments. Most early empires generate 1 culture per turn, and stay that way for a while. A monument only adds 1 culture, but in the early game that's a 100% increase (this is partially why Trajan/Rome is so powerful).
Horses. Some of your tiles may randomly get +1 production in the first few turns of the game for getting a tech that you always have to get. Essentially a free 20-25% production boost in your capital.
Early envoys. If you are the first person to find a city state, you get free resources in your capital. Same logic applies: it may only be 1 Science (for e.g.) but that’s a 33-50% boost in your early game.
Early Governor Promotions. The BBG level 2 promotion for Pingala is +1 Science per population. The BBG level 2 promotion for Moksha is +1 Culture per population. You can get 2 governor promotions by the time you get to Political Philosophy, one from State Workforce and the other from Early Empire. I think on average that’s a 100% boost.
Strategically, you should always be looking for ways to get those percentage increases, especially when they are unique to your empire. Urban Planning is a great card, but everyone has access to it so it's hard to use Urban Planning to get an edge. Utilizing geography, targeting and winning specific races, or finding and exploiting civ-specific synergies are all ways to get extra yield gain, especially early in the game. Sometimes, buying the right tile in the early game will triple your city's output.
Not all Yields are Created Equal
Even though early percentage increases can be powerful, I tend not to build early monuments that frequently. Why? Yields are not all created equal.
In rough order of importance, you should aim to maximize: production, food, coin, faith/science/culture. Of course, different civs may benefit from different yields — for example, you want way more coin and faith if you're playing Mali. But for the average civ I think production and food are far more important than other resources, because production creates more production, and food creates more workers which creates more production. Coin is a close third, because it can also be used to improve production, but generally does not scale as well. Faith, science1, and culture are all important to eventually win the game, but they tend to be much more game/strategy specific.
There are actually ways in which getting too far ahead on science can be dangerous if your production is not up to speed as well. For example, if you unlock knights, the production cost will be much higher than for chariots; and the game will prevent you from building more chariots once you can make knights. Not a good place to be if you're at war and you need units five turns ago!