In the grand strategic calculus of Civilization 6, Governor Liang the Surveyor holds a unique, if somewhat niche, position. Her final promotion, “Parks and Recreation,” allows her to construct City Park improvements, a tool primarily wielded in the pursuit of a Culture Victory. These parks bestow a suite of benefits: Culture, Amenities, and, most critically, a +2 Appeal bonus to adjacent tiles. This Appeal is the lifeblood of Seaside Resorts and National Parks, the twin engines of late-game tourism. However, the City Park is shackled by a significant constraint: it cannot be built on tiles with strategic or luxury resources, nor on many features.
But what if this limitation was removed? What if Liang, with a single promotion, could command her builders to lay down a City Park on any tile within a city’s borders? This seemingly simple change would not just be a minor buff; it would represent a seismic shift in the strategic landscape of Civilization 6. It would elevate Liang from a useful specialist to an indispensable powerhouse, fundamentally rewriting the rules of territorial development, economic planning, and the race for cultural dominance. Analysis on forums shows that the player community already recognizes the power of Appeal manipulation; this change would grant players an unprecedented level of control, turning the map itself into a canvas for their cultural ambitions.
The New Foundation: Appeal on Demand
The most immediate and profound consequence of this hypothetical change would be the absolute control over tile Appeal. Currently, players must work with the terrain they are given. Mountains, coastlines, and certain districts or wonders provide inherent Appeal, while rainforests, marshes, and industrial zones detract from it. Players meticulously plan their cities, seeking out naturally appealing locations for their National Parks. This process is often a puzzle, requiring careful placement of districts and removal of undesirable features.
If City Parks could be built anywhere, this puzzle would be solved. A popular strategy would become the systematic transformation of entire landscapes.
- National Park Paradise: A National Park requires four contiguous, unimproved tiles of at least Charming Appeal, all owned by the same city. With unrestricted City Parks, a player could simply identify any four-tile diamond and surround it with parks. A tile with a base Appeal of -1, normally a dead zone for tourism, could be instantly elevated to +7 by placing four City Parks around it. This would make any four-tile block of land a potential National Park, regardless of its natural features. The community of professional gamers often emphasizes maximizing National Park locations; this change would make that maximization absolute.
- Seaside Resorts Everywhere: Similarly, Seaside Resorts require a flat land tile with at least Breathtaking Appeal. With this change, any coastal tile could be made viable. A dismal -2 Appeal coastal marsh tile, currently useless for tourism, could have two City Parks placed inland next to it, instantly raising its Appeal to +2 (Charming). A third park would bring it to +4 (Breathtaking). Entire coastlines, no matter how initially unappealing, could be converted into unbroken chains of high-yield tourism resorts.
This absolute control would remove the element of chance and adaptation from the cultural game. No longer would a player’s tourism potential be dictated by a lucky start near mountains or natural wonders. Any territory, no matter how bleak, could be sculpted into a tourism paradise.
Economic and Strategic Revolution: The End of Tile Yields
The ability to build a City Park on any tile would introduce a fascinating and complex layer of economic and strategic decision-making. The choice would no longer be between an improvement and nothing, but between an improvement and the potent, multi-faceted yield of a City Park.
Sacrificing Strategic and Luxury Resources
According to the player community, the management of strategic and luxury resources is a cornerstone of victory in any condition. This change would force a radical re-evaluation of that principle.
- The Strategic Trade-Off: Imagine a city with a single source of Oil. Conventionally, improving this tile is a non-negotiable strategic imperative. But with a super-charged Liang, a player might face a difficult choice. Do they build the Oil Well to fuel their late-game military, or do they build a City Park on the tile? The park, especially with Liang established, would provide a steady stream of Culture, an Amenity, and potentially unlock massive tourism from adjacent National Parks. A player pursuing a Culture Victory might calculate that the long-term tourism gain from the park outweighs the immediate military benefit of the oil, choosing to trade for or even ignore the strategic resource entirely. This would be a high-stakes gamble, betting cultural dominance against military vulnerability.
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Luxuries vs. Amenities: The same logic applies to luxury resources. A tile holding Silver provides Gold and an Amenity when improved. A City Park provides an Amenity (two if next to water) and Culture. The choice would come down to the specific needs of the empire. Is the Gold from the Silver mine more valuable than the Culture from the park? If the city is desperate for Amenities, a park next to a river could provide +2 Amenities, double the output of a standard plantation or mine. This would allow for incredibly dense, happy cities without relying on a wide variety of luxury resources.
Rewriting the Value of Bonus Resources and High-Yield Tiles
The impact would extend beyond resources to every single tile on the map.
- From Farms to Parks: A tile with Wheat, when developed into a Farm, becomes a crucial source of Food, especially with adjacent farms. Many professional gamers suggest that creating farm triangles is a fundamental tactic for growing large cities. The option to place a City Park on that Wheat tile would challenge this orthodoxy. A player might choose to sacrifice the Food yield of a single tile to boost the Appeal of an entire region, turning a city’s breadbasket into its tourism engine. This would force players to think about city growth and development in a completely new way, balancing population capacity against cultural output.
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The Lumber Mill’s Dilemma: A Lumber Mill on a hill with Woods is a production powerhouse. In the current game, chopping down woods to place a district is a common decision. But what if you could leave the woods for Appeal and place a City Park on an adjacent high-production mine? A player might choose to systematically replace their mines and quarries with City Parks, deliberately tanking a city’s production in the short term to create a cultural juggernaut that wins the game through tourism pressure. This would be a radical, all-in strategy, transforming an industrial heartland into a sprawling nature preserve.
Unconventional Warfare: Defensive and Territorial Control
The implications of unrestricted City Parks extend beyond economics and culture into the realm of military strategy and territorial control. The ability to instantly create an “improvement” on any tile would provide a unique, non-violent tool for shaping the battlefield.
- Creating Strategic Buffers: Analysis on forums shows that players are constantly looking for ways to slow enemy advances. A line of City Parks on your border would create a defensive buffer. While units can move through parks, they offer no defensive bonus and the tile yields are poor for a pillaging army. A player could deliberately create a “scorched earth” defense by converting all tiles on their frontier into parks, forcing an invading army to traverse a landscape devoid of resources to plunder, slowing them down and making them vulnerable to counter-attack.
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Blocking Chokepoints and Denying Territory: More powerfully, City Parks could be used to block strategic chokepoints. Imagine a narrow mountain pass, the only viable route for an enemy army. A player could use a builder to place a City Park directly in the pass, effectively creating a permanent, impassable roadblock. Unlike a unit, the park cannot be attacked and destroyed. It would have to be removed by an enemy builder, a time-consuming process that would require the builder to be protected. This would be a revolutionary defensive tactic, allowing players to reshape the map to their strategic advantage, creating fortifications more permanent than any fort. This same principle could be used to deny key coastal landing sites or river crossings.
The Ultimate Culture Victory Engine
Synthesizing all these points, it becomes clear that this change would make Liang the undisputed master of the Culture Victory. The path to cultural dominance would become a streamlined, predictable process.
A player would start by identifying the general areas for their future National Parks and Seaside Resorts. They would then use Liang, moving her from city to city, to direct builders in the systematic placement of City Parks. All other considerations—resource yields, production, even strategic resource access—would become secondary to the grand design of maximizing Appeal.
The empire would transform. Industrial zones would be ringed with parks to negate their Appeal penalty. Barren deserts and tundra, normally worthless, would become prime real estate for National Parks, their emptiness easily converted to Breathtaking Appeal. The player would not need to hope for good terrain; they would manufacture it.
This would create a snowball effect. The Culture from the parks themselves would speed the acquisition of new civics and policies. The Amenities would allow for larger, more productive cities, which in turn could work more tiles and produce more builders. The tourism pressure would mount relentlessly, overwhelming all other civilizations with a tide of blue jeans and pop music generated from a perfectly sculpted landscape.
Counter-Strategies and the Question of Balance
In the face of such a powerful strategy, other civilizations would be forced to adapt. The most direct counter would be military conquest. An opponent would have to recognize the looming threat of Liang’s tourism engine and launch an early-game war to disrupt the placement of parks and capture the cities being prepared for cultural ascendancy. Espionage would also become critical, with spies deployed to sabotage industrial zones and spaceports to slow the cultural player’s progress in other areas.
However, the fundamental problem is one of balance. This hypothetical change would make Liang’s “Parks and Recreation” promotion arguably the single most powerful ability in the game. It would be a “one-button” solution to the complex puzzle of the Culture Victory. The strategic diversity of the game would suffer, as any player attempting a Culture Victory would be almost required to choose Liang and pursue this strategy. It would invalidate many other leaders and strategies that rely on careful, organic development of their territory.
Conclusion
The ability for Liang the Surveyor to build City Parks on any tile would be a game-changer of the highest order. It would transform the pursuit of a Culture Victory from a nuanced art of adaptation and planning into a methodical science of absolute control. The map would cease to be a constraint and would instead become a blank slate, ready to be painted with the vibrant colors of Breathtaking Appeal. This change would introduce fascinating new strategic dilemmas, forcing players to weigh the value of immediate yields against long-term cultural power and even to use tile improvements as tools of war. While it would undoubtedly make for a thrilling and powerful playstyle, it would also create a significant imbalance, a testament to how a single, seemingly small change to the rules can ripple through the entire strategic framework of a game as deep and complex as Civilization 6. The result would be a Liang who is not just a surveyor, but a true architect of worlds.