ADJACENCY BONUSES
Placing a tile, building, or unit next to a related one grants a bonus, so where you build matters as much as what you build.
- SOLO-DEV COST LOW
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN STRATEGY · 4X · CITY-BUILDER
Civilization VI's district system is the canonical example: a campus beside mountains, a harbor beside the city center. Designers use adjacency to turn placement into a spatial optimization puzzle — the map becomes a board where good sites are contested and layout planning is a skill. It rewards foresight (reserving tiles for future synergies) and reading terrain. Key decisions: bonus magnitude (strong enough to shape decisions, not so strong that one perfect layout dominates), whether bonuses stack or diminish, and legibility — players must be able to preview a placement's yield before committing, or the system devolves into wiki-checking. Pitfall: adjacency math so opaque that only spreadsheet players engage with it, while everyone else places buildings randomly and misses the whole system.