New strategy: Ignore happiness

Doesn't very unhappy freeze growth? I'm -10 means no growth, -33% combat, and -33% science (I was suggesting gold and production, but I realized that means you can't build improvements to get out of the mess. Maybe -15% gold and production). Then -20 should be -50% combat, -50% science, -25% gold and -25% production. When you get to this point, the biggest reason is you continued to conquer while very unhappy. Unless you lost resources while in a very unhappy stage (in which case, use diplomacy to get them back), there's no excuse for this, it's the exact behavior the model is trying to discourage.
 
last game on prince with India in late game I was "pulsing" between +50 surplus happy and -15 unhappy...

this whole hapiness mess motivates only 1 thing...raze every enemy city you find and annex what you can't raze.
I am not sure if CiV should promote such genocide...sufficient enough that players love to throw nukes around like it's no tomorrow.
 
OK I know this is way off topic but:

Louie the quote in your signature
Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy
-Ben Franklin

This is actually not a misquote that's caught on, not quite sure who said if first, but they distorted what Ben Franklin actually said. What he actually said in a letter addressed to André Morellet in 1779:

Ben Franklin said:
Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine, a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.
 
After trying to ignore happiness, I agree that razing almost all cities seems to be the better - and possibly more obvious - option. However, it's every bit as absurd as ignoring happiness in my opinion.

If you conquer a country, you don't normally genocide the whole people and then build your own cities there, even though there were some cases in history where something like that was done deliberately or accidentally (the Americas come to mind), it wasn't the usual method, and would be highly unacceptable in a modern world with ethical standards. I would like to see a big diplomacy and happiness penalty for razing cities.

Maybe if the AI had a propensity to be against genociding instead of playing to win just as a person would do there might be a reason not to do so. I agree, there needs to be a much more firm diplomatic model in place that doesn't turn a blind eye to wanton genocide.
 
ALL you need is
-10 => no improvement in your empire's capabilities

Essentially every empire should AIM for
Maximum total happiness
-10 NET happiness

They designed the system so that
Maximum Population of Empire ~ Happiness+10

The problem is you can get around the "Maximum Population" through conquest.

Then it becomes very simple
1. No new population from city growth... check
2. No new population from founding cities...check
3. No new population from conquering cities.... OOps, fix this.. OK, conquered cities stay in resistance. (like razing cities should)

Then Maybe add on a combat penalty, to stop you from gobbling up Territory where you get benefits (-33% seems good as it counters the Oligarchy/Nationalism bonus, so your troops are poor 'outside' of your territory, but balanced inside it.)


Or if you want to be really mean, charge maintenance for buildings in cities in resistance..... that'll stop the war machine.


That should be enough I think

-10=> No city growth, no settlers, no cities leave resistance

General change: Must Pay maintenance for buildings of cities in resistance.
 
Thanks. But you probably should've read the rest of my post first.

I did. You didn't address some of those points nearly as well as you seem to think you did. (Besides, it was a comprehensive list of options, obviously some of it would be redundant with things others had said already.)

First, large empires do NOT shut down SPs, because the +30% is additive instead of multiplicative. So as long as any new city produces more than 30% as much culture as the capital, it's a net gain to add a new city.
If your empire is rolling in wonders then sure, it's hard to reach that 30%, but if it's not? If you've only got a handful of wonders, then the 5 culture for Monument+Temple starts to add pretty significantly to your empire's culture, and easily offsets the increased SP costs. (Especially if you're France.) Sure, rushing a Temple sounds pointless, but I've been playing Egypt, whose Burial tombs are +2 happy +2 culture, and THAT is definitely a worthwhile building to rush immediately in any new city (border spreading and happiness boost in one!). Before that, I played Persia on an archipelago map (and lots of water means lots of money and very few roads, so my income was huge), and I'd rush-buy at least four buildings in each new city.

Second, stockpiling. The question becomes, are you actively expanding at the moment, or did this come up on you some other way? It's often in your best interest to save up some culture points to buy the later-game SPs as soon as they unlock. (In my last game, I bought three Rationalism SPs as soon as I hit the Renaissance, resulting in a massive science boost. If I'd spent those points on lower-quality SPs in earlier eras, even with the reduced costs I would have faced at the time, it would have raised the later SP costs up even higher.) If you've been steady at a given number of cities for a while, then it's likely that you're either at the amount needed for a new SP or close to it.

Using a statement that begins with "Barring trading for more resources" is hardly a slam-dunk, because that's the main way of dealing with unhappiness. ("Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?") No, most people don't trade for every possible luxury at every opportunity if they don't need to, for two reasons.
First, because if you're at +5 happiness, going to +10 only really makes Golden Ages come a bit faster, but if you traded a critical luxury to your opponent to get that boost, he'll get a lot more utility from the trade than you will. So trading for more happiness when you're still in the positive numbers isn't really a good idea.
Second, because if you're talking about city-states, it's an ongoing cost to keep their relations up. (To make things worse, what happens if you spend 1000 gold to get to Ally, only to have another empire conquer the city-state?) So if you're running low on cash, is it really worth spending that sort of money for a happiness boost you don't need? Or would you just be better off using that 1000 gold to rush-buy a Colosseum in one of your cities instead?
End result, you'll often have some way to get a new luxury that you won't take advantage of until necessary.

Indeed. Will not help. When you're at -15-20 Unhappy, this will take forever to matter and/or may eternally cripple your cities.

Not really true. If you've got a 10-city empire, then starving each city by one size saves you 10 happiness, barring any discounts for certain SPs/wonders. This isn't really a good long-term solution, because it takes too long to recover and the loss of income hurts badly, but it's at least an option. It's especially useful if you have no intention of recovering; for instance, if I'm ten turns away from a domination victory, and I just need to keep my people happy enough to avoid the -33% penalty, then there's no downside to doing this. It also doesn't take long; spend one turn not farming any tiles (all specialists!), watch your city shrink, gain a happiness.

Not just raze a recently-conquered city. Raze 90% of cities upon conqering.

Hence the "or wait for it to finish dying". But I disagree with your 90%, and your own culture argument above is the reason why. If you're capturing small border towns that have never had any culture, then sure, burn 'em. But if a city's had a lot of culture and/or paid border expansions, then the amount of territory you lose by razing can be huge, and it's often worth the 5gpt (and Courthouse building turns, and lost turns of rioting) to keep all of those hexes, even if there are no new luxuries or strategic resources within those hexes. It's hard enough getting a decent amount of culture accumulated for SPs, but if we need it for basic border expansions in the late game as well?
(And obviously, don't raze anything with a Wonder.)

If you are building stuff, you are not playing optimally.

Now THAT is just a dumb statement.
Some things should be bought, sure, but money is often in tremendously short supply in the later game. For the cost of a single rushed Colosseum, you could enter two research agreements, and that building might only take 10 turns to build the old-fashioned way. Or for that same cost, you could upgrade three or four units to the next tech level. It's a non-negligible cost to rush something that big.
If we're talking about a newly-conquered or newly-founded city, then sure, buy it because the city's production will be nonexistent or better used for a Courthouse. But if it's just that you never got around to building that Colosseum in one of your older cities because you had more than enough happiness and didn't want to pay 3gpt for something you didn't need, then it can easily be better to build it.

*I* never got "that horrible unhappiness level".

"You" can be both singular and plural. In this context, the "you" corresponds to "anyone who's having massive unhappiness problems". You don't have to be using the ignore unhappiness strategy to reach -10; an excessive conquering spree will do nicely, even if you're razing regularly.
For instance, in my most recent game, I started on a continent with three civs. In the ancient era, two of them declared war on me at the same time. Thankfully, I was Egypt, whose chariots are awesome, and I wiped out both of them (although it took a LONG time), razing their non-capital cities and capturing the capitals.
So far so good, but the third civ on my continent, Siam, was at 9 cities by the time he declared war on me (industrial era), at least 5 of which were well-developed, wonder-filled cities with huge culture. So when I started conquering his cities, I couldn't afford to raze most of them. (Replacing them would have cost me far more in the long term, especially compared to the other civs on the map. Rome and England had gone on massive conquering sprees on the other continents and were now racing me towards the spaceship. I NEEDED the science and gold those cities could produce.)
So, I had quite a few turns where I fell below -10 happiness, especially if I'd just conquered a new border city that I was in the process of razing (since the conquered unhappiness doesn't go away until the city dies entirely).

The mistake you're making (& the OP is making) is generating all that Unhappiness & either ignoring it or seeking greater penalties for having it. Raze. Raze. Raze. No unhappiness. No "solutions" needed.

Clearly you didn't read the OP too closely, since you completely missed the point of this entire strategy.

No matter how much you raze, you're still adhering to the game's core limitations. You're trying to keep your people happy, and slowing down your empire's expansion to account for this. Sure, you can raze a conquered city, but you won't get anything out of it; in terms of money and production, you'll be exactly the same as if you'd never conquered the city in the first place. If you found a new city on that spot, it'll generate its own unhappiness, forcing even more rush-buying of happiness buildings, and it'd be quite a while before it would be productive enough to contribute significantly to your empire. This slows you down, keeping you from going on the massive conquering spree that was the bane of earlier Civ games; in Civ 3, you could conquer an entire distant empire in a turn or two (in the later eras, I mean), plop down the Forbidden Palace, and suddenly your empire was twice as productive as before. Civ 5's happiness mechanism attempts to limit this.

But with the OP's strategy, you don't have this problem. You conquer, and just keep conquering. There's no reason whatsoever to hold back. The cities you conquer are just as productive as your ones back home (once they come out of rebellion), assuming the appropriate buildings are in place. (Rush a factory instead of a Colosseum, for instance.) The only limiting factor on this strategy, normally, is happiness, and the OP's point was that this was an inadequate balance.
Compared to your raze-for-happiness strategy, the OP will have MUCH higher science, gold, and production, because those captured cities will contribute far more than any new city you'd found on the spot after razing. All he'd lose is city growth (which people trying to keep cities happy will limit themselves, and freezing a captured city at size 5 still puts it far ahead of your brand-new size 1 colony for a LONG time) and the -33% military strength. And that's not even mentioning the financial benefits, like not paying 3gpt for each of a dozen Colosseums across the empire; that adds up quickly, and the cost can be used to make more units. Or like how if you don't care about unhappiness then you have no reason not to sell the last unit of each luxury within your territory to other civs for even more cash.

What we're asking for, then, is an unhappiness penalty that makes the latter situation more like the former. A production and gold penalty for unhappiness that makes empires with massive unhappiness less productive than if they'd followed a strategy that attempted to manage the happiness the normal way, because ANY attempt to manage happiness (even your Razing "strategy") will result in less production, gold, and science than the OP's method. (Especially far less gold, which is the major limiting factor in later ages.) And that's bad.
 
last game on prince with India in late game I was "pulsing" between +50 surplus happy and -15 unhappy...

this whole hapiness mess motivates only 1 thing...raze every enemy city you find and annex what you can't raze.
I am not sure if CiV should promote such genocide...sufficient enough that players love to throw nukes around like it's no tomorrow.

How is this different from Civ4, though?

WeaselSlapper, this has been pointed out to me several times. I respond that the misquote is more poetic sounding, so I still with it in spite of it's inaccuracy. Maybe I should add a disclaimer about that... :dunno:

BTW, can someone do a quick walkthrough of a game using this strategy? I'm curious what the numbers go up to at various stages of conquest and what the consequences are of never addressing them.
 
How is this different from Civ4, though?

WeaselSlapper, this has been pointed out to me several times. I respond that the misquote is more poetic sounding, so I still with it in spite of it's inaccuracy. Maybe I should add a disclaimer about that... :dunno:

BTW, can someone do a quick walkthrough of a game using this strategy? I'm curious what the numbers go up to at various stages of conquest and what the consequences are of never addressing them.

well in Civ 4 you actually didnt need/want to raze the cities...well some people did but it was relatively rare. mostly you took them. This game taking enemy cities bring too much restriction - every variant has some strict disadvantage...puppet - they over time drain your coffers (don't understand why empire pays maintenance for their buildings...it's like when for example Iraq would build temple and US government would have to pay for it), annex - long long long long time big big big unhappy and when they finally go out of "strike" you pay 5g just for it...I would adjust the maintenance or build time, since this way the opportunity cost is too steep, you have to pay 2.5 TPs just to have annexed city, I can see why people want to raze most cities especially when conquering halves the amount of people and I usually get 1-3 pop cities (I don't raze enough...yet).

Or you mean the nukes? Yeah in Civ 4 the same...I didn't like it there and don't like it for sure here. Imagine our world with some crazy people that think nuking someone with 100 nukes and take their oil is fun with access rights to the right computers...
 
The happiness system has several major flaws that I can see (yes a few shamelessly borrowed from posters above :)):
1. -10 is an unscaled breakpoint. When you're already running a 100+ pop empire with surplus happiness, taking 1 city or a trade expiring should not send your entire empire into decline.

2. +Happiness from nonbuildings is limited and does not scale. +5/resource is huge early on and peanuts late game or on huge maps. SP happiness scales but mostly small benefits. SPs late game also accumulate too slow to fix a sudden happy drop.

3. If you want to play by the intended rules of keeping your empire happy, you lack enough control. Most happy buildings take a long time to build. Couple with point 1 and you can hit the production penalty before you finish 1.

4. You can only control pop in cities you directly control, on conquering if you do not want to grow, you have only 4 options, 3 of which break realism: Raze everything new, annex and ignore penalty, gift them all to the dumb ai, or annex and pay to rushbuy happiness buildings and waste time on courthouses. I'm guessing option 4 was the intended, but is often the worst.

5. The aforementioned lack of penalty to just dominating everything past -10.


Some fixes I'd suggest:
1. Preferably some form of penalty scaling. Though as noted the difficulty is penalizing production/gold/research/military/culture but still allowing the player a way to dig themselves out of the unhappiness penalty. Perhaps increase the penalties to include gold, research, and culture. Scale this penalty high enough to break the OP's strat.

To compensate, add the Entertainer specialist. No slot limits, +1 happiness, no other effect, even with SPs.

1a. If keeping a hardcap, change the -10 based on mapsize and possibly empire population.

1b. If no assignable +happiness option, lower the building cost, but not upkeep, of +happiness buildings. As well as allowing you easier correction if you dip, I'd imagine this'd affect puppets by making them cost more upkeep each when they finish buildings faster (not a bad thing imo given their strength), but allow them to be self supporting faster so you could take more sooner w/o dipping into unhappy.

2. Allow you to order Stop Growth on puppets. This way you can at least limit future empire growth solely to city populations you directly control or you own decision to take another city.

edit: I wrote this like an hour ago and server didn't respond to post request. To address the post above, maybe I never took enough puppets, but I never had them drain my income, they were always cash neutral at worst. And I'd pay a little gold for the research and culture bonuses. As to why you pay gold (beyond an attempt at game balance), I assume it's like the administrative overhead of trying to control your puppet state and collect their surpluses for your own use.
 
Why the hell are people razing cities? It's like throwing away gold. Just sell it instead.

This thread's run its course. I thank everyone who contributed, and I hope Firaxis saw it as well. I know what I'm going to do and how to implement it if I have to, otherwise it was a good mental exercise and a great mid-late game strategy.
 
Why the hell are people razing cities? It's like throwing away gold. Just sell it instead.

This thread's run its course. I thank everyone who contributed, and I hope Firaxis saw it as well. I know what I'm going to do and how to implement it if I have to, otherwise it was a good mental exercise and a great mid-late game strategy.

Because I need the room for more cities :D
 
This thread's run its course. I thank everyone who contributed, and I hope Firaxis saw it as well. I know what I'm going to do and how to implement it if I have to, otherwise it was a good mental exercise and a great mid-late game strategy.

I'm very interested in seeing your eventual modpack; it seems like it'll solve a lot of the abuses of Civ5 thus far.
 
The problem is that -10 happiness is becoming a Penalty instead of a "Cap"

If it was an actual Cap, there would be much less problem with it.

So they need to remove the "Penalty" and reinstate it as a cap.
 
To compensate, add the Entertainer specialist. No slot limits, +1 happiness, no other effect, even with SPs.

I tried this last night, actually, except as I'd mentioned before, I'm putting it in as the "Empath" (slightly future-era) specialist, who adds +1 Happy and 5 GPP towards a Great Empath unit (has to be more than the usual 3 in my mod, since you won't start getting these until late in the game, when GPs cost much more). Here are the problems I've run into:

1> Specialists, like tiles, choose a yield type and then an amount. You can add a new entry in the Yields file (YIELD_HAPPINESS), but tying it to an actual effect seems to occur in a place I have yet to find. More on this below.
2> All specialists are tied to specific buildings; I've yet to see code for a generic specialist slot (a la Civ4) to assign to an arbitrary new type. You just can't do the "no slot limits" thing, as far as I can tell.
So to add an "Entertainer", you'd have to change some building (say, the various +culture buildings like the Temple) to have a specialist slot of the appropriate type.
3> If you allow this specialist type to generate Great Person Points, then you'd either need to have your Entertainer progress towards an existing GP type (Artist?), or create an entirely new Great Person unit. (Or you could just have it generate zero GPPs. I actually did that for my "Transcend" specialist, who only slots into a couple top-end future buildings but has huge bonuses.)
The biggest problem with creating a new GP is that Great Person special abilities (the engineer rush, artist culture bomb, etc.) seem to basically be hard-coded. There doesn't seem to be much flexibility to add new ones, at least not within the existing XML structure. You CAN change a few other things, like making Empath/Entertainer Golden Ages last 50% longer or something. Also, think of the tile improvement; my Empaths can create the Monolith improvement, which when worked adds +2 happy (except that as mentioned in #1, I haven't got the happiness yield to work yet, and it's missing the 2001 artwork of course).
4> You can't seem to do what you'd suggested of having these specialists give no other bonuses with SPs; if an SP adds some bonus to a specialist, it'll do it to all of them. So yes, these'd become pretty powerful. I suppose you could compensate by giving these a NEGATIVE amount for research, gold, etc., and assume that SPs would at best neutralize these penalties, but that'd be brutal in earlier eras, and I'm not sure how well the AI would handle that.

The confusing part about adding these things is that the existing mod structure has a LOT of unused functions (stubs for religion, tech trading, map trading, etc.), but many of these wouldn't work right if you turned them on. For instance, the tech tree is dynamic (add a new tech and it'll draw the lines connecting them, and if you want to add more future techs it'll keep expanding the tree to the right, complete with era titles and such), which is a great improvement. It does this by parsing the Technologies.xml file, tech by tech. But if you go into the Technologies.xml file, there's a section for Prerequisites, and another section for ORPrerequisites, presumably so that you could add some flexible tech requirements. Sounds great, but the Tech Tree Lua files simply don't have any ability to draw arrows for that OR logic, so I'm not sure what it'd do. (Probably not draw anything.)
 
Throw another vote in favor of Dark Ages - they are flavorful, have an elegant symmetry, and avoid the death spiral problem.

If you do this, make sure you have a lot of friends because you do not want someone to attack you.

Say someone sends in mounted units to pillage your farms and take out your allied maritime city-states to starve your population, what do you do? You could attack them back, even wipe their people out, except once the war is over you will be stuck with a bunch of 3-pop cities because you still have unhapiness from number of cities. Roads cost maintenance in Civ5 and you just won't have that many relative to your empire since the number of road segments for n number of cities is kn^2, you won't catch the enemy cavalry even in your own territory. You do have more units overall but you also have more land to protect so you will have some local superiority issues, even though perimeter grows slower than area.

This is clever, and a great balancing mechanic for multiplayer. Unfortunately, I don't know how well it would go over in SP.

If we're increasing the penalty for unhappiness, we should be extremely careful about introducing death spirals.

Actually, death spirals would be an interesting mechanic. Sucks for the human, of course. You could introduce some kind of revolution mechanic that would bring you out.
 
This is clever, and a great balancing mechanic for multiplayer. Unfortunately, I don't know how well it would go over in SP.

Remarkably well, I'd bet. The person you were quoting didn't have quite the correct math; the number of road segments for N cities does not go as N^2, it's closer to going as N. Often you'll have a single transportation trunk line going through your main cities, with only short spurs going off to the side cities. But regardless, think of it this way: if you're packing your cities in, then regardless of geometry, each city would be about 4-5 hexes away from its neighbors; less means overlap, more means unused tiles. So no matter how many cities you had, connecting a new city to the network would cost 4-5 tiles' worth of upkeep.

The only question would be how well the AI would do this, but it seems to be doing a pretty good job so far.

Actually, death spirals would be an interesting mechanic. Sucks for the human, of course. You could introduce some kind of revolution mechanic that would bring you out.

Most of the "death spirals" we've discussed here really aren't. It's the old positive-vs-negative feedback thing.
If extreme unhappiness caused your population to actively drop (not just stop growing), then it's somewhat self-correcting; less people means less unhappiness.
If extreme unhappiness caused some of your military units to spontaneously disband, then you're now spending less money on military and can spend more to buy a Colosseum.
Adding a straight production/gold bonus might be a problem since yes, it could create a situation where it's much harder to rebound from extreme unhappiness, but not every proposed solution was like that.

(There are other ways we can solve this. For instance, if your unhappiness is below -10, then capturing a city could automatically pick "Raze" instead of "Annex" or "Puppet". This'd effectively kill the strategy, since you'd now have less production and research than someone who tried settling new cities and/or annexing.)

But again, I think the underlying problem with the happiness system is that it isn't adjustable. If you know there's going to be a 5-turn period of extreme unhappiness before your new Colosseum is built, you often have no choice but to just wait it out. There's not an easy way to temporarily boost happiness at the cost of science or production. That's why I'd like to see the Entertainer/Empath type specialists implemented.
 
Just a comment on the original post: I too have seen the computer using this "strategy": massive expansion and gold weeeee.
 
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