New strategy: Ignore happiness

Library 7-9 turns, colloseum 11-13 , monument 5, not counting if you are in golden age...

If you get your city in the right places, get the good tiles worked etc... it gets alot smoother and possible to have 15 cities with 15+ happiness

But it is true that the interface especially for allocating tiles is dumb

sounds as abusive as permanent anarchy was. Perhaps deep unhappyness (eg -20) should cripple your economy too, as well as increase production and warfare debuffs. You got plenty of warning both up to -10 and further to -20 that you should fix your happyness or else, I think it's ok if it just comes down on you as hard as possible next.

EDIT:

Give -2 production and gold (the production taken away from the largest cities first) for each unhappy face.

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or something like that, only you should I think have a 'grace' period (or two) where unhappyness is not penalized at all/much . If its totally painless like up to -10 now, then it probably is necessary for the comp to stop growth automatically, for you have no reason to. And even if its not fully painless, its still practical to save micromanagement. Beyond its unnecessary but it makes little sense to remove the penalty, the only possible impact if any is to make a careless player grow himself into a deeper hole.

And maybe it's more elegant to just have an increasing -X % to all production and gold in all cities for unhappy beyond the threshold than divide a global effect (unhappyness) to individual cities as you suggest by some fairly random criteria. Its concievable one would think of exploiting the way city to be penalized is chosen.

All sounds terrible to me.

They did test this game, right? Didn't some civfanatics help test, people who would've discovered this kind of stuff and report it? You would think...

I don't see how this can be considered a viable "strategy" since it's counter to most of the game's design.

I haven't tried this, but I saw an AI doing it yesterday - one AI took out an entire pangea as fast as he could move troops, was making 330+ gold per turn (when I checked, I'm sure it was higher by the end) and had 15k gold sitting. He was also 25 techs ahead of me, but I was doing OCC and last for just about everything.

Well if the AI is using this tactic then surely it isn't something the developers didn't design themselves.

Has anyone had the problem of the trading posts not producing 2 science? I'm not sure if it's my insane unhappiness or something else. But I'm only ever getting 1 science on trading posts.

oppy said:

Has anyone had the problem of the trading posts not producing 2 science? I'm not sure if it's my insane unhappiness or something else. But I'm only ever getting 1 science on trading posts.

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Its a bug in XML file, policy has +2, but xml only +1.

the happyness system is broken and quite seriously. I would have the penalites and benefits of happyness based on a proportional scale.

Bonus for happyness: +.5% combat strength for all units each happy.
+.25% production for each happy.
A small bonus simply because excess happyness already goes towards golden ages.

Penalty for unhappyness: -1% combat strength for all units for each unhappy.
-.5% food penalty for each unhappy.
+.25% Increase in maintenance costs for each
unhappy.(including unit upkeep + road upkeep.
-.25% decrease in research for each unhappy.

Or something like that.

That way, 1 or 2 unhappy doesn't really affect your empire too much. You could probably still happily operate with 10 unhappy unless you were really big but you'd be able to cope.
But if you end up with a 100 people unhappy (i.e. don't bother managing tour empire) your empire would implode quite quickly. You're units would be ineffective, your people would starve, you'd be bankrupt and research would grind to a halt. Domination would still be possible because you only have to capture the capitals to win. The result would be less inequality between a large and small empire.

there already is a proportional bonus for happy, it accumulates to a golden age, +gold +prod.

Yeah, the bonus for being above zero-level happiness doesn't need to be too big since it will already result in a golden age. Those bonuses should be capped though. Make them linear increases up until you hit +10.

The negative bonuses, on the other hand, need to start out gentle, then increase severely as you get to 10-20 below your requirement. I think those should be percentage based... small maps you only need a total of about +40 happiness to keep your 3 cities running. But on larger maps where you might have 15 cities, you need more like 150-200 happiness. So 10-20 difference is a drop in the bucket (only 5-10%) compared to 25-50% on a small map.

So the big penalties should not occur before -5 (absolute) and any bonuses should stop at +10 (absolute). Anything at or below -5 should be calculated based on the percent deficit, with exponential impact as you decrease below that point (and it should be pretty harsh by the time you hit -20%).

Has anyone ever played Rise of Mankind mod for Civ4? It included something called revolutions mod where if unhappiness was very high, and other demands weren't met (civic policies, religion, nation stability\economy, -happiness for large empires etc) cities would start rebelling against you and even form a new nation. That would be an interesting idea for a future mod that will take care of this and add difficulty to large empires wtf-stomping everyone.
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But staying in vanilla game, they should implement a dark ages event, where if your -happiness generates points towards a dark age (instead of +happiness for golden age) and that's where you'll get huge penalties (allowing that lee-way to improve happiness until a dark age or at least slowdown the rate at which you'll enter a dark age)

Yeah I wondered if you could do something like this. Happiness? Who needs happiness? My slaves are supposed to work!

Anyways, I don't really like it that such a strategy is possible. The primary reason it works is because purchasing things is in many cases far too good. I don't think you should be able to buy military units at all because this also unlocks strategies that aim on taking some single city on a foreign shore and simply buying units there every turn once it's out of anarchy.

WuphonsReach said:

Yeah, the bonus for being above zero-level happiness doesn't need to be too big since it will already result in a golden age. Those bonuses should be capped though. Make them linear increases up until you hit +10.

The negative bonuses, on the other hand, need to start out gentle, then increase severely as you get to 10-20 below your requirement. I think those should be percentage based... small maps you only need a total of about +40 happiness to keep your 3 cities running. But on larger maps where you might have 15 cities, you need more like 150-200 happiness. So 10-20 difference is a drop in the bucket (only 5-10%) compared to 25-50% on a small map.

So the big penalties should not occur before -5 (absolute) and any bonuses should stop at +10 (absolute). Anything at or below -5 should be calculated based on the percent deficit, with exponential impact as you decrease below that point (and it should be pretty harsh by the time you hit -20%).

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Some clever ideas there. Thing is, if you made the penalties for below -20 unhappynes exponential you would be hammered if you conquered a rival civ with even 3 cities and would have no time to adjust quickly enough. Not too low to make conquering one empire an insurmountable problem, but high enough to ensure you can't go on a roll and simply ignore the unhappyness.

I think the real trick would be to make the penalty also proportional to the number of cities annexed.

So expanding from 5 of your own cities by conquering 5 cities wouldn't harm you too much if you went into unhappyness, it would only be multipleid by 5 and could be offset by courthouses. You'd have the opportunity to deal with the problem and reasonably quickly if you managed the situation well.

But it would really kick in if you then took it from those 10 to 20 too soon. The effect would then be multiplied by 15 (and it would thus appear that the penalties increase exponentially) if you didn't bother dealing with that initial unhappyness by building courthouses or by failing to puppet state them.

assuming each new city would add 15 unhappy (probably a conservative estimate) and you're neutral happyness.

1 city annexed would result in 15 unhappy and a penalty factor of 15. i.e. 1.5%
2 city annexed would result in 30 unahappy but a penalty factor of 60. i.e. 6%
3 city annexed would result in 45 unhappy but a penalty factor of 135. i.e. 13.5%

Once you get to 5 cities you'd end up with 75 unhappy but a penalty factor of 375. 37.5% The 6th a penalty of 54%. the 7th 73.5%. Annexing cities beyond this would quite simple crash your economy.

At which point, you probably wouldn't want to continue expanding until you've sorted the mess out or were going to raise or puppet the cities you took anyway.

This would discourage people form going on a roll by forcing the player to deal with the unhappyness before further aggressive expansion, or limiting the amount that could be gained by annexing (because you can't control what is built) but not from expansion or aggressive expansion in general.

The idea is to punish a lack of management and poor strategic choices, not military and tactical success.

I believe you guys are approaching this backwards. The problem is not that the penalty for happiness is too small. The problem is that the penalty is too much and there are too few things you can do about it. However, the human player knows how to work around it while the AI is afraid to grow their empire and create new cities.

The fix should be some combination of more happiness buildings, more happiness from those buildings, lower production cost and less maintenance for those buildings. The incentive is for both the human player and AI to solve their unhappiness problem by building their happiness buildings, not work around it.

The happiness penalties are also backwards. If Firaxis is trying to combat the ICS problem, this current method is the wrong way to do it. The problem with ICS is people building too many small cities rather than building cities they would grow. The current implementation penalizes population just as harshly as having more cities, so people are afraid to expand at all unless they want to ignore happiness.

Firaxis should increase the penalty of having too many cities while vastly decreasing the population penalty. Combined with making the happiness buildings give more bonuses and have less maintenance, people would be willing to improve their current cities first rather than spam them all over the map. At the same time, it wouldn't scare anybody from expanding or growing their empire at all.

The simplest thing would be to have "extreme unhappiness"-> negative growth, ie under 'extreme unhappiness' food boxes empty at 1 per turn
When totally empty, the city drops in pop by one and the food box is 1/2 refilled.

This way you can end up in Monetary disaster, because your cities depopulate, giving you less gold, and less science. Eventually, your cities contract to all 1 pop and you are in permanent bankruptcy.

lower production cost and less maintenance for those buildings.more happiness from those buildings, lower production cost and less maintenance for those buildings.

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I'm not sure that's a good idea, seems like the new economy system intends for having to create a balance between maintenance and unhappiness and production and growth/science. So each should substantially burden the relevant others.

and higher penalties deeper on would solve the exploit, so..

I disagree with any suggestion that has happiness becoming really severe at a certain level. The system is not... continuous. The strategy usually turns into keeping your head *just* above water, which is the problems we're seeing now at 0 happiness.

aryah said:

I'm not sure that's a good idea, seems like the new economy system intends for having to create a balance between maintenance and unhappiness and production and growth/science. So each should substantially burden the relevant others.

and higher penalties deeper on would solve the exploit, so..

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The problem is that the amount of happiness buildings really puts a hard cap on the number of cities with large populations you can have in a game. It's just way too limiting.

Ironically, it's actually better to spam a lot of low population cities rather than build up large cities. There are really only 3 happiness buildings in the entire game (colosseum, theatre and stadium) and they only add up to 12 happiness total you can have in any single city. A fourth one, circus, requires either horses or ivory near the city. That means, for the most part, you are basically better off spamming size 12 cities rather than growing any above it.

andrewlt said:

Ironically, it's actually better to spam a lot of low population cities rather than build up large cities. There are really only 3 happiness buildings in the entire game (colosseum, theatre and stadium) and they only add up to 12 happiness total you can have in any single city. A fourth one, circus, requires either horses or ivory near the city. That means, for the most part, you are basically better off spamming size 12 cities rather than growing any above it.

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Perhaps it isn't ironic, since in the teens is when we begin to see it take a large amount of time for pop growth. Maybe it's the intent to have many cities floating around pop 10.

Edit: Out of curiosity, I checked a save-file I had; Standard Earth, Standard Speed ~ By turn 280, the largest city in the world is my capital at 16... every other city is floating around 10.

andrewlt said:

The problem is that the amount of happiness buildings really puts a hard cap on the number of cities with large populations you can have in a game. It's just way too limiting.

Ironically, it's actually better to spam a lot of low population cities rather than build up large cities. There are really only 3 happiness buildings in the entire game (colosseum, theatre and stadium) and they only add up to 12 happiness total you can have in any single city. A fourth one, circus, requires either horses or ivory near the city. That means, for the most part, you are basically better off spamming size 12 cities rather than growing any above it.

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I don't disagree with the unquoted part of your post - I'm not sure, but possibly it would be better to have additional happiness buildings. I'm just skeptical of making happiness any cheaper, hammer wise or gold wise or by buffing existing structures much w/o extra costs.

Perhaps it isn't ironic, since in the teens is when we begin to see it take a large amount of time for pop growth. Maybe it's the intent to have many cities floating around pop 10.

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yeah, I wonder what's the point of having such a steep pop growth curve too. I'd like to see that a bit flatter, I think, by itself or by sooner access to hospital-like structures..

andrewlt said:

I believe you guys are approaching this backwards. The problem is not that the penalty for happiness is too small. The problem is that the penalty is too much and there are too few things you can do about it. However, the human player knows how to work around it while the AI is afraid to grow their empire and create new cities.

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My view of the problem is varied:

- You can ignore the impact of the unhappy / very unhappy and still succeed. That's very broken. Which is why I think the penalty needs to ramp up drastically the farther you get away from zero-point.

- The impact of unhappiness is extremely sharp-edged. When you are sitting at zero, everything is fine, then you slip into -1 and you get huge nerfs to your city growth and other issues. I want to see that stepped effect smoothed out into an exponential curve as you drop below zero. I think using the minimum of either -3 / -6 / -15 or the greater of -3% / -6% / -15% would probably work. Really, by the time you've hit -15% below what you need, it's probably time to stop and re-consolidate a bit (and you could have easily started the war at 10% above what you'd eventually need).

- Not enough that can be done to fix happiness (especially on larger maps). Can't use luxuries to get out of it because there are only N luxuries that you can possibly get. And there's only N world wonders. Can't build your way out of it, because the buildings are too expensive. So you're stuck waiting, waiting, waiting for a social policy to pop.

- I like the idea that annexed cities give more unhappiness or that it would have some bearing on the calculation - but that already kind of exists.