New strategy: Ignore happiness

Celevin said:

As a side note: I have a list in a word document of every thing that I think is broken and needs fixing in the game, and how to fix it. The more controversial items are the ones I make posts out of, trying to show exactly how to exploit it. I also list what I think the Civ tiers are, and am trying to think of ways to balance them. When I get more free time, and after we see how Firaxis approaches the current problems, I'm thinking of designing a mod to fix and rebalance these problems.

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I'd be pretty interested in seeing your take on the why some civs are weaker and stronger and what might be done to balance.

Celevin's posts have demonstrated the first actually broken elements of the game that I've seen on these forums. Everyone else just gripes about crappy AI and hidden diplomacy. He's actually suggesting useful fixes that sound workable.

I had to break from my lurker status to say that I wholeheartedly support his attempts to improve the game. Problems aside, I love this game. With some tweaks, albeit major ones, it could be the best Civ yet.

It seems to me this problem could be fixed fairly easily and in a way that would strongly deter playing with negative happy for long periods.

Tie research and cultural outputs to how unhappy your people are. Say 2% penalty for each unhappy, so with 6 unhappy you'd get a 12% reduction in total beakers per turn and a 12% reduction in culture added to SPs.

Once unhappiness reached a certain point (say -40), your army and navy will be ejected from enemy controlled tiles and refuse to attack any units except in friendly territory.

At -50 happiness or worse you'd get zero research and culture and not be able to attack anyone. In other words you'd have no way to win, until you fix the happiness, except perhaps a Time Victory

Celevin said:

What you lose
- NO city growth
- NO golden ages from happiness
- Half production
- Penalty to combat

What you gain
- A LOT of gold off selling luxuries
- More gold from production
- Cities switching from growth to more useful tiles, like merchants and trade posts
- No maintenance from happiness buildings and previously needed workshops
- No maintenance happens from marketplaces or any other key buildings
- Benefits of currency modifiers over production modifiers
- More specialized policies
- No caring to stop the war machine, and thus a much larger empire
- Gobs and gobs of great generals and other specialists to use for golden ages (+1 commerce per tile in a massive empire!)
- The highest science you'll ever see

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I'm just curious, would this work in a multiplayer game?

You can't "sell off" your luxury resources so easily if 2 of the players are humans trying to win, and you are conquering the AI players.

Plus you won't be able to conquer such large swaths of territory without a human deciding you are getting too crazy, and attacking much smarter than the AI.

Celevin said:

Eyeballing it, I think what we want is probably -2 production and -2 gold per unhappy citizen. We then divide this by the total number of population, and apply it times the number of population of a particular city to that city, for all cities.

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While I like the general idea of having this sort of dynamic penalty, I do think it'd be a bit too tough to mod in. A more discrete numbering might work better in practice; besides being easier to code, it'd be less abuseable. (A late-game city with tons of production and gold might be able to live with the sort of penalty you're proposing. I want to see something that completely shuts them down regardless of size.)

Very Unhappy (-10): as current, massive growth penalty and -33% military
Rioting (-20): cities cannot produce buildings (but can make units at half the normal speed) and do not grow, -50% military, -50% research. Only the capital can purchase buildings.
Revolting (-30): -10 food to all cities (meaning they'll shrink as people abandon your empire), cities cannot produce or purchase anything, -66% military, -100% research. (Easy way to do some of this: put the city into the revolt mode you get when you annex a new city.)
Apocalypse (-50): in addition to the above, all cities go into "Raze" mode, losing 1 population per turn (which should quickly free up some happiness). If you hit this, you've done something REALLY wrong.

That should be enough by itself to prevent the sort of abuses you discussed in the original post, without needing any kind of complex math. Just a couple additional thresholds, something a normal player should never reach.

Spatzimaus said:

Just a couple additional thresholds, something a normal player should never reach.

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Even with those thresholds you can still do this strategy, just buy a few happiness structures, keep a couple luxuries, throw in one SP and you can keep your head above water. That point might be -20 or whatever it is under your paradigm, but it won't stop this general approach.

A better threshold would be time-based, i.e. after 10 turns of -20 (whatever), penalties kick in, another 10 and the penalties scale. Increasing happiness scales this backward, gradually. This would totally kill the notion of unending unhappiness.

Dix Cheney said:

Even with those thresholds you can still do this strategy, just buy a few happiness structures, keep a couple luxuries, throw in one SP and you can keep your head above water. That point might be -20 or whatever it is under your paradigm, but it won't stop this general approach.

A better threshold would be time-based, i.e. after 10 turns of -20 (whatever), penalties kick in, another 10 and the penalties scale. Increasing happiness scales this backward, gradually. This would totally kill the notion of unending unhappiness.

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Use the Golden Age timer, but allow it to go into negatives and create negative golden ages (anarchy?) of increasing duration that basically paralyze the state completely. Logical, and an impermeable barrier to someone trying to game the system indefinitely.

Corbeau said:

Use the Golden Age timer, but allow it to go into negatives and create negative golden ages (anarchy?) of increasing duration that basically paralyze the state completely. Logical, and an impermeable barrier to someone trying to game the system indefinitely.

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Yeah, someone previously in this thread (Vlad at post #50) mentioned using the golden age timer to generate dark ages. I think that would be an awesome way to fix this rather huge problem. It might be cool if their length were increased with each instance, sort of as a mirror to the golden ages' duration decreasing with each instance.

Corbeau said:

Use the Golden Age timer, but allow it to go into negatives and create negative golden ages (anarchy?) of increasing duration that basically paralyze the state completely. Logical, and an impermeable barrier to someone trying to game the system indefinitely.

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That would work quite nicely. It would also give players time do something about it. Having it based upon a similar premise to golden ages would do the trick.

Every tile producing 1 hammer or more will produce 1 less hammer.
Every tile producing 1 gold or more will produce 1 less gold.
A penalty for units as well?

Start off with the first occuring at an accumulation of 1000. Then decrease for each successive Dark Age (the lowest at 100), with the length increasing (the longest at 17 turns). As running a deficit leads to penalties towards technology this would slow up players who don't bother trying to manage their cities.

Common Sensei said:

I'd be pretty interested in seeing your take on the why some civs are weaker and stronger and what might be done to balance.

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Here it is... You can count on France being on its own tier above the others, it just looks weird if I list it like that though.

Tier 1
France, Babylon, India
Tier 2
Arabia, China, Greece, Japan, Siam, Romans
Tier 3
Aztecs, America, Egypt, English, Iroquois, Persia, Russia, Songhai
Tier 4
Germany, Ottomans

Keep in mind 2 things:
1) Don't argue if "x isn't 3, it's tier 2" because one tier difference isn't big at all
2) Yeah yeah, I don't think much of Germany / Ottomans

It's really interesting to see how the tiers change with a few of the changes I've been snarky about lately. They really even out.

If you decrease production AND gold/rushbuy with unhappiness, how do expect anyone to become happy again?

Barring trading for more resources, which would presumably have already been done as much as possible before hitting that point, if you make it so the player can't build anything & can't buy anything, they're just going to be stuck being unhappy forever, especially if the unhappiness was caused by a large empire (so they may never get another SP).

Of course, there is a "hard cap" to the number of cities you can have. If you have 69+ cities, your game will crash & your save file will become corrupt, so there's that for a solution.

You can always starve your people / take out a com loan / sell cities.

Celevin said:

...
2) Yeah yeah, I don't think much of Germany ...

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Off topic: neither do I. However this is the civ which will produce the quickest conquests.

On topic: I think the way to deal with the mega unhappiness strategy is to create a 3rd threshold, -30?, which causes rioting=-1 pop in each city per turn.

I disagree with new thresholds, Civ4's system was clean because it gave a penalty per-unhappiness. By the same manner, Civ5 should have a penalty per unhappy citizen.

Celevin said:

Here it is... You can count on France being on its own tier above the others, it just looks weird if I list it like that though.

Tier 1
France, Babylon, India
Tier 2
Arabia, China, Greece, Japan, Siam, Romans
Tier 3
Aztecs, America, Egypt, English, Iroquois, Persia, Russia, Songhai
Tier 4
Germany, Ottomans

Keep in mind 2 things:
1) Don't argue if "x isn't 3, it's tier 2" because one tier difference isn't big at all
2) Yeah yeah, I don't think much of Germany / Ottomans

It's really interesting to see how the tiers change with a few of the changes I've been snarky about lately. They really even out.

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I'm not too surprised by the tiers. They make sense to me. Were you planning to post your potential tweaks or holding off until you have time to mod?

I'm just playing a conquest game and I can say that this strategy is probably valid, but not the ONLY way to go. Actually, I find it easier doing it the happiness way.

Common Sensei said:

I'm not too surprised by the tiers. They make sense to me. Were you planning to post your potential tweaks or holding off until you have time to mod?

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I think I'll post them when I think they're bulletproof... I'm constantly altering them.

I just finished 2 back to back compact Masters degrees, moving, and am looking for a job, so I'm out of time. Luckily we can't even start modding until the SDK is released. Also, I haven't modded any Civ games before. I've got c++ experience and VBA exposure, but I think it would take me a long long time to get going.

I've got a lot more ideas on how to fix the game and make it better, which I'm recording, but it's going to take me a long time to implement them. Plus I need to wait for two things first:
1) The game's too young, and any imbalances I see might just be me being a newbie at it still. The game needs time to ripen. That's half the reason I post so much, I like it when people either prove me wrong or reinforce my ideas.
2) We need to wait for Firaxis to make the first move in patching things up. Otherwise I might be redundant, and make a mod that's obsoleted the week after it comes out. I'd rather wait until they get all their ducks in a row.

If I started to make a game fixing / balancing mod, I'd need help.

Celevin said:

I disagree with new thresholds, Civ4's system was clean because it gave a penalty per-unhappiness. By the same manner, Civ5 should have a penalty per unhappy citizen.

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Ah..., I'm, as yet, undecided on this.

My suggestion is an easy to implement (simple patch rather extensive mod) fix for the mega unhappiness strategy.

(It is another question whether it is needed at all. If mega unhappiness is not OP or it was forseen then no fix is needed.)

You keep saying the AI does the "ignore happiness" strategy, but do you have any evidence for that? At least on King difficulty, when the AI gets huge it still has a lead in the "People that smile the most" category and on demographics, there seem to be a bunch of happiness bonuses they get.

As it is right now, the game generally encourages REX; with the right social policies the marginal cost of a new city is 0 and you get the city center for free. If you are an invader, you get puppet states that are also very cheap happiness-wise (and the production difference doesn't matter that much to the AI).

I think the best and most fun way to deal withthe imbalance is to combine both the dark age idea and a revolution mechanic. I really think global happiness lends itself really well to revolution.