Does Civ 5 (Gods and Kings) need a Happiness nerf?

well, all this happiness has made the Piety policy (50% of happ cpt bonus) actually worth it. It's helped me get multiple golden ages and make culture vics much easier. if it gets really nerfed then CV's get even more cumbersome.
 
1 - Treat the religious buildings happiness as local
2 - Treat the Social Policies bonuses regarding cities as local as well (liberty tree)
3 - Treat the religious hapiness bonuses as local too (X happiness for each 5 followers in your city...)
4- - Adjust the mercantile CS bonuses and lower them
5- - Buff the Piety policy (50% of happ cpt bonus) to compensate for it, hell, bring back the whole "golden ages last 50% more" bonus too
6 - Profit!
 
2 - Treat the Social Policies bonuses regarding cities as local as well (liberty tree)

This already happens, I think.

3 - Treat the religious hapiness bonuses as local too (X happiness for each 5 followers in your city...)

Ceremonial Burial and Peace Loving are the problem, here. While the other beliefs attach the Happiness to buildings where it's easy to localize, these two provide Happiness bonuses based on the number of cities and followers following a religion. I don't see a way to localize these bonuses. Worse, both are likely to provide more Happiness than any of the building-based beliefs in most situations.

I suppose that the Happiness could be local to the holy city, but I'm not sure if I like that solution. It feels weird.

5- - Buff the Piety policy (50% of happ cpt bonus) to compensate for it, hell, bring back the whole "golden ages last 50% more" bonus too

I'm not opposed to changing Mandate of Heaven to provide 75% or even 100% of Happiness as Culture if Happiness is nerfed somewhat. The Freedom finisher already increases the length of Golden Ages by 50%.
 
Sometimes this is why I wish you could change the difficulty setting for different aspects separately. (e.g. Make starting happiness low without having other Civs DoW you just because you built your city 100 hexes away.)
 
if it gets really nerfed then CV's get even more cumbersome.

Going to have to agree here, I think it's in a good place right now. As far as limiting mechanics go, Happiness is one of the worst because of its pooled nature.
 
everything on the right track, if one play on domination and huge map with 18 civ you will feel the happiness still hard to find even still an issue. Even if its not a problem still the excess number of happiness still worth for golden ages. Actually I don't really like the happiness things, they should make it as unrest, security or stability instead of happiness. Large population and massive economy not cause unhappy peoples, but cause unrest or lack of security also problem with health and sanitation. Yea just hope some one from civ read my post and think about changing the happiness system into security, unrest, unemployment or stability instead of happiness.
 
Did you bother to read the thread at all?

Religion = (ceremonial burial/ peace loving), Its true they create a vast amounts of happiness, but how sure is it that your religion will spread?, maybe it spreads but at the same time another guy comes in converting all the cities. The thing with these bonuses is that they arent set in stone. For example, you build a circus, you get 2 happiness for life. There is no way another player can come in and take the 2 happiness that you obtained from a circus, while there is a way to lose 2 happiness from religion if another player converts your city to another religion. Of course a descent player wouldnt just convert 1 city. They would save up the prophet until they have 2, and in a series of events convert 8 cities quickly, rebalancing the power of your religion. Having huge drawbacks on your happiness level.

Pagodas, etc. Yes they are also pretty nice, but if your religion is even spreading to enemy cities, I certainly wouldnt fight off your religion, I would be able to take advantage of the pagodas and I too would be able to get happiness, culture, and faith.

Mercantile City states: This is similar to Religion, but a bit worse in my opinion. They grant massive happiness, but its also not set on stone. If another player comes in and snatches your city state, you pay a big price for relying so much on the city state to help you out. Your happiness gets destroyed. Imagine a player relying on 2 mercantile city states. And suddenly another player snatches both?

Most players, feel these bonuses are for life, you have to keep a constant eye on it, because it can be easy to take that happiness away.

I dont think there is an issue for happiness, because everyone has the chance to all of this. Some players do get away with the massive prize, but thats because the other players arent doing anything about it. Why should some people be punished for playing right? While the people who play wrong, get to act like happiness is an issue?

Also you forgot to mention how beautiful it is to just make one city, i am literally almost positive happiness when I go for monarchy and have zero luxury items(with no religion). :p So Wide or Tall, the benefit of happiness is for everyone. Not just a few selected, and thats how I think you are looking at this that only players who play religion get the massive happiness bonus. When in fact even non-religious players like myself still get to have a chunk of good happiness throughout the entire game, even with zero luxuries at hand
 
Religion = (ceremonial burial/ peace loving), Its true they create a vast amounts of happiness, but how sure is it that your religion will spread?, maybe it spreads but at the same time another guy comes in converting all the cities. The thing with these bonuses is that they arent set in stone. For example, you build a circus, you get 2 happiness for life. There is no way another player can come in and take the 2 happiness that you obtained from a circus, while there is a way to lose 2 happiness from religion if another player converts your city to another religion. Of course a descent player wouldnt just convert 1 city. They would save up the prophet until they have 2, and in a series of events convert 8 cities quickly, rebalancing the power of your religion. Having huge drawbacks on your happiness level.

This is all nonsense.

First, you could lose the Circus if an enemy captures your city. Even retaking the city doesn't guarantee the survival of the Circus.

Second, religion and Circuses coexist. This isn't a situation of having one or the other. You can't make an equivalence between "less Happiness, less risk" and "more Happiness, more risk". In fact, you can have both sources of Happiness simultaneously. The end result is too much Happiness. Sure, bad players might not get the same benefit that better players do (because they don't spread their religion or defend against enemy spread), but so what? That's true of everything in Civ V.

Finally, you're ignoring the Happiness beliefs that are just as "set in stone" as the Circus. These include Asceticism (+1 Happiness for Shrines), Peace Gardens (+2 Happiness for Gardens), and Religious Center (+2 Happiness for Temples). Ceremonial Burial and (to a lesser extent) Peace Loving are a large part of the problem, but these other beliefs coexist with those two. You can stack them. That's a lot of Happiness, even if you never spread beyond your own cities.

Pagodas, etc. Yes they are also pretty nice, but if your religion is even spreading to enemy cities, I certainly wouldnt fight off your religion, I would be able to take advantage of the pagodas and I too would be able to get happiness, culture, and faith.

I'd be more concerned with saving those Faith points for Missionaries and Inquisitors to rebuild my own religion. The founder beliefs are too powerful to give up if you've already devoted resources to founding a religion. If you don't have your own religion, then of course you might accept one from a neighbor, but so what? He's got Pagodas and Ceremonial Burial. He's still winning.

You raise another point, though. The Cathedrals, Mosques, and Pagodas all provide even more Happiness to stack with the other beliefs. And these buildings are just as "set in stone" as the Circus. Plus, you don't have to spend Production to get them!

Mercantile City states: This is similar to Religion, but a bit worse in my opinion. They grant massive happiness, but its also not set on stone. If another player comes in and snatches your city state, you pay a big price for relying so much on the city state to help you out. Your happiness gets destroyed. Imagine a player relying on 2 mercantile city states. And suddenly another player snatches both?

Most players, feel these bonuses are for life, you have to keep a constant eye on it, because it can be easy to take that happiness away.

Look, the game isn't going to be balanced exclusively around bad players. If you're relying on two Mercantile city-states and manage to lose both of them, then that's your own damn fault. The fact is that it's pretty easy (even on Immortal and Deity) to keep the Happiness flowing from Mercantile city-states.

I dont think there is an issue for happiness, because everyone has the chance to all of this. Some players do get away with the massive prize, but thats because the other players arent doing anything about it. Why should some people be punished for playing right? While the people who play wrong, get to act like happiness is an issue?

By that logic, why not just put a Giant Death Robot squad somewhere on the map and let players hunt for it at the start of the game? Since everyone had equal access to it, it's not unfair if the player who gets there first uses his new army to annihilate everything on the map, right?

Games that aren't balanced aren't fun.

Also you forgot to mention how beautiful it is to just make one city, i am literally almost positive happiness when I go for monarchy and have zero luxury items(with no religion). :p So Wide or Tall, the benefit of happiness is for everyone. Not just a few selected, and thats how I think you are looking at this that only players who play religion get the massive happiness bonus. When in fact even non-religious players like myself still get to have a chunk of good happiness throughout the entire game, even with zero luxuries at hand

This entire paragraph doesn't make sense to me.

First, what do you mean by "how beautiful it is to just make one city"?

Second, that's my entire point. There's already enough Happiness in the game to support spreading or growing at a reasonable, competitive rate. If you want to spread or grow even faster than that, then you should need to make a tradeoff. You should consider building Colloseums, which provide Happiness at the expense of Gold. You should care about where the new cities are in relation to luxury resources because you rely on the Happiness that they provide.

With religion and Mercantile city-states in their current form, you can pretty much ignore these mechanics and spread or grow like crazy. Happiness is no longer a resource to manage in Civ V once you get past the initial 30-40 turns. Since Civ V is a strategy game, a loss of a strategic resource system weakens the gameplay.
 
No. Happiness is the biggest pain the ass in the game. I only play on Prince and it gets annoying having to stop building productive buildings or units or taking cities just to waste 10 - 20 turns bumping my happiness back up.
 
Is this thread meant to be about ideas to nerf happiness, or a discussion as to whether that is necessary?

I definitely think it needs a nerf, at least when it comes to the AI. The happiness bonuses they receive are pretty needless, and kinda destroy the point of the system as it relates to them.

From my understanding, it was likely a response to how if the AI has to deal with happiness as a whole, it had a lot of difficulty in making it understand when it's good or bad to expand further, resulting in either AIs that just didn't expand properly or worst, Unhappy AIs with combat penalties.

I do think it leads however to uneven difficulty at higher levels since (at least on Deity) an AI that expands massively explodes in the mid game with it's growth and happy bonuses.
In my experience, this has lead to certain civs feeling much more powerful and some a bit weaker. Persia, Siam, Greece, Germany, Mongolia, Incans, and Mayans seem to on average be a little bit stronger as a result since they can end up in the mid game with 8-20 cities with like 15+pop when left unchecked. Playing a game with most of them on a Pangaea and it's insane how much red is on the world politics.

As for happiness as a whole... I personally just think religion has a little too much in it which can lead to low difficulty games where the ICS can get a little crazy. On higher difficulties I think it balances itself out because you rarely can get away with an easy dominant religion, but I don't think it's a proper excuse for happiness and expansion to be easy mode on lower difficulties and a crazy struggle *sometimes* at the highest just because you can't get the proper beliefs.

Personally I think they should take out some of the happy from beliefs and perhaps put some of it back Piety so having a massive happy empire is an option but one with a relative cost that is a bit independent of what beliefs you get, other than that... I don't see a major problem...
 
happiness is hard too maintain early, and a cakewalk to maintain mid-late game. At least in my personal experience.

maybe have a mid game introduction of atheism that slowly deconverts your citizens to diminish your faith and eventually eliminate it from some cities.
 
Let's consider the main issue behind happiness. It's to prevent the unmitigated growth of population, be it though peaceful city growth, excessive settling or war.

It seems everybody agrees that it's more difficult early on than it is later to please your citizens and keep them happy.

In my opinion it become difficult in the late ancient through the mid classical/modern eras to keep everyone happy. At this point in the game everybody is still building their civs. Once you hit the late stage of the game, what's the point of limiting player's civilizations? the point of the game is to achieve one of the goals, with the focus of some being directly related to population(Space race) or war (Conquest)

What's more, it prevents late game golden ages to nerf happiness. IMO, It would be counter-intuitive to remove happiness counters.

I do agree that religion should have negative modifiers as well. Possibly a hard negative to beakers. It's a very powerful mid-game tool with no repercussions.
 
well, i like happiness as it is for the most part. it was such a problem in vanilla that it has been at worst only slightly overcompensated for in GnK. for one, AI happiness needs to be reigned in as it truly is ridiculous. im usually last in civ-wide happiness at +30 hpt and that just seems silly.

but also, the only thing i would do for player happiness is a flat -happy for warmongering. puppet/annex unhappiness is fine but i'd have a flat -happ per civ you are at war with, probably no more than -2 per civ as it could rack up when you are declared on by everyone. plus that could be worked into a UA as a bonus, even some religious beliefs, something to help encourage/penalize the playstyle.

but still im quite fine with it as is, even ridiculous AI happiness.
 
I do agree that religion should have negative modifiers as well. Possibly a hard negative to beakers. It's a very powerful mid-game tool with no repercussions.

Turn 271: American religion installs Creationism belief in Public Schools, -200 science.

Yeah, I can see it.
 
This is all nonsense.

First, you could lose the Circus if an enemy captures your city. Even retaking the city doesn't guarantee the survival of the Circus.

Second, religion and Circuses coexist. This isn't a situation of having one or the other. You can't make an equivalence between "less Happiness, less risk" and "more Happiness, more risk". In fact, you can have both sources of Happiness simultaneously. The end result is too much Happiness. Sure, bad players might not get the same benefit that better players do (because they don't spread their religion or defend against enemy spread), but so what? That's true of everything in Civ V.

Finally, you're ignoring the Happiness beliefs that are just as "set in stone" as the Circus. These include Asceticism (+1 Happiness for Shrines), Peace Gardens (+2 Happiness for Gardens), and Religious Center (+2 Happiness for Temples). Ceremonial Burial and (to a lesser extent) Peace Loving are a large part of the problem, but these other beliefs coexist with those two. You can stack them. That's a lot of Happiness, even if you never spread beyond your own cities.



I'd be more concerned with saving those Faith points for Missionaries and Inquisitors to rebuild my own religion. The founder beliefs are too powerful to give up if you've already devoted resources to founding a religion. If you don't have your own religion, then of course you might accept one from a neighbor, but so what? He's got Pagodas and Ceremonial Burial. He's still winning.

You raise another point, though. The Cathedrals, Mosques, and Pagodas all provide even more Happiness to stack with the other beliefs. And these buildings are just as "set in stone" as the Circus. Plus, you don't have to spend Production to get them!



Look, the game isn't going to be balanced exclusively around bad players. If you're relying on two Mercantile city-states and manage to lose both of them, then that's your own damn fault. The fact is that it's pretty easy (even on Immortal and Deity) to keep the Happiness flowing from Mercantile city-states.



By that logic, why not just put a Giant Death Robot squad somewhere on the map and let players hunt for it at the start of the game? Since everyone had equal access to it, it's not unfair if the player who gets there first uses his new army to annihilate everything on the map, right?

Games that aren't balanced aren't fun.



This entire paragraph doesn't make sense to me.

First, what do you mean by "how beautiful it is to just make one city"?

Second, that's my entire point. There's already enough Happiness in the game to support spreading or growing at a reasonable, competitive rate. If you want to spread or grow even faster than that, then you should need to make a tradeoff. You should consider building Colloseums, which provide Happiness at the expense of Gold. You should care about where the new cities are in relation to luxury resources because you rely on the Happiness that they provide.

With religion and Mercantile city-states in their current form, you can pretty much ignore these mechanics and spread or grow like crazy. Happiness is no longer a resource to manage in Civ V once you get past the initial 30-40 turns. Since Civ V is a strategy game, a loss of a strategic resource system weakens the gameplay.

1. Losing a city through war is much harder than losing followers in a city through conversion.

2. Too much happiness for all players

3. The religious belief you mentioned with the exception of ceremonial burial and peace loving, yes those are set in stone, but they require you to actually build them, and they dont continue growing. +1 happiness from shrines isnt even a threat. and +2 from temples/gardens doesnt seem much of a harm either. Now ceremonial burial/peace loving those are not set in stone. and good players can manage their way to counter your happiness excess and when they convert your cities you might even lose the other bonuses +1 happiness from shrines and +2 happiness from temples/gardens as well if you chose as follower beliefs creating a great threat to your growth. Many people are still experimenting with religion and maybe havent yet figured out how to counter it, specially when you see the mayans/ethiopians going ICS. Just carefully save 2 prophets after you found a religion. Aim for the hagia sophia. to speed this process and establish a strong religion around your holy city. Making it tough on religious players.

4. Using those prophets to convert cities is a lot better than missionaries since they can use their ability 4 times and have a stronger influence. Yes it might seem to nice to enhance your religion as soon as you get that second prophet, but if you see that your enemy is going to be trouble in religion, it does help to use that one to convert cities before you enhance it. This helps you establish your religion in the playing field before the other player, even if they founded their religion first, if they choose to enhance rather than convert.

5. Pagodas/cathedrals/mosques are follower beliefs which benefit players who follow it. Also, one civ cant get ALL happy religious beliefs, this means everyone can have a bit of happiness in their religion

6. Its not as easy as it seems to keep those mercantile cs with you on MP.

7. That is not what I mean, for example, I do think el dorado is imbalanced, and thats what you think im trying to say that el dorado is balanced. What I mean, when i say everyone has a chance is that you dont have to be celts to get your religion first, you might be the civ you builds stonehenge, you might be the civ you stars by a religious city state, you might be the civ you starts by a natural wonder. When you get that first religion, 1 civ cant get both ceremonial burial and peace loving, when your religion is out in the playing field you dont know if another guy is going to convert your cities. What i feel that happens with many good players is that they become runaways and they feel cheap for playing good. Obviously completely imbalanced games are not fun, but games that are perfectly balanced are not fun either. I came from civrev, and I can tell you that civ5 is a million times more balanced than civrev, which is why i come from a view point that i dont see many imbalances in this game, it might have some here and there features that feel a bit more imbalanced. but when i come from civ rev when literally every game 1 guy reaches modern era when everyone is still in ancient era, or when "7 cities of gold" (civ5s version of el dorado) is nearly in every map, or when some civs carry bonuses that can take your civilization out within the first 10 turns of the game(4 turns with one particular civ) .. civ5 in comparison feels extremely more balanced. Of course, like i mentioned it is not perfect in that its not completely balanced, but perfect enough to be both closer to both balanced and imbalanced..

8. Lastly, no, in vanilla 5 wide empires were not as good. it had less incentive when 1-3 cities could do an even better job. Now that happiness is a bit more free, wide empires can actually compete against tall empires. It was extremely difficult to play a science game with a wide empire. progressively your science could get better but by then, tall empires had such a tech lead that they could destroy you before you got your moment to shine...
 
HelloGoodbye123:

1. I don't play MP. It's a waste of time in its current form. I don't think that MP is considered too much when the developers balance the game.

2. I'm not sure why you're trying to provide a strategy about spreading religion. Nobody's asking for strategy in this topic. We're just talking about whether Happiness is too easy to obtain in G&K.

3. As a corollary of point 2, your comments about vanilla are not relevant.

4. You really don't seem to be making an argument that religion doesn't provide too much Happiness. You're just making an argument that bad players won't be able to take advantage of that Happiness. Point taken? Happiness is still too easy to get in G&K, especially after the early game. There's no point in having a strategic resource that doesn't require any strategy to manage for 80% of the game.
 
Ceremonial Burial could be fixed if they just added a cap.

Like "Adds 1 happiness for every city that follows this religion up to a maximum of the number of citizens in your highest population city"

Or something static like "1 Happiness per city following this religion up to a maximum of 10'
Mercantile could be fixed easily too if they just removed the luxury. Still beneficial for having multiple allies, but you aren't getting this massive boost like you would from 4 Colosseums.
 
religion can easily be reverted. Thats my whole point, you may or may not have your religious bonus throughout the game depending on random events.
 
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