45°38'N-13°47'E;13906862 said:
I was wondering if anyone is having real troubles with healthiness in industrial era or early modern. From what I've seen with lots of autoplayed games, AI is starving some of its cities because of healthiness problems. I've reworked a bit the production function to push on healthiness when needed and it's a bit better. But apart from those civs having lots of resources or food, many civs have their cities shrinking compared to previous eras and this sounds wrong. I was wondering if anyone feels it's necessary to have a bit more health in industrial era.
Vokarya, have you ever looked at how healthiness and unhealthiness develop through eras? Might we need just a little boost to healthiness in industrial era? Just one or two health points provided either by buildings or techs?
My experience has been that the Industrial Era is definitely where unhealth starts to be a major problem. I can usually keep up with the unhealth from buildings as long as I work at the health giving buildings before the unhealthy ones, but it almost always means running Socialized and staying away from the dirty power plants. The early power plants are MASSIVE health hits, because there is a -2 health from power in general, an additional -4 health from dirty power, and the Coal Plant gives -2 health on top of that.
I haven't done any kind of major look at health/unhealth, mostly because population is such a factor. It seems to be about 1/3 to 1/2 of a city's total unhealth is from population, and about equal from buildings, with the remainder from a few sources (resources, improvements, flood plains).
I still haven't done the water modifications I want to do; that will change Artesian Well from +3 food to +1 health (the +1 food from Rice migrates to Irrigation Canals), and I was going to roll that bonus into Water Treatment Plant as well (increasing it to a flat +3 health). Losing Artesian Well's food bonus will also lower city populations and growth rates a little.
I was also going to lower Aqueduct from 0.15 to 0.10 health per citizen, and I was thinking about lowering WTP and Waste Digester as well, but if you think there's a problem with health, I can leave those alone.
I would look at lowering unhealth penalties on buildings before raising health on others. That means you don't have as many wild swings. Is there a specific part of the era that's giving trouble? Depending on where the problem is, I think a few places to look would be lowering Levee to -1 (remember, it's 0 in BTS and the -2 is an Afforess add-on), reducing the Tobacco unhealth penalty on Supermarket to -1 (so it's no worse than Grocer), lowering Arsenal to -2, and maybe even lowering International Port to -3. Some of these only apply to specific cities, though.
I was also considering a rework of Fertilizers; it adds +3 health, which seems like a lot. If there was a way to have it directly boost the yield of Farms, that would be nice. The nominal +1 food or +1 production seen on some resources is the tile bonus, not a civ-wide bonus; it looks to me like only happiness and health can be adjusted by resources alone (without buildings).