Pinstar
Ringtailed Regent
They do need to stick in a harsher penalty for being in the 'livid' happiness mode. Perhaps -50% gold income (thefts) or random citizens go on strike around you cities (forced into the 'unemployed citizens tab)
Alright, let's think it through on how it *should* scale then.
We need to set some goals first. What needs to be brought down if you get low on happiness?
- I will start by arguing food shouldn't be. Food going up causes unhappiness, therefore you don't need it diminishing when happiness goes down. Switching to no food is something the player should manage to stop happiness from going out of line. Really food diminishing is a way of Civ5 to hold your hand by telling you "you shouldn't grow right now, you're just going to make things worse". If a person wants to grow, they should be able to grow.
- Production should be, as we don't want people producing troops in mass numbers in negative happiness
- If production is on the list, then so should gold, as it is another means of production. I "gamed" gold to get by their little roadblock in my original post.
- Obviously the hit to golden ages should be present
- A hit to military power. This is to stop steamrolling, which isn't good for the game
Next, we need to know how we want to implement it. If it's a stepped system (ie how it is now), it is easily brought to the most efficient level by staying just above one of the steps. This is unrealistic, and doesn't feel right at all. Moreover, a system like this doesn't scale equally from large empires to small empires. Therefore, I think a more continuous system (alright, not continuous, but the most small steps we can get) is needed.
Finally, what we need is for this to work well for big empires and small empires. Note that I'm talking about 2 different things. First, it should work for empires with the same population, but different numbers of cities. Secondly, it should work for different numbers of population.
To tackle the first point is easy. A straight up percentage loss on production/gold would work for both. The problem is if you try this, then small population empires will barely suffer. I'll take 1 additional citizen (ie 2 production and 2 gold) for a 1% loss on production/gold if I only have 10 population in total. So we can't use straight percentages.
Instead, think of what 1 unhappiness causes you, and what it also benefits you. Obviously we want 1 more unhappiness to give a net loss: The goal is to punish the player for trying to play with a really unhappy empire. We want the player to want happiness.
Letting the city grow by 1 citizen nets:
- 1 unhappiness
- -2 food
- +production value of a citizen
- -1 golden age point
Therefore we need our "happiness detriment" to be worse than the production value of a citizen - a golden age point - 2 food.
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.
For example, say we have an empire of a size 20 city A, and size 10 city B, and the player has 5 unhappiness.
Then the player suffers -10*(20/30) production and gold in city A, and -10*(10/30) production and gold in city B.
That means that late game, I can construct as many size 11 cities as I want (14 with a circus), as long as I can afford the maintenance on the happiness buildings. I get a penalty I need to offset with luxury resources and other stuff if I let any city go past this population.
If this proves to be a problem, and it very well may, I would argue that the problem is that the cost of new technologies do not scale with #cities. Without a tech lead/advantage, that -33% combat penalty will become much more relevant.
Currently, a size 20 city results in 21 unhappiness (1 city + 20 pop), while two size 10 cities result in 22 unhappiness (2 cities + 20 pop total).
good point, and moreover, given how progressively more difficult it becomes growing the population anyway, good luck getting it go much past anyway.I get a penalty I need to offset with luxury resources and other stuff if I let any city go past this population.
Not everybody enjoys playing using a 1 city challenge. ... It's time for the devs to just quit that pointless endeavor and design a Civ around a mass land grab.
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.
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.
Why would you want the cost of new technologies to scale with # of cities? Not everybody enjoys playing using a 1 city challenge. Firaxis has been trying desperately since Civ 3 to weaken large empires and people keep finding ways around it.
Firaxis should just face the facts that most people play Civ to build large empires and start conquering things, not survive until end of game with their 3 cities with all the other AI factions still intact. Most people want to build lots of huge size cities to cover the map with and they should just stop trying to cater to the minority who want their small 3 city civ to break even with a 50 city juggernaut.
Every single game from Civ 3 - Civ 5 has the developers trying to reduce city spam and limiting population growth in cities. And in every single game, the dominant strategy quickly became the loophole that allowed players to do just exactly that. It's time for the devs to just quit that pointless endeavor and design a Civ around a mass land grab.
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.
Sorry, I meant Rationalism. Most of your cities will be on trade posts and specialists. Since they won't be that big, 1-2 maritime city states will give enough food to make this really easy to maintain.Also, why do you think the freedom line is so good for this? The first benefit, lower unhappiness from specialists, is totally useless to you. Lower food for specialists is kind of useful, but you can make up for it easily with city states. The only really good benefit is the extra great people, but I think you'd be better off going for autocracy (lower unit maintence and rush buy cost) or commerce (lower road maintence fee).