Can you please be clearer what you mean by this? I thought it was a given that every citizen contributes to the happiness cap already, and whether or not the city is starving is irrelevant in the calculation of whether your empire is happy or unhappy.
Sounds very vague to me. What is "deep in trouble" to you?
Thyrwyn said:
Not having the choice to grow (or more accurately ... the choice to grow being less attractive or less efficient) is not necessarily going to be much of a disincentive for much of the game. Unless the game is designed so that cities are growing quickly for most of the game, I would assume there are times when your empire is not experiencing much growth. It could simply be because you're at a stage of the game where you are mostly blocked in and you are focusing on building military for conquest as opposed to growing your cities larger (and unhappier).
I can imagine that city growth will be more important in civ5 than it was in civ4. Cities can reach more tiles now and there seems to be heavier dependence on city size for production of
, but it doesn't completely remove my concern. Often the ways that features get exploited to the max (like chop overflow on wonders in civ4 for example) are not all that obvious at the design stage and still not anywhere near obvious at the beta stage (or whatever you call the game at its current point of development).Consider another abused mechanic in the early days of civ4 - anarchy. IIRC originally there was no restriction after changing civics on how soon you could change civics again. Players abused that in their early conquest campaigns by taking advantage of the fact that there were no maintenance costs during anarchy. These players forfeited the chance to grow their cities (no food collected during anarchy) but they were still perfectly able to capture cities and even obtain more gold for those captures. Perpetual anarchy was undoubtedly an exploit and even today it is banned for HOF games despite it being much reduced in effectiveness thanks to patches.(actually I can't find evidence of this in the HOF site so maybe it has been removed from the rules)
Reducing growth rate, if it doesn't affect cities that aren't growing much anyway if at all, does not sound like much of a negative consequence of empire unhappiness. This is why I'm assuming there will be other effects that come along with the unhappiness. I think reduced combat effectiveness has been mentioned as well, but even that is likely to have negligible effect during times of peace.
for a turn then +1
