Happiness is unbalanced

There seems to be an unbalance in happiness distribution.

Lets say you`re playing a duel map. You have 4 or 5 cities that cover half of the world and pretty much half of the luxuries are in your possession. Now unless you have king sized cities, you should be well off without colosseums or other buildings that you would normally need to increase your happiness. In fact, you probably have alot of excess happiness. The problem here is that it`s too easy to earn happiness.

Now picture this scenario. You are playing on a large map. Half of the world is covered with your cities. You should have about 3/4 of the luxury resources. Same circumstances, just different map size. Yet your unhappiness is off the scale, making you build happiness producing buildings and bankrupting yourself. The problem here is that it`s way too hard to earn happiness.

Now what Firaxis should have done to balance this is modify the bonus for each map size. For example 2 happiness for resources in Duel, 3 for small, 4 for standard, 7 for large, 11 for huge. Or if they were really into it they could make more luxury resources that would only show up on bigger maps.

Maybe someone can make a mod or something. I have a bad feeling they`re not about to patch this inconsistency.

It would be nice if luxuries scaled a bit based on either map size or number of cities.

My problem is that it is so finicky and changes so rapidly. One city adds 1 pop = -1 happiness - if you get a golden age or >1 happiness your cities will grow and boom in one turn you can gain -5 happiness because your cities grew by 1. It just seems like I cant go more than few turns without plummeting again after buying/building a lot of happiness structures.

You are winning a defensive war and the more succesful you are (cities conquere/razed) the more annoyed your pop gets but they are cheerful as you get shellacked??

The IA cheating, as a human player I have yet to gain ANYWHERE near the 50++ value the AI gets even while playing on scrub levels.

Suggestion: Make more wonders and improvements give happiness (especially monument/temple!! and cultural wonders).

Rat

Yeah, happiness doesn't relate to 'happiness' in any way at all. If it did there would be war-weariness and there wouldn't be nonesense about unhappiness for number of cities. Population size I can see (sorta...) but number of cities!? How is that logical?

What I think is starnge is why you only get a maximum of 5 happines of each resource. 'if you have an iron mine you can build as many units that you have iron so why is it not the same with luxeries. two wine shold get 10 happines for exampel.

dragomaster said:

What I think is starnge is why you only get a maximum of 5 happines of each resource. 'if you have an iron mine you can build as many units that you have iron so why is it not the same with luxeries. two wine shold get 10 happines for exampel.

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Yeah I don't get this either. You need multiple iron mines, but one sugar plantation is enough for everywhere? WTH? It's inconsistent and doesn't make a lot of sense.

Plus the whole problem of large empires simply being constantly unhappy. Razing everything in sight really shouldn't be the best tactic.

MadRat said:

The IA cheating, as a human player I have yet to gain ANYWHERE near the 50++ value the AI gets even while playing on scrub levels.

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I had my happiness in the 60s (while making gold, not in a golden age, and on top of the science curve) in the late game on a Standard map, King level. That was fly.

jjkrause84 said:

Yeah, happiness doesn't relate to 'happiness' in any way at all. If it did there would be war-weariness and there wouldn't be nonesense about unhappiness for number of cities. Population size I can see (sorta...) but number of cities!? How is that logical?

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Having 20 people in a single city makes it very easy for all of them to get to the luxury resources.
Having 5 people in each city in different areas of the planet makes it harder for them to get the luxury resources. Hence they are not as happy.

My happiness hit 60ish in my Immortal game after I finally adopted the social policy that does half unhappiness for specialists. I really wasn't expecting it to leap quite so high, but I had quite a lot of high pop cities, with quite a few specialists pumping out science.

Most happiness gains from social policies scale with number of cities.
Grabbing Forbidden Palace + one of the Order SPs completely removes the unhappiness from cities.
Unhappiness isn't an issue for large empires if you know what to look for to correct it.

Personally, I think they made it too easy to maintain large empires. And winning with a small, peaceful empire on the higher difficulties is now more of a challenge in Civ5 than it was in Civ4.

Unbalance is a situation where one choice (civilization, unit, tech, etc.) is always stronger than other. There's nothing unbalanced in happiness.

In fact it's a lot of fun to manage happiness in Civ 5, it's much deeper than previous installments.

stealth_nsk said:

Unbalance is a situation where one choice (civilization, unit, tech, etc.) is always stronger than other.

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Don`t mean to troll you but the smaller map you take the bigger advantage in Happiness you have. I wouldn`t say AI gets the same bonus. AI usually keeps it`s happiness high no matter what.

lissenber said:

<good analysis snipped>

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It's also a matter of distribution. On a huge map you're lucky to have 2 happiness resources near your starting location, and 5 in your whole empire. smaller maps have more concentrated luxuries, and more luxury variety. Further, on a larger map, the clustering of resources means that nearby cities and civs will usually have the same luxuries you have, so there is little point to trading with them. And as resources are more spread out on larger maps, the AI's clustering of its cities gives them relatively fewer resources, when they bother to improve them at all.

I've even tried playing 18 Civ 28 CS Huge maps, and there doesn't seem to be more happiness resources available than on a 12/24 huge, so it seemingly fails to scale by number of civs as well as map size.

It seems some player strategy is needed here. If you try to take over half the map on a huge map, you should get killed by unhappiness. You just don't have enough happiness producing luxuries, buildings to do that. So the lesson is don't try to build a 50 city empire. This is a way of stopping infinite city sprawl, and is a good thing in my opinion.

To sum up...(and the numbers are just for illustrative purposes)

duel map - 4 cities - covers half the map = manageable happiness
huge map - 50 cities - covers half the map = unmanageable happiness

It seems right to me.

Theres a softcap mechanism in play that prevents unhappiness problems in large empires. Most cities won't grow past 10-15 population before the modern era unless you build hospitals/med labs. The number 15 also happens to be how much happiness a city with every happy building gives.

So if you built every happiness building in all your cities and are still suffering from happiness problems, then the problem isn't because your empire is large. Its because you're annexing cities without understanding the implications.

Wonder what happiness looks like with AI civs, when they spam 15 to 20 cities regurarly and still manage to have a nice army and huge piles of gold.

lissenber said:

Don`t mean to troll you but the smaller map you take the bigger advantage in Happiness you have. I wouldn`t say AI gets the same bonus. AI usually keeps it`s happiness high no matter what.

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If they have happiness high, they have Golden Age often. I don't think they loose anything here.

stealth_nsk said:

In fact it's a lot of fun to manage happiness in Civ 5, it's much deeper than previous installments.

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Not sure it is MUCH deeper. It's a bit deeper. Still, it feels really, really odd at times. Global happiness makes sense on some levels and doesn't make sense on others. I wish there was a way to distinguish between the two.

Ironically, global food production makes more sense generally than global happiness.

No, it´s not. If your cities grow large, they become unhappy (has been a feature since Civ1). If your empire grows large, unhappiness rises too. Perfectly logical. What´s unbalanced is the desire to have a very large empire - you don´t need it to win. If you want to conquer the world (a very unrealistic Civ feauture since Civ1), there are consequences. Ofcourse you can ignore unhappiness - there´s a thread about this particular subject.

JEELEN said:

No, it´s not. If your cities grow large, they become unhappy (has been a feature since Civ1). If your empire grows large, unhappiness rises too. Perfectly logical. What´s unbalanced is the desire to have a very large empire - you don´t need it to win. If you want to conquer the world (a very unrealistic Civ feauture since Civ1), there are consequences. Ofcourse you can ignore unhappiness - there´s a thread about this particular subject.

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Historically speaking, there's really no reason to think that large empires make people unhappy. If anything, it is the opposite. It's large, poorly protected empires that cause unhappiness.

That said, the golden age link to global happiness is cool thematically.

As for conquering the world, I am not sure how unrealistic per se that really is. Alexander the Great might have done it if he had been immortal. It just takes a lot of time. No more unrealistic than one person ruling a civilization for over 6000 years.