3.3.4 AI happiness

[Ahriman]

There's something odd with AI happiness again. I get a report on turn 30 of the happiest civs, and there are multiple civs around +30 happy. That would explain why the AI's are ignoring happiness so well.

 

[stackpointer]

Could you try using IGE/firetuner to see the breakdown in happiness/unhappiness? The handicaps file has the AI default happiness at 17 and the unhappiness from cities and population at 90%. So to get 30+ happiness, they'd need at least 4 luxury resources along with some other sources (buildings/wonders). Unless Thal has already reintroduced some invisible yield buildings per era.

 

[Ahriman]

I don't have a tuner sorry, but it definitely feels like there is a very big AI happiness advantage. They had 30+ excess happiness, its very hard to see how they could get this from normal play. There are no wonders they could have that early, and its hard to see how they could have more than a couple of luxuries.

And AI civs seem to be able to support a ton of cities, way more than the human can at 4 unhappiness per city.

 

[stackpointer]

I can't seem to reproduce the issue. At King difficulty, the highest AI on turn 25 had 28 happiness, 8 from luxuries, 3 from discovery of natural wonders, and 17 base. With 5 unhappiness from cities/population that makes 23 net happiness.

You can use IGE to take the AI seat and mouseover the toolbar at the top of the screen to get a breakdown on their happiness. While I think that the 17 base happiness is excessive, the change was made when the barbarians were overrunning the AI and causing them to be unable to improve their resources.

 

[mystikx21]

We could just improve the AI's barb bonuses, or the barbarians appear less frequently/early and that would take care of it. +17 is definitely too high.

 

[stackpointer]

It was set to 17 very early on before Thal made some improvements to the AI's handling of the barbarians. So the base happiness can probably be safely lowered now.

 

[Ahriman]

Yeah. The human gets ~7? That's a pretty huge AI advantage for the early game.

 

[stackpointer]

Human gets base 9 at Prince and above. Warlord and chieftain has 12 and settler 15 I believe. Still a big handicap that was made as a quick fix for the early AI happiness problems that were occurring in earlier versions.

 

[Ahriman]

If we give the AI happiness bonuses, I would much rather it be gradual things (like 0.5 less per city, or .1 less per pop) rather than a big lump sum up front which lets it REX.

 

[mystikx21]

It should be getting -.1 per pop AND -.4 per city already as bonuses. So I am not sure what the +8 is for either.

 

[stackpointer]

It was a quick fix for the AI's inability to get luxuries up in the early game due to barbarians in the earlier versions of CEP. Since Thal has mostly fixed that in other ways, he'll hopefully lower their base happiness in future versions of CEP.