Dale Kents ICS Killer - Happiness Remodeled

[Dale]

This is my attempt to fix the problem with ICS being the single over-powered strategy to win. A good ICS'er is able to win in vanilla Civ 5 around turn 200 by space victory.

Why this mod was made:
I got sick of everyone complaining about ICS, but not doing anything about it. I also feel that changes in patches (and the upcoming patch) will not do enough to fix ICS.

Changes:
Building happiness percent:
- Colosseum: 25% of city population made happy, 5 gold maintenance
- Theatre: 25% of city population made happy, 7 gold maintenance
- Stadium: 25% of city population made happy, 10 gold maintenance
Trading Post: now only gives +1 gold / +1 beaker with Free Thought
Resources: now only give +4 happy / +5 with Commerce
Maritime friends: now only give +2 / +0 food to capital / other cities
Maritime allies: now give +3 / +1 food to capital / other cities
Library: now has 1 specialist slot
Bureaucracy: increasing unhappiness due to number of cities

Why those changes?
One of the limiting factors to huge cities was covering happiness of 25+ pop. In this mod due to percentages of city pop made happy it is easier to ensure the pop of a large city is happy. This also ensures that a happy building in a tiny city does not make more pop happy than actually exists in that city. Maintenance has increased to support new feature.

Trading Posts and Maritime city-states are central to the power of ICS. Whilst both tall and wide Empires rely on trading posts, the ICS'er relies exclusively on them. The power of gold in Civ 5 vanilla is immense. Maritime city-states supply the fuel to feed small city ICS'ing. Now maritime city-states support the capital more, but the other cities in your Empire less.

The library has 2 specialist slots in vanilla Civ 5. This is reduced to 1 to kill an ICS exploit allowing a city to be fed by maritime city-states and use the freed population to fuel massive science growth.

The changes above dramatically effect the wide Empire, reducing the power of the central ingredients to over-powered ICS. Tall Empires will find that the impact is much less as they have a greater base income and science generation per city, and can maintain and rely on higher level buildings such as schools and banks.

The Bureaucracy unhappiness change reflects the dropping efficiency of your Empire's leadership to administer and act on citizen needs. As an Empire gets bigger, you will incur bigger and bigger bureaucracy unhappiness. This unhappiness is on top of the normal city number unhappiness. However, bureaucracy unhappiness increases exponentially.

Test and report!
Please test this mod with either normal or ICS styles of play. I want to hear your feedback on how you think the mod compares to vanilla Civ 5, and what impact you felt in your style of play. My goal is to create a situation where EITHER pursuing a tall Empire or a wide Empire is equally possible.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Gotta give this a try... and, i'll report some comments and/or suggestions once i'm through with a minimal amount of testing games.
Possibly, as an exchange of "favors", i'll later submit a request to fix my Era-Screen popup flaw for the Ancient i've been struggling with.
See ya in a few days.

PS; I'm certainly not an ICS'er but it really doesn't matter if i understand your premise well that gameplay-wise effects must be accounted for in anyone's style or usual conditions.

 

[Tomice]

Your idea for happiness buildings is awesome - Respect!

I already use Thal's mods making ICS less powerful, but I'd love him to consider your idea. It's truly great, also because it's realistic.

 

[alpaca]

First impression: I think you overdid it a bit. Now, you very rarely want to settle another city. Even trying ICS would be suicide.

I think your bureaucracy penalty is a bit too harsh. Quadratic unhappiness increase is a lot, and without buildings to provide any happiness it means you can't get enough happiness to even have a medium-sized empire (10 cities or so). Colosseums become really bad, I'd say they aren't useful at all if your city is below size 12 or so.

Also, the happiness golden age contribution is bugged.

Nerfing trade posts in this way is a bad idea, too, in my opinion. They weren't particularly strong before, I don't see why you think they should be made utterly useless?

 

[Dale]

First impression: I think you overdid it a bit. Now, you very rarely want to settle another city. Even trying ICS would be suicide.

I think your bureaucracy penalty is a bit too harsh. Quadratic unhappiness increase is a lot, and without buildings to provide any happiness it means you can't get enough happiness to even have a medium-sized empire (10 cities or so). Colosseums become really bad, I'd say they aren't useful at all if your city is below size 12 or so.

Also, the happiness golden age contribution is bugged.

Nerfing trade posts in this way is a bad idea, too, in my opinion. They weren't particularly strong before, I don't see why you think they should be made utterly useless?

Bureaucracy formula is Factorial(Numcities) / 2, so it's not really that harsh until you get going. But this is what testing is for.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Alright... just a small but pivotal first report.
Normally when i reach about half turns(250), this is where i get a feeling if things are going rather well or not.

Settings; Small/Archipelago/Prince
AIs; America VS Egypt & Rome... 9 CS.
Victories; Time, Science or Cultural.

In the image attached you'll have plenty of references to judge what impacts if any your adjustments have in such a situation.
-- CW, DW current status.
-- SP's completed while i hovered over my probable next target(s)... Freedom towards Free-Speech.
-- Global Diplomacy rankings; Egypt is still a bit weaker in military, so don't mind the usual hostility.

1) I'm keeping the Engineer idled for later use, most possibly aiming -- for Hermitage. Merchants are pouring like hell and mucho cash is steadily (very quickly too, thanks to such proximity!) provided by a near Warsaw-CS top left.

2) A few Frigates are roaming the seas already & they might find the 9th last CS. I could use an extra Maritime.

3) Notice the whopping 58 happiness! Although my science is a bit low for my taste... but, Universities are queued while some Banks are about to be finished. I've been feeding CS with gifts, so gold stays around 1000+ for a few turns, then the cycle repeats.

4) I'm planning to have two or three more cities once Coal/Oil/Uranium/Aluminium finally do show up. Cross-fingers!

Soooo, generally speaking... the changes didn't really affect my "gameplay" choices. Colosseum(s) seemed a bit heavy on cost at first but i can *now* understand why.

I'll return later with a final report once this first game has been resolved.

PS; The Great People mod-addon no longer shows up its statistics. Maybe a conflict with your stuff?

 

[alpaca]

Bureaucracy formula is Factorial(Numcities) / 2, so it's not really that harsh until you get going. But this is what testing is for.

The formula is 1/2 sum(k) from 0 to n which equals n*(n-1)/4. So together with the 2 from vanilla you get 0.25 n^2 + 1.75 n

I had a weird experience. I played the game until turn 203, when it crashed. I then reloaded and had >90 happiness when I reloaded. This sounds like a bug to me and when loading the auto-save and manually calculating I arrive at -20 or something with the numbers you give. I noticed you have some global variables but aren't doing any save stuff so the variable values are lost when reloading. This sounds like a likely culprit.

While playing, I didn't feel like I had a lot of fun, to be honest. The steep convex happiness curve with no way to compensate by creating buildings did feel like running up against a wall. I'm fine with having to make a decision about whether founding a city makes sense but the way happiness works in your mod, you simply can't found a new city after a while, no matter how much money you pour into it. I was only able to go above 9 cities after I had the FP, Planned Economy, Meritocracy and Freedom. Circuses were the only thing that kept me alive during the game.

All in all I just don't think using happiness against city spamming is a great idea. The design space of adding some building that reduces unhappiness from population is interesting. However, you should still be able to expand, even if it costs you. So a money and/or science maintenance (I wrote a script for a non-linear money maintenance earlier today) just sounds like a lot more fun for me.

The library change worked very well in my opinion. The trade post change, not so much. They are pretty much completely useless if you don't have Free Thought, and of questionable worth even if you do. With low pop unhappiness in your mod I felt like just building a farm for +2 food (and therefore another citizen or two) was worth more once I got happiness under control.

For completeness, I finished with a Diplo victory on turn 233. I went for the Artillery slingshot but then decided a diplo victory is less work and went for that afterwards.

 

[Dale]

That's for the feedback. I'd deliberately made the exponential unhappiness a bit harsh to leave me open to include features to reduce it. I wanted to see how initial changes fared first before including such things.

At the moment I've got on the table for possible inclusion:
- Forbidden Palace: 33% bureaucracy unhappiness reduction (instead of current feature)
- Change one of the social policies to also reduce bureaucracy unhappiness by 33% (a late policy)
- Tie some of the techs to other lines to eliminate some of the biggest slingshots into policies, such as Acoustics into ren within 7 techs, and others.

This would allow for sinking production or culture (or gold to get the prod / culture) to reduce the burden of bureaucracy. The tech changes would fix some big slingshot holes left in vanilla.

Did you find the science rate still really fast? I also considered removing all specialist slots from the library and just have the base effect.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Have only just seen this Mod, so haven't had a chance to test yet (might give it a shot tonight), but I was wondering if its possible to change Luxuries so that they behave more like strategic resources-i.e. act as units. So, for example, one "deposit" of sugar might give only +2 happiness (2 units), whereas another "deposit" might give +5 happiness.
This might also create new trade opportunities, as the Civ with only +2 happiness worth of gold might now be interested in getting his/her hands on another +2 happiness worth of gold.

Of course, another thing to consider down the track (I'm guessing this is more of an SDK thing) is a Mod which ties the usefulness of your resources (strategic, bonus & luxury) to the number of cities you have-the larger your empire, the more resources you need to keep that empire running efficiently. Hope that makes sense.

Aussie.

 

[alpaca]

The problem is rather that you removed all flat happiness bonuses from buildings so when expanding you simply hit a wall that is completely determined by access to luxuries (and circuses). I just don't see this design being fun, no matter if you add ways to reduce the bureaucracy penalty.

Edit: AussieLurker, this could in principle be done by adding high-modifier buildings that require resources, like the Factory. Maybe a workshop with +50% production instead of +20% and cost 1 iron for example. However, I've found that resource abundance is typically high in large empires so this would just be another advantage, probably.

Science rate is still quick but a lot slower because of the happiness wall. I was using all free science stuff available (Oxford, Scientific Rev, four GS or so). Maybe reducing GS points to 2 per scientist makes sense. I don't feel comfortable with so few scientist specialists because they are a good way to boost your research at the cost of some food. Personally, I will probably add different trees for the scientist buildings and library-like buildings, though.

 

[Jabarto]

Nevermind, figured it out.

 

[LordTC]

Seems like despite all these nerfs the game is still winnable in a very low number of turns (233 instead of 190ish). And I agree on the fact that fighting the quadratic happiness is far less fun, although I'm biased since I think fighting empire happiness in general is unfun.

I also find a very limited number of cities to be very effective here, so I think this mod has gone too far the other way, I often feel its not worth expanding at all (ICS placement or otherwise), and to me for the game to work expanding has to feel like a viable possibility whenever you have space for a good city.

 

[Dale]

Have only just seen this Mod, so haven't had a chance to test yet (might give it a shot tonight), but I was wondering if its possible to change Luxuries so that they behave more like strategic resources-i.e. act as units. So, for example, one "deposit" of sugar might give only +2 happiness (2 units), whereas another "deposit" might give +5 happiness.
This might also create new trade opportunities, as the Civ with only +2 happiness worth of gold might now be interested in getting his/her hands on another +2 happiness worth of gold.

Of course, another thing to consider down the track (I'm guessing this is more of an SDK thing) is a Mod which ties the usefulness of your resources (strategic, bonus & luxury) to the number of cities you have-the larger your empire, the more resources you need to keep that empire running efficiently. Hope that makes sense.

Aussie.

Valkrion is working on a resources mod such as this, and hopes to integrate these changes when they become more stable.

 

[Dale]

The problem is rather that you removed all flat happiness bonuses from buildings so when expanding you simply hit a wall that is completely determined by access to luxuries (and circuses). I just don't see this design being fun, no matter if you add ways to reduce the bureaucracy penalty.

Edit: AussieLurker, this could in principle be done by adding high-modifier buildings that require resources, like the Factory. Maybe a workshop with +50% production instead of +20% and cost 1 iron for example. However, I've found that resource abundance is typically high in large empires so this would just be another advantage, probably.

Science rate is still quick but a lot slower because of the happiness wall. I was using all free science stuff available (Oxford, Scientific Rev, four GS or so). Maybe reducing GS points to 2 per scientist makes sense. I don't feel comfortable with so few scientist specialists because they are a good way to boost your research at the cost of some food. Personally, I will probably add different trees for the scientist buildings and library-like buildings, though.

The flat happiness is achievable from resources, circus, natural wonders, national wonders and global wonders.

There is another option I thought about, and that is possibly adding a specialist slot to happiness buildings. The return of Elvis. This would put the power to gain more flat happiness in the player's hands, at the cost of other city workers / specialists.

This would also give you the flexibility to short term increase happiness to found a new city to access long term happiness.

 

[Louis XXIV]

I've been an advocate of a happiness specialist for awhile. I think it would yield positive results.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Second in 1980, 100 turns to go -- showing 124 Happy!!

1) Piety & Patronage done, still one in Freedom next & possibly will be cranking out most if not all Commerce-SP to help out a somewhat "struggling" Economy.

2) Both are becoming quite Hostile but i've got big surprises for them... i was able to stockpile a huge Navy edge along with strong Rifles stationed everywhere. Rome just bombarded near Chicago (bottom left) with an Artist-GP -- go figure, they possibly want the only remaining Aluminium leftover slightly North. I really don't mind that tile, got 24 of these already. Settling just two tiles up & Chicago would have gained it later on. Bad guess!

3) I think i may have got lucky with Luxury resources almost everywhere near my cities while hitting two Oil tiles right outside the Capital.

4) Much of the score comes from Wonders (Retendor came in handy as usual!) & highest rankings almost in every possible slots.

Probably won't ever reach a cultural victory or SS-Launch but scorewise i'm still waaaaayyyy ahead.

Like i said, i'm no ICS'er. I'd rather play fair & square within reasonable ruleset limits.

The only noticeable effect i could detect from your stuff is that Economy is somehow irregular even if i managed to put in many banks & presently aiming for a few StockExchanges.

Next report will be for final observations & conclusions driven from the whole perspective.

 

[bobbyboy29]

Dale, I really like your change to the happiness building mechanic. It's quite ingenious!

Anyway, I had an idea which is along a similar vein so that fewer, larger cities can keep up research wise with their ICS counterparts but i'm not sure if this is possible (in fact i'm pretty sure it'll be tough. But my latest idea for combatting ICS is to make extra specialist spots open up with higher pop (i.e library only gives 1 scientist specialist for cities<5 pop but once you grow past that another slot opens up).

I feel this is in keeping with realism (bigger cities have bigger libraries, unis etc...). It is good for gameplay because rather than just nerfing one strategy i feel it will add a bit more depth to the game and I think it's in keeping with your changes which also try to make cities give better returns as they grow.

 

[Dale]

It would actually be easier to have specialists give pop-based increases to science, like what I do with the buildings. It would be very difficult (and time consuming) to program a system that added more slots to a building. But it would be simple to program a system like the happiness buildings where, say a specialist gave 25% of pop in beakers. So a size 4 city would enable +1 beaker per specialist, but a size 20 city would enable +5 beakers per specialist.

 

[Tomice]

I was wondering if its possible to change Luxuries so that they behave more like strategic resources-i.e. act as units. So, for example, one "deposit" of sugar might give only +2 happiness (2 units), whereas another "deposit" might give +5 happiness.
This might also create new trade opportunities, as the Civ with only +2 happiness worth of gold might now be interested in getting his/her hands on another +2 happiness worth of gold.

Wouldn't that make it irrelevant which luxuries you have?

3 gold and 2 ivory would be the same as 5 sugar.

Don't think this would be fun, either.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Wouldn't that make it irrelevant which luxuries you have?

3 gold and 2 ivory would be the same as 5 sugar.

Don't think this would be fun, either.

Up to a point, maybe, but I think it would end this stupid situation of "Well CivA already has Gold, so my Gold is now *useless* (as I'm already receiving maximum happiness from Gold)", which I think is less fun. That's how strategic resources used to work too, but now its much more enjoyable having units of resources to trade, I don't see any reason why luxuries can't work in a similar fashion.
Actually, in some ways its *not* the same. If we assume that no luxury resource type can give more than 5 happiness, then if you find yourself with two relatively large deposits of the same luxury (which, lets face it, happens a lot), then your chances to trade are increased if you're not automatically locked out by someone having that resource too.

Aussie.