Happiness for wide & peaceful

[Omen of Peace]

I consistently see Happiness issues when playing wide and peaceful (typically Progress).
To clarify:
- I play on Standard maps (generally Continents)
- By wide I mean 10+ cities
- I tend to be well-placed in science/policies, so unhappiness shouldn't be related to a major yield deficit.

I've noticed, and mentioned some issues with this in recent months, but never really got any feedback in beta threads, hence this dedicated thread. See previous post below.

Wide Happiness
I'm very keen to hear more evidence, but it seems to me that wide happiness is not in a good place. I totally get that we want to punish expansion to some extent, but I thought the idea is that it's possible to dig oneself out of this hole. In my very wide game, I never got out of it.

I would blame the Empire modifier for this. It was above +90% for me, so naturally it would be quite hard to get yields to match.
I don't think more fixed bonuses to Happiness will do the trick, since they will make Happiness trivial for not-so-Wide civ.

Let me reiterate a past proposal that Defense buildings, instead of reducing this modifier by a fixed amount, reduce the per-city increment.
Example:
assuming the per-city increment is 7% on Standard and that today a Defensive Building decreases the modifier by 5%
If you have 5 cities, you get an Empire modifier of 5 x 7 = 35% (no building) / 30% (1st building) / 25% (2nd) / 20% (3rd)
If you have 15 cities, you get an Empire modifier of 105% / 100% / 95% / 90%
The buildings make a dent in the modifier for Tall, but nor for Wide.

My proposal: Walls decrease the increment by e.g. 1, Castles by 2 and Arsenals by 2
If you have 5 cities, you get an Empire modifier of 35% / 5 x 6 = 30% (1st building) / 5 x 4 = 20 % (2nd) / 5 x 2 = 10% (3rd)
If you have 15 cities, you get an Empire modifier of 105% / 90% / 60% / 30%
So the modifier is still punishing without a Building or with just a Wall, but you can bring it down considerably with later buildings.
Your expansion is restricted in early eras, much less in later eras (which is the design goal I would set for this subsystem).

It would need to be adapted to map size since the increment changes with map size, which I admit is a downside of this solution.

Another example
In my most recent 04-17 game, I started out fine happiness-wise, but it slowly crashed below 50% in Medieval as I reached 11 or 12 cities, and never lifted back up.
That's while:
- playing Fealty (so +1 Happiness / city from castle)
- getting +13 Happiness from Faith of the Masses (I was the only one to found on my continent, so I had 27 cities following my religion)
- owning or importing a decent amount of luxuries, including from CS
- being allied with 1 Mercantile CS (and 3 other CS)
- having a mostly up-to-date infrastructure as well (most cities were missing some buildings, because it's a time when you tech faster than you can build all that you unlock).
With all of that, I was still at e.g. 73 Happiness / 91 Unhappiness, or similar numbers.

Thoughts
- I don't think that this amount of cities is considered too much at this stage of the game?

- To elaborate on why this Unhappiness is not good: it makes it really tough to produce units (you reach -35% or higher production penalties!), and then you end up in wars because you're considered weak.

- In the quoted post above, I've identified the Empire modifier as a likely culprit.
I've suggested that Defense buildings lower the Empire modifier per-city increment instead of the Empire modifier. I'm keen to hear
1/ if it's feasible @Gazebo
2/ what others think of it.

- Another avenue would be to buff the Progress Happiness policy.
However, I don't see any problem when Progress has ~9 or fewer cities, so I'm not sure this is the correct path forward.

- Ironically, I've had fewer issues when warmongering, probably because some cities are puppets, and puppets only increase the Empire modifier by half as much IIRC.
Happiness was meant to be a hurdle for going too-wide, but it was supposed to hinder warmongers than peacemongers, I believe.

Let me know what you experience has been on Standard maps and what you think of the evolutions I proposed.

 

[Stalker0]

With city numbers that high (assuming annexed and not puppets), I think you need public works.

Generally I find at some point in my wide play, I do a round where each city does a public works building. Its a big help with unhappiness. That said, +13 happy is a big religion boost that your not going to get in most playthroughs.

Also one thing I have learned in recent playthroughs is its often best to grow through the pain. I used to stop all growth until I could fix the unhappiness, but long term that just puts you behind everyone. Once cities get to certain high pop numbers there unhappiness often naturally goes down.

 

[Gazebo]

Reminds me, this is the kind of topic @CrazyG used to respond to almost instantly. Haven't seen them in awhile. Has anyone else? Worried, their tag shows they reside in mainland China.

G

 

[Revolutionist_8]

I agree with Stalker regarding public works and growth as well. Only a small notice I can add is what happened me couple games ago, where I had no plantation luxuries. I was like yeah finally some useful luxuries but my joy quickly turned opposite direction when I had serious poverty problems all game. Lesson learned.
I actually like how happiness usually swings a little bit thorough the game and can vary from game to game. I even increased some values to make unhappiness more brutal but that's probably just personal taste.

Reminds me, this is the kind of topic @CrazyG used to respond to almost instantly. Haven't seen them in awhile. Has anyone else? Worried, their tag shows they reside in mainland China.

Indeed. According to civfanatics they were online 3 days ago. I sincerely hope they are well and healthy!

 

[0x2953]

After seeing so many discussions about wide happiness, I checked out the code on github and saw that the city unhappiness multiplier has been anywhere between 3 and 10 over the last year or so, currently sitting at 9. I think this accounts for the issues people have been having recently, if you have 12 cities then that's a difference of up to 84% needs modification between different versions, right now on the higher end of the range. I think the idea proposed here is really interesting, although maybe you could put the multiplier reduction on constabularies/police stations instead. If any of the devs want to point me to where in the code the actual calculation is performed I'd love to try to implement it myself and test it out.

 

[ICanHasName?]

11-12 cities is a lot. In my experience medieval is a tough time happiness wise too. I wonder if all your cities happened to be below size 10, with unhappiness capped by city size. In that case your progress policy might be doing literally nothing.

That happiness proposal is interesting. I like the idea of the happiness size penalty being gradually reduced over time.

4/17 is the old patch though. I dont know if happy changed in the new ones.

 

[Drakle]

My issue with wide unhappiness is the inconsistent eras. In the early game, it can be really punishing until the renaissance, but in my most recent game, once I grabbed the Industry Finisher, and got over 10 techs ahead of everybody else, I stopped having any non-specialist unhappiness. Likely because my cities are well above the average in terms of yields, and the few remaining unhappiness is dealt with by flat building reductions.

I'm not sure if the average is such a great mechanic. The AI get bonus yields, so the human is unfairly behind in earlier eras, even with nearly all production spent trying to keep to date with buildings. But then once a runaway gets rolling, everybody below gets hammered with unhappiness, allowing the runaway to runaway even further.

Meanwhile, the lower AI behind on tech are drowning in unhappiness. Some of the bottom civs have been behind on tech all game, which has meant their populations are puny because of unhappiness, which means they can't catch up on tech.

 

[azum4roll]

I think the tech penalty should be increased and non-tech/building happiness source slightly increased to favour tech runaways less.

 

[Delvemor]

I had a similar experience in the last few months playing wide and mostly peaceful on Emperor/Immortal. Even while being the tech leader, being in the top 3 for policies and with well developed cities, I was still between 40% and 50% pretty much all game before the Industrial Era. It's a bit counter-intuitive to have happiness problems in these conditions. Recently I tried to focus more on culture instead of science to minimize the tech penalty for happiness, but even then I'm almost forced to build Public Works. A few versions ago I needed Public Works only while being a warmonger.