A Production Penalty for "Unhappy?"

[Marshall Thomas]

When your country is "unhappy", the only thing that's effected is your population growth (food). I think that the problem with this is that during times of normal "unhappiness", you can simply change the tiles your citizens work (in each of your cities) to maximize production and gold; basically become a civ that focuses on hammers and money. As far as food goes, just don't starve while the unhappiness penalty is in effect.

When your country becomes "very unhappy" (unhappiness at 10 or above) your army fights at -30% strengh and you recieve a -50% production penalty (which I hadn't heard about until I actually played the game; maybe it was added just prior to release). But the production penalty is very nesscessary to make "very unhappy" the problem it should be. You can't just become focused on production without penalty like you could for "normal unhappy."

I think that normal "unhappy" (unhappiness under 10) should also have a production penalty (maybe -25%) to make it less easy to adapt to it by just temporarily switching to a hammer/production nation (or a nation that focuses on gold tiles). Perhaps both, or maybe just "very unhappy" should also have a penalty for gold. The way things are now, when my country is unhappy I just focus on building and money until the unhappiness is over. During unhappy times, I sometimes actually get more buildings and units constructed than during happy times. At some point you should probably focus on production instead of population growth anyway, so "unhappiness" just determines when.

Judging from the demographics screen, the AI seems to do a great job at staying happy; so increasing unhappiness penalties would hurt the player more than the AI. This could increase the challenge.

How can I mod the unhappiness penalties to make them slightly harsher? I mainly would like to include a slight production penalty to "unhappy"; similar (but less harsh) to the production % penalty for "very unhappy." Thanks in advance

 

[Roland Ehnström]

Good idea, I support this.

 

[Lord Tirian]

I think that normal "unhappy" (unhappiness under 10) should also have a production penalty (maybe -25%)...

That would cause a death spiral. Slight unhappiness is stopping growth (and hence development of your science economy) and you don't get further progress to golden ages. That's a penalty already. However, by leaving production intact, it gives you a "grace period" to recover - by quicky settling/puppeting a city near a luxury resource - or by building a happiness building. Both require quite some production and building production in Civ5 is a lot slower than before.

By introducing a production penalty to low unhappiness, you'd severely cripple the chances of reasonably fast recovery. And if you don't recover fast enough, the growth penalty would cause you to lag behind even more. Hence, death spiral.

Cheers, LT.