Balance - The "Wide vs Tall" Problem

[Wodhann]

Ok, so I have fleshed out a part of my grand happiness "remake" idea. Be warned: This is a pretty "out there" concept, I took many liberties into developing it and thought in core game design terms more than balance terms. But I hope it serves us to take the discussion towards a fruitful path. And please READ THE WHOLE POST before criticizing.

"Comfort"

Basically it works like this: Rather than giving bonuses or penalties based on empire-wide characteristics, we focus on each citizen's comfort. But what is a comfortable citizen? A comfortable citizen is not necessarily a happy citizen, but it is a content one. This not about citizens being happy, more about them not being unhappy. Luxury resources and entertainment makes people happy, but comfort just prevents them from being miserable.

For each citizen, ask this question:

1. Is this citizen healthy and well fed?
2. Is there enough culture to make this citizen a part of a society?
3. Is this citizen's religion being well represented?
4. Is this citizen working and feeling useful?
5. Is this citizen secure?
6. Is this citizen happy with his leader?
7. Does this citizen agree with his ruler's ideology?

For 1, the question is simple, is there enough food to keep this citizen alive? Also, operating under the assumption that food is also Civ5's representative of health (as evidenced by the Hospital), a citizen with enough "food" is a healthy citizen. From a game design perspective, it makes sense that not having enough food should penalize you in some way - if you want to go really tall, you need to be able to sustain that position.

For 2: Culture speaks of many things, and gives a person a sense of identity, which without it, can cause social problems. Plus it punishes wide empires that can't (or won't) manage its cultural imput properly. Basically every citizen would require a certain amount of cultural output to be content.

For 3, I believe religion should play a part in it, and make religion a more relevant part of the game - and I also believe conflicting religions should have an effect on the citizens' comfort, as in, if a citizen belongs to a religion different from the city's converted religion, he should not be happy with that.

4 is self-explanatory - unemployed citizens should produce unhappiness.

About 5, it encourages empires to protect their cities, and hurts wide empires a bit as they have to spend more time fortifying than tall ones.

About 6, it speaks about occupied cities. A citizen led by a foreign leader will not like him.

About 7, it speaks about public opinion and ideologies.


For each of those questions, a "no" answer will give you a "discomfort point" for that particular category (that being, food, culture, religion, employment, safety, leadership and ideology). Summing up all discomfort points for each category will define how comfortable a citizen is:

Confortable: 0 discomfort, +0 .
Unconfortable: At least 1 discomfort. +1 .
Miserable: At least 3 discomfort. +2 .
Oppressed: At least 5 discomfort. +3 .


The advantage of a system like this is this: No more arbitrary unhappiness modifiers. No more instant unhappiness when you settle cities, no more of this "all citizens give you unhappiness regardless". If your citizens are unhappy, it's because you screwed up on something, and wide empires will have a higher chance of screwing up than tall ones.

As for coding, I see it would look something like this:
For example, if your city is in starvation, account for how many citizens the current food amount is sufficient to. The rest count as food discomfort points. Then move on to the next, count the cultural output, so let's say every citizen requires 5 culture output, if you have 4 citizens and +15 culture, you get a single cultural discomfort point. So on so forth until you've gathered all discomfort points for different categories, then just tally them together and apply the unhappiness based on the above reference. If you get for instance, a discomfort point in all categories and an additional 5 discomfort in the culture category, you get 3 + 5 unhappiness, which would represent an Oppressed and five Unconfortable citizens.

But it wouldn't necessarily have to be like that. I'm not a coder, so someone could think of a much simpler way to accomplish this. Keep in mind, what I'm doing here is simply scribbling on the white board - not laying out how it is to be developed specifically.


As for luxury resources and other sources of happiness, they can be tweaked according to how this new rule would pan out.


Now, the question in your minds: How does this help the wide vs tall problem?

The answer is simple: It presents more hardships for a wide empire to keep itself happy.

When building tall, you generally have everything - food, culture, safety and you rarely have occupied cities. When building wide though, this is not the case, as you generally are focusing on building things to assist you with conquest, or generally concerned with building the new cities up, none of them which help your population to be happy.


Now, does this fix the issue completely? No, nor it is supposed to. There are other problems, and putting all focus on just happiness will not fix them. I just developed this system to make the current system less arbitrary and more dependant on good city management than no-brainer "just increase happiness" strategy.

Ok, that was a long text, you're free to rip it apart now.

 

[mystikx21]

It does have a bread and circuses feel to it that seems more concrete than the abstract and arbitrary system the game provides.

I'm not sure how this would be coded (and it's certainly not balanced yet as you have an input of happiness from luxuries or buildings or policies that is unaccounted for) but in general I'm not sure it would create much unhappiness to actually manage and that we would have to change sources of happiness to be very different or else we'd just have golden ages all the time if they are competing against it. (food and employment are almost never sources of issues).

Culture seems like it would be the largest source (for wide) as there are fewer sources of culture for most of the game (religion/great works/a few policies or possible policies). Though that could be based on the numbers you are using. 5 culture per citizen would require 100 for a size 20 city. I don't think that's likely in the BNW economy without other changes except in a tall empire. Even in CEP, with more culture sources available, with a wide empire it was rare to see many cities over 10-15 culture other than wonder and great work heavy ones.

The religion one presents an obvious policy choice (in piety or freedom) for a tolerance or free religion effect that halves or removes the unhappiness from other religions. The culture issue could be dealt with in a similar way.

Ideology sources probably don't require any significant changes right now. It's operating on greater of per person or per city effect right now as it is. This could maybe be strengthened, but the basic mechanic is essentially what you are describing.

 

[Wodhann]

I'm actually thinking maybe add one or more sources of discomfort, but I'm not sure yet what. Yes, the food and employment (especially employment) will rarely happen, but it's good to be there at least to provide that extra pressure. And yes, sources of happiness would have to be revised - as well as necessary points towards golden ages.

The amount of culture necessary per capita was just an example, by the way.

 

[Lord Tirian]

I think your idea has a lot of interesting bits to it, but it feels... too clunky overall, since it's essentially tracking individual citizens. It looks very micro-management heavy and while it's an interesting system, it feels like it's too much for something that attempts to be a patch, it's more of a big overhaul.

On the other hand, I think the "comfort level" idea is very neat and you could streamline it by applying it on a per-city basis, where every city has a "satisfaction rating" determining an unhappiness multiplier for all citizens in the city, something like this:

Satisfaction Level | Factor
Satisfied|x1
Discontent|x1.5
Miserable|x2
Protesting|x3
Oppressed|x5
Anarchy!|x10

Every city starts at "satisfied", moving down one rank for failing one of the following conditions:

• Cultivated: City's culture output must be X (scaling somehow with citizens) or higher
• Secure: City must have 1 defensive building per 5 citizens (including constabulary)
• Free: City must not be occupied or have a courthouse.
• Devout: One religion has at least 66% of the population as believers (certain SPs get rid of this).
• Connected: City is connected to trade network.
• Healthy: City is not starving.
• Peaceful: No plundered improvements adjacent to the city.
• Maintained: Total building maintenance cost is equal or less the city's gold output.

Of course, this is just throwing out ideas, but I think this captures the ideas of your system with less individual tracking and helps the wide vs. tall issue by basically making unhappiness weighted by city development (meaning new/small cities' unhappiness has more weight in global happiness).

Free, Healthy, Connected, Peaceful are all deliberately done in a way to usually trigger for invaded cities to drop them down to "Oppressed" to "Anarchy!" straight away.

 

[Gazebo]

Interesting concepts. I like them, genuinely, I'm just terrified by them.

Since this mod is intended as a balance patch, I'm reluctant to overhaul an entire game function, especially one as deeply rooted in the dll as happiness. Furthermore, how do we teach the AI to do this? The AI has a love for the unemployed citizens (for production) that is nigh-impossible to prevent- would that not cripple the AI's happiness? Furthermore, we would have to completely re-think how happiness works for every policy, building, trait and belief in order to make it all work well (not to mention that mods used in addition to this would have to reconsider their own sources of happiness).

Is it ambitious? Absolutely. Is it something I like? Yes. I just don't think it falls under the scope of 'balance.' Something simpler, a tweak here and there (different means of calculating luxury happiness, revised penalties/bonuses for being unhappy or happy, etc.) are much, much easier to diagnose, and the AI already knows how to use them.

I stress that latter bit, as teaching the AI new tricks is incredibly time-consuming. Of all of the changes I've made to the DLL thus far, AI-related changes have occupied 90% of my time. They're complex, and often have unintended side-effects. The AI is in a good place right now; I'd hate to have to completely re-write how the AI deals with happiness. I do not say this lightly, but since I'm the only one plodding around in the DLL regularly, I really cannot stress enough how complex and difficult it is to modify the AI. Yes, I know, I'm a stick in the mud.

I'm not shooting down the idea - far from it - I'm simply thinking that we should approach those ideas from an incremental standpoint. For the sake of progress, we should not be making more than one or two changes to each element of the game that we deem necessary per release. That means a few policy tweaks, a few happiness tweaks, a few trait tweaks, etc (initial v1 import from CEP excluded from this criteria). That will allow us to slowly hone in on optimal balance, rather than leaping from imbalanced end to another imbalanced end.
G

 

[mystikx21]

Tirian's take on it is probably more fleshed out. I'd throw in a garrison as part of the "defensive structure" (I don't think you should get happiness from the garrison in honor anyway, but as a general idea, sure). The scale of unhappiness is probably off somewhere, which means we'd have to run some numbers and see what it would look like. I am assuming this would not include an unhappiness per city feature, just that less developed cities would cost more unhappiness.

Most likely happiness buildings would act as a counter weight to one level of discomfort (so you could counter 3 of them) and then policy effects, luxuries, and other sources of happiness would add up as positive happiness for your empire.

I'd agree the AI's strange love of citizen specialists makes using that a problem. I (almost) never experience that, but it will. I would recommend against it.

I'd also agree that it's probably too ambitious for now. It's a major overhaul. If someone wants to try it, I'm for it. But it's probably outside of scope for a general patch.

 

[Gazebo]

Tirian's take on it is probably more fleshed out. I'd throw in a garrison as part of the "defensive structure" (I don't think you should get happiness from the garrison in honor anyway, but as a general idea, sure). The scale of unhappiness is probably off somewhere, which means we'd have to run some numbers and see what it would look like. I am assuming this would not include an unhappiness per city feature, just that less developed cities would cost more unhappiness.

Most likely happiness buildings would act as a counter weight to one level of discomfort (so you could counter 3 of them) and then policy effects, luxuries, and other sources of happiness would add up as positive happiness for your empire.

I'd agree the AI's strange love of citizen specialists makes using that a problem. I (almost) never experience that, but it will. I would recommend against it.

I'd also agree that it's probably too ambitious for now. It's a major overhaul. If someone wants to try it, I'm for it. But it's probably outside of scope for a general patch.

Like I said: I like it, but I'm terrified of the work it would require. I think, for now, we focus on tweaking the existing happiness system and integrating CEP.
G

 

[Lord Tirian]

Like I said: I like it, but I'm terrified of the work it would require. I think, for now, we focus on tweaking the existing happiness system and integrating CEP.
G

I think a full "city satisfaction" system is outside the scope of the patch. But the idea behind it (weighted citizen unhappiness encouraging development) is within - it's not a larger change than the introduction of local happiness and the influence benefits of the post-BNW patch.

At least the idea behind it could be something in the arsenal of possible ways to tweak the existing happiness system, even if you go with something as simple as a timed multiplier, "simulating" the establishment of a city. Or depending on city distance.

Needs more thought, though, to make it simple and straightforward.

The weird favouring of citizen specialists is probably something for the endless bucket list of AI issues in general.

 

[mystikx21]

If that's the case that it's too big to do scope wise, we have these options then so far...

1) Set up some method of luxuries adding happiness per citizen instead of a flat happiness bonus per luxury. This sounds like it could be done, but I'm not sure how to balance it yet. I haven't played with the math.
2) Reduce luxury happiness
3) Increase per city unhappiness
4) Possibly scale happiness buildings (2-3-4, with increasing upkeep as well, but probably decreased upfront cost).
5) Probably reduce the number of policy sources of happiness (CEP version contained way too many, default probably has enough but needs some re-arranging).

6) Scale penalties for unhappiness (but add in penalties for science or culture?)
7) Improve bonuses for golden ages.

 

[Gazebo]

I'd add to this that we should modify the penalties for unhappiness to be more broad, and incremental. For example, every point of unhappiness below zero could decrease culture by 1, science by 2%, gold by 2%, etc. This would make the zero-line of happiness and unhappiness less stark, and remove the goofy 'no more babies' nature of the current unhappiness mechanic. People shouldn't stop having babies because they're unhappy.
G

 

[mystikx21]

It's not that people stop having babies when disgruntled. They stop growing and selling as much "food" or the health care system collapses such that fewer people live long healthy lives or are born, etc. The game just puts this in as "no population growth, no expansion".

I'm in agreement that the system is not scaled well there, or that the penalties are too severe and arbitrary. We can replace them with other empire management penalties such that having sufficient happiness is still an important quality (rebellions should stay in too), and then provide some incentives to have extra through ease of expansion and growth and better bonuses from golden ages. Things like that.

 

[JFD]

I'd add to this that we should modify the penalties for unhappiness to be more broad, and incremental. For example, every point of unhappiness below zero could decrease culture by 1, science by 2%, gold by 2%, etc. This would make the zero-line of happiness and unhappiness less stark, and remove the goofy 'no more babies' nature of the current unhappiness mechanic. People shouldn't stop having babies because they're unhappy.
G

Should be the opposite

But I've always seen it as an increase in mortality counteracting birthrate.

EDIT: Basically what mystik says.

Possibly, unhappiness shouldn't affect science so much as the rest, because gold already affects science, so it seems redundant, as the penalty to science is already inadvertently achieved.

 

[Gazebo]

Should be the opposite

But I've always seen it as an increase in mortality counteracting birthrate.

Possibly, unhappiness shouldn't affect science so much as the rest, because gold already affects science, so it seems redundant, as the penalty to science is already inadvertently achieved.

True - but other elements, such as faith, gold, culture, etc. should be affected.
G

 

[mystikx21]

I'd put it as food/production/gold affected by 2%, faith and culture (and maybe tourism) by 1%. Science remains the same with the reasoning that you could go into default on gold with say a 10% drop in gold income pretty quickly, as JFD points out. The food reduction would achieve the same goal of slowing growth but without being as arbitrary.

 

[Lord Tirian]

The food reduction would achieve the same goal of slowing growth but without being as arbitrary.

I prefer a growth rate drop over a food production drop, the implication that people start to starve themselves out of discontent is strange (and annoying).

I wonder whether it would make sense to use the unhappiness as threshold to impose city-based penalties, i.e. at -X unhappiness, all cities with population X stop/lower production, growth, trade etc.

This, again, would give incentive to have taller, more developed cities, they are more resilient against the effects of unhappiness.

 

[mystikx21]

As above, the implication isn't that people starve themselves, it's that the mortality rate increases (more crime/mayhem, less access to health care, poverty, etc). It's mostly a question of how best to represent this as a problem for the empire to manage and recover from though rather than what it represents and implies.

 

[Wodhann]

As I said my idea was just scribbling on the white board and Tirian did a good job simplifying it.

And also I said before: The wide vs tall problem is the largest game design flaw in Civ 5, and as such, I feel it does deserve a big change.

Furthermore, how do we teach the AI to do this? The AI has a love for the unemployed citizens (for production) that is nigh-impossible to prevent- would that not cripple the AI's happiness?

Fine, just remove unemployment unhappiness then, it's not that important.

Furthermore, we would have to completely re-think how happiness works for every policy, building, trait and belief in order to make it all work well.

We are going to rethink every policy building trait and belief anyway.

(not to mention that mods used in addition to this would have to reconsider their own sources of happiness)

Mods which decide to be compatible with the balance path will have to rethink a lot of things anyway, since we're basically changing balance as a whole.

 

[ExpiredReign]

This may be stating the obvious but I'll go with it anyway.
Keep in mind that the terms used in the game and in this discussion: Happiness, culture, contentment etc. all refer to abstract mechanics that don't have to correlate with the actual 'real-world' terms.

e.g. Unhappiness, in game, can come from a newly captured city with a large population.
One method of reducing that unhappiness, ie. making people happy, is by slaughtering the population or even razing the city!
Are we seriously considering the genocide of a populace as a way of producing happiness? No. Its just one game mechanic that affects another game mechanic. Terminology notwithstanding, the mechanic works well enough, if though a bit clunky.

The reason I raise this is just to highlight the object of this exercise, which is to bring into check the game mechanics, not to find direct matches for real-world phenomena inside the game. Not that that is what is happening now, just that it could if we get too fancy with our suggestions.

Like I said, we probably know this already, just a refresher.

Sent from my GT-I9305T using Tapatalk

 

[Dunkah]

One of the things I try to do when I go wide is a delayed tactic.

Where I will build three or four cities to claim some space then build the basics in each. Wait for the appropriate Nation Wonders to pop up and build them. Once built the wide strategy runs amuk...

National Buildings should be turned off any time a new city is built, until such time as that new city builds the prerequisite building/s to allow it to exist again. Call it the proprietor of the Wonder going off to supervise construction or funds being diverted to the new Library construction.

Rather than shutting the building down entirely there could simply be a penalty so they get some of the benefits. Or perhaps a penealty per required building missing. So that the more cities you build/conquer the more of a penalty to the National Wonder.

Another suggestion is to limit the usefulness of the National Wonders based on the number of other buuldings. So if a Civ has 40 Libraries thier National Wonder wouldn't produce as much as a Civ with 5 Libraries.

Lastly I love the idea of population limits for teir 2 - 4 buildings and National Wonders. After all not every city in the Civ should have a University!

 

[Lord Tirian]

Not that that is what is happening now, just that it could if we get too fancy with our suggestions.

Though I do think one should keep a sensible way of explaining the abstraction in mind, if simply because it guides intuition. A new subsystem or tweak should at least not go contrary to expectation.

Regarding the food vs. growth: It's not just the implication that bothers me, it's also that it punishes wide more than tall: often, cities go into stagnation with then hit the food ceiling, often without many reserves. If you are then hit by unhappiness, you might lose a citizen. It takes a size 15 city a lot more turns to recover from that than a size 2 city, meaning a empire with large, topped out, well-developed cities is hit harder than one of a lot of tiny ones.

Rather than shutting the building down entirely there could simply be a penalty so they get some of the benefits. Or perhaps a penealty per required building missing. So that the more cities you build/conquer the more of a penalty to the National Wonder.

[...]

Lastly I love the idea of population limits for teir 2 - 4 buildings and National Wonders. After all not every city in the Civ should have a University!

Another idea along this line: for every missing building, have a gold penalty equal to the maintenance cost of the missing building. It imposes a "development penalty" - cities pay for the buildings without getting the benefit until they are actually built.

I'm starting to like the idea of population limits, I have to say. It also solves the issue that luxury resources are always better than food resources. If population becomes more important, so do settling spots with lots of food.