Balance - The "Wide vs Tall" Problem

[Gazebo]

A philosophy that makes the pursuit of balance very tricky

Why? If the game's balance rests on a single thing existing (or not existing), we probably haven't achieved a very stable balance. Besides, if it is an issue of compatibility, it is the responsibility of the other mod to compensate for the absence of that which is removed. We can be modular and achieve balance, so long as people understand that balance is relative to the % use of the balance mod's features.
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[JFD]

Why? If the game's balance rests on a single thing existing (or not existing), we probably haven't achieved a very stable balance.

Tricky unless you declare the second clause of your statement

Besides, if it is an issue of compatibility, it is the responsibility of the other mod to compensate for the absence of that which is removed.

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If you're not even going to consider the effects that the patch will have upon other mods, then you embolden my disinterest in this side of the project, which further disestablishes the community side of it.

 

[Gazebo]

If you're not even going to consider the effects that the patch will have upon other mods, then you embolden my disinterest in this side of the project, which further dis-establishes the community side of it.

That's not what I said. I said if someone wants to remove something from the patch by disabling it, and they have no intention of having a suitable alternative (or means of dealing with the removal of said item), it isn't really possible for us to 'balance' that. We will do our best to balance the mod in an open, flexible way, but if you pull 75% of the mod out and then complain that it isn't balanced...that's not terribly realistic, is it?

If you are looking for a mod that is 100% democratic and 100% compatible with all mods and 100% balanced with or without 100% of its constituent parts...I'm afraid you are asking for an impossible reality.

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[JFD]

I meant incompatibility through the addition of features, not removal. Removal you can't really be expected to consider, as you say. Positive incompatibility.

Fortunately, I've never stated I was looking for a mod that was 100% Democratic (make it 0% or 100% Architectural Democracy, it doesn't make a difference as far as I am concerned) and I do not believe the pursuit of balance is a stable objective, so I'm not asking for 100% balance, patch whole or not. Too, I am not asking for 100% compatibility. Merely that:

[One should] be careful with adding new concepts...

You need only to consider the impact new concepts might have upon other mods to achieve my advice. I'm just saying that, if you add War Weariness, and have policies that deal with that, you should consider how that might affect a user using Reform and Rule. And consider whether War Weariness is actually necessary for this patch's style of balance; whether the incompatibility is worth the implementation. That is, of course, one responsibility, IMO, of this being called a community effort, though this may not actually align with your intent.

I only offer my opinion because I want success from this project and would hate to have it negatively impact upon my own modding or gaming; I'm not being vindictively oppositional.

 

[Gazebo]

I meant incompatibility through the addition of features, not removal. Removal you can't really be expected to consider, as you say. Positive incompatibility.

Fortunately, I've never stated I was looking for a mod that was 100% Democratic (make it 0% or 100% Architectural Democracy, it doesn't make a difference as far as I am concerned) and I do not believe the pursuit of balance is a stable objective, so I'm not asking for 100% balance, patch whole or not. Too, I am not asking for 100% compatibility. Merely that:



You need only to consider the impact new concepts might have upon other mods to achieve my advice. I'm just saying that, if you add War Weariness, and have policies that deal with that, you should consider how that might affect a user using Reform and Rule. And consider whether War Weariness is actually necessary for this patch's style of balance; whether the incompatibility is worth the implementation. That is, of course, one responsibility, IMO, of this being called a community effort, though this may not actually align with your intent.

I only offer my opinion because I want success from this project and would hate to have it negatively impact upon my own modding or gaming; I'm not being vindictively oppositional.

Agreed – any entirely new features added to the game will need to be thoroughly considered. Thankfully, nothing is set in stone (or really, even in bits/bytes) yet.
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[mystikx21]

I'm in agreement with JFD that neither corruption or war weariness is desirable.

Wars I find don't usually last that long and there's plenty of "war weariness" experienced by wars of conquest in the form of increasing happiness problems from captured cities that must be managed to continue the war and which persist even after the war may have ended, something that "war weariness" does not actually capture as the disruption of empires by assimilating new cultures/people.

Maybe there can be policies or traits which mitigate this effect as it already is in the game without introducing new effects.

Corruption was an unpleasant and disruptive mechanic that couldn't be overcome in meaningful ways (or if overcome, they basically required to only play one way). If we must have penalties, they should be penalties that we can work to mitigate over time (the science penalty for wide for example can be overcome by growing taller and gaining more science than a smaller empire, the culture penalty by taking liberty or spending your economic growth on cultural buildings, beliefs, or policies).

Unhappiness impacting social policy growth could be an interesting effect. This could be done by simply having the existing penalties impact cultural income, both suppressing border expansion (a likely prospect for a disgruntled people would be much less desire to expand the "ways of the force", as it were) and hampering social growth.

The main desirability of this is that the current unhappiness speed bump can be significant enough early in the game that it could be crippling socially to expand too rapidly, snapping up luxuries for later, etc.

I do not think it should matter to add in bonuses for happiness over 1. The incentive for having more happiness should be the usefulness of golden ages (which could be increased or expanded) and as a buffer for further growth, expansion, ideological disputes, or conflict. These seem adequate as it is. At least 2 of those 4 goals and needs will be present for almost any player at all times (we should always want to be growing or expanding/conquering).

I would consider reducing luxury happiness but not that drastically, cutting it from 4 to 3 should be enough, with commerce finisher adding +1 (I would not want to put this in exploration, but we could consider an effect of +1 there, and for commerce +1 for foreign sources, and patronage +1 from CS sources, I'm just more of a fan of leaving the +1 in commerce as its source of happiness and leaving exploration with the coastal happiness and making coasts better). We could also increase the per city unhappiness from 3 to 4.

I'm not sure a per era penalty is merited, but if it is, there should be ways to compensate for it (scaling up the happiness buildings so a stadium is better than a zoo is better than a colosseum would be one option)

 

[JFD]

In my Exploration Continued Expanded mod, I reduce happiness from resources that provided food down to 3. That could forcibly equalise the value of certain resources over others, if it was something considered necessary.

 

[Gazebo]

In my Exploration Continued Expanded mod, I reduce happiness from resources that provided food down to 3. That could forcibly equalise the value of certain resources over others, if it was something considered necessary.

I think there's a general agreement here that modifying happiness yields from luxury resources is a good 'first-step' in managing this issue. Variability in happiness yields based on other yields is definitely an interesting mechanic, though I do wonder how it would affect environmental determinism in the long-run (i.e. starting location). Probably not much, but worth considering. It might also be interesting to simply have the value of each resource's happiness calculated at randomly at the beginning of each game. Some resources are more valuable/happiness-generating than others IRL – why not also in Civ?

Buffing Golden Ages makes a lot sense, and would be an effective means of increasing the value of tall empires (particularly if the golden age threshold increased with every city founding, much like techs or policies.

I'd like to see the growth penalty removed (or drastically reduced) from unhappiness. I'd also like to see unhappiness penalties scale a little more prior to jumping to -10 (so that -1 happiness is less crippling than -9 happiness, etc.). This can be accomplished fairly easily, and would make the '0 happiness' threshold a point of variability, instead of the binary position it holds now.

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[mystikx21]

If the growth penalty scales upward the way the production (or culture or whatever) penalty scales then it should work to feel less arbitrary while still hitting with a severe penalty for effectively mismanaging your empire. At some point it should still cut off additional expansion or start to generate rebellions. These are ways to either penalize overrapid expansion or to provide some power to the ideology and culture influence.

One of the other things CEP used (at one point, it's not active now) was to let the GA counter keep accumulating during a golden age, so excess happiness remained at large. Even without an overall buff to golden ages, this would make it useful too.

Another option for happiness to be useful could be to scale the rationalism policy so it works like a belief that increases in power, say +2% science at 1 happy and up to 15% maybe (+1% each?). A golden age buff probably is sufficient here though.

 

[ExpiredReign]

I am not that in favour of adjusting the luxury bonuses.
In my opinion this is looking at the situation one step too late. By that I mean instead of adjusting the mechanism used to ADD happiness, put in place to combat the unhappiness, we should be looking at the mechanism that CAUSES the unhappiness. But I am willing to see how it might be used.

To me the problem I face in deciding to expand or not is the strange arbitrary way unhappiness is assigned to a city AND the population. CEP tried, and IMO failed, to address this by adjusting those values. I still think there could be more done with this avenue, though I am not sure what.
In my mind there shouldn't be a penalty to happiness for founding cities, rather the contrary, an immediate boost that begins to tail off if not kept in check by the game mechanics we already have.

e.g. My 20 population mega-city can function perfectly well IF I have all the necessary buildings/resources/policies/traits/beliefs/etc. in place. If I am not able to provide ALL those things I will need to plant a new city and shift population around. This means my 4 cities of population 5 can function at the same happiness level but might be less productive or scientific or culturally significant than my mega-city. At a later point any one of these small cities can easily become a mega-city if the prerequisites are in place.

I guess what this means is: I think the determining factor in 'fixing' the wide vs tall issue is population. That way luxuries are just that, 'luxuries', something not needed for empire growth but if you have them, then you get a boost. At the moment luxuries are necessities.

Spitballing further, in the later game when internal routes (Railroad/airports) and communication (radio/satellites) are established in your empire, a cluster of smaller cities can become almost as effective as mega-cities in their yield generation, almost! We don't want to have them the same as that would make the choice of 'wide vs tall' redundant.

As with most of my ideas, this is a rough outline. Feel free to rip shreds off it.

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[Gazebo]

Thinking about previous civilization games, luxuries offered benefits aside from raw happiness – there were more variables (like health) that affected a city's growth which do not exist in Civ 5. The key is finding a way to make luxuries compelling, without making them as essential as they are now. Benefits from buildings work well for most bonus resources (and others, such as the Mint, for luxuries) – such a dependency model would allow us to introduce different means of interacting/benefitting from luxuries without simply falling back on happiness.

In my mind there shouldn't be a penalty to happiness for founding cities, rather the contrary, an immediate boost that begins to tail off if not kept in check by the game mechanics we already have.

This could get complicated, but I do think that founding additional cities and/or unhappiness should have more effects than those we have now.
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[ExpiredReign]

What about making certain building classes available in cities that have >= a certain population?
That way if you want to have a buildingclass that does something great, you need the population to warrant it!

At the moment it is sort of implemented in the mechanic for arenas, colossae, theatres, etc. in that the effect of producing happiness kicks in only upon reaching that population level, but that is only for the counter-unhappiness effect. If we had it on buildings that aren't just 'happiness generators' then the reason to go 'tall' is obvious.
To counter that we could also make a buildingclass, or group of buildingclasses, that can only be built if the empire has >= a certain number of cities.

The two sets of buildingclasses would be similar in outputs, but different enough to make the choice a difficult one.

So you know that if you found x cities you can then begin building these types of buildings that grant you y bonuses but if you go tall another group of buildings gives you z bonuses, which may or may not match your goals at the time.
A bit of code would be needed to do a check on these cities so that if the 'wide' buildings exist the 'tall' ones won't be available once the city grows. Or they are lost and the 'tall' options become available.

Hmm... I'm just pausing over this before I submit it and it may be overly complex and not even hit the mark. Doubt washes over me. I think I may have just reinforced one of my pet hates about 'tall vs wide'. This all depends on defining a certain number as the difference between wide and tall. Ah well, it's just an idea.

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[mystikx21]

What about making certain building classes available in cities that have >= a certain population?

- This sounds too arbitrary. It also only gives incentive to grow to a certain point, just as the current colosseum>line does.

+% modifiers already provide advantages to taller cities. The tiering is also intended to be a tall-wide concern. It's possible we could thin out some building lines in that way.

What I think wodhann pointed out is that this is effectively the same in all cities later on, most cities just get bigger because the speed bump of happiness no longer plays a role. The comparison I think that's at issue isn't 4 size 5 cities to a size 20, it's 4 size 15 cities and one 25. Something like that.

Benefits from buildings work well for most bonus resources (and others, such as the Mint, for luxuries) – such a dependency model would allow us to introduce different means of interacting/benefitting from luxuries without simply falling back on happiness.

- there's a couple things at issue there.

1) at least in CEP there were issues getting pastures/plantations/etc balanced so that these bonus tiles felt like bonuses instead of following behind villages/farms and mines and specialists. You could add yields to them from techs in this way (but reduce the initial yields to be +1 and +2 improved), this would allow the luxury tiles to be important for technical reasons that they advance in power just like everything else.
2) More buildings could interact with a luxuries to add gold or culture or some economic value (CEP had lots of these interactions, anything from the generic +1 on the caravansary to England getting a steam mill that added +1production/1gold on luxuries as a factory replacement). The advantage of that approach is that you can improve some flimsy buildings (the caravansary being one) with some flavor effects that make them potentially useful in some cities.
1-2a) if that kind of approach is used, you'd have to increase gold/culture/ or whatever as costs somewhat though.
3) Policies or civ traits could involve luxuries in a non-happiness way on top of the commerce or patronage effects. An ideology could maybe add (increasing?) tourism per unique luxury?

As a further happiness related issue, there's a policy that adds culture from happiness. Something that adds tourism from happiness would be interesting.

 

[Wodhann]

This means my 4 cities of population 5 can function at the same happiness level but might be less productive or scientific or culturally significant than my mega-city.

There's a problem with this approach.

If we were to do this, we would need to make it so that only population produces unhappiness, to accomplish the "20 city = 4x 5 cities" style formula. And thus it entails that a civ with more cities would have access to more buildings, and more luxury resources, and in the end, would end up better than the guy with a single city with 20 population and can only build 1 of each happiness buildings and only has access to a couple luxury resources.

The idea of unhappiness given only by population does resolve a few problems though - the arbritary nature of settling new cities giving you a solid instant unhappiness, for one. Solid unhappiness for each city is a bad system, it punishes you heavily as you found a city (at a time when your city is barely relevant) but ceases to be a problem after you build your first happiness buildings and find new resources (when your city starts being relevant). It does not, at least by itself, resolve the large sprawling empire superiority problem though (in fact makes it worse).

I am cooking an idea in my mind and will post sometime soon.

 

[Anastase Alex]

Just my two cents on the matter:

In my view, unhappyness should come as soon as you pass a threshold in a city, not before. Historically, overpopulation has been one of the major reasons for unrest and for new colonization. Settling new cities was a way to remove part of the population and claim new resources at the same time. Therefore I believe that without proper infrastructure, larger cities should generate more unhappyness. Also, bigger cities should depend on smaller ones.

I consider that appart from happyness, the other cap that the empire would encounter would be its economy.

I would suggest that some buildings should have minimum population requirements, especially those that give a per citizen bonus.

Tier 1 have no population limitations (aprox. library)
Tier 2 require 8 population (aprox. university)
Tier 3 require 14 (aprox. public school)
Tier 4 require 20 (aprox. research lab)

To counter that, new cities should add to the happyness of the empire, but cost money. The quantity of money should be an exponential function based on technological era and number of cities. Your empire would cost you something like (technological era + difficulty level - X) ^ ((2*number of non-puppet cities you control + 3*number of resisting cities you control ) / number of connected luxury items). This has the added benefit to prevent technology slingshots.

So each city would give you N happyness, each citizen would remove M happyness, with N and M to be determined by difficulty level and balance. You would want to build new cities for the happyness, but they would become financially unsustainable.

And if you just Infinite City Sprawl, you would never be able to aford your empire, loosing beakers each turn, not to mention that without advanced buildings your empire would not be able to produce as fast the other civs could produce. It also makes keeping puppets more interesting.

In this system luxury resources would be interesting to get in order to reduce the penalty you get for the total cost of your empire. I guess most people would find this too radical a shift from the original game though. If not, I could take the time and calculate, games-theory-wise what the optimal values of costs would be to balance tall vs wide vs inbetween.

 

[mystikx21]

To explain why the min population requirement doesn't make sense: this takes away from us decisions and adds little or no value. What does it accomplish to level out balance? If we're dealing with a city that hasn't had much population, it won't be generating much science. We might prefer to build other things, like aqueducts or hospitals ahead of the science buildings. This already is available.

In this example, neither labs or universities have a per citizen bonus (directly), so there isn't a basis for reducing the ability to build them.

Suppose also you have a city that just has academies and farms worked but isn't at size 20. We would probably want a research lab there. The easier solution to that is to make them cost more (upkeep or production) than to hard cap it that you can only build them at time X or Y, which is arbitrary. If they cost more, then the investment requires that we build them when they will return well and obviously.

I did like the gold option in Civ4 much better as a way of slowing expansion compared to happiness, but I have had few issues generating gold in civ5 that it would slow down expansion that much. You'd just hammer out more trade posts and plantations and luxuries, trade routes, etc.

I'm a little confused as to the value of luxuries in this system. It sounds like more of them makes cities cost less? Do they also add happiness?

 

[Lord Tirian]

Settling new cities was a way to remove part of the population and claim new resources at the same time.

The problem with the wide vs. tall is making a both strategies interesting and viable, your approach just substitutes it by a single strategy, you cannot go truly wide, because it bankrupts you, but you cannot go truly tall, because your cities become too unhappy.

The problem is making each playstyle viable (but different). Wide inherently offers high production (because many cities means having lots of production outlets), tall needs to offer something of its own beyond "more efficiency" (i.e. the lower costs for making stuff).

One idea I had earlier was the exponentially increasing settler cost, since that encourages improving cities to keep up with the settler costs (though that does not discourage military wide strategies) - but might be at least worth a thought/try.

The second is staying true to CiV's preferred expression of tall - easier happiness and, as Gazebo outlined before, make positive happiness mean something. Back then, NiGHTS gave happiness for citizens, but larger unhappiness for cities, encouraging bigger cities. That'd be too big a change for a "balance patch" though, but it's an interesting way to think about it, especially with the second change it implemented: military units cost happiness.

Together with the increased settler cost, I think that might be a viable path to basically reduce the effectiveness of wide's high production and improve tall's ability to gain something from high happiness.

Now, how to incentivise tall to go happy without the need for luxury grabs...?

 

[Gazebo]

What if luxury happiness was based on population? I.e., you get 1 happiness per 1 luxury for every 10 citizens in your empire or something? Just a thought. It would make tall cities happier by virtue of granting more efficient happiness. If cities cost additional unhappiness, you would need bigger and bigger cities to offset that unhappiness.
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[ExpiredReign]

Yeah, I think that might work. It ties the two biggest determining factors together:
Luxuries + Population into managing your empire's happiness.

It also opens up some variation on the multipliers from policies/buildings/improvements/etc.
By that I mean we could change the 1 Happiness per 1 Luxury by either making it:

2 Happiness per 1 Luxury or 1 Happiness per 0.5 Luxury

Same net result but one favours a wide style and one favours a tall style.

I think something like this also takes away the arbitrary definition of 'wide vs tall'. It would just work regardless of the number of cities you had.

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[Gazebo]

Yeah, I think that might work. It ties the two biggest determining factors together:
Luxuries + Population into managing your empire's happiness.

It also opens up some variation on the multipliers from policies/buildings/improvements/etc.
By that I mean we could change the 1 Happiness per 1 Luxury by either making it:

2 Happiness per 1 Luxury or 1 Happiness per 0.5 Luxury

Same net result but one favours a wide style and one favours a tall style.

I think something like this also takes away the arbitrary definition of 'wide vs tall'. It would just work regardless of the number of cities you had.

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Exactly. It'd also create opportunity costs for expanding civs - do I trade with a civ to get their luxury good (thus getting a luxury per pop boost for free), or do I take it and decrease that luxury's value for my civ (due to the unhappiness boost for owning an additional city).
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