Beyond Health

[GammaNova]

I felt that with only a handful of widely spaced health breakpoints, health just didn't have much incentive to manage carefully. So, I created: Beyond Health. Negative effects are more immediate and more severe. Positive effects are more gradual and never higher than the core effects.

It's on steam workshop HERE

From the description (and included civilopedia entry, in-game):


The following are the new unhealth levels:
1 - 5 : Shaky
6 - 10 : Troubled
11 - 15 : Distressed
16 - 20 : Dire
21 - 29 : Panicked
30+ : Epidemic

At -1 Health, 10% more intrigue is generated in your cities per unhealth, up to 100%. Culture and Science yields immediately drop by 10%. Your Culture, Science, and Production yields all cumulatively drop 1% for every level of unhealth.
At -5, your combat begins to be modified by -1% per unhealth point.
At -10, your city and outpost growth rates at a -5% every unhealth level, up to -100%
At -16 your Energy yield will begin dropping by 1% per unhealth
At -21 your food yield will begin dropping by 1% per unhealth.
If your health rate reaches -31, in addition to all of the above effects, you will suffer an additional -10% yeild to Culture, Science, Production, Energy, and Food. Plus an additional -10% to your combat effectiveness.

There are also now new health levels:
0 - 9 : Stable
10 - 19 : Improved
20 - 29 : Prosperous
30 - 39 : Flourishing
40 - 49 : Booming
50+ : Utopian

At Stable levels, Outpost growth speed gains 2% per Health point, to a maximum of 20%.
At Improved, 5% less intrigue is generated in your cities per health point, to a maximum of 50%.
When Prosperous, your Production yield gains 1% per health level, to a maximum of 10%
When Flourishing, your Culture and Technology yields gain +1% per health point, to a maximum of 10%
When Booming, your Cities growth rate increases by 2% per health level, to a maximum of 20%

To view the full description of the new health levels and effects while in game, just search the Civilopedia for Beyond Health.

 

[GammaNova]

I'm also already toying with making the negative effects even more severe. 2-5% hits per unhealthy instead of just 1. Perhaps modified by difficulty level, though, if I can work that out. A distinct possibility for an update later.

 

[Bandersnatching]

Have you played many games using these new health rules? While I agree that there should be greater penalties for negative health, these seem somewhat severe. I also think that at least part of the solution to balancing health is reconfiguring how it is we get it - modifying virtues so that the +health virtues for Prosperity and Industry are not as necessary as they are currently.

 

[Victus Mortuus]

You can do this but with the lack of luxuries it will just become a slog to play with these health mods.

 

[alpaca]

While I hate thresholds with a passion, since they always make you want to min-max as close to them as possible, it doesn't seem to me that the magnitude of the punishment is much too small. It could be a little more drastic, especially if you choose not to manage it at all, but it's also not so small that you would normally just ignore it.

The more relevant problem is that it's almost impossible to manage health if you don't go for prosperity, which has 3 global health sources. Without virtues, even if you build every health building you see, you can only build 2 cities without going unhealthy (at least on Apollo difficulty). It looks like they just took the happiness system from Civ5, but then forgot to add a replacement for luxuries. Right now, it seems as if you have three choices: go prosperity, completely ignore health, or play OCC.

 

[GammaNova]

First, thanks for the feedback folks, this helps solidify a few thoughts I was having. Definitely appreciate it

Have you played many games using these new health rules? While I agree that there should be greater penalties for negative health, these seem somewhat severe. I also think that at least part of the solution to balancing health is reconfiguring how it is we get it - modifying virtues so that the +health virtues for Prosperity and Industry are not as necessary as they are currently.

Indeed I haven't pulled off a full play-through from start to finish with this enabled, merely confirming the effects at various levels. And now that you mention it, I realize that my personal style of play always leans heavily toward the Prosperity virtues anyway. Bad design on my part, not thinking of other styles, I should know better.

Here's some options, discussion would be interesting:
1. Re-balance virtues in the other trees, making health more easily gain-able for all styles.
2. Alter some tile improvements to add more health: I was thinking some of the more "biological" flavored things, like plantations on tubers, or terrascapes, for example, might provide some health benefits.
3. The real ambitious plan: This all started because I eventually want to build something similar to SMAC's Social Engineering, with health being handled like Psych was: sacrifice some of your economy or science yield in order to gain more health.

 

[Lord Shadow]

It's alright if Prosperity's more biased towards health gain. After all, factions going down that tree should be rewarded with the possibility of building larger, wider empires.

The better health gains should likely come from elsewhere, for the most part. Certain tile improvements is a good idea, and modded/new buildings wouldn't be bad either.

But on the whole, it's such an overarching system the changes would primarily require lots of testing.

 

[Bandersnatching]

I'm glad my advice has been helpful.
I've gone down the Might tree in most of my games, and with that experience I feel like Public Security (+0.25 health/military unit, doesn't count explorers or tacjets) is slightly underwhelming. It helps in the late game if you build a lot of military units, but is basically just +1 health in the early game unless you build too many troops or one of your four dies to a bug. I also skipped it most of the time because it was more profitable to beeline the +Affinity from tech virtue and then go into Industry or Prosperity to nab their health benefits.
I think it is good to keep it at tier one (which means it shouldn't be too powerful) but the health bonus should be raised to +0.34 per military unit. At least experiment with it; if +1 health/3 soldiers is too powerful, then bring it back down. The virtue is weak, but not as weak as Pathfinders or Liberation Army seem to be.
I haven't played with knowledge as much, but the +1 health/6 pop in a city is very useful for colonies with large cities, and knowledge seems geared towards that anyways. I don't think it is too weak or too strong. The first knowledge virtue, however, is great to take in the mid-late game when you've dealt with your health issues and now only care about winning faster. In the early game it is both a small bonus and hard to actually keep while expanding, which you need to do to remain competitive. That the opener is so inconsistently useful has spurred me to avoid the tree several times.

 

[GammaNova]

Writing code is my day job, so you'd think I'd have gotten this figured out by now. I made a delightful blunder last night.

I had previously spot-tested updates for version 2 of the mod, and had just wrapped 2 hours of playing an Apollo-level game to make sure a certain strategy could still be viable health-wise, and I was feeling pretty good. I was ready to publish an update!

Then I had the bright idea, "You know, some screen shots of the health tool-tip at extreme unhealth levels would be awesome, I'll just put the debug updates back in really fast." These debug updates were a nice simple update to UNHEALTH_PER_CITY, setting it 50.

Got my screenshots, still feeling good.

Apparently I published before removing that update line. I could have sworn I had removed it, but the comments on Steam this morning give proof: Don't publish updates at midnight after you've just tweaked your own debug code.

Also: If debugging, just go edit your own silly files manually, don't go playing with ModBuddy just for one line.

Happily, I'm at work, so no updates again until tonight. Looks like I'm some sort of Civilization doofus.

 

[Baleur]

Direct link would be much appreciated!

 

[Strategist83]

The more relevant problem is that it's almost impossible to manage health if you don't go for prosperity, which has 3 global health sources. Without virtues, even if you build every health building you see, you can only build 2 cities without going unhealthy (at least on Apollo difficulty). It looks like they just took the happiness system from Civ5, but then forgot to add a replacement for luxuries. Right now, it seems as if you have three choices: go prosperity, completely ignore health, or play OCC.

This, exactly.

What you want your Health mod to do is address mainly this problem. It is because of what alpaca writes explains here that people are choosing to go into deep unhealth in the first place: It's simply too hard to stay healthy.

I don't believe the developers actually intended players to seek to go into unhealth at all - it's just that the game is so poorly put together and carelessly balanced that it is the result. The game actively tries to prevent growth by taking workers off food tiles when you're unhealthy, same as Civ V did, suggesting staying healthy was probably the original goal. To solve the problem you could try a simple fix:

- Reduce unhealth from number of cities from 4 to 3 (you can remove the Health bonus from Artists/Aristocrats at the same time to make up for this).
- Increase Health provided by the early buildings - I suggest either giving Clinic and Cytonursery +1 Health OR Cytonursery and Pharmalab +1 Health, depending on how fast you want the game to be.

You can then increase penalties for being unhealthy, as your mod already does. The result will be gameplay more similar to Civ V where staying healthy is the best course of action. There will then be a balance between building infrastructure (the health buildings) and expansion without the dire need for the late Prosperity virtues currently featured by the game.