C2C - Civics Discussion Thread

[Thunderbrd]

Just to clarify, he said + 40 so I'd say he means he has 40 OVER whatever unhappiness. You're example of 40 happy and 30 unhappy would be thus expressed as +10 happy.

I've been having pretty much the same experience. I've never had an unhappy city all game as I go into the Classical era here.

Not that I mind too terribly. If you let crime get out of control it can still happen of course. War... that can do it as well so not having experienced a war yet I don't know how much of an impact that may have.

Since we've pretty much lost the ability to exchange research and gold into happiness via cultural spending on the slider there isn't much we can do about it if we start going unhappy so it's not bothering me that there's a bit more margin.

 

[Hydromancerx]

Just to clarify, he said + 40 so I'd say he means he has 40 OVER whatever unhappiness.

Yeah sorry. I talk backwards sometimes. I ment 40 or more

 

[JosEPh_II]

Just to clarify, he said + 40 so I'd say he means he has 40 OVER whatever unhappiness. You're example of 40 happy and 30 unhappy would be thus expressed as +10 happy.

I've been having pretty much the same experience. I've never had an unhappy city all game as I go into the Classical era here.

Not that I mind too terribly. If you let crime get out of control it can still happen of course. War... that can do it as well so not having experienced a war yet I don't know how much of an impact that may have.

Since we've pretty much lost the ability to exchange research and gold into happiness via cultural spending on the slider there isn't much we can do about it if we start going unhappy so it's not bothering me that there's a bit more margin.

So to condense this, my point is valid.

JosEPh

 

[LumenAngel]

I think many civis might change specialists more.

Example :
Mercenary can give +1 gold for Military Instructor, Great general and Great Hunter
Military Education + 1 education for Military Instructor, Great general and Great Hunter
Religious Education +1 education rom priest
Atheism +1 culture for scientist, -1 culture for priest
Monarchy and feodal +1 culture for noble
Technocracy +1 culture for scientist and engeneer, -1 culture for artist
Propagandia +1 espionnage for all specialist, -2 culture for artist, -1 science for scientists
...

 

[Thunderbrd]

I think your point is valid yes but I think theirs are too. How much the game asks you to struggle with happiness, gold, or whatever challenges we face within it are, from what I've learned from all the reading on this forum, very subjective to the player. And those tastes can change over time too.

Kinda like when I started playing C2C I wished there were no barbarians because I'd been sick of them in Vanilla - the challenge they represented seemed somehow unfairly pit against the player. But now I quite like them.

Personally? I feel that there's probably too much happiness since I'm never challenged by it. The point you're highlighting is the bigger issue I have here - taking that slider for happiness ability away means we'd better NOT be challenged by it because we've lost our tools to deal with it. I'd rather have the tools and the challenge.

But I also admit that all balance efforts tend to get frustrated by new things.

So... one question I'd have for you, Joe... have you ever had an unhappy city recently? I mean at all? It's basically a non-factor in the game so far as I've experienced it so I'm really honestly asking.

I've also noticed, from evaluating your playstyle, that doing all you can to stay on top of all the buildings you can in your city is not your highest priority - so if you've had unhappiness challenges it may be a matter of a simple difference in strategy.

Also... sometimes I feel you might be coming across as saying you'd rather there were no struggles in the game at all. I sometimes must wonder what conflicts you do enjoy in the mod because it does seem like you'd rather have none sometimes. I'm only bringing this up because I'm curious how you actually feel about it so I can put presumptions to rest. I mean, in this context, one thing we haven't really put forth yet is what we all feel really should be the right amount of 'difficulty' a civ would have with happiness.

And dynamics of that difficulty is also important to consider so sometimes cries of too much or not enough simply aren't saying enough. Just as valuable to propose when and why and how unhappiness should be coming into play as a challenge.

In Vanilla, it was pretty clear you couldn't grow a city past a certain point without hitting a wall of unhappiness you couldn't do much more about and at that point you were highly motivated to use slavery to knock down your population for potent effect then you could usually pretty quickly build it back to the happiness wall again. Techs would eventually release you from these limitations. Religions were the most immediate way to expand your happiness limits.

War would usually gradually cause all of your cities to descend into unhappiness and it would take a gradually increasing use of the culture slider to maintain the war without having so many unhappy folks you'd start having your cities starve off - representing another drain war would present.

Of course, in C2C right now the scenario is conversely:
Cities now satisfyingly grow much more slowly in the early era than they used to. Therefore each population is quite valuable and I rarely ever feel it would be worth anything to lose one. Then again, perhaps this is partly because I don't have any struggle with happiness at all. If you don't manage your crime levels you will potentially have some problems with happiness but even more of a problem economically. Gold income vs costs seems to be (and this is really unusual for me to say this) PERFECTLY balanced throughout the Prehistoric and Ancient eras at least. Always a struggle to stay on top of it but not impossible. Sometimes I would need to reduce the slider from research to keep myself from losing quite a bit of gold but if I've saved up properly I can usually make it through these dry 'loss spells' while I strive for a better civic or something else that will help my income tremendously. Civics are triggering at just the right times to be saviors to issues that would otherwise be a big problem.

Throughout all this though I wouldn't ever be wanting to lose pop and I certainly am not struggling with happiness because the push to keep up on gold is forcing me to address many of the same issues that keeps me on top of happiness problems. Of course happiness WOULD be a problem if I were happy to let gold also be a problem.

In essence this is what makes it very difficult to go to war in the early stages of the game. Armies are expensive. So you wouldn't be able to really do it and stay on top of your gold budget (not easily anyhow) and finding the time and production to build an army would be an epic challenge since it takes full focus to keep on top of the gold buildings. Gold buildings, I notice, always seem to be the heaviest builds!

Point being, perhaps happiness would be more of an issue in these earlier stages of the game IF war was more prevalent. Hard to say.

Religions have next to nothing to do with happiness at this stage and more to do with health and growth (and cultural expansion.) Neither gold nor happiness can be addressed with religions until well and after the prehistoric.

Happiness, up to this point, has played a very dim role. In the very early prehistoric, health struggles are just about everything. As the game proceeds, staying on top of your disease level means the difference between healthy and unhealthy cities and that's again... expensive - the units to control them are costly.

Perhaps if there were an earlier law enforcement unit available at Conduct and a little more unhappiness applied to crimes then we'd have a more challenging system where happiness is concerned.

But one thing this is doing is shifting more of the real challenge over to the gold budget and making the system punish even harder if you dare to allow gold to go a bit so you can afford to build units and go to war. The properties are making the game a little gold-centric in challenge focus.

Slavery makes things a bit more interesting though. You can get a lot of production, growth, even gold from them but they can enhance the unhappiness/unhealth challenges a lot so unhappiness and unhealth become the true limiter on how much slaving you can really get away with.

In short, the main difference between c2c and vanilla where happiness is concerned is that you have some more hard limits to overcome thanks to unhappiness in vanilla. By hard I mean you simply cannot. You must make the most of the fact the limit exists and figure out how to work with it and scratch to get them knocked down as fast as you can but that process is going to be very slow to earn.

Whereas in C2C, unhappiness is much more fluid and is like a flexible net. If you don't take a balanced approach to strategically maneuvering your civ through the ages you'll run up against the net and probably have numerous ways to address it that you simply then have to re-prioritize your build efforts towards. Those fixes, unlike in Vanilla with the slider, are never immediate though. C2C likes to punish the erroneous player with a hole that can be difficult to climb out of. If you let your focus on balanced management of the empire falter, you'll run afoul of unhappiness severely and it may end up feeling like there's nothing you can do about it because it can really get to be a runaway problem with the way crimes can compound their own issues. A downward spiral situation can easily be hit if you step off the balanced path.

I guess I like both game approaches. Very different really but both are validly interesting. Could C2C do to pull in it's 'net' a little tighter? Perhaps... I'm playing on Emperor level and I'm not terribly challenged by unhappiness so yeah I think so. A little.

 

[timschuett]

I see both sides of the argument. There are so many sources of so early in the game that the likelihood of manifesting itself as as issue is almost nil. But I also think this is appropriate for the eras we're talking about. I'd imagine at 45000 BC people weren't unhappy about the situations in which they lived. I imagine they were glad to have shelter from the elements and protection from predators.

The fact that leads to revolution is a big consideration here, IMHO. The idea that cavemen would overthrow the practically non-existant social structure and revolt because there wasn't a beaver pelt at their immediate disposal is silly. Even the most ancient town idiot would recognize that its better to live without turquoise beads than risk being eaten by a cave bear.

I see as a modern convention. People who have not experienced a life without social order (ie medieval and later) and have a grievance are more likely to be unhappy and revolt. In earlier eras, they will see any group of humans with a shelter as a very positive thing and find happiness in that, so the abundance of early happiness is perhaps not a bad thing.

Maybe have the from certain buildings or resources decrease as time goes on? I dont see anyone nowadays saying "Whoa we have FEATHERS! Awesome!"

Possibly another good balance is to have increase with era? at least to a point? in post modern and transhuman, we can envision a more utopian society than what we have now, so maybe decrease after a certain era or tech. Might help the team fill in some of the empty late techs...

 

[Yudishtira]

In Vanilla, it was pretty clear you couldn't grow a city past a certain point without hitting a wall of unhappiness you couldn't do much more about and at that point you were highly motivated to use slavery to knock down your population for potent effect then you could usually pretty quickly build it back to the happiness wall again. Techs would eventually release you from these limitations. Religions were the most immediate way to expand your happiness limits.

War would usually gradually cause all of your cities to descend into unhappiness and it would take a gradually increasing use of the culture slider to maintain the war without having so many unhappy folks you'd start having your cities starve off - representing another drain war would present.

I want that situation back.

Of course, in C2C right now the scenario is conversely:
Cities now satisfyingly grow much more slowly in the early era than they used to. Therefore each population is quite valuable and I rarely ever feel it would be worth anything to lose one. Then again, perhaps this is partly because I don't have any struggle with happiness at all.

Yeah the problem with whipping is mainly that it should be worth more than 30 hammers per pop when a building costs 1000 and your 50th pop point represents 100,000+ people. Ie. something else entirely and I don't think civics can fix it. Agree it's a serious problem though, and needs fixing if possible.

Sometimes I would need to reduce the slider from research to keep myself from losing quite a bit of gold but if I've saved up properly I can usually make it through these dry 'loss spells' while I strive for a better civic or something else that will help my income tremendously. Civics are triggering at just the right times to be saviors to issues that would otherwise be a big problem.

Well you're talking about gold now, but have you played before Rep Dem with the new 12-city happiness limits on Monarchy and Republic? If you run into this unhappiness wall, no civic comes to save you for a millennium or two! So can we fix this now and debate tweaks later?

Religions have next to nothing to do with happiness at this stage and more to do with health and growth (and cultural expansion.) Neither gold nor happiness can be addressed with religions until well and after the prehistoric.

On Deity I don't think you can get religion in the Prehistoric can you?

Perhaps if there were an earlier law enforcement unit available at Conduct and a little more unhappiness applied to crimes then we'd have a more challenging system where happiness is concerned.

Yes we really need this unit.

Maybe have the from certain buildings or resources decrease as time goes on? I dont see anyone nowadays saying "Whoa we have FEATHERS! Awesome!"

Excellent point!

 

[Thunderbrd]

I haven't been playing with city happiness limits so you should take all I'm saying here under that consideration.

Whipping should indeed have a lot more production per pop now... perhaps it might be interesting if we had some tags that would manipulate how much production a whipped pop would give... hmm. I may need to look into that.

 

[JosEPh_II]

I want that situation back.


<snip>


Well you're talking about gold now, but have you played before Rep Dem with the new 12-city happiness limits on Monarchy and Republic? If you run into this unhappiness wall, no civic comes to save you for a millennium or two! So can we fix this now and debate tweaks later?



<snip>!

What SVN version was this implemented? It was not shown in the SVN Thread.

JosEPh

 

[Nevets_]

I think it might be a good idea to examine what and actually represent in the game. I don't think they represent just what makes people happy and what makes them unhappy. Miserable people still go to work, while happy people will protest in the street. Those people obviously aren't happy about something in particular, but overall many of them probably think they have a decent life. I think the / scale should be how likely people are to protest their government's actions. That is what is happening by them not working a tile when they turn into an angry civilian: they are out in the street shouting "No blood for Iron!", refusing to pay their taxes, boycotting businesses, going on strike, or other acts of civil disobedience.

So if is reasons to not protest that means it is both general contentment, and the fear of the repercussions if they do. Conversely, that means is generated both by reasons to protest, and by the lack of fear of the repercussions. If you think that asking for an increase in the minimum wage might result in the secret police making you disappear, you'd be less likely to open your mouth.

So I would suggest that oppressive civics should actually increase , and liberal civics should decrease it. To balance them out, the oppressive civics should (in general) have bonuses to , and the liberal civics should (in general) have bonuses to //, and better bonuses overall. This would reflect the freedom of thought and speech in more liberal societies that leads to advances in research, art, and trade. If you are playing with REV on, oppressive civics should increase REV more than liberal ones. If you have the ability to petition your government for change you aren't as like to start stockpiling weapons and planning a coup.

To help keep it balanced for the early game and for newly founded cities, I think the / modifiers should be a per population one, ie +0.1 per population / +0.2 per population / etc. Since it would hit large cities harder than smaller ones, it would encourage the use of the immigrant unit to spread out your population. Also, the earliest anarchist civics you start with shouldn't have any / modifiers since their really isn't any kind of power structure to fear yet.

So if you have a big empire and are struggling to maintain control of it, implementing a Stalinist single-party government should help clamp down on dissent; and if you have a happy and wealthy populace you can turn have your monarch step back and let parliament and the prime minister run the show. This would give players who are experiencing temporary from war weariness / events / crime etc. the option to 'declare martial law' by switching their civics to oppressive ones.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I totally agree with you that 'what happiness IS' is really off from what it means in game terms. This is one of the foundational mistakes in CivIV if you're looking to make a realistic model out of the game but IMO it's perhaps impossible to really fix.

A few points to consider:
1) The player is given to think of happiness/unhappiness as exactly that based on everything that's been done since vanilla to now. Meaning our modifiers on all buildings and civics are a reflection of what makes a person happy or unhappy rather than what makes one want to resist the nation's and/or employer's authority.

2) The problem is that in CivIV the effect of unhappiness is that people stop working. You've made a valid point I've often thought myself going back to the root of the game. Unhappy people still work - and isn't work potentially a huge source of unhappiness in itself? Depends on the job I suppose. And isn't UNEMPLOYMENT an even BIGGER source of unhappiness??? Human beings cannot resolve their misery by stopping being contributing members of society. It's already the case that it's generally the need to survive that forces people to work at all, not their pleasure with life. Therefore it is illogical to make the cost of unhappiness the refusal of people to work.

3) However, what then IS the realistic 'price' a nation would pay for having its citizens be unhappy? The answer I think is where the Rev mechanism comes into play - and maybe doesn't answer it well the way Rev currently is structured. But it's basically the point - a nation that allows its people to be incredibly unhappy will have the potential for revolution, a term that can take many varying degrees of intensity. Oftentimes, those planning revolution are still working up until the day they decide to implement their plans to force change. So is unhappiness supposed to be a simplified way of representing revolutionary sentiment BEING carried out? If this is the case then Rev should not have bothered to create its own revolutionary index tracking but should've simply added more potential penalties to the existence of unchecked unhappiness existing in a city - including revolt of city and possibly empire.

4) In this case we'd have contradictory meanings to the addition and subtraction of happiness on buildings and civics and such. A police state would increase the sentiment to revolt but would decrease the likelihood of successful revolt no? Determining the difference between unhappiness and revolutionary sentiment would be difficult - in fact, it IS difficult now.

5) What WOULD determine whether citizens are productive or not are a blend of cultural features, loyalty to national ideals, economic structure and economic health. MUCH more difficult to model.

6) To gain greater adherence to a real world model, we would need to rewrite the whole concept of happiness/unhappiness/revolt and national stability to include such deep economic and societal factors into the equation. If we step down the path you suggest then what happiness IS takes a nearly overlapping definition to Rev index. It thus takes on a more realistic perspective of what causes people to work or not work but there's a LOT more involved in that than just the angle you suggest.

Most importantly, one value would need to represent the sentiment to resist society while another would need to represent the ability to resist society. You would not be able to successfully overlap both because one thing (like a building such as a Prison for example) may make the sentiment to revolt greater while reducing the ability to revolt at the same time. If they mean the same thing you'd have the game object's modifiers negate itself in your mind when going to assign the one 'blended' value that is intended to represent both at once. They are very different concepts. This is the chief danger in the approach you suggest - happiness would stop just being 'sentiment' and start also encompassing 'ability'.

7) Rev is entirely optional under the current game structure. Such a splitting of what happiness means would force a non-optional system of revolution to be built.

8) Our only alternative (for now) is to accept that happiness means just that and that there is an illogical conclusion as to how unhappy people behave in a nation. Perhaps eventually we can address this with a better model. Perhaps not within the confines of Civ at all.

I tend to think of happiness (in its current format) as being the sentiment of discontent blended with the economic circumstances that keep or deny people the ability to be employed. In a sense, it's not the happiness of 'the people' so much as it is the happiness of the 'leaders of the people' - the morale of those who would employ others. It's these movers and shakers of society that either employ folks with their resources or channel those resources into ways to enact change in the governmental policies. It's not a refusal of the people to work that's taking place it's the inability because those with wealth are not investing into the status quo but rather into doing all they can to change the status quo. These people at the top MAY choose to simply not invest right now - no confidence in the nation or the market perhaps. Or not enough opportunities such as is reflected by the happiness that's brought in by a given resource's presence in the city. They may easily revolt with the simple act of shutting down businesses under their umbrellas, scaling back their operations. This happens all the time and is not so much a sentiment that IS political revolution like Rev would be (an uprising of the people) but often just a reflection of confidence in the country itself.

These two concepts of revolution and unhappiness could be tracked separately and could interweave with some harmony and that's much more like the model we have now. Oppressive states, in this model, would NOT benefit the economies of their nations, would NOT stimulate growth in markets and many people would not be able to work despite how much they may wish to or be forced to.

Also too, consider that a worker in a city is representing one that benefits the state's efforts. Some of those 'refusing to work' may not be unemployed so much as diverted to efforts that don't assist the state in any way - under the table employment, slaves being devoted to doing nothing but serving masters that are directing them towards meaningless and unproductive tasks etc...

There's other ways to view the happiness model is all I'm getting at and I would worry that taking the approach you suggest, while the thought behind it is EXTREMELY valid, would be also very dangerous to manage and would represent a major balance shift as it would force the rethinking of all buildings and civics and such and would probably run up against a high degree of equal internal inconsistency.

THIS, imo, is a matter to consider for the 'next game' entirely.

 

[Nevets_]

I agree that redefining happiness / unhappiness as forces that suppress or encourage dissent is a major shift from the way things work currently, but I do believe that working from this perspective there could be limited changes made to the game that would improve both balance and realism; and it would not be necessary to take this line of thought all the way to it's conclusion and re-write the entire socioeconomic simulation.

From a purely game play perspective is a resource that is consumed by people or buildings (represented by ) in order to produce //etc. If there are more consumers than then the un-supplied people don't produce their //etc. Right now the game play problem is that when there is a surplus of it is wasted.

What I'm saying is that a quick fix for excess is to give the player something to spend it on rather than reduce the supply. So we make some civics generally 'better' than others but have them cost more . If you want to play a Monarchy with 70 cities no problem: you aren't going to be able to match the output of a Republic with 70 cities, but then again you don't have to work as hard making sure all your citizens are content. I think everyone would agree that historically there has been a trend toward freedom of expression and freedom of trade and that countries which provided these freedoms improved economically, as long as their populace didn't have too many grievances that were being held in check by the now-departed oppressive regime.

 

[Hydromancerx]

What SVN version was this implemented? It was not shown in the SVN Thread.

Some where between 7029 and 7035 on Feb 18, 2014.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13069498&postcount=7806

 

[JosEPh_II]

Some where between 7029 and 7035 on Feb 18, 2014.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13069498&postcount=7806

Wow that Update was Extremely vague!

JosEPh

 

[Yudishtira]

Wow that Update was Extremely vague!

JosEPh

7031 - #7807 in SVN thread

 

[JosEPh_II]

7031 - #7807 in SVN thread

I know.

As long as this change does not affect a game with the City Limits by Civics Option turned OFF I can live with it. But if it's been slipped in to override the turning of that Option Off then..... C2C is the poorer because of it.

JosEPh

 

[Thunderbrd]

It's just an xml adjustment to how potent those city limits are... I really doubt it would impact a game with the option off. I'm sure you'll notice if it does but again... seriously doubt it.

 

[gamer1978]

would be cool if monarchy would be split into different types like constitutional monarchy, or autocratic one. etc. also maybe add a few more different types of goverments. why was comunism taken out a while back? wish it could be a full goverment instead of just supporting civics. guess can't be change cause the dude that is in charge of civics has not been around for a while I guess. Just saying ideas...

 

[climat]

would be cool if monarchy would be split into different types like constitutional monarchy, or autocratic one. etc. also maybe add a few more different types of goverments. why was comunism taken out a while back? wish it could be a full goverment instead of just supporting civics. guess can't be change cause the dude that is in charge of civics has not been around for a while I guess. Just saying ideas...

I think there is no need to add more Government civics because it can be represented through combination of many civics.

For example:
Constitutional Monarchy : Monarchy(Government)+Separation of Powers(Power)
Communism : Republic(Government)+Single Party(Power)+Planned(Economy)+Proletariat/Marxist(Society)
(Well, Communistic countries are also democractic republics "in theory". )

Maybe there should be some synergy when you adopt certain combination but that's another story.

 

[gamer1978]

I think there is no need to add more Government civics because it can be represented through combination of many civics.

For example:
Constitutional Monarchy : Monarchy(Government)+Separation of Powers(Power)
Communism : Republic(Government)+Single Party(Power)+Planned(Economy)+Proletariat/Marxist(Society)
(Well, Communistic countries are also democractic republics "in theory". )

Maybe there should be some synergy when you adopt certain combination but that's another story.

What you mean by synergy? You mean like the civilization's name changeging to A communist or whatever as a result of those civics combination? Oh that mod is sorta not working either..dynamic civ name mod. But that would be cool.

In the same grain...you can put Goverment....federation...+ single party + planned+ proletariat...etc etc. Just rather have communism under Goverment types though meh...lol.