calabim happiness

[daladinn]

i consider myself a pretty fervent player of the calabim and have come to a conclusion that in the interest of flavor and playablity i am a bit stumped by. the calabim have a rather odd issue with happiness. the start on a downward cascade of happy pretty much once they gain either vampires or lothas and as a society have never learned how to prevent it. is it part of the storyline with after soo much abuse the common fodder rise up and revolt agains thier vampire masters or were the calabim just too lazy to learn better techniques. so far the only answers i have found were with the OO or with archmages. long run , archmages and liches completely solve the happy issue , but it takes a long while to do this. anyone got a good solution?

 

[Gamestation]

Are you having your vampires feasting as soon as a city gets a ? Bad idea, every turn that you have a vampire feast in a city, another appears and will stay for 10 turns. That means if a city is growing very fast (takes less than 10 turns to grow back) and then you feast again because a exists, there would be two that will exist and the city reaches its happy cap even faster. Hold yourself back on the temptation to feast as soon as a appears to avoid this. What I would do is every 10 turns, look around for cities that are unhappy and take care of those problems all at once and wait another 10 turns before feasting again. You can feast as many times as you want on that 1 turn and only 1 will appear in a city that your vampires feasted in. I think of this as bringing order to the way your vampires feed.

 

[daladinn]

not true mate, i have eaten cities from 35 on down and gotten many many unhappies. and toward midgame on many cities they grow 1 per turn until teh 30's. i cant remmeber off the top of my head, and have not dug into the numbers as much , but i think keal and friends changed the way it works at one point.

 

[Gamestation]

Really? That's a lot of people that you must be feasting on a turn. How would you get to 35 people in the first place with all the you would be getting?

 

[Good Sauce]

It's also important to note that feasting has diminishing returns. I'm not exactly sure how fast it goes down, but after about 4-5 times you'll only be getting 1 exp/pop point.

 

[Mithrus]

nope, you get something like pop-3 exps with each feast. so starting at 35 pop, you'd get 32+31+30+....etc I've played games where he ate cities down from 35 to 10 and got several HUNDRED exps in one turn. Granted, good thing it had the tower of complacency or archamge with unyielding order...but its possible.

 

[Gamestation]

Well if you could do that as the Calabim (get hundreds of exp in one turn), I don't think you should really be worrying about the happiness of your people. Just go out and conquer more resources. Bring some newbie vampires along so that when you take over a huge city, you could instantly get them to combat 5 or city raider 3. Then conquer some more. During peace time though, I still think it might be a good idea to drink in moderation or at least choose only certain cities to menace, not the whole empire.

After testing the unhappiness penalty from feasting a lot on 1 turn, I see you are correct daladinn about there being more than 1 from feasting too much on one turn. What's worse is that those will actually stick around longer, taking 10 turns to get rid of 1 . It takes about 3 feastings for an additional to appear so I guess at most you should feed twice from a single city on 1 turn. Then stop feasting for 10 turns for the to wear off. It would be slower exp gain than you would probably like but it's better than what happens to the other civs, no benefit from too many people.

 

[daladinn]

ya , my favorite tactic is to send a stack of 3 hidden nationality vamps with combat 5 , shock 2 , cover 2 , charge 2(?calvary), and city attack 3 into enemy territory. its very hard to kill a stack of 3 in 1 turn unless you have heros and/or nationals. not to mention making lothas as a hidden national is jsut outright sick.

the trick seems to be getting OO , them getting your archmages and liches. at least this way you can have 7 cities with no unhappies. realisticly though i have never really needed mroe then 2 or 3 for feeding.

things to remembeer with calabim...
1-- 60% startline on food at every growth level
2-- agriculture/aristocracy on grassland runs you 5 food 3 gold with one of the leaders , floodplains are 6 food 4 gold.

keal , cani make a suggestion though for future? can you make losha require fuedalism? it would help balance her.