Civics Improvements Suggestions

[Vokarya]

Here's another. Would it be at all possible for Federation to give a small decrease in unhappiness from empire size? I finished up a game where I was resettling various continents after wiping out the AI civs and since I usually raze non-Wonder cities to avoid revolutions, the new cities were absolutely drowning in unhappiness. I was getting 12-15 points of unhappiness from empire size on Standard size/Noble difficulty, and I was running Federation/President/Liberal/Free Market/Volunteer Army/Secular/Socialized/Protectionism with Charismatic on top of it. So when I was founding new cities with Pioneers, they were strangling themselves down to size 1-2 and had to either rush happiness buildings with gold or airlift in Freight units just to dig themselves out of their hole. Granted, I was in the endgame stage at this point and had conquered the rest of the world, so my experience might be pushing the limits.

If Federation is supposed to be the "big empire" government, I think a small offset of empire size unhappiness would be very useful. I don't think it would need to be more than 25%, and I would be happy to give up Federation's +1 general happiness. It would help the cities on the outskirts of the empire more than the well-developed core.

 

[Vokarya]

One last thing. When I designed the Absolutism tech, I wanted it to have a civic to represent "enlightened despotism". The only things that I know are to call it Autocracy (on the grounds that we aren't currently using the name anywhere, and I really don't want a two-word name if at all possible) and that it would have a relationship to the President civic similar to the relationship between Monarchy and Republic, but that's about all I know. Does this sound worth developing? We might need to rewrite President as well.

 

[Rezca]

I like the first idea, and an automatic 10 ~ 12 unhappiness in a newly founded city on that difficulty just seems absolutely absurd. The concept of "Unhappiness from Empire Size" coupled with Distance unhappiness seems very painful right there. Granted as you said you can just buy your way out of it if you can, but still.... That'd get expensive very fast, shouldn't even need to do that with every founded city.


What sort of pros/cons would this potential civic have?

 

[<Nexus>]

I have had a few other stray thoughts on Civics that I want to post just to get them out there and see what other people think.

Has there ever been any thought towards making Slavery a Society civic rather than an Economy civic? I am not sure why I thought this, but I suspect I was thinking something along the lines of Caste, but instead of multiple castes, you had a slave "caste" and an everybody-else "caste". I think it would be interesting, but I'm not sure what the ripple effects might be.

I think I am rather against it. Slavery is always a sort of Caste system. I cannot imagine to run Slavery with all kind of economic civics, like Slavery and Green, or Slavery and Post-Scarcity
Simply moving Slavery to an other category is not a very good idea IMO.

But I agree that Slavery is a very hard concept to adapt to the game...

An idea is to get rid of Slavery at all and make it part of other civics, like Caste. Maybe Feudal too. I dunno...

Here's another. Would it be at all possible for Federation to give a small decrease in unhappiness from empire size? I finished up a game where I was resettling various continents after wiping out the AI civs and since I usually raze non-Wonder cities to avoid revolutions, the new cities were absolutely drowning in unhappiness. I was getting 12-15 points of unhappiness from empire size on Standard size/Noble difficulty, and I was running Federation/President/Liberal/Free Market/Volunteer Army/Secular/Socialized/Protectionism with Charismatic on top of it. So when I was founding new cities with Pioneers, they were strangling themselves down to size 1-2 and had to either rush happiness buildings with gold or airlift in Freight units just to dig themselves out of their hole. Granted, I was in the endgame stage at this point and had conquered the rest of the world, so my experience might be pushing the limits.

If Federation is supposed to be the "big empire" government, I think a small offset of empire size unhappiness would be very useful. I don't think it would need to be more than 25%, and I would be happy to give up Federation's +1 general happiness. It would help the cities on the outskirts of the empire more than the well-developed core.

okay

One last thing. When I designed the Absolutism tech, I wanted it to have a civic to represent "enlightened despotism". The only things that I know are to call it Autocracy (on the grounds that we aren't currently using the name anywhere, and I really don't want a two-word name if at all possible) and that it would have a relationship to the President civic similar to the relationship between Monarchy and Republic, but that's about all I know. Does this sound worth developing? We might need to rewrite President as well.

Err... Do we really need any more dictatorship civics? I think no. Can you tell a historical example that was Autocracy and could not be modeled by other, already existing civics? I just don't see the need

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

I'm against slavery changes and I also don't think we need autocracy. I'm OK with slightly reducing unhappiness for empire size with federation. Depending on reduction, I'm also ok with removing that +1 happiness

 

[Arakhor]

One last thing. When I designed the Absolutism tech, I wanted it to have a civic to represent "enlightened despotism". The only things that I know are to call it Autocracy (on the grounds that we aren't currently using the name anywhere, and I really don't want a two-word name if at all possible) and that it would have a relationship to the President civic similar to the relationship between Monarchy and Republic, but that's about all I know. Does this sound worth developing? We might need to rewrite President as well.

How about Paternalism as a one-word name? I'm not sure how relevant it would be as a civic though.

 

[Vokarya]

I'm against slavery changes and I also don't think we need autocracy. I'm OK with slightly reducing unhappiness for empire size with federation. Depending on reduction, I'm also ok with removing that +1 happiness

OK. I can let the other ideas go. They were something of very odd speculations I had and wanted to see if anyone else agreed. I think if Federation gives -25% unhappiness from empire size, that will be enough. I checked the savegame you gave me for Reichstag testing and with 11 cities on Large, that was worth 2 points of unhappiness. When I had 64 cities on Standard (extreme case) I got 16 points of unhappiness. Cutting that down by 25% would be much better than 1 point of general happiness.

 

[Vokarya]

Here is something else I saw when I was looking at civics. Do we need civics to give +/- happiness or health from Wonders? I feel that these changes from regular buildings are fine (regular BTS does this with Barracks under Nationhood) because it encourages/discourages building particular buildings and every city is in a position to be affected. However, for these changes from National or World Wonders, only one city is affected out of your entire empire. If the bonus was applied civ-wide, that would make more sense, but that's not how the XML is laid out (otherwise, ordinary buildings would go exponential) and I'm not about to request a change just for this -- now I could be wrong, so correct me if I am. But as I see it, I think that these bonuses would only make a difference in very corner-case situations and that the civics would be a lot simpler with the bonuses simply cut.

 

[<Nexus>]

Here is something else I saw when I was looking at civics. Do we need civics to give +/- happiness or health from Wonders? I feel that these changes from regular buildings are fine (regular BTS does this with Barracks under Nationhood) because it encourages/discourages building particular buildings and every city is in a position to be affected. However, for these changes from National or World Wonders, only one city is affected out of your entire empire. If the bonus was applied civ-wide, that would make more sense, but that's not how the XML is laid out (otherwise, ordinary buildings would go exponential) and I'm not about to request a change just for this -- now I could be wrong, so correct me if I am. But as I see it, I think that these bonuses would only make a difference in very corner-case situations and that the civics would be a lot simpler with the bonuses simply cut.

Absolutely agree
Those bonuses on World Wonders are just confusing (I wonder how confusing it is for the AI )
For some National Wonders they may be acceptable in some cases (Foundling Hospital with State Church and Free Church; or max3 national wonders). Acceptable, but not absolutely necessary.

 

[nionios]

I've got the impression that as the game time goes the gap between happiness and unhappiness increases dramatically while the battle between and is surely undecided (especially since industrial era), assuming that someone possesses almost all resources which IMO is usual.
What about introducing an unhappiness penalty per X% espionage rate under certain "liberal sounding" civics? Someone could say that this is indirectly displayed by the negative % espionage under such civics but the truth is that the (un)happiness factor isn't affected.
Of course such a feature wouldn't reduce the gap enough but sounds reasonable and funny.(similar feature already exists for unhappy citizens due to taxation under certain civics)

 

[Vokarya]

I've got the impression that as the game time goes the gap between happiness and unhappiness increases dramatically while the battle between and is surely undecided (especially since industrial era), assuming that someone possesses almost all resources which IMO is usual.
What about introducing an unhappiness penalty per X% espionage rate under certain "liberal sounding" civics? Someone could say that this is indirectly displayed by the negative % espionage under such civics but the truth is that the (un)happiness factor isn't affected.
Of course such a feature wouldn't reduce the gap enough but sounds reasonable and funny.(similar feature already exists for unhappy citizens due to taxation under certain civics)

I would hate to introduce a new XML tag just for this; civic changes based on commerce rates are not currently supported by the XML. The tag for unhappiness from taxation is literally <iTaxRateUnhappiness> and you put in a number to decide the max unhappiness at 100% taxation. 4 is 1 unhappy/25%, 5 is 1 unhappy/20%, 10 would be 1 unhappy/10%.

 

[nionios]

I would hate to introduce a new XML tag just for this; civic changes based on commerce rates are not currently supported by the XML. The tag for unhappiness from taxation is literally <iTaxRateUnhappiness> and you put in a number to decide the max unhappiness at 100% taxation. 4 is 1 unhappy/25%, 5 is 1 unhappy/20%, 10 would be 1 unhappy/10%.

OK,I understand that there's no intention to introduce new features but what do you mean that "civic changes based on commerce are not currently supported by XML"?
Isn't there currently something similar for Republic or Democracy IIRC?

 

[Rezca]

OK,I understand that there's no intention to introduce new features but what do you mean that "civic changes based on commerce are not currently supported by XML"?
Isn't there currently something similar for Republic or Democracy IIRC?

As far as I know there isn't anything for Unhappiness for running a specific part of the slider - i.e. unhappiness for every 25% of Culture (for whatever reason)

There's Happiness for X% of Science being run on buildings, but not civics.


Replace culture/science with whatever slider you wish to be using.

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

There's some unhappiness with some civics if gold is above a certain percent, where by gold I mean 100%-science-culture-espionage percents

 

[Vokarya]

As far as I know there isn't anything for Unhappiness for running a specific part of the slider - i.e. unhappiness for every 25% of Culture (for whatever reason)

There's Happiness for X% of Science being run on buildings, but not civics.

Replace culture/science with whatever slider you wish to be using.

Yes, buildings have access to <CommerceHappinesses>, where you set a maximum happiness from a particular type of commerce, then multiply the max happiness by the % allocated to the given slider to get the total happiness bonus. For example, this is the happiness bonus from culture for Arena:

<CommerceHappinesses>
	<iCommerce>0</iCommerce>
	<iCommerce>0</iCommerce>
	<iCommerce>5</iCommerce>
</CommerceHappinesses>

where the third <iCommerce> is happiness from culture (1st is gold, 2nd is science, 3rd is culture, 4th is espionage) and with a base of 5, that gives 1 happiness per 20% on the culture slider.

Civics don't get <CommerceHappinesses>, only <iTaxRateUnhappiness> which works the same but explicitly only checks the gold % (everything left over after science/culture/espionage).

 

[nionios]

OK, maybe I got misunderstood because english isn't my mother language.
I've just talked about civics, not buildings.What I simply proposed is something like <iEspionageRateUnhappiness> for certain civics.

 

[Rezca]

OK, maybe I got misunderstood because english isn't my mother language.
I've just talked about civics, not buildings.What I simply proposed is something like <iEspionageRateUnhappiness> for certain civics.

I understood, just used buildings as a comparison. What you're asking about is a <iTaxRateUnhappiness> tag that currently only exists for buildings, but for civics.

 

[nionios]

I understood, just used buildings as a comparison. What you're asking about is a <iTaxRateUnhappiness> tag that currently only exists for buildings, but for civics.

But it already exists for civics as 45°38'N-13°47'E also said in post #354.
It's in CIV4CivicInfos.xml.

 

[Rezca]

But it already exists for civics as 45°38'N-13°47'E also said in post #354.
It's in CIV4CivicInfos.xml.

That's referring to just Gold - or the absence of Culture/Science/Espionage. So Running
75% - 0% - 0% would be a 25% gold/tax rate. That tag is looking for the gold/tax rate, not the commerce science/culture/espi rates.

 

[<Nexus>]

It was mentioned earlier to make Interrogation Building available with Single Party too.
I think Monument of the Dictator would make sense too. Even, MotD could be enabled by Personality cult; or get a bonus with it.

An other idea is about Slave Market. Would it make sense to give +1 for Slave market when running Caste?