Have you seen the algorithm provided by FoxAhead? It is anything but simple. Numerous errors in descriptions provided with the game ensure me that the production of Civ2 was chaotic and the product is filled with bugs which we learned to love. E.g. power of howitzer is ridiculous because they were playing with HP and firepower (and I guess never properly tested the unit). Costs of bribing a city is laughable and just a fraction of the cost of bribing units garrisoned in that very city (even though we would need to de-stack those units). Courthouse in Communism does nothing because the gov probably had some corruption during testing. Etc., etc. Still, the game is great but if we can patch some issues (especially as obvious as the happiness quirk) why not?
I'm not sure why you chose Communism as opposed to Fundamentalism for your courthouse example. Communism can experience one or two arrows of corruption in the standard game if the city has enough trade, and can experience a lot by changing the communism palace distance. The police station is also a worthless building for most governments, too. All of the examples you give are of balance issues, not bugs. I could add the the massive caravan delivery bonus imbalance to the list. Testing for balance is much harder than looking at the happiness calculation chart and seeing if it does what you expect. I can believe that the Shakespeare's Theatre interaction with the angry citizens could have been missed (or ignored as a minor issue), and might therefore be considered a bug, but your argument for the black hats being "bugged" in general is that the game developers didn't shake out some balance issues, or that they made some changes that didn't make it into the documentation.
My primary argument that it works as intended is that
they built an extremely easy way to see the calculation. My secondary argument is that
they fixed the airbase bug for ToT, so why not this even more obvious one as well. You didn't address the second argument. As far as I can tell, your counter argument to 1 is that they didn't balance mechanics which took years of gameplay by talented people to realise they were completely busted, and that the code is complicated. I'm not sure why you think the happiness algorithm is complicated, or, indeed, why it being complicated would mean they would have left an obvious bug in. The "normalization" procedure is a few simple loops, that they could have changed if they wanted, and the rest of the algorithm is a bunch of if-else statements. If this was code that they could only validate by going through line by line, I could see how they could miss this, but they have a calculation window.
Really? You have discontent people who will strike and they are not convinced but the very most radical group jumps from angry to happy?
In the real world, we see discontent and angry people
after the government gives out (or allows people to get) luxuries, etc. So, naturally, the people who are still left out aren't likely to be easily bought off. However, there is another interpretation of the black hats. They are people of local power and influence. If they're brought into the empire's upper class, they use their power to help maintain the status quo. If they're not bought off by the empire, they turn their influence either to rebellion or to interdicting resources intended for the central government.
If you want a mechanic that makes no sense, it is the distance component of the caravan delivery bonus, which suggests things become more valuable as you transport them further away. This is exactly backwards. Goods are transported long distances if the good is more valuable in the distant location than at the source.
Yeah, for me it's debatable if it is a bug - I can see arguments it is just a balancing issue (the cost seems right at the very beginning when buying a single city requires a real effort). I just presented these "semi-bugs" as an illustration that the game is not as polished as my nostalgia and Prof. Garfield's posts seem to believe. This way I hope to reach consensus that the most obvious bugs should be considered as bugs.
I haven't been arguing that the game as a whole is polished. "Double unhappiness" was explicitly programmed in, with its own artwork. There is a happiness calculation window. As far as I can tell, your argument is that quality control was so lax that they didn't spend five minutes to check that the happiness window worked with that art, and performed the calculations correctly. I don't see how they could actually produce a functioning game if their quality control was that lax. Hence, I believe that 2 luxuries makes a happy citizen was either deliberate, or seen and accepted as a reasonable mechanic.
EDIT: I think this discussion has hijacked this thread a bit too much. Someone else can have the last word here. If my further participation is desired in this conversation, someone should start a new thread for this topic in the General Discussion forum, and I may choose to respond there.