Getting Started

[Ahriman]

Flavors. If you find that AI isn't building enough of this or that, then you increase the flavor.

So, basically forcing the AI to build happiness buildings everywhere?
That seems a bit dangerous, particularly given the system where happiness > citysize does nothing. I'd worry about making the AI invest too much then in happiness buildings it didn't need.
I can see you using this as a partial fix, but it would still be pretty blunt.

Basically, everytime you adopt a social policy you get 2 happiness.

Ahh. I think here we should keep happiness and culture separate.

Well one thing is i've added +2 to happiness flavor on conquest grand strategy

Thats a very good idea. Conquest is likely to be the main thing that causes AI unhappiness.

 

[Sneaks]

Personally I would really just like to do away with the idea of Global Happiness and move towards localized happiness plus city maintenance. Not only could the AI handle it about 50 times better, it would be much more effective at stopping ICS than just about everything else.

 

[Txurce]

Personally I would really just like to do away with the idea of Global Happiness and move towards localized happiness plus city maintenance. Not only could the AI handle it about 50 times better, it would be much more effective at stopping ICS than just about everything else.

Could that approach be modded with the tools available to you?

 

[Thalassicus]

Alpaca basically did it in PlayWithMe. I like the concept but I'm hesitant to do it in a balance mod... sort of on a "wishlist" status on my todo list.

 

[skodkim]

Personally I would really just like to do away with the idea of Global Happiness and move towards localized happiness plus city maintenance. Not only could the AI handle it about 50 times better, it would be much more effective at stopping ICS than just about everything else.

+1

 

[Ahriman]

Personally I would really just like to do away with the idea of Global Happiness and move towards localized happiness plus city maintenance. Not only could the AI handle it about 50 times better, it would be much more effective at stopping ICS than just about everything else.

I don't think this is a good idea for this mod.
Global happiness is I think a good concept, not a fundamentally broken one.
I no longer really read General Discussions forum because it is full of people constantly complaining about the global happiness mechanism and 1upt.

Those aren't going to change.

City-based happiness in previous Civs was terrible. It meant that happiness was utterly useless in every city unless you were exactly at the local happiness cap. Health was similarly messed up, in that the marginal benefit of excess health was zero.

Global happiness is a very nice system because:
a) It only needs to look for a constraint at an empire-wide level, rather than an individual level
b) It allows for smoother transitions, where excess happiness is beneficial.

Now, I'd be fine with doing things to tweak the system, like having graduated penalties for increasing levels of unhappiness, but otherwise I think the system is pretty good, and is pretty integral to the Civ5 design.

Alpaca still doesn't remove the mechanic, he just fudges it in a way that IMO is not very fun.

ICS has already been stopped with this mod. It is not a good strategy anymore, because the returns to buildings are so high.
I'm not convinced that AI would be better at a local happiness system, or at dealing with whatever global expansion mechanism you created to replace global happiness. And I'm certainly not convinced that abandoning global happiness would make the game more fun for the human player. Happiness in previous civs was stupid.

 

[Sneaks]

ICS has been stopped in certain manners with this mod in regards to player decision-making. A lot of the changes implemented in this mod make a whole lot of sense, and properly incentivize smart city placement. However, the AI is still left in the dark. To put it simply, it cannot handle global happiness. As Ahriman mentioned earlier, the AI has a real lack of capacity to plan ahead in regards to happiness. The very hacky and unfortunate approach the devs seemed to have taken to resolve this was to simply eliminate the global happiness mechanic from the AI through massive free bonuses. There are several huge problems with this approach. The most obvious is that the logical limiter on the AI for ICS is completely gone. The AI always has a ton of happiness, thus always thinks it is a good time to expand. Global happiness is also an economic restraint mechanism. If your population expands too quickly, you'll become unhappy and thus lose production across the board. On the flip side, if you maintain high happiness, you will receive many golden ages, and massive financial buffs. Because the AI is always very happy, it will by default slowly amass absurd amounts of gold. Global happiness also has another flaw in its current iteration - it does no affect science. You can have a grumpy population and still research as fast as the next guy.

2 key complaints about the global happiness system as it stands are first, that the AI operates under a set of rules that are completely different from the player. A challenging AI should indeed receive benefits, but it should not ignore a massive component of the game. The second complaint is the absurdity argument. Should I be able to get away with building no happiness buildings in half my cities because I have extra happiness in another? It seems the devs took some of this to heart when they saw strategies of spamming cities with colosseums to allows happiness transfer from city to city. In essence, we have received recognition that there should be a local happiness system, but it has been implemented in such a way that both hides it physically from the UI and still only stresses global happiness.

Now looking at the arguments for a city maintenance, one of the first is that the current system encourages spamming cities rather than building infrastructure. Adding a city to my empire will increase my gold and science instantly, as well as providing me with a free defender. Building infrastructure in an existing city has an immediate gold negative cost. I in no way desire to totally be done with building maintenance, but in the current system, the player is not properly rewarded for building up rather than wide. If each new city had an escalating gold cost associated with it (1 for my second city, up to 9 for my 10th, etc) each new city would operate at a loss until I built enough infrastructure to create a return on that initial investment. The best part about this system is that the AI gets it. The initial gold losses make the AI attempt to strengthen its economy, as well as use its already fairly good decision making as far as actual building infrastructure in its cities.

I should also clarify a point about global happiness. I do like the idea that if the aggregate happiness of my empire is low, I could see rebellion and my troops might be ineffective.

 

[Txurce]

A challenging AI should indeed receive benefits, but it should not ignore a massive component of the game.

This is the core concept of that half of your mod, and why I think that at this time it is the best place to start, building up the AI as needed from there.

 

[Thalassicus]

There's several reason the AI can deal with gold easier than happiness: volatility, severity, and aquisition.

Gold

• GPT is relatively stable (with the exception of golden ages).
• Negative gold slows research a bit (or disbands units if very severe, which auto-corrects the problem for the AI).
• Immediately solving negative GPT is easy, only requiring one of the below:
  • The Currency tech researched
    -or-
  • Units to disband
    -or-
  • Buildings to disband
    -or-
  • A player willing to trade gold for gpt or resources.

Happiness

• Happiness is highly volatile; acquiring a single city of ~10 can drop an empire from to state.
• state has crippling effects, including a severe production penalty that makes it difficult to get out of that state.
• Immediately solving negative happiness requires:
  • Surplus gold
    -and-
  • The AI must not already have happiness buildings in every city.
    -or-
  • The AI must not already have all available luxuries from trading partners.

I think those last two are a big issue. If the AI's already maxed out and captures or is gifted a single moderately-sized city, it's dead in the water for at least a dozen turns or so. If the acquired city cannot be razed, it must sacrifice another city it already owns, and while the city's being razed it's severely vulnerable with the unit strength penalty.

The player can plan ahead and prevent this, but due to happiness's high volatility and severe effects it'd be very difficult to anticipate all potential outcomes when coding an AI.

This does not necessarily mean maintenance is a better overall goal than happiness, however... I'm just thinking about why the current happiness system doesn't work for the current AI. I haven't really looked into things enough to say for sure if there's a way to fix the happiness or AI to deal with the issue. However, I doubt there's much we can do with current tools to change either one, so that's why several modders have taken the approach of shifting to a maintenance system we can implement and is very easy for the AI to handle.

 

[Txurce]

• Happiness is highly volatile; acquiring a single city of ~10 can drop an empire from to state.
• state has crippling effects, including a severe production penalty that makes it difficult to get out of that state.
• Immediately solving negative happiness requires:
  • Surplus gold
    -and-
  • The AI must not already have happiness buildings in every city.
    -or-
  • The AI must not already have all available luxuries from trading partners.

I think those last two are a big issue. If the AI's already maxed out and captures or is gifted a single moderately-sized city, it's dead in the water for at least a dozen turns or so. If the acquired city cannot be razed, it must sacrifice another city it already owns, and while the city's being razed it's severely vulnerable with the unit strength penalty.

It seems as if you are presenting an extreme case (a maxed-out, conquering AI) then making two leaps instead of only one. If the AI drops from +5 to -5, this doesn't drop the AI into an angry-unit penalty, does it? I thought that came at -10. More likely an AI now at -5 has to adjust, perhaps by razing, definitely by slowing down. That's what they did in the game I played with the AI Equalizer, which is more radical than WWGD v5. What's wrong with that? It would be even less problematic if you made razing less painful for the AI.

That the human player will handle it better is true in almost any example you can think of comparing the human to the AI. It's why we give the AI handicaps on the higher levels. But eliminating happiness as an issue for the AI means it's playing a different game than me, rather than the same one with handicaps. That doesn't seem to jibe with a "balance" approach to me.

 

[Seek]

Is it possible or desirable to make trade routes nonlinear - so, for instance, a size 10 city yielded twice as much as two size 5 cities? It would be a further ICS inhibitor and would help small empires keep up financially. From my understanding, ICS empires still have large capitals, so being based on capital population doesn't actually hurt the strat.

Perhaps with an additional negative modifier like what Alpaca did in PWM: routes start at -1 (or more) gold [EDIT: this already exists here, doh!] so new cities would remain a loss for a longer period because the break point is reached at higher pop sizes. This could potentially be a good way to implement a kind of city maintenance within the current framework - no need for a new mechanic.

Thoughts?

 

[orangecape]

The trick there is that you don't want to make the negative gold base number too big or people can avoid it by refusing to build roads. If say you started trade routes at -3 and had them return 1 gold/pop then for most cities you would need size ~6 before you broke even on road maintenance. Given that you also are investing worker turns you probably don't bother with a trade route until size ~8. It certainly nerfs small cities but it does it in a potentially undesirable way, by punishing people who connect up with roads.

I think the only really decent way to solve the issue if you want to do it on a city by city basis is the one alpaca used, which is to give the city a building it can't get rid of that has a substantial maintenance. It leaves the logic of trade routes intact but noticeably reduces the gold income of the empire. This does require lua to do instead of the trade route fix, which is easy with xml, but works much better imo.

In my mod I did some other things that tackled it very differently. I increased the unhappiness per city to 4 and added in more happiness in buildings and policies. Basically that was designed to throttle early expansion and prevent steamrolling but to allow highly developed civs in the late game to have enormous empires if they have sufficient infrastructure to support it. The goal was to encourage building up cities, prevent spamming of tiny junk cities but to allow limitless expansion *given sufficient investment*.

 

[Sneaks]

Thal makes very correct points even if his illustrations might be off to you. Think in these terms: when you decide to found a new city, you can easily calculate happiness potential. The same goes for conquering a new city. Your ability to plan ahead makes this a simple function. The ai lacks the ability to do the same at anywhere near a decent level as of now. It does not calculate happiness hits from diplomacy screen city trades. It also does not calculate conquest happiness well. In your ai equalizer example, the ai is reactive in getting out of terrible happiness where a human could avoid the situation.
To put it simply, happiness is a system requiring forethought and planning where as flat maintenance is both more forgiving and allows greater reactive play, which the ai as it stands is far better at.

 

[Txurce]

Thal makes very correct points even if his illustrations might be off to you. Think in these terms: when you decide to found a new city, you can easily calculate happiness potential. The same goes for conquering a new city. Your ability to plan ahead makes this a simple function. The ai lacks the ability to do the same at anywhere near a decent level as of now. It does not calculate happiness hits from diplomacy screen city trades. It also does not calculate conquest happiness well. In your ai equalizer example, the ai is reactive in getting out of terrible happiness where a human could avoid the situation.
To put it simply, happiness is a system requiring forethought and planning where as flat maintenance is both more forgiving and allows greater reactive play, which the ai as it stands is far better at.

I agree that a flat maintenance system is preferable to happiness. But since I don't think Thal is proposing the former for TBC, I was stressing my preference for WWGD v5 in principle, over the kludgy or bugged vanilla game approach, which TBC had yet to address. Does this make sense?

 

[Sneaks]

Yep now that I read it like that

 

[Txurce]

Yep now that I read it like that

I just added a slight qualifier to the last sentence, but I think it doesn't change the substance of my point.

 

[Gamerwiz]

Hey Thal, I have a question not totally related to this mod but I figured you could help me and it's better than starting a new thread on something not really deserving it. Plus this'll be quick.

I'm having some issues that I'm guessing are due to compatibility issues with multiple mods, things like building tooltips not displaying fully and TXT_MISSING errors or somesuch. Thing is, all the mods I'm using are from your 'Recommended Mods' list, which I took to assuming meant they were compatible (RED's mod, WWGD, InfoAddict, and CivWillard, besides your own Balance Combined), so what's going on?

Thanks, keep up the good work

 

[Sneaks]

Gamer, chances are you loaded WWGD after Thal's Balance Mods.

An easy fix is this:
Go into your MODS folder (My Games/Sid Meier's Civ 5/MODS)
Find WWGD and open it
Rename InfoToolTipInclude.lua to _InfoToolTipInclude.lua

Rerun your game and see if everything looks better.

 

[Lazy Knight]

Just wanted to drop by after having left Civ for now saying:
1. Congratulations on your forum
2. It's impressive how many Ideas of this mod made it into the patch notes. Great Job!

 

[Gamerwiz]

Gamer, chances are you loaded WWGD after Thal's Balance Mods.

An easy fix is this:
Go into your MODS folder (My Games/Sid Meier's Civ 5/MODS)
Find WWGD and open it
Rename InfoToolTipInclude.lua to _InfoToolTipInclude.lua

Rerun your game and see if everything looks better.

Been awhile, but I've been too busy playing to say that this worked, and thanks! The description for the Temple still isn't showing but the info is there, so it's hardly bothersome. I have a question though, since you actually understand this coding stuff, why is it that your mod messes with the tooltips? I don't want to carry this thread too off topic though, so if you'd rather, you could PM me instead(If these forums have that function, I honestly can't tell). Thanks.