Happiness and Growth

[Howard Mahler]

As has been discussed, due to the large number new resources added to HR there have been problems with too much health and happiness.
0.9.5 has made steps in the right direction, but there still seems to be room for improvement.

I have mentioned that adding a base unhappiness to Authoritarianism would help in my opinion.
I wish to put forward a new idea I had which I think would also help, although it may not be feasible.

As many of us recall, in earlier versions of Civilization in order to grow beyond a certain size, a city had to have a certain improvement, for example an Aqueduct or Sewer.
This might be a good addition to HR in any case.

If it can be added, then at the same time these buildings could lose their health bonus
(reducing overall health) and be given a happiness penalty.

For example, let us assume Aqueduct were needed for a city to grow to size 8.
Then it could be given for example -2 happiness.
Then the effective unhappiness from a size of 8 would be 10 rather than 8.
If for example in addition a Sewer were needed for a city to grow to size 16, it could have a -3 happiness penalty. Then the effective unhappiness from size 16 would be 16 + 2 + 3 = 21 rather than 16.

These are just illustrative examples.
Please do not comment on the particular numbers.
I suspect the idea would work best with a series of 4 or 5 such buildings.
First, is it possible?
If it is, then it would need lots of discussion and testing before it might be part of 0.9.7.

 

[Simon_Jester]

I don't think happiness should be too sharp a cap on city size. In-game, it's hard to obtain all the many happiness resources (since many of them are scarce even on large maps, or in the hands of people reluctant to trade them away). As a practical matter I haven't seen unreasonable levels of happiness.

 

[davidtylr]

Maybe gaining some happiness resource does nothing until you build improvements.

 

[Howard Mahler]

Opinions will differ based on playing style, difficulty level, map type, etc.

My experience with 0.9.5 is:
During the first 20% or so of the game, happiness is usually a major constraint on city size.
After that, happiness gradually but very significantly lessens in importance as a constraint.
Once Authoritarianism is available, happiness usually does not constrain city size.

I have attached a save from my current game.
An isolated start, so no trade yet with anyone.
I was not making a concerted effort to grow cities as big as possible.
By 1290, my three biggest cities are 20 or more in population.
They are constrained in size by food and useful tiles to work rather than happiness.

 

[Howard Mahler]

In BTS and prior versions of Civilization, one increase in city size results in one more unhappiness and one more unhealth.
This is just a special case of a more general idea.

One could either have a function or a table relating size to unhappiness and unhealth.
For example, one could have: unhappiness = 1.5 size.

If I were designing from scratch, I would have a table that related unhappiness to city size.
For example, it might have:
Size 1 = 1 unhappiness.
Size 2 = 2 unhappiness.
...
Size 7 = 7 unhappiness
Size 8 = 9 unhappiness
Size 9 = 10 unhappiness
Size 10 = 12 unhappiness
etc.

In the abstract, I prefer something that would increase somewhat more than linearly.

The particular numbers in the table (or form of the function) would need to be coordinated with the other aspects of the game.
In the case of HR, prior to the recent reductions in the ways to get happiness, it was clear that unhappiness would need to go up much more than 1 for 1.
(If the flexibility were available to change the relationship of size and unhappiness, then the recent reductions in the ways to get happiness would not have been needed.)

In version 0.9.5, I think it still would be preferable to have unhappiness go up more than 1 for 1.

Similar ideas apply to unhealthiness.

 

[Xyth]

It's possible to code population caps removable by buildings but, as always, getting the AI to understand it would be a difficult task.

Basically I could add a lot of 'weight' to such buildings and their techs but that effectively locks the AI into one tech strategy which is not at all desirable.

Alternatively I could possibly write some sort of script that forces the AI to build the appropriate building (if available) when a city hits the cap.

In either case we run the risk that the AI gets stuck and unable to grow its cities - or screws up its strategy at a crucial point. I'll do a bit of experimenting for the version after next but my initial suspicions are that it could cause worse problems than it fixes.

Maybe gaining some happiness resource does nothing until you build improvements.

That's what I tried for 0.9.4 but it screwed up AI diplomacy in a way that couldn't be fixed without DLL changes. It's a shame because it was a simple and elegant solution.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Could we implement bonus unhappiness for reaching certain city sizes?

I remember suggesting that idea once before, myself.

 

[Xyth]

In version 0.9.5, I think it still would be preferable to have unhappiness go up more than 1 for 1.

Similar ideas apply to unhealthiness.

Could we implement bonus unhappiness for reaching certain city sizes?

I remember suggesting that idea once before, myself.

I think it may be possible, there's just a few situations where I'm not quite sure how to ensure unhappiness/unhealthiness doesn't get added more than once. For example, if a city shrinks from famine and then grows again. And of course, we'll have to see how the AI copes with it. It seems to handle unhealthiness from improvements well enough so it's worth a shot.

+2 unhappiness/unhealthiness per population after size 10, +3 per population after size 20? The simpler the system the better.

I won't tackle this for 0.9.6 (which by the way is going to be called 1.16 - more on that later) since it's very nearly done, but I'll do some tests after it's out.

 

[Simon_Jester]

+2 above 10 and +3 above 20 sounds... pretty punitive; you need 30 happiness (which is pretty close to the practical cap) to get a size 20 city at all in the game, and moving beyond that you need 42 happiness to get to size 24.

That would pretty drastically rebalance the mod- cities would be smaller than in vanilla BTS for most of the game. Things like wonder construction, unit costs, and research costs would all need to change too, because it would be extremely difficult to boost city sizes up into the teens, which is an integral part of most mid-game strategies I can think of.

I was thinking of something more gentle, like 1.5 happiness per person past X, X is flexible and 10 might actually work. Then you don't run up against quite such a hard wall, and large cities are still possible.