tu_79
Deity
I was mistaken about puppets giving happiness, you were mistaken about unhappiness being so punishing to combat strength. Should I now say that you don't know a damn about what you are saying in the same tone you used with me? I dislike wide warmongering, true, but I've done it.I think you don't have any idea what you're talking about. Puppets produce no Happiness whatsoever. Neither garrison from Authority, nor any building works, whether the happiness is innate (Circus), or policy-given (Imperialism's Constabulary, Fealty's Castle). No Happiness is given from either until you annex. Puppet only takes happy faces, never gives any, and it's been that way for more than a year. They can build as many Happiness buildings as they can, that doesn't give you anything. I really wonder why you clearly don't play wide warmongering to the point you don't know the basics, and yet try to tell me - who tends to warmonger - what amount of cities is enough for a domination victory. 20 cities aren't nearly enough.
Why are you theorycrafting and trying to change happiness to punish a playstyle you know nothing about and clearly don't use? You don't like micromanaging many cities, fine, but I do. You don't see me calling for a nerf of tall empires because half they do is click next turn with no thought or action needed. I've played enough tall over the years to know this is the case. I sometimes try, but I typically leave 100-150 turns in because it's boring or I change my plans.
Also what do you mean by "avoid food tiles"? You cannot micromanage which tile is worked by a puppet (not even for Venice, unless it got changed in 2 years, in which case I'm wrong) unless you use some mod. You can take away a puppet's food-heavy tile, but you need an annexed city in 3 tile radius from the tile - you click it once in the annexed one, and the puppet won't work it. If said city doesn't exist. In your imagined situation, you can't even annex a good nearby city with good infrastructure and tiles to take that Crab tile off a puppet without dying of unhappiness because señor Cortez the 79th on civfanatics who doesn't warmonger clearly knows better than a warmongerer how many cities are needed.
Sure, you can destroy some infrastructure with workers to reduce the amount of Food by going over every single Farm with a worker and choosing another improvement so it instantly disappears. There's also monopoly luxuries, but those will be very hard to remove unless you've pillaged just enough of their tiles to not get a monopoly before conquering a city - and you did it on purpose. The problem besides it being super-micro intensive, annoying is it's incredibly counterintuitive and overcomplicated, excluding the farms I guess. I can get it, but will someone new? What about Temple of Artemis?
-100 Happiness is -100% CS, and that + the maxed penalty from warmongering means a Spearman can probably beat your Rifleman and you will deal no real damage to anything the opponent rolls out. I am no mathematician like some here, but that's a fair assumption. Someone can disprove it, but whatever.
I'm not imposing my opinion, just giving it, just how Bite and the rest are doing. Even more, I was also open to modify it later if it ends up being too strict.
About not feeding city states, if you avoid farms, place villages in plains better than grassland, chopp forests on hills, the city state won't be able to produce too much food and it will not grow too fast.