We intend to discuss information in the game manual recently made available online and the balance of the civ5 game pertaining to mapsizes and happiness.
Discussions of things not relevant to this should be kept out of the thread, even if it relates to one element or the other (example: complaining about happiness' effect on war, or about mapsize's effect on the domination victory).
We will assume the following which are not explicitly stated anywhere like it's explicitly stated different mapsizes exist, but are reasonable conclusions. If there is very strong reason not to consider any of the following premises it should be well-argued.
The information in the game manual that is particularly relevant:
So here's the problem:
Static bonuses to happiness will likely cause the game to play far differently, to the point of imbalance, on different mapsizes.
If certain bonuses are not set to change based on mapsize, as there is currently no indication, happiness becomes harder to acquire and maintain on different mapsizes.
Examples of static bonuses are starting happiness (while dependence on difficulty is interesting and I don't like that, it doesn't matter here - the effect would be the same if we had starting happy = 7 for instance), happiness from Social Policies, Wonders which can only be built once no matter the size of the map, and so on.
Resources are more static than was implied earlier in the game development, as you only get happiness for one instance of a resource. So if you obtained all luxury resources, then no matter what more resources you had the amount of happiness wouldn't change.
Bonuses that are not static depend on things the player can build and control. Mostly in civ5 the only such factors are city buildings - we don't have happiness improvements or citizens or so on.
So what leads to a problem is that static bonuses don't change on mapsize. On a small map, with a handful of cities, the static bonuses make up a nice chunk of your total added onto the happiness you get from things per city. On a large map, the static bonuses are the same so you have to get more and more happiness per city to keep in balance.
Mathematical example: Say you have 50 happiness from resources, social policies, starting happiness. Then each city you have can on average make 6 happiness from buildings and so on.
Small map: 5 cities @ 15 pop equals, say, 80 unhappy. 50 + 5*6 = 80 happy so you're good
Large map: 9 cities @ 13 pop equals, say, 125 unhappy. 50 +9*6 = 104, which is WAY less than 125 so you are severely unhappy.
Below are what may be some common and easily defeated counterarguments that may be useful to consider:
1) The developers didn't intend for the game to be balanced on larger maps and I as a player don't care since I won't play them.
-That's fine, but that doesn't help fix anything, and a lot of people wouldn't want to admit the game could be imbalanced like that. If this is your view you might as well quote this as it sums up contribution to the thread from this argument.
2) You're not supposed to settle more cities, have more population, etc... on larger maps.
-This is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, this is WHY many players WANT to play larger maps, somewhat removing their purpose/fun for the player. Secondly, on larger maps you actually need even more cities just to obtain more distant resources and so on - it would be far easy to obtain 8 different resources for happiness on a smaller map than a large one which only compounds the happiness problem.
More severely, though, is the fact that you can't just expect the player to settle fewer cities and remain competitive with the single-player AI. The AI certainly will keep on settling, and will often have bonuses so that it's not a problem for them (difficulty bonuses at the very least). So if the game winds up where players can't effectively settle many more cities on larger maps but all that space is easy for AI to settle more, that's introducing a lot of imbalance.
There are several solutions but I'm not sure what, if any will be implemented. For instance I originally thought resources would all provide happiness for every instance (say +3 for every single luxury, even duplicates) but this isn't the case. If things were/changed back that way it would go a ways to mitigate the problem.
Naturally they could also try to scale static bonuses, make Piety for example 1 happy/city or make it be 2/4/6 or some bonus based on mapsize to account for things.
Discussions of things not relevant to this should be kept out of the thread, even if it relates to one element or the other (example: complaining about happiness' effect on war, or about mapsize's effect on the domination victory).
We will assume the following which are not explicitly stated anywhere like it's explicitly stated different mapsizes exist, but are reasonable conclusions. If there is very strong reason not to consider any of the following premises it should be well-argued.
Larger maps will allow for each civilization to have more cities on average than smaller maps.
Larger maps will have resources and geography more spread out than smaller maps (ie. resources of different types found in different areas)
Other factors of game balance which may or may not change based on mapsize, like maintenance of armies, but that don't relate at all to happiness don't matter much to this discussion
The information in the game manual that is particularly relevant:
Spoiler :
So here's the problem:
Static bonuses to happiness will likely cause the game to play far differently, to the point of imbalance, on different mapsizes.
If certain bonuses are not set to change based on mapsize, as there is currently no indication, happiness becomes harder to acquire and maintain on different mapsizes.
Examples of static bonuses are starting happiness (while dependence on difficulty is interesting and I don't like that, it doesn't matter here - the effect would be the same if we had starting happy = 7 for instance), happiness from Social Policies, Wonders which can only be built once no matter the size of the map, and so on.
Resources are more static than was implied earlier in the game development, as you only get happiness for one instance of a resource. So if you obtained all luxury resources, then no matter what more resources you had the amount of happiness wouldn't change.
Bonuses that are not static depend on things the player can build and control. Mostly in civ5 the only such factors are city buildings - we don't have happiness improvements or citizens or so on.
So what leads to a problem is that static bonuses don't change on mapsize. On a small map, with a handful of cities, the static bonuses make up a nice chunk of your total added onto the happiness you get from things per city. On a large map, the static bonuses are the same so you have to get more and more happiness per city to keep in balance.
Mathematical example: Say you have 50 happiness from resources, social policies, starting happiness. Then each city you have can on average make 6 happiness from buildings and so on.
Small map: 5 cities @ 15 pop equals, say, 80 unhappy. 50 + 5*6 = 80 happy so you're good
Large map: 9 cities @ 13 pop equals, say, 125 unhappy. 50 +9*6 = 104, which is WAY less than 125 so you are severely unhappy.
Below are what may be some common and easily defeated counterarguments that may be useful to consider:
1) The developers didn't intend for the game to be balanced on larger maps and I as a player don't care since I won't play them.
-That's fine, but that doesn't help fix anything, and a lot of people wouldn't want to admit the game could be imbalanced like that. If this is your view you might as well quote this as it sums up contribution to the thread from this argument.
2) You're not supposed to settle more cities, have more population, etc... on larger maps.
-This is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, this is WHY many players WANT to play larger maps, somewhat removing their purpose/fun for the player. Secondly, on larger maps you actually need even more cities just to obtain more distant resources and so on - it would be far easy to obtain 8 different resources for happiness on a smaller map than a large one which only compounds the happiness problem.
More severely, though, is the fact that you can't just expect the player to settle fewer cities and remain competitive with the single-player AI. The AI certainly will keep on settling, and will often have bonuses so that it's not a problem for them (difficulty bonuses at the very least). So if the game winds up where players can't effectively settle many more cities on larger maps but all that space is easy for AI to settle more, that's introducing a lot of imbalance.
There are several solutions but I'm not sure what, if any will be implemented. For instance I originally thought resources would all provide happiness for every instance (say +3 for every single luxury, even duplicates) but this isn't the case. If things were/changed back that way it would go a ways to mitigate the problem.
Naturally they could also try to scale static bonuses, make Piety for example 1 happy/city or make it be 2/4/6 or some bonus based on mapsize to account for things.
