Happiness is unbalanced

[JimT]

Pretty much this..

The worst part of CiV is what its done to the community...

It will settle down soon enough .... even if it is because one side of the argument goes back to Civ IV

 

[R0gue]

I will give some details of happiness mechanics (may have be covered)

any map size (10-15 cities) 10-15 unappiness for the amount of cities you have.
NONE ANNEXED

NO HAPPY RESOURCES ATM (by getting happy resources you can mimise this penalty.

Coliseum - + 4 Happyness
Theatre - + 4 Happyness
Circus - + 3 Happyness
3/9 natural Wonders Found + 3 (+9 if all is found) Happyness

Total Happiness - 14 (City size 14) ratio is 0 happiness for each city of size 14 or below

Now lets add some happy resources

Dye + 5 happiness
Cotton +5 happiness
Gems + 5 happiness

with just these 3 Luxury Resources you get a further +15 happiness - entire civ. (negates 7 city amount)

This is giving your a cities growth of 29 before they become unhappy.

Now why are ppl complaining Civ 5 is unbalanced with happiness.

even if you annex a city you get major unhappiness. By building the courthouse it reduces the happiness based on what building/resources you have.

So in my opinion you are just either build build build, even before you can sort out each cities happiness or you are annexing the cities and not building the courthouses.

I think it makes no difference which map size you play these are the figures and apply to all map sizes. If you do not have any happy resources. Trade or go to war and get what you need to balance you happiness.

 

[Tutkarz]

Because when i was playing on large map and had empire size like two other AIs, i had all resources, all map wonders, few policies i could take and few wonders that added happiness/removed unhappy i stuck with -30gpt and -3 happiness and only thing i could do is to spam small pop 1 cities with happiness buildings. Is this good? Or maybe i should somehow decrase my population/raze cities even if i couldnt afford city not so far from my capitol to make my country more stramlined.

To me game should be balanced so on any map, in the end of the game world should be filled with culture and not have empty spaces - like in my game half of the world is not populated.

Edit: and btw R0gue you say that i should have 10-15 cities on tiny and huge maps, right? This is the same for you?

So maybe ill explain something for those who dont get it still:
on small map your country should have like (random nubers) 3-4 big cities and net you 0 happiness with buildings
on huge map it should be more like 20 big cities with 0 happiness with buildings.
And difficulty level have nothing to do with that because map size is not for determining difficulty. Other options are for that.

I dont know what make me sad more: broken mechanics or people who defend them because they dont see effects they have ...

 

[Ravenal]

duh, its because dual map = 2 civs each with half the map.
Tiny is 4 civs, each at their optimal happiness with cities controlling 1/4 of the map ... etc.

I mean, duh...

 

[DalekDavros]

I've had +50 happiness on a Huge map at Immortal despite having conquered half the world, so it can be done (usually, it tends to peak around the Renaissance and drop to about +20 by the end of the game). First off, it's actually easier to get all of the luxuries on a larger map since there are more potential locations for them. Look at what city-states have and ally with anyone who has a resource you need. Often they'll also have a second copy of a resource that you already had, which means that you can sell your copy to an AI for 200-300 gold per 30 turns, which is often enough to cover the gift to the CS.

More importantly, however: at larger map sizes, more of your happiness has to come from SPs. It's easiest if you're playing culturally, but even if you're not you should be able to get to most of the key SPs: Theocracy, Cultural Diplomacy, and Planned Economy. Theocracy has the advantage of opening earliest, but the disadvantage that it's real benefits aren't felt until they late game. However, it has the potential to be the SP that keeps on giving, and getting it early will help make expansion less painful. Cultural Diplomacy is a good first target, as it's worth +30 or so happiness if you can get every resource from a CS (impossible on small maps, unlikely on large maps); in practice I find that I can get 15-20 happiness from it. Planned Economy in a large empire is usually worth at least 15-20 happiness too and usually comes at a point in time where it's really useful, but harder to get since it unlocks so late that non-culture games probably won't be able to get that far into the Order branch. Similarly, Police State looks like it'd be good, but I've never actually been able to try it out (since in order to be getting more policies that late in the game you pretty much need to have the Freedom branch active).

A few others are useful too, of course. Legalism has less oomph in a large empire, but is another good early choice. Meritocracy, Military Caste, and Humanism technically give bonuses, but I find that they are pretty meager compared to the other options available when they come up. Protectionism can be pretty nice, but is deep enough in the Commerce tree that I wouldn't suggest going for it solely because of the happy bonus.

 

[Creativus]

Hi All,

I like to play on huge maps with low sea level, to have more land conquer and fill with cities. I used to play all the previous civ games in the following way. I play the game with marathon speed, but happiness buildings take too much time to be completed and there are only a few of them. Happiness wonders also do not really give good benefits on huge maps (Hanging Garden 3 happiness on all maps).

To adjust the happiness a little bit I uploaded a small modification (it is in the mod browser). At the moment it is not really balanced, but it can be updated later.

I made the following changes:

1) Happiness for Luxories doubled (each will give 10) (probably unbalanced with the changes I made in the buildings and Social policies)
2) Buidling happiness changes:
-Temple will give 2 happiness
-Burial Tomb 4
-Mud Pyramid 2
-Satrap court 4
-Colosseum 6
-Theatre 6
-Stadium 6
-Monument 1
-Monastery 2
-Mint 2
-Garden 1
-Broadcast tower 3

3) Wonders will give 4x happiness.
-Hanging Garden 12
-Notre Dame 20
-Eiffel Tower 32

4) Social Policies
-Piety happiness increased to 10
-Military Caste happiness increased to 2 (unit in a city)
-Meritocracy happiness increased to 2 (city connected to capital)

I would like to make further changes, but I need more experience in modding. I welcome any suggestions to adjust the modification.

 

[Babri]

I would say that unhappiness by founding cities should be more dependant on their distance from the capital. Otherwise I've seen it many times that players try to build new cities to grab luxuries faraway which only gives them more advantage.

There seems to be an unbalance in happiness distribution.

Lets say you`re playing a duel map. You have 4 or 5 cities that cover half of the world and pretty much half of the luxuries are in your possession. Now unless you have king sized cities, you should be well off without colosseums or other buildings that you would normally need to increase your happiness. In fact, you probably have alot of excess happiness. The problem here is that it`s too easy to earn happiness.

Now picture this scenario. You are playing on a large map. Half of the world is covered with your cities. You should have about 3/4 of the luxury resources. Same circumstances, just different map size. Yet your unhappiness is off the scale, making you build happiness producing buildings and bankrupting yourself. The problem here is that it`s way too hard to earn happiness.

That doesn't make sense. It is like saying that game is unbalanced because when occupying half of the huge map, you need to micro more, defend more & have to play better than when you have to occupy the half of the world on small map.
BTW if you really want the happiness to be easier I would say that vassals should be reintroduced in an expansion pack, building courthouses should be cheaper & when you have a large empire you can use up a bit more of same type of luxury resource for your empire since one luxury for 100 city empire is unrealistic.

 

[Nutteria]

I can`t find even one pre modern times empire/country that grew happyer the larger it became.Same goes for citys as well - the bigger the city the more unhappy it is.

The problem here is not so much that the hapiness is imbalanced it has more to do that the non-happyness providing special tiles(read sheep cow etc etc) bring literally NOTHING to the table.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I would say that unhappiness by founding cities should be more dependant on their distance from the capital. Otherwise I've seen it many times that players try to build new cities to grab luxuries faraway which only gives them more advantage.

Trade route maintenance serves the same purpose, plus you need to defend these cities. No need in additional mechanic.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

I'd still prefer it if (a) Happiness had both a local (city-based) & global component to it & (b) that having multiple copies of the same resource was meaningful (up to a point-if you didn't cap it, then trade would have no purpose). I also wish that they would bring back foreign trade routes in some form or other-even if its some kind of gold bonus, from your existing trade routes, gained from connecting your capital to theirs. Which reminds me-do you need trade connections in order to trade resources in Civ5? I've played the game a few times over the last week or so, but haven't been able to tell. If not, then this is a *massive* oversight on their part!

Aussie.

 

[lissenber]

I like the idea of local and global happiness coexisting.

And no, you don`t need to be connected to other civs to trade a resource to them. In fact you can have no roads or harbors and you can still trade resources. It`s a shame things are like this. I hate to say these two words but they... dumbed down... this part of the game.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Look, I'm one of those who thinks that-in *general* the claims of the game being "dumbed down" are inaccurate-but in this particular instance I think the accusation holds true! Bring back the need for a physical connection between Capitals in order to trade luxuries & resources!!!!

Aussie.

 

[V. Soma]

Thinking about happiness factors, I propose (you mentioned some of them already):

Things should scale with map, especially with the size of area that is "natural" to be gained
That is:
Say, if you have duel map and 2 civs, then "natural" is 1/2 of the land
if you have standard, and 6 civs, it is 1/6 of the land,
you get it...

Now, for the land size the things that give happiness should be scaled,
and these are:

1.
the happiness that each resource give
(because number of resource types do not change with map types,
maybe adjusted with the chance of how many types are likely to appear in the "naturally gained" land size)


2.
The happiness penalty that come from number of cities
(I inderstand that this is already so)

3.
SPs, and all other things that are not changing with map size
should also be scaled

Buildings that give luxury should not be scaled,
as with the changing of land size you have the chance to make changed number of them.

 

[weeee333]

Some of you think thats it is ok for small map to have easy time for managing happiness and hard time for this on large maps. But for me its wrong since it forces players to employ wierd mechanics like razing cities or building pop 1 cities only to have happiness buildings. Or making almost impossible to cover my empty spaces in my country with culture borders - that is wierd and unrealistic (and NOT fun). Or even force me to build cities only to get next happiness resource - instead where i want more. So to me game is not balanced at all in regard to map sizes and it should be changed.

small map and half of the world covered should be same unhappy like big map (with more cities but the same % of world). If you dont agree then maybe you should think more about it.

What this guy said. I don't think I'll ever get used to the fact that under the new system, we're meant to have gaping holes in our empires if we need to:
-maintain positive happiness
-maintain positive GPT
-acquire most or all luxury resources (ok this is debatable. maybe I should get used to trading for it instead of warring for it? I don't like how this is designed, and it's not consistent with the rest of the game's design, but oh well.)

So there are a few options. I either have to make a whole bunch of crap cities to fill in the holes, and risk having city overlap near the mid/end-game, or go crazy with my culture boosting, or spend tons of money to buy useless land, or stop all open borders on my end so the AI doesn't come in and plop a city right in the middle of my empire. But I forgot to mention that there seems to be bugs with open borders and trade deals expiring every turn.

And when this is happening in all of my games in the modern era, it kills whatever suspension of belief i have for the game. Sure, in the age of automobiles, mass media, and even SPACE COLONIZATION, the Earth is not fully inhabited. Tell me, if we can't even fully populate our own planet (and let our people be happy enough while we do it), why should we go and colonize the stars.

Oh I know, upon space victory, if you click on "just... one... more... turn..." and keep playing, you should get -50 happiness for bringing all those citizens to a super far world and making new cities there.

All i can say is "I'm a builder, and this game is not meant for me".

 

[charon2112]

All i can say is "I'm a builder, and this game is not meant for me".

I'm a builder, and the game works very well for me.

 

[Iberian]

I'm a builder, and the game works very well for me.

In both Civ IV and CiV being a builder civ is not the most effective way to win. With the 1upt and super vetran units you can get that never die it makes CiV even more geared towards war.

In Civilization I would beeline democracy and build up my cities till armors and then conquer the world. Unless those blasted Mongols showed up. Civ II was also good for building. From Civ III on building wasn't as viable of a strategy.

 

[charon2112]

With the 1upt and super vetran units you can get that never die it makes CiV even more geared towards war.

I'm not sure I agree that 1UPT and the unit promotions (which are in Civ IV too), make V more of a war game. All of the options to win are viable, just more challenging than rushing cities with early units.