Happiness needs system

[rusbeh]

What is the general consensus on the current needs system? I think it's one of the weakest parts of vp as it takes a lot away from city specialization. Currently every city needs every yield because of needs so every city needs to build more or less the same buildings and the same improvements. City specialization is so fun in games like civ 4 and I wish vp had that.

I dont really find managing needs is a fun system. It feels tedious and unnecessary bloat to me. A simpler system that takes city size and number of cities would be better in my opinion. Thoughts?

 

[Nightmare Dusk]

I've mentioned it before in the discord. It would probably be a lot of work, and would require a rebalancing of the happiness system, but i think having cities connected to the city with unhappiness issues could help with the happiness issues. For example a city with no culture generation is right next to and connected to a city with culture over the amount needed to be happy. Some of that extra culture would count towards the culture generated by the city with no culture for the purpose of happiness (no increase in yields, and to represent travel between cities). And once railroads become a thing, the amount that is "transfered" would increase because of the increase ease of travel.

 

[hokath]

The premise is a little off.
You don't *have* to minimize unhappiness.
With luxuries, trade, policies, etc. you can run reasonable unhappiness in your cities and not face ill effects. Remember that there serious stuff only happens below 50%.
You lose some benefits, like the happiness growth %, and Golden Age Points, but in return you get to save hammers and do things like specialization!
Here, I take it to mean specifically something like working only scientist specialists. The reward here is great person point efficiency.

However, VP is (and has always) had very strong Capitals, which mean specialization of cities with the national wonders -- putting School of Philosophy in one, and Circus Maximus in another, etc -- usually isn't that appealing.
So there is a limit compared to something like Civ IV, that's true.
I don't think this is mainly the fault of the happiness though.
We could push it harder, for example, by having more specialist slots. This is an area of balance that has changed a lot over time (we used to have a *huge* number of specialist slots and they were very good compared to tiles).

 

[azum4roll]

The "very strong capitals" is often times the result of them having the best tiles in the region and being the holy city, assuming you don't go Tradition.

Specialization already exists for some criteria like military production, diplo unit production, and guilds.