Happiness system civ 7

[dagriggstar]

My collection of semi-random thoughts on the subject

I guess I'll start with that I dislike that there are situations in civ 6 where because of the Ecstatic/Happy bonus, there are situations where it is actually bad to gain population. I don't think there ever should be a situation where it is bad to gain population. I actually would like to go back to more of a civ 2/3 situation where an individual citizen could be happy/content/angry. The happy bonus applies to the individual citizen rather than the entire city. I think that then naturally flows into weaving in a citizen migration mechanic - angry citizens migrate to cities with many happy citizens.

I think for the first 1/3 of the game, religion should be the source for like 95% of your empires happiness. As the game progresses past that 1/3 mark, the game gives you other options for happiness and religion fades from importance (while still being present and still giving you that option).

I've never found myself fighting for an extra luxury resource, although I do pick some expansion spots based on whether I will pick a new one up or not. I'd like to see what are luxuries now, turn into the primary drivers for generating gold, rather than giving you happiness.

 

[Saxo Grammaticus]

While I agree with the basic premise that I do not like to sacrifice amenity bonuses by gaining population, it seems entirely logical to acknowledge that population growth creates challenges for at a minimum cities and states. It could be interesting to recenter happiness around citizen units rather than cities, but it both could lead to a similar shift in population even as the first retains certain amenity bonuses. In my experience playing migration mods, it can be a relief to have population migrate elsewhere to relieve the happiness burden, but in practice, when the whole world is overpopulated, so to speak, what should be the resulting effect? Likewise, I am not sure I really want to structurally set aside so many citizens to represent a permanently discontented population in-game.

Religion-as-happiness sounds a bit strange to me, but you might be able to get away with religion-as-stability under certain circumstances. I agree that luxury resources do not make much sense in terms of amenities. The excess copies need to do more in terms of amenities or something economic, e.g. a monopoly can be very profitable, but why exploit 8 copies of gems when only four cities can consume them and no other players are interesting in trading for them?

On a side note, I have been toying around with the idea of what impact employment has in Civilization. Specifically in VI, generally cities have excess tiles and specialist slots, such that population can always work towards fully exploiting the surrounding area; however, there are cases with new cities and very large cities where some population exceeds the number of tiles and slots. Perhaps migration is the answer to leveling across cities. It also helps me appreciate the the population requirement for districts provides rough adjacent scaffolding for this.

 

[dagriggstar]

To me, on a city level the challenges of growing a city are represented by providing it with enough housing and food in that city.

Functionally, I think the happiness system therefore should be more of a limit on empire size rather than city size. Like it should be doing something gameplay wise that housing/food consumption doesn't. My issue with a happiness system that relies mostly on buildings and resources is that inherently the bigger you are the more advantage you have (More land = more resources and more cities = more buildings).
The only other ways of limiting empire size I can think of would be like stability/government related. Like you can only rule 3 cities effectively with an Autocratic government. But that to me feels like too much like a "hard" rule. Loyalty works when the game is 50/50 but in my games if you get into say a 65/35 situation you end up flipping a neighbour off the map, because loyalty snowballs. There was corruption in the early civ games but I don't think people find that a fun mechanic. There is war weariness but that doesn't matter if you don't go to war.

If you design the religious system to consistently generate 'pockets' geographically, then tie happiness to religious appeasement, to me the finished product is a system where you are encouraged to have a few cities but expansion outside your initial area is difficult (but not impossible). It should feel to the gamer as an organic way to balance tall vs wide. Give the gamer a choice between fewer cities but appease one religion and have those happy citizens produce high yields OR try play the middle road religiously and aim for many content citizens spread across a wider amount of cities.

Resources like furs should just generate gold. Can be as simple as gain +1/3/6/10/15/21 gold per turn for controlling 1/2/3/4/5/6 copies of Furs. Like the closer you get to the monopoly, the more gold you get per resource.

 

[Saxo Grammaticus]

It sounds a bit like you are advocating for a return to at least the Global Happiness component of Civ V, such that stability is optimized for 4 or so cities, but then stripping those cities of the opportunity to generate local happiness through buildings.

Personally, it makes sense that housing/food/water would factor into whether a city is content. After those needs are met, luxuries and possibly other amenities can factor into higher yields. This still favors wide-play but only if the basic factors are there.

As for religion, I am curious whether you have in mind something akin to identity. Would the problem be having cities that do not follow the state religion or citizens in those cities who follow other religions? It is not obvious to me how having one religion would inherently lead to higher yields, but I do see the potential for certain policies or beliefs to mitigate religious tension. Framing this balance as choices in beliefs makes more sense to me: one could choose to affirm certain locations as holy, and in doing so limit the accessibility of the religion outside a region; or one could choose religious schools that open the faith up to anyone in the state.

I do not mind luxury resources providing amenities, but JungleTreetops put it well in their Citizens thread that amenities ought to be broken up, such that a larger population may demand a larger supply of certain luxuries, for example. One of the problems with monopolies is that there is often a dip approaching control, in that the bonus of monopolistic behavior is determining supply.

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

1. What names should be taken? Happiness or Amenity?
2. Happiness by any means should be specific to a city and not pooled nationwide as in Civ5

 

[dagriggstar]

I'm sort of unsure as to whether we are at a topic splitting point, but to me the overall flow of the game should be something like
First third - you have 3 ish cities
Second third - Expansion phase
Final third - Winning the game
So most of my suggestions are going to be about how to get a game to behave in that way.

The way I see the happiness - religion interaction would be something like
Happy citizens work 50% better than a content citizen
Angry citizens work 50% worse than a content citizen
Citizens can become happy from
1) Following a religion with a positive opinion of you
2) Happiness buildings/wonders
3) Ideology stuff
Citizens can become unhappy from
1) Following a religion with a negative opinion of you
2) War Weariness
3) Ideology stuff

Religious opinion works basically how civ 5 city state opinion works, except that generally completing a quest for one religion means losing opinion with all other religions. This means that you will have this choice where do you chose to make just one religion extra happy to maximise the happiness bonus OR try to balance religious opinion with all religions and avoid having angry citizens.

When you get to the mid-game you start unlocking other sources of happiness. So the religious opinion aspect becomes less and less important as you can keep citizens happy through other means. These other sources of happiness also allows you to go through a second expansion phase (so colonialism can happen basically).

I don't really like identity as a concept, I think it's too complicated for my mind, but then maybe linking using happiness in this way is too.

Right now, if a happiness system isn't acting as a limit on expansion, especially early game, then what is it's in game function ? Civ has always had problems with snowballing and happiness is one of the few potential systems that could act in an anti-snowball way. Like you could remove the entire happiness system from civ 6 and it would probably have very minimal impact on gameplay.
Perhaps the question then would be should there even be a happiness system at that point.......

 

[rocksinmypath]

I haven't played Civ 2 or 3, but assigning happiness to individual citizens sounds like a lot of micromanagement. Does this mean I have to choose which citizen will work which tile and such based on their happiness and the yields I want to prioritize?

The problem of population growth being detrimental because of losing happiness bonus can be resolved by making the bonuses scale linearly with excess amenities. For example, +1 amenity = +4% yield, +2 amenity = +8% yield, etc. With linear scaling, the only time you don't want to grow your population is if the new citizen will be working a relatively bad tile or no tile at all, which is totally reasonable. I don't really understand the logic of just having two levels of happiness. The perverse incentive this system creates is so easy to see, just like how prohibiting district placements on strategic resources incentivizes players to dance around certain techs, which I don't imagine is how the game is intended to be played.

I think the big problem with amenities right now is that they're either too easy or too difficult to get right depending on where you are in a game. If you can purchase luxuries from AI, and they'll usually give you these dirt cheap, it's easy to maintain good amenities early game. Then, your empire becomes large enough to need more amenities, but there aren't a lot of alternative sources of amenities until later in the game when you unlock high-tier entertainment complex and water park buildings, which provide regional amenities. Nobody wants to build an entertainment complex and an arena in every city early game just to keep up with amenities.

I mentioned this in a different thread, but a solution to this is to make more districts and buildings provide amenities. This would be a more accurate reflection of why many people are attracted to big cities. Big cities can provide citizens access to good education, ease of shopping, and enriching cultural experiences. All of these should count as amenities. Gameplay-wise, this will make amenities scale more smoothly with population growth, as long as you're adding the relevant buildings at the right time. Also, I think amenities provided by all buildings (as well as other effects they provide) should be regional, and the radius of effect should increase as your empire advances technologically and acquires better infrastructure, allowing people to move around more easily. This will make it so that a lot of your amenities will come from planning out and developing a city that is "qualified" to make its citizens happy.

Afterthought: Another potential source of late game amenities is manufactured goods. Civ 6 kind of touches on this with jeans and cosmetics available through great merchants, but I think there should be a way to assign factories to produce certain types of goods that become available as you move through the tech tree.

 

[jsciv69]

Happiness usually goes hand in hand with access to cultural and entertainment districts. Mobility is the keyword. The better road systems the better connections to these districts. Public transit becomes very essential. The more movement within a Civilization also will produce a good amount of happiness. Less oppressive governments. Less insistence on a central religious system, these will produce a lot of extra happiness.

 

[jsciv69]

religion should be the source for like 95% of your empires happiness

Religion is usually the opposite of happiness. Religions by design were invented to control peoples. Especially those religions with draconian laws and regulations. These days religion is equal to some of our favorite 4-letter words. Studies show. The more secular a society, the more happy that society will be.

 

[Saxo Grammaticus]

I admit, I am not sure of the rationale between tying religion exclusively to happiness or control. For Civilization, I would look more to the potentials of religious expression and organization than retroactively applying present conclusions, secular or otherwise.

As an example, I reflect on Graeber and Wengrow's discussion of the Athenian cults of Adonis and Demeter in Chapter 6 of The Dawn of Everything. While the Athenian state supported a harvest festival in autumn centered on Demeter and "serious farming," Athenian women from a variety of backgrounds would often engage in "festive speed farming" in the heat of summer building up to an ecstatic memorial of young Adonis' death. I do not think it has been all that rare for religion to offer the means for both human expression and social organization.

As for the question of phases of expansion, I definitely see three cities being the realm of a pantheon, one that likely covers a similar set of terrain, resources, or experiences. The road from three to ten cities could continue through the development of organized religion, rituals, or beliefs, with a gradual transition to luxuries in the early modern representing both medieval heights of religion and the dominance of the global market. The mid-game would be complicated by potentially diverse populations with differing religious affiliations. In the late game, I would be happy for ideological pressure in the manner of Brave New World to come into play.

In general, happiness, contentment, and stability seem linked across this thread. A particular religion may have an ecstatic component or a pacifying effect, whereas even if salt brings little happiness to the citizenry, its absence could have a destabilizing effect.

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

Religion is usually the opposite of happiness. Religions by design were invented to control peoples. Especially those religions with draconian laws and regulations. These days religion is equal to some of our favorite 4-letter words. Studies show. The more secular a society, the more happy that society will be.

This model of 'happiness' needs some restructure by studying 4X games made for the 'world in transitions' like Empire Total War which emulates thew world in changing. Before the Enlightenment movemnts ever exists in the world. Religion did indeed 'grants happiness' and not just in the ways of festivals but also by other means like Charity systems.
It has to be more 'dynamic', relating to how one society progresses.

 

[DeckerdJames]

Maybe they could do away with happiness. Instead, they could focus on city capacity being affected by infrastructure and the availability of resources in the city. If the city has residents, it is implied they are happy enough to be there. Population can go up or down. If a foreign army, as one example, is invading perhaps the population starts to go down in the city near the invaders to simulate refugees leaving and your other cities start to rise in population to simulate refugees arriving. Then there might be population health measurements. Health is good as long as there is the appropriate infrastructure but if the population gets too high, perhaps the health declines. If health declines, you get illnesses, homelessness, crime, unemployment, and things like that which affect productivity and ultimately, that affects tax receipts. With some work, they could come up with interesting effects from these kinds of city problems that would require governmental management choices.

High level policy decisions to affect cities might be interesting.

From the city view, it would be cool if you could enter a city planner mode where you could design the entire city from scratch. The improvement of all tiles, all districts, if they still exist, and the order in which they will build as a priority list. If the tech is not available for something to be constructed, it gets bumped down the list until it can be built. So, then you could look at your starting city and create a plan on turn 1. Then you could concentrate on other things like units and expanding, or warfare.

There should be some use for luxuries and amenities though.

 

[Krajzen]

Civ5 had really frustrating happiness system which you had to control all the time 24/7 for it to never fall below cursed threshold. Goddamn was it exhausting.
Civ6 had the opposite problem, happiness being basically non - issue, umlimited wide growth, nobody ever complains. Bonus pointa for loyalty system of course being completely worthless in this regard and disconnected from aby factor except "blogger neighbor swallows your cities" (geez what a great anti snowball mechanic).

Also, civ5 had the ridiculously abstract idea of civ happiness being additively global - as a result system was unable to model basically anything involving unrest, disconent and rebellions because, surprise, real humans are not hiveminds on a state level lol.
Meanwhile civ6 had equally ridiculously abstract idea of cities not growing in population until they have enough housing.
I want to ask you a question: tell me what happens IRL when a poor country has population explosion, do people just stop having kids until gov builds them homes, or do Third World cities just end up full of slums as population growth continues anyway?

ALSO, who had the idea that luxury resources are what should be extremely important for happiness (especially in civ5). Luxury resources, consumed by higher classes only, were historically crucial for economy and trade, no civil wars and rebellions were fought over access to (by definition) luxury items such as gems or wine, common people had enough trouble having basic food and security.


So here are my suggestions:
1) No nonsensical abstract 'global happiness' hiveminds, happiness works per city, enabling particular cities to have disconent, unrest, rebellion, autonomy, secession etc
2) No nonsensical abstract 'housing' hard limitations on growth, instead some realistic soft ones (food growing capacity, disease 'tax' being reduced by medicine, whatever)
3) Luxury resources are crucial for economy but have either no major impact on happiness or only for 'upper class' of society, if the game has such distinctions
4) People get angry when they don't have access to expensive living conditions infrastructure they slowly grow to expect across ages (bread, circuses, sewers, security etc)
5) People get angry when their religion is not respected and given good infrastructure and freedoms
6) People get angry when you invade and occupy them and don't care about placating them or assimilating or giving them autonomy (this should be a very long term problem, not just something you deal with once and easily and forever)
7) People get angry when you tax and exploit them just too much, for example when fighting stupid unpopular wars, or when they are relatively poor in general
8) People get angry when ideology spread across them that is alien to the state (for example you play as monarchic state and people get communist)
9) The further your cities are from capital, the more rowdy their citizens tend to be


Aforementioned issues and lack of sufficient care to solve them lead individual cities to rebellion, or sometimes even big part of the country may simultaneously go for civil war or revolution (but you are warned of that risk long before).

 

[dagriggstar]

Well the opposite end of individual citizen happiness I guess would be a city happiness requirement. I guess that could look like if you adopt Merchant Republic, each city needs 2 merchant specialists to remain content. Cities without 2 merchant specialists simply rebel. The game can then automatically slot in the 2 merchant specialists before assigning any other citizens. Or you can do other stuff like Fascism requires a police station building in every city. Basically some kind of true/false statement and the city (as a whole) is either content/rebelling.

Then there might be population health measurements. Health is good as long as there is the appropriate infrastructure but if the population gets too high, perhaps the health declines. If health declines, you get illnesses, homelessness, crime, unemployment, and things like that which affect productivity and ultimately, that affects tax receipts. With some work, they could come up with interesting effects from these kinds of city problems that would require governmental management choices.
.

When we are talking about homelessness, crime, unemployment, I mean we are kinda getting away from "health" territory and back into "happiness" territory.
Housing is sort of psuedo-health, the stuff that grants big housing tends to be infrastructure (aqueduct, sewer system). I would prefer "health" as a term though, it's more generalised.

1) No nonsensical abstract 'global happiness' hiveminds, happiness works per city, enabling particular cities to have disconent, unrest, rebellion, autonomy, secession etc
2) No nonsensical abstract 'housing' hard limitations on growth, instead some realistic soft ones (food growing capacity, disease 'tax' being reduced by medicine, whatever)
3) Luxury resources are crucial for economy but have either no major impact on happiness or only for 'upper class' of society, if the game has such distinctions
4) People get angry when they don't have access to expensive living conditions infrastructure they slowly grow to expect across ages (bread, circuses, sewers, security etc)
5) People get angry when their religion is not respected and given good infrastructure and freedoms
6) People get angry when you invade and occupy them and don't care about placating them or assimilating or giving them autonomy (this should be a very long term problem, not just something you deal with once and easily and forever)
7) People get angry when you tax and exploit them just too much, for example when fighting stupid unpopular wars, or when they are relatively poor in general
8) People get angry when ideology spread across them that is alien to the state (for example you play as monarchic state and people get communist)
9) The further your cities are from capital, the more rowdy their citizens tend to be

I agree with 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Point 4, I mean the name needs to change from "expensive living conditions infrastructure". I guess it's more like, how do you tell when you meet the threshold when people start getting angry. Like, every 8 technologies you have, you need 1 happiness infrastructure per city ?
Point 9, the only reason I dislike it, is because it acts as a disincentive to establish colonies. That said, it can work, if the game is designed where a new city on a new continent is immediately "profitable".

 

[criZp]

Happiness as a second factor for population growth has no reason to exist. Civ 6 got that right by switching to health as the second factor, except for some reason they didn't actually call it health even if it clearly is.