Immigration

[Myrion]

Immigration could be the solution to the tourism-conundrum. Currently touristic influence reduces happiness in other Civs with the final effect of it being that you can get rewarded a whole foreign city at 20 unhappiness for 5 or more turns. You will probably get the worst city of that other Civ so basically you get an addition for your tall empire you don't need at all.
This is where immigration should start. Not at -20 but maybe at -5. This way an unhappy empire simply loses population which isn't such a bad thing because it makes them happier. The touristic aggressor benefits as well by getting even taller. Obviously this shouldn't happen too often (now it does happen faaaaar too often).

Now what to do with America? Maybe every time they receive population in this manner they have a chance to get a GP instead (10% GS, 5% GE, 5% GMus, 5% GA, 5% GW, 5% GMer; no generals or admirals). This would reflect immigration in the time around WW2.

In terms of tactics it would allow America to participate in the culture game to further enhance their space-race potential.

 

[Delekhan]

Now what to do with America? Maybe every time they receive population in this manner they have a chance to get a GP instead (10% GS, 5% GE, 5% GMus, 5% GA, 5% GW, 5% GMer; no generals or admirals). This would reflect immigration in the time around WW2.

I like this idea. Though I'd probably restrict it to only Great Merchants, Engineers, and to a lesser extent scientists (maybe 15/10/5% respectively). Assuming the overall immigration rate gets toned down substantially of course.

I'm thinking the average semi-aggressive America player would get between 6 - 10 Great people through this mechanic for the entire game. Maybe we can make it so that these GP are really "free" and not raise the cost of filling the great people counters the normal way?

This idea has flavor and sounds fun, at least on paper.

 

[nbrebol]

It seems the main frustration with immigration is that it happens too frequently for the gameplay to be enjoyable. I like the feature, but it seems a bit unbalanced. I checked my game log and it appears citizens only emigrate to my nation.

Has anyone taken a look at the code to figure out how to at least reduce the chance of it occurring?

 

[lockstep]

It seems the main frustration with immigration is that it happens too frequently for the gameplay to be enjoyable.

My main frustration with this feature is that it was added with only a cryptic note in the CEG history, which is against the mod's stated aim of " set[ing] a high bar for adding new things to the game".

 

[nbrebol]

My main frustration with this feature is that it was added with only a cryptic note in the CEG history, which is against the mod's stated aim of " set[ing] a high bar for adding new things to the game".

To be fair, CEG and CAT are still in Beta, and having a high bar for new things to the game means giving them a go and trying it out.

That said, it is unclear what the intention of the immigration feature is supposed to be. There is this line from the CEI_Events.lua: "-- TODO: immigration for all players, with bonus for America".

As far as I can tell from the logs there looks to be immigration ONLY to me despite barely having any happiness so it is clearly not working.

 

[lockstep]

To be fair, CEG and CAT are still in Beta, and having a high bar for new things to the game means giving them a go and trying it out.

This may be true for changing items (e.g. building/unit stats) and adding new items to existing gameplay systems (e.g. adding new beliefs/techs), but not for adding a new gameplay system without stating the reasons to do so.

 

[Dunkah]

My main frustration with this feature is that it was added with only a cryptic note in the CEG history, which is against the mod's stated aim of " set[ing] a high bar for adding new things to the game".

This was a part of this mod since the very beginning for the most part. So any debate about weather to include it was done long ago.

 

[Ahriman]

This was a part of this mod since the very beginning for the most part

Immigration was added to the mod very recently. By no means was it in the mod since the beginning.

My basic problem is that we already have a mechanic for increasing population in cities: food. And importantly, the marginal food cost of adding an extra citizen increases dramatically with city size.

Starting to have citizens moving between cities totally messes up basic economic features of the game, because it means that you don't need food to grow, and it starts to pretend that citizens everywhere are equal, whereas in reality a citizen in city A might have cost 100 food to produce while a citizen in larger city B might have cost 300 food.

Happiness is supposed to be a limit to growth (you get large excess food penalties when you have negative happiness), it isn't supposed to let you grow by itself. With immigration, you don't have to work farms or build granaries to grow, you just work villages and mines, build and buy happiness stuff, and steal other people's population. It undermines the basic game economy.

All the arguments for including immigration seem to be of either a realism argument, or a "we need something for the America civ" argument, rather than actually identifying a gameplay problem in BNW that needs to be solved.

 

[lockstep]

This was a part of this mod since the very beginning for the most part. So any debate about weather to include it was done long ago.

I don't know what "the very beginning" exactly means. GEM included a Freedom policy called "Immigration" with the effect "Citystate friends and allies gift Great People" -- no mentioning of population transfer between cities. Plus, Thalassicus stated that for the BNW mod version he wanted "to rebuild things from the ground up, borrowing only the most essential features from past versions of the project".

 

[Myrion]

It is true that the difference between pop 26 and 27 is around 1 million people while between 7 and 8 it's 100k. So if 100k move from that city of size 8 to the one with 26 they multiply heavily on their journey.

But the general idea is interesting as an alternative to tourism-related city-conversions. It should really be tied to tourism, making it a late-game mechanic.

 

[Dunkah]

Perhaps I was mistaken. I clearly remember those green and red population notifications popping up way back when. Before GnK.

Perhaps I was using that mod separately. But I doubt it.

Currently in vanilla... Every time my Civ goes unhappy... one of my cities will become starved. No matter what I do this will not rectify until I am happy again. If this isn't emigration, it's the next best thing.

 

[Ahriman]

I clearly remember those green and red population notifications popping up way back when. Before GnK.

There were green and red population notifications when a city gained a population from food or lost population from starvation, but that had nothing to do with immigration.

Currently in vanilla... Every time my Civ goes unhappy... one of my cities will become starved. No matter what I do this will not rectify until I am happy again.

I'm fairly sure that unhappiness cannot make a city starve. AFAIK unhappiness reduces only *excess* food, not the food needed to feed your citizens. It has worked this way since the original Civ5 release; happiness serves to halt growth by shutting down excess food, and it does that fairly well.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

is this using the Immigration Mod by Killmeplease?

Aussie.

 

[EricB]

I've still been playing with immigration deleted from the mod, and it's been working out great. Immigration ruins the mod. It's fairly easy to remove it, although I have a feeling that Thal will remove it shortly since it's seems like there is nearly unanimous opposition to it.

 

[Myrion]

There is a difference between hating the status quo and hating the whole concept. As I said before I'd rather have immigration than getting a whole underdeveloped city because of my overpowering tourism. Though obviously population changes every other turn are a nuisance. It has to be tweaked heavily that's for sure.

 

[void_genesis]

Is part of the problem that the current American immigration mechanic is passive?(and therefore the code needs to be perfectly balanced for all situations to be workable). Would a better active trait be that America can convert workers into city population? Workers produced in one location can quickly grow a city elsewhere. Workers can also be captured during warfare (a hat tip to American slavery). The only historic thing missing is peaceful immigration from other unhappy nations.

 

[EricB]

I just started a finished a game, so I finally got around to trying to change the American unique ability from Immigration bonuses to something else.

I deleted Immigration from the mod, so immigration bonuses are worthless. I settled on changing it to a +25% great engineer rate plus a free Smith in every city. Looking into the XML files, there isn't an easy way to add +25% great engineers. It's built-in to do that for great scientists (Bablylon) or all great people. So I cancelled that idea.

I ended up adding a free Smith in every city plus restored the -50% plot buying ability. The NASA building is giving you a free spaceship factory plus a free tech. That's too powerful, so I deleted the free tech and added some extra production on the NASA building.

 

[mystikx21]

I'd rather the NASA building have the spaceship effects and some instant research yield (but not a free tech). A free smith already adds some production to a city, so more isn't really that important on top of the space race effects of faster (but not instant) tech.

I don't think the problem with the immigration mechanic is the passive nature of it, and the active method suggested there really doesn't sound that appealing. It might be possible to tie it to tourism and influence, as Myrion suggested which would give it an active effect. But it seems simpler to just use food and happiness within the existing empires for now for growth than to introduce the entire mechanism of migrating populations. I haven't looked into the code, but an option of extra great people for the US via influence on CS and tourism on major powers would be both active and interesting rather than the free population that doesn't seem well balanced at all.

 

[Ahriman]

I'd rather the NASA building have the spaceship effects and some instant research yield (but not a free tech).
...
But it seems simpler to just use food and happiness within the existing empires for now for growth than to introduce the entire mechanism of migrating populations. I haven't looked into the code, but an option of extra great people for the US via influence on CS and tourism on major powers would be both active and interesting rather than the free population that doesn't seem well balanced at all.

+1.
The problem with immigration is that it undermines the food and happiness mechanics, which are core to the game economy. And it is weird and hard to balance for tourism starting to move people around permanently.

 

[Zaldron]

Perhaps I was mistaken. I clearly remember those green and red population notifications popping up way back when. Before GnK.

Perhaps I was using that mod separately. But I doubt it.

For a brief period of time in VEM Thal enabled the emigration mod where if *your* empire was unhappy people would leave. He then implemented better happiness models and removed emigration.