Mod Idea Happyness specialist

[grimey]

A problem I've noticed with the luxury system is that players are not rewarded for having multiple luxuries. Sure you can trade these extra luxuries but that can be frustrating at best with npcs who either dont like you and demand more stuff an luxury in exchange or just dont have an extra to exhange.

Also happyness is extremely hard to manage for large empires expecially if you dont have a large variety of luxurys and instead have multiple extra copies like I tend to have.

My Idea for a solution for both of these is simple in theory but I don't know if it's possible script.

Make a specialist building that needs the luxury resource in the local city zone area that allows you to make a new specialist that increases happiness by about 3 and it uses up one of the extra sources of luxuries that you own.

Now why not make it so the building itself uses up the resource and gives the bonus.

Because I would like it to be able to be toggled off so you can trade the resource again if the oppertunity arrises and the bonus is left at only 3 so trading with your neighbors would still be a worthwhile endevor mostly an option for those who don't want to or can't trade their extra resources.

The big question i have is it possible to make a specialist use up a luxury resource.

Everything else I believe is not very difficult to mod.

I'd also like the buildings to be cheap maintenance cost with a small bonus to culture or gold or whatever based on the resource to still have a purpose when not using the specialist.

The specialist also balances because it could be used for food, hammers, or gold so a large empire could use it to help the happiness but a small empire with fewer cities would feel the loss of gold, production, or food because small empires depend on having fully improved and developed cities so a loss of one population working would not be worth it, but in a larger undeveloped empire could deal with the loss and would have more extra luxuries to use as well.

I am not the best modder but could help I am going to try myself to make this mod but if a more experienced modder wants to make this mod or give advise I would appriechiate it.

 

[Spatzimaus]

This has been suggested, repeatedly, although not in nearly as complex of a way. (Simplest: an Entertainer specialist that adds +1 happiness instead of the usual production/gold/etc. +3 is WAY too much.)

The problem is that it's currently not possible to assign Happiness to a specialist directly. So even without your whole luxury resource consumption idea, it won't work. Currently, neither Happiness nor Culture can be assigned as a Yield; Artist specialists give culture through a hard-coded table entry, and there are a few explicitly-created ways for buildings and policies to affect culture and happiness, but it's not nearly as flexible as production, food, gold, or science.

This is high on a lot of people's priority lists, and I expect to see a lot of interesting changes made once a happiness Yield is implemented by someone.

 

[Supercheese]

Yeah, I had to mod the Civ 4 DLL to get specialists to provide happiness. I expect t'will be much the same in Civ 5...

 

[grimey]

thanks for the quick reply. Its good to hear right away that it cannot be done so I don't waste any time trying. Would it still be possible to make buildings that increased happiness and consumed the luxury resource instead just like the Economy Mod does with bonus resources like wheat, and bananas.

Also imho considering building the building cost production, and costs gold to maintain I really don't think +3 happiness is that crazy considering trading for another luxury which is easy when the comps are neutral and have the extra resource gives +5

 

[Lord Shadow]

+3 happiness is crazy from my point of view, considering said stat is no longer local, but global. Luxury resources might give +5, but they're far rarer than specialists.

 

[grimey]

I'm not talking about making a type of specialist that just simply gives +3 happiness
I'm talking about first making a building that can only make 1 specialist that needs the luxury nearby AND uses up a luxury resource. The only reason i would like a specialist to use up the resource and give the bonus is because you could change it from using up your resource or not and because it would use up a citizen so it would be more balancing.

considering you could use that luxury resource to trade for another one possibly giving you +5 IMHO I don't think +3 is crazy. Maybe some people might think this is game breaking but if they want they could go into said mod and adjust it to only +2 or even as low as +1

I already play with the Large scale mod that gives +1 happiness for extra luxuries which is nice but it still really feels like the "Random" map generator likes to clump 2 or 3 luxuries on a single continent and I'm left with 4-5 sugars and 1 or 2 other luxuries

So instead of relying on trading with other civs for happiness every 30 turns or possibly never getting to trade depending if the comps didn't already trade their extra resources to other comps I'd rather keep them for myself (anyone say mercantilism)

 

[Spatzimaus]

I'm talking about first making a building that can only make 1 specialist that needs the luxury nearby AND uses up a luxury resource.

That's still just too much, because often, a second deposit of a luxury resource is useless. You often CAN'T trade it away for a +5; maybe the other civs are at war with you, maybe they have that resource already, maybe they have nothing spare to trade. So you're effectively "giving up" something that has very little value already. It gets even worse when you look at the clustering logic; there are often four or five Incense deposits in a single area, and clumping is similar for many of the luxuries. As a result, one empire will often get most or all of these at once. So when you have five Incense to trade and few of the other civs are interested/have something to trade, those last couple deposits really aren't worth anything beyond the piddly +gold the Plantation provides.

But under your system, these later deposits would be extremely valuable; in fact, they'd be MORE valuable than the normal way. Sure, +5 looks better than +3, but if you'll ALWAYS have that +3, while the +5 depends on the other civs not hating you, having something to trade that you don't already have, and not ever acquiring their own supply of what you're trading. I'd take a consistent +3 in a heartbeat in most games.

Also, there are SPs and wonders that make specialists better (less food, more happiness, whatever). So the fact that you're spending a citizen to do this isn't much of a drawback in the later eras, because that citizen will often be better than working another marginal tile, even if the Citizen gave only the base +1 hammer, let alone the +3 happiness. Some of these bonuses (like the Statue of Liberty) are tunable to a specific specialist type, but the SP ones aren't.

Yes, you can still keep this balanced by jacking up the cost of the building itself to something appropriate for a +3 happiness building. But at that point, the fact that it cost you a specialist becomes meaningless; the primary cost becomes the building's cost, so why even bother with the specialist part in the first place?

 

[grimey]

I see a lot of the points you have made and I didn't think about the fact that if it was a specialist then a lot of other bonuses could be added to it. (I don't usually play with a lot of specialist)

Also considering the fact that it seems like a function such as this is really not feasible with the current mod tools means it probably won't happen.

Your comment about having a lot of an extra resources being completely useless to extremely valuable is well kinda the idea of the mod, maybe not "extremely" useful probably lower it to +2 (sorry +1 just seems like a waste of time) and make the building have a relatively cheap maintenance for a happiness building like 2 or maybe 3 because it does use up a luxury and because you would need to have the luxury near the city so if you did get a giant clump of them in one spot you would only be able to build one or 2 of such a building because only a couple cities have access to them

Is that really adding too much happiness because as a large empire it seems like my happiness is always less then 10 and gets close to 0.

In civ 4s happiness with it being local big empires really didn't get hit with unhappiness problems as much in fact a single luxury would increase your happiness by 1 PER city which in most cases would be WAY more then 5. Civ 5 luxuries give 5 happiness but 1 citizen still gives a total of 1 unhappiness.

I know that Civ 5 uses happiness to balance out large empires whereas Civ 4 used increasing maintenance costs but in Civ 4 the worst thing about expanding too much was that your science took a big hit mostly. In Civ 5 if you get too big then the unhappiness makes all your cities less productive.

It gets even worse if it drops to 10 where your happiness will stay really low because now you want to build a happiness building and well its going to take a REALLY long time because of the unhappiness especially If you are conquering cities and trying to build courthouses that take 50 turns to build and give you HUGE happiness negatives until finished which cant be hurried and well I could go on and on about the subject.

The biggest thing I hate running into the game is the extreme cost of happiness buildings. With the vanilla game with units costing exponentially more with ever extending trade routes costing more to maintain, and more and more buildings to maintain the last thing i want to do is spend an entire 5 gold on 4 happiness its like be either happy or wealthy.