Okay, I was thinking again, which is becoming a bad habit. You mentioned wanted to add a layer of complexity with religion and happiness, that got me thinking about a couple of my favorite games:
Stronghold and Stronghold Crusader. These games are over 10 years old now, but I was thinking that there are strong similarities between the concepts in M:C and the Stonghold games, and how M:C might benefit from taking a closer look at the way happiness and fear effects productivity.
I guess any game based on the Medieval economy is going to share those similarities...
There are differences too. In Stronghold, you levy a tax on your peasants to generate day-to-day operational expenses, which causes unhappiness and can cause peasants to leave your settlement. So you have to have certain things to offset that unhappiness to keep and attract new peasants. There's not much of a birthrate in Stronghold, the player gains citizens almost exclusively through the his "popularity", which can be said to equate to Crosses or Culture or whatever.
Another difference is that the Stronghold games are a series of related real-time scenarios where the player faces one or more invasions by a foe. Each successive scenario is more challenging. Whereas Civ4Col is a turn-based strategy.
Anyway, let's get this post on topic...
The happiness system in Stronghold is really a three axis model of human contentment: Food, Safety, and Entertainment = Loyalty/Fealty.
In Stronghold, if you make the peasants "too happy", they get lazy and do nothing but eat and drink while your coffers and larder bleed dry. So there are items you put around the village to remind people that you're still the boss. A gibbet, torturing devices, etc. If you achieve the right balance of happiness and terror, you can increase productivity to 200%
If your citizens are happy enough, they start making babies, which go through a phase where they do nothing but eat food and do nothing else. Civ4Col doesn't have much like that, except the educational buildings. But in Stronghold, they just "grow up" after a certain time has passed, similar to what you've done with the Nobles in M:C. In a manner of speaking the "eat food/do nothing" phase is represented by the gathering of 200 units of luxury food. That is one of the features of M:C that really impressed me from the start.
Much like the JAnmals mod, in Stronghold there are Bears, Wolves, and sometimes killer Rabbits that will kill your peasants, so you have to keep those beat down. Just like in M:C, in Stronghold there are bad guys constantly chewing on the edges of your territory. So, over all, the peasants have to be really unhappy before they'll go face that again.
Much like in M:C, Stronghold requires that you build a granary/warehouse/storehouse to store food and other goods. In Stronghold the granary and the warehouse are separate buildings. But the idea is the same.
The more varieties of food you have for the peasants to eat, the happier and healthier they are (Civ 4 uses the same mechanic). The food system in Civ4Col vanilla is so dumbed-down from the version used in Civ4 that almost feels insulting.
In Stronghold, the basic food sources are Apples (Orchards), Cheese (Cows), Bread (Wheat), Meat (Hunting), and Ale (Hops). The basic food economy is like this:
1st Building (Product)→ Warehouse→ 2nd Building (Processes Product)→ Granary→ Distribution
BREAD:
Wheat Farm (Wheat)→ Mill (Flour)→ Bakery (Bread)→ Granary
CHEESE:
Dairy Farm (Cheese)→ Granary
MEAT:
Hunters Post (Meat)→ Granary
APPLES:
Apple Farm (Apples)→ Granary
ALE:
Hops Farm (Hops)→ Brewery (Ale)→ Inn
In Stronghold, Wheat feeds more than any other food resource, but the infrastructure to utilize it cost the most and takes the longest to get into running order. Apples are the easiest food resource to grow, but they provide very little food value.
You have replicated much of this in the way you've set up the resource processing.
But the part where having more kinds of food resource leads to happier, healthier citizens is the missing part. It's like the Jester, I'm not sure what to do with that guy. The theatre doesn't have slots for workers, so I'm at a loss. I figure you mean him to generate contentment or culture, I just don't know which building to put him in. But if the theatre were a work building, the jester could generate YIELD_HAPPINESS. And a leech, barber, herbalist, apothecary, physic, or doctor could generate YIELD_HEALTH.
I need to look at the religion system in Civ4 again to see how it is handled. My blind guess is that there is a YIELD_CROSSES equivalent in Civ4 that is used for a different purpose than that used in Civ4Col. But since Civ4 really doesn't generate goods the same way as Civ4Col, I figure the differences would likely be very striking. I remember that religions in Civ4 really treat more with Commerce than anything else. How that factors into Happiness, I can't really guess.
But creating new YIELDS for the foods may not be required for M:C any more than it would be needed for Civ4, just adding a check in the DLL for food resources in the 3x3 grid of the city should be enough. The happy thing about that is that during map generation Python pulls all the info from the BonusInfos.xml and drops bonuses onto the map, so a new resource that generates an already existing YIELD doesn't require any alteration of the DLL.
So I think adding more food resources would be an easy way to set the stage for a "happiness" layer to M:C's complexity.
This raises the question of what food to add? I'm all for adding more resources and yields, but most mods seem to suffer from too little or too much. For instance, the Wheat Bonus from Civ4 gets used for everything coming and going. I've seen it (without modification) used for flax, barley, rye, sword grass, and even occasionally wheat. I guess that is to be expected when the NIF file system is very far removed from "user friendly".
More is not always better. I think "Cereal (generic)" would be preferable to seeing the same 3D art used seven times with seven different names and dubious recolor textures. But seeing Indian corn (maize, a New World food grop) in M:C bothers me the same way seeing it in the Lord of the Ring movies bothered me. But, I don't know what would replace the Indian corn. I guess anything would be better than Indian corn.
Certainly, they make beer from rice, wheat, barley and a lot of other cereals. And the "mash" in mash whiskey can be made with anything with carbohydrates that will ferment to make alcohol, really anything, from apples to potatoes to stale bread. My grandfather ran a still, so he had occasion to use everything from bread flour to sugar water, and in his opinion, the only thing that changed was how long it took to ferment. But barley is iconic in the brewing of beer, so it has to stay.
Grapes have to stay too. I don't think there's any need to add more layers to wine making. Brandy is just distilled wine and Champagne is just wine that has been fermented a second time. Generic Wine and Ale cover all that's needed there.
Hemp, okay, got to have it, but in my college-day experiences, hemp is most definitely a wet, hot-weather loving plant. So I'd say make it a swamp terrain item or an item that only appears next to a river.
I'd add opium too. Until the British set up the opium plantations in India, opium was predominantly a North African and Mediterranean crop. I remember reading that the valleys of the Pyrenees and Italian Alps were full of wild poppies during Roman times, but as far as I ever read, the crop was never domesticated or put into institutional farming until the Brits decided they would use India as a drug factory.
So if we add a medical layer to M:C, then an herbalist unit could operate like the hunter gathering YIELD_HERBS that get processed into YIELD_MEDICINE by an apothacary unit. Also, if a city has YIELD_MEDICINE in the warehouse, in the case of a plague event, it could be used like food (2 per citizen per turn) to reduce the death toll. Not eliminate it, just reduce it. If there was no YIELD_MEDICINE in the warehouse, I'd have the player's units dropping like flies.
Welcome to the Age of Great Demographic Catastrophes, baby...
And I'd add earthquakes, cattle murrain, forest fires, floods, and drought as random events. Maybe not alter terrain fetaures or remove bonuses from the map, just temporarily reduce the yields of terrain and bonuses. In the case of a cattle murrain, sheep, horses, and cows produce 0 for 5 turns, then +1 each turn until returned to normal. Maybe I'd allow specialist units to produce one unit of the yield per turn, but not non-specialist units.
Anyway, back to religion and happiness. I think the system in Civ4 is upside down. If history tells us anything, it tells us that religious tolerance is very definitely not a reliable human trait. So, I'd make religion much less easy to spread. And in a multi-player setting, I'd let missionaries work to siphon off skilled specialists from opposing players cities. Or set it so that your religion could gain you a city the same way that culture can, only not require it to be already inside your territory. Say something like the more pilgrims that city sends to your shrines, the more that city "converts" to being your city.
But that's me, I think of religion as an excuse to start a war >_<
now we just need to sort out all our ideas.
