MOD request : infinite happiness for player + AI

[Naokaukodem]

I've done a search about it on Civfanatics but didn't find any related post, so here it is.

Whatever how simply it is, can someone create this MOD for me? Hapiness limit is really contraignant and frustrating for me.

Thank you very much.

 

[magzhi]

you could use no happiness option in world builder it completely switches off happiness and golden ages

 

[Naokaukodem]

How do we activate world builder?

 

[magzhi]

download SDK

 

[Naokaukodem]

download SDK

I didn't even know it was available. Where to download it please?

 

[SamBC]

I didn't even know it was available. Where to download it please?

Steam -> Library tab -> Change 'All Games' (or whatever you have it as) to 'Tool' -> Find Sid Meier's Civilization V SDK in the list, and download it.

 

[Naokaukodem]

Thx.

Well I tried it, but when it loads errors appear, and it won't generate any random map...

 

[SamBC]

Oh yeah, there's a bug since the last patch (as worldbuilder uses parts of the game engine, and those parts changed without worldbuilder updating to match, AIUI). A hotfix is promised, 'soon'.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Soon-ish. Soon-esque. Soon-adjacent.

But to the original point: if Happiness is that frustrating for you, then you're not playing the game well. Playing without a Happiness system completely unbalances many aspects of the game (like making many Policies, Wonders, and Buildings completely useless), and you'll never learn how to play the game well if you do something like this, any more than you'd learn to play well by giving yourself an extra few thousand gold at the start of a game.

Difficulties less than Prince receive a bonus to Happiness, so if you're having problems you might want to drop a difficulty or two until you get the hang of things. But if you're still consistently going negative on Happiness, then you're not putting enough emphasis on the trading/acquisition of Luxuries, not developing your cities' infrastructure well, or trying to settle too many small cities too quickly (what we used to call ICS). Learn the pace at which an empire can expand without crippling itself, and you'll be able to play on higher difficulties fairly quickly.

Now, this isn't to say that there aren't mods that tweak Happiness in some way. Many mods, my own included, change how it scales with city size or number of cities, and change how much you get from various types of buildings. In some cases these changes make things easier for the player, in others (like mine) it often makes it harder. I'm sure you can find a mod that tweaks things in the direction you want if you look, or just make one of your own.

 

[Naokaukodem]

Well, I used to play Settler or Chieftain for that purpose, but the game is really too easy that way. Now i play Prince. The thing I dislike in that game is that civilizations have so few happiness that most of the map stays blank, that's totally not realistic. (unless a damn AI decides to over-expand, and that seems reserved to AIs that have plenty happiness, crap) Most of the time I end up with 3 cities, 3 cities!

Last game, I had 2 luxuries in my capital radius, founded another coastal city with pearls, and a distant another distant coastal city to grab iron, and luckily i had whales also. That makes 4 luxuries for an empire, and later in my game i could grab another luxury from conquest, but the city was so distant that at size 1, and with a worked luxury, the hapiness hit was 6 unhappy faces... then I just razed this city. Of course, I had all circuses, colosseums, theaters built in my 3 original cities.

Genarally, luxuries are way too rare, and it's rare that in my games i have a consistent number of them.

I want to try a game where there no happiness, to amphasis again the developpment of the civilizations, aka building of settler and conquest. The game seems a way lot more interesting like that. At least, your efforts (expansion, conquest) pay.

 

[SamBC]

I'm not sure why you have that much of a problem. Firstly, you can trade for more luxuries, and/or get them from CS allies - no-one expects to get that many from their own empire, especially early on. Another is to moderate expansion somewhat, but 4 cities shouldn't be a problem unless they're also all (or most) incredibly tall.

In previous Civs, happiness constrained how big individual cities could get; now it constrains both total population and number of cities (considered together), and the capping of regular happiness building's contribution means it also constrains individual cities. It's more subtle, but it's not impossible to deal with unless you're stuck in a Civ IV mindset of rolling out cities as quickly as you can - in that game, it was finances that constrained number of cities most, while finances don't do that now except indirectly (by constraining the number and type of buildings you can build).

You don't mention SPs or Wonders - they both have a huge impact on happiness now, with SPs cheaper initially so everyone should be able to get a decent number of them, and at least one policy in each branch helping to improve happiness. There's also puppeting of cities, which (slightly) reduces the unhappiness burden of conquest, and completely removes the culture-cost burden.

 

[Naokaukodem]

You are walkthroughing me but i don't really need it.

4 cities shouldn't be a problem unless they're also all (or most) incredibly tall

I want to say WTH? LOL? No, my cities aren't "increadibly tall", never taller than AI ones. 4 "increadibly tall" cities would consume much more happiness than one can find on the map.

No i'm not stuck in Civ4 way of expansion, I say you i had only 3 cities last game, current game 5-6, but that's with limiting growth in most of my cities, except the capital for science and gold purposes. My capital is still not "increadibly tall" by the way. (the cap for growth growing increadibly in that game)

I don't mention SP because pity has changed totally now, there's not anymore that boost for hapiness in it, only cultural boost, yey. The best end-policy than improves happiness now is decreasing unhappiness of non-occupying population by... 5%. Yey.

Wonders? Do you think i can build Forbidden Palace and Sixtine Chapel every time? Except than those, there' none which imrpove happiness. And it's rare in fact that i can build them.

So what's left? I turn you back the remark: I'm not sure why you have that few of a problem.

 

[SamBC]

The change in SP is that Piety isn't all about happiness, but there are some for happiness in every branch. Honour has happiness from defensive buildings, freedom has reduced unhappiness from specialists, patronage has extra happiness from CS-gifted luxuries... there are loads. Just pick the ones that give you the biggest boost for your play-style. Honour can end up eliminating unhappiness from the number of cities, for instance, by building all city defence buildings in every city.

 

[Spatzimaus]

So what's left? I turn you back the remark: I'm not sure why you have that few of a problem.

Sam's right, you're wrong. But let's try to figure out why. You should NEVER need to use the Avoid Growth option, if you're playing correctly, because you should always have a small Happiness surplus to account for that growth.

1> How many luxuries do you have within your territory? That's actually two questions: how many UNIQUE luxuries, and how many total luxury deposits?
In most games, you'll start with 4-5 different types of luxury within reach "your" territory, one of which will have clustered deposits (meaning extras). You SHOULD be able to trade those extras away for two or three additional luxuries.

2> Have you bribed any city-states into alliances, or conquered any? When the game is starting, three luxury resources are reserved ONLY for city-states. Only after starting locations are determined are these resources placed, so you should be making an attempt to get these somehow.

3> Which policy branches have you unlocked? As he pointed out, every branch now has at least SOME Happiness. Piety is no longer the main Happiness-changer (at least in the vanilla game) with the change to Theocracy, but it's still got Organized Religion (+1 Happy per Monument, Temple, or Monastery); Monasteries will only be in a few cities, but those others should be in every city you have, so that's +2 per city right there. And other branches can do even better; the Honor branch can now get FIVE happiness per city from two consecutive policies...

4> Have you been building every available Happiness-producing building in every city? I don't just mean the Colosseum. Did you notice the Stone Works generating +1 Happiness? Or the Circus Maximus adding 5? A Circus (+2)? There are quite a few of these less common sources of Happiness out there.

So post your numbers. That is, the Happiness pulldown in the upper-left; take a screenshot if you want, or write it down, so that we can see how many Happiness you're gaining from luxuries, buildings, etc., and how many Unhappiness you're generating from number of cities and population.

The thing is, before this last patch the main source of Happiness was luxuries. One new luxury equalled one new city, easily making up the small disparity between the building happiness and the Unhappiness generated by size. Given the +9 you start with, that meant that 4-5 luxuries could support 6-7 cities fairly easily. (Add another for the Circus Maximus, and once you got to Theocracy...)
Post-patch, luxuries aren't nearly enough and you're expected to take Policies that help with this, most of which key off of specific buildings or playstyles.

Now, given that we're in the modding forum here, it's simple to point out that quite a few mods (including my own) tweak a lot of this. In my mod, cities generate even MORE Unhappiness (4 + 1.2/pop instead of 3+1/pop), but I've got a half-dozen more buildings that add +1 Happiness. It's even more of a challege staying above 0 in my mod, and yet the people who play it can do so fairly consistently.

 

[Naokaukodem]

The change in SP is that Piety isn't all about happiness, but there are some for happiness in every branch. Honour has happiness from defensive buildings, freedom has reduced unhappiness from specialists, patronage has extra happiness from CS-gifted luxuries... there are loads. Just pick the ones that give you the biggest boost for your play-style. Honour can end up eliminating unhappiness from the number of cities, for instance, by building all city defence buildings in every city.

They are minimalistic and anecdotic. And, who could ever envisage to get them all? Culture is kinda the rare thing. (i mean social policies won't trigger so often)

Spatzimaus: be happy to have the great honor of an answer by myself, however I won't go further than your first sentence with you, I'm not feeling it's about who's right or wrong, smart ass.

 

[Seven05]

To answer your original question, you can effectively give yourself (and the AI) infinite hapiness by changing the values for each (or one specific) difficulty level you'll find in the HandicapInfos.xml file. Just read Kaels guide on making a mod as I'm not about to re-write it here

Alternatively you can boost the happy bonus given by any number of buildings, resources or wonders, there are several with existing happy bonuses BTW, not just the two you mentioned. Chicken Pizza for example now has the +50% golden age duration bonus AND +5

As for why it's an issue for you... I think that discussion is best done in another forum and you will likely find a lot of helpful answers from different people for different strategies if you bring it up in the strategies forum. I will second the advice on Honor though, if only because those defensive buildings not only give a hapiness bonus with the right SP but they're are also maintenance free, it's win-win.

 

[Naokaukodem]

UP !

Let down the "you're wrong" behavior, I'm upping this topic to know if the World Builder still emit a bug for what I want to do.

On a side note, I would still strongly like a MOd that allows infinite unhapiness, I think it would be more handy for me, plus one could imagine a way to still have Golden Ages without Happiness and do a MOD for that !

 

[Putmalk]

UP !

Let down the "you're wrong" behavior, I'm upping this topic to know if the World Builder still emit a bug for what I want to do.

On a side note, I would still strongly like a MOd that allows infinite unhapiness, I think it would be more handy for me, plus one could imagine a way to still have Golden Ages without Happiness and do a MOD for that !

Happiness without Golden Ages is impossible.

Go read Kael's Modding Guide and find out how to mod buildings.

Then, update the Palace to grant 200 happiness on start.

Then, update the Global Defines so that it takes 500000 happiness to start a Golden Age (so that nobody ever gets them).

There you go, unlimited happiness.

 

[Spatzimaus]

There you go, unlimited happiness.

... until you take the Piety policy that gives you +1 Culture towards policies per 2 excess Happiness you have. So you'd need to edit that one as well. The Rationalism policy that gives extra research for being Happy wouldn't cause this sort of problem, but you'd probably want to make that one a bit weaker to keep it balanced. And any other Policy that adds Happiness becomes worthless in this sort of game, but the AI will take them just as often as before, so you'll need to adjust those as well.

Mechanically, the game already has a flag for ignoring Happiness. All you need to do is enable it. There are quite a few options that are hidden by default, so that they won't appear in the Advanced Setup screen; all you need to do is update one entry in the <GameOptions> table to have <Hidden> set to false instead of true, and these can now automatically appear in the setup menus.

 

[Putmalk]

... until you take the Piety policy that gives you +1 Culture towards policies per 2 excess Happiness you have. So you'd need to edit that one as well. The Rationalism policy that gives extra research for being Happy wouldn't cause this sort of problem, but you'd probably want to make that one a bit weaker to keep it balanced. And any other Policy that adds Happiness becomes worthless in this sort of game, but the AI will take them just as often as before, so you'll need to adjust those as well.

Mechanically, the game already has a flag for ignoring Happiness. All you need to do is enable it. There are quite a few options that are hidden by default, so that they won't appear in the Advanced Setup screen; all you need to do is update one entry in the <GameOptions> table to have <Hidden> set to false instead of true, and these can now automatically appear in the setup menus.

You're right. I play my own mod too much that I forgot what vanilla policies did.

And isn't unlimited happiness removing the point of the game? O_O