TheLopez said:
Please try to think of ways to balance the mod and post them here, I am always open to changes in my mod comps.
Earlier someone raised the problem that immigration basically makes happiness into a no-brainer, since immigration automatically deals with the problem for you.
I suggested that this was beyond the scope of this component, and needed to be combined with other components to find an interesting game balance. Diseases, cultural influence, and popular support all came up.
But a few ideas just occured to me with Immigration that could make it a balanced component unto itself. Any of these ideas can be used individually, or combined, or perhaps as inspiration for other ideas:
1) Civic Variance: Some civics improve the likelihood that immigration will occur. Hence, immigration isn't always there to bail you out -- you have to choose specific civics for it to really work to your advantage.
2) International, Not Intranational: Right now, immigration is computed on an individual city basis, causing people to move from highly populated dense cities into underdeveloped cities. This is a win win situation in fighting your overpopulation and boosting your new settlements.
What if immigration was instead computed nationally? That is, immigration within your nation would be extremely unlikely. Instead, a national average would be computed, and if an immigrant were to pop up, it would be in all likelihood to move to a neighboring nation with high amounts of excess happiness. This way, you actually care about unhappiness, since it can lead to population getting up and leaving... and you care about excess happiness, since it can attract new population to your cities.
3) Maintainance by Population / Cost of Sprawl: Currently, maintainance is computed by the number of cities and the distance each city has away from the palace. What if population were a factor? Namely, greater population would have a multiplicative effect on city maintainance. This would mean that the player would desire high population centers near their capitols, and high population further away would be more costly.
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Just a few ideas. One other idea I had was something to do with immigrants having some kind of interaction effect with cottages, but I couldn't figure out how this would work in such a way that you'd care about too much unhappiness.