New Beta Version - April 20th (4-20)

[pineappledan]

Is that possible? Its an interesting idea.

Oh God, what have I done? I was trying to suggest how silly that would be. doooooon't

 

[Bhawb]

The point of scaling on era is that a city will take a comparable amount of time producing their first public works in classical as it does in industrial, for the same benefit.

By that same token, why does it take my city the same number of turns to build a monument in ancient as it takes to build a broadcast tower? Building PW early with era scaling is less production for the same effect. And happiness isn't useless, by building the PW early you have a slightly higher happiness threshold to work with. With era scaling in effect you are actively punishing players for not building however many PWs they'll need for the rest of the game as early as possible. That isn't an emergency button, encouraging pre-planning is literally the exact opposite of what PW's are supposed to be about.

 

[Rekk]

By that same token, why does it take my city the same number of turns to build a monument in ancient as it takes to build a broadcast tower? Building PW early with era scaling is less production for the same effect. And happiness isn't useless, by building the PW early you have a slightly higher happiness threshold to work with. With era scaling in effect you are actively punishing players for not building however many PWs they'll need for the rest of the game as early as possible. That isn't an emergency button, encouraging pre-planning is literally the exact opposite of what PW's are supposed to be about.

I don't know how to reword my statement when you've just restated EnricoSwagalo's comment that I tried to address.

The point is that it's supposed to take roughly X turns to gain the happiness benefit, no matter which era you choose to build the project. The benefit of -1 unhappiness, for example, is the same in ancient as it is in industrial. The benefit of a monument in ancient is much less meaningful in industrial compared to when you build it in ancient. That's why it takes many fewer turns to build in industrial.

If you want to spend X turns building public works in ancient for no immediate benefit compared to something actually useful, go right ahead. Or, you can spend the X turns when unhappiness is still a problem and there's nothing else you can do. It'll be ~X turns no matter what era you decide to do it.

 

[Stalker0]

Oh God, what have I done? I was trying to suggest how silly that would be. doooooon't

Why would that be silly if this is truly an emergency button?

 

[Bhawb]

The benefit of -1 unhappiness, for example, is the same in ancient as it is in industrial.

No, it isn't. Sources of happiness and unhappiness reductions are much stronger in industrial, and the benefit of an additional happiness in a city with 5 happiness is very different to one with 20.

And again, production matters. If I estimate I'm going to need 5 PWs in a city, it is more efficient to build those as early in the game as I can, and leave happiness buildings for later, because happiness buildings have static production cost. So instead of building a Circus now and PW later, you would always prioritize PWs first and buildings later, since the PW will always take say 5 turns, but a Circus will take 5 turns now but only 1 turn later. That's the problem with era scaling, you completely reverse the ideal usage of PWs from being your last resort to gain some extra happiness into being your first resort to pre-manage future unhappiness.

 

[BiteInTheMark]

No, it isn't. Sources of happiness and unhappiness reductions are much stronger in industrial, and the benefit of an additional happiness in a city with 5 happiness is very different to one with 20.

And again, production matters. If I estimate I'm going to need 5 PWs in a city, it is more efficient to build those as early in the game as I can, and leave happiness buildings for later, because happiness buildings have static production cost. So instead of building a Circus now and PW later, you would always prioritize PWs first and buildings later, since the PW will always take say 5 turns, but a Circus will take 5 turns now but only 1 turn later. That's the problem with era scaling, you completely reverse the ideal usage of PWs from being your last resort to gain some extra happiness into being your first resort to pre-manage future unhappiness.

This comparison may be true for circuses, cause they are as close as possible to a pure happiness building. But most other buildings have other positive effects besides a unhappiness reduction.
A PW may have the same effect happiness wise than a workshop, cause the increased hammers decrease the unhappiness by distress, but it also offers me greater hammer generation for all following constructions. Same is true for culture or science buildings. While you focus on PW, maybe 2 or 3 times in row in classical, others are able to construct buildings which decrease the time till the next technology or social policy is unlocked. Which may give greater benefits than the saved hammers. In general, the production of cities rise faster over the length of the game than the production cost of PW, making it time wise better to construct them later.
Additionally, you will not know if you will need the happiness reduction in the end, maybe you will have plenty of happiness and all the early spend hammers were wasted.

In the end, all your cities will have modifiers of around +400% for needs, and its obviosly, that only capitals will be able to satisfy such numbers. Only 10% reduction, and only for 1 city is pretty much pointless.
Another question is, how much sense does it make to want hammers for fighting unhappiness? Those cities which can afford spending hammers in PW will be not the cities, which have huge unhappiness problems.
A solution for both problems would be to make PW to a national process.
Either PW reduce the needs empire wide and the cost are increasing with population and each time you repeat it (to block abusing very early PW, its unlocked at a specific tech). Or PW give flat happiness on global level and its distributed among the cities like other global happiness, increasing with era slightly but stronger with repeating.

Best solution is still fixing the game balance, making PW unnecessary.

 

[FaarmAnimal]

Personally, I always though PW was a bad idea. Having read some of these comments now I know it is.

On one hand, we have the idea that 'noobs' need it as a panic button to save their empire. I never liked this idea. When you are learning the game you mess up and your empire collapses. You learn from it and start again.

On the other hand, the changes some people want is eventually going to lead to it being abused and become an exploit.

I would rather see the whole idea dropped.

 

[Rafs]

I personally don't dislike PW as a way for extremely wide empires to help keep things in check, but right now I believe the tool itself is not effective enough. I think the only times I've tried using it aside from very late game is when I have a very powerful capital during renaissance and it's grown quite a lot, at that point I'll probably build one or two PW.
I wouldn't be devastated if we lost PW, but I believe it's a tool that can server its purpose, it just needs to be fine tuned a bit more. Maybe only have to use it on very extreme case, like cities with very high pop count such as a capital or some cities with good food yields in a wide empire.
For me (very personal goal of course) what it is important is to be able to have a high amount of cities in your empires, if you have to dedicate some production/culture/yields to make it work I don't mind, I even don't mind stoping growth on new cities until everything is up to date, but there isn't much I can do on old cities with high pop and all buildings in the current system, and that's kind of saddening.

 

[tu_79]

I don't feel too entitled to talk about Public Works, since I'm taking a break, but I'd like to talk about fun. Especially after reading Stalker0 late combat troubles.
What makes a mechanic fun? I know each player has his own idea and not everybody likes the same things. Further, there's no mechanic without some trade offs. So, if something works well for me in 90% of the cases, it will work bad in 50% of the cases for other players, and even while it works, it might not be appreciated.
But I've been thinking about what makes me feel good about a game. I think I'm 50% explorer, 40% puzzle solver and 5% social. So, for me, a game feels good when I'm doing different things each game, I can take different approachs or the map forces me to change my strategy. It feels good when I'm facing a problem and I can deal with it and move forward. When I'm forced to face the same problem again and again, without a definitive solution, then it becomes a chore.
For example, it's fun to arrange furniture in your bedroom. The location of the bed might not have been optimal, and moving it to a more convenient place make arise problems with the dresser access, which could be solved by placing the desk closer to the window, even if it makes me glare a little when reading. That's it. Done. The bedroom is not perfect now, but it's better than before. Next time I'll think about the hall. Or maybe I'll go check my car.
Cleaning the dust out of the bedroom's furniture is right the opposite of fun. It is something that needs to be done periodically, or the bedroom will become unhealthy. But it is always the same boring thing, week after week. This is life. We do things that need to be done, even if they are boring. That's why we love games. In game, things don't need to be done. If it is fun for you, you play, otherwise you let it down.

I disgress. Hmm. Yes. Public Works.

Avoiding happiness problems is a puzzle in itself. You set in your mind how much unhappiness you are willing to endure and push the boundaries of your empire growth and expansion. With some experience, you can foresee which problems will affect each one of your cities and plan in advance so you (ideally) never have to rely on PW. But you could have been careless for a while, or maybe you are not experienced enough, and then you fall into an unhappiness pit, completely ruining the game. Because, do you remember, some months ago we had unhappiness spirals which took forever to recover. PW came in a pack with a bunch of other solutions to our happiness issues, specifically addressing 'agency'. The goal of PW was to give players something easy to understand that would alleviate their happiness problems, at the cost of long-term economy. It wasn't meant to be used by seasoned players who can solve the happiness puzzle beforehand, but for people that don't enjoy this puzzle or that are too unexperienced to even know what they are doing wrong. Let me restate this. Public Works should not be used in an optimal game, they are not intended to be used for any strategy. To achieve this goal, building Public Works should never be better than conducting a proper development.
If I'm right, this is why PW only works at a percentage. Only cities that are suffering from massive unhappiness should go for PW.

But there's a corner case that might not have addressed: an overexpanded empire with many slightly unhappy cities. A Public Works in any of these cities does very little, since their unhappiness is not really that high, but since there are many cities, the 'empire size' happiness penalty is quite high.

I don't know the better way to address this. Is it adding a global effect so the penalty for empire size is reduced by the number of PW built in the empire? Is it yielding raw happiness to global in addition to the local effect? Is it making a city with Public Works not count for calculating the empire size penalty? Is it making the active PW work like if there were extra luxuries in that city?
Each proposed solution will bring new issues. Any of the above will make it possible to build much larger empires, which might not be desirable, unless PW is really a costly project that would delay the expansion long enough to make things balanced.

 

[FaarmAnimal]

My worry is that happiness will return to becoming overly complex and PW does not help.

The move towards local happiness was a breath of fresh air for many. I only wish it could go further. I unashamedly support a true integer based local happiness system. No rubber banding modifiers based on tech or anything else.

For years, it has been the bane of this mod in what was a genuine attempt to improve the poorly conceived global happiness of vanilla civ v, but it is a road to nowhere.

Happiness should never have become the be all and end all of limiting expansion. If you need to rubber band technology then give tech bonuses to technology - not happiness modifiers.

Global happiness should be changed to a generic 'stability' to limit expansion, calculated much as it is already. Yes, it will need balancing but it might work.

 

[Voker57]

Is distress intended to be an always looming threat to city happiness?

Every other need, there are lots of buildings and wonders to solve it, and it's usually not hard to keep it minimal.

Distress, it is spiraling out of control in every city unless you stop growth early and forget about ever enabling it. Still city will grow because growth restriction is not perfect. Buildings that stop distress are: barracks, armory... and that's basically it. -1 from constabulary is very late and by that time you're going to have -10 distress everywhere, so it's meaningless. Statue of Zeus is the only reasonably buildable wonder that reduces distress, while other modifiers have several.
Food/production increase does not do anything, I agree with somebody who said needs should be just detached from yields, since yields are meaningless compared to all these percentage increasers/decreasers.

 

[FaarmAnimal]

I I agree with somebody who said needs should be just detached from yields, since yields are meaningless compared to all these percentage increasers/decreasers.

This is exactly right.

Gazebo will claim that he likes the granularity of the current system.

What should be evident is that yields have value as a means to an end.

No other mechanic in the game is influenced in this way other than happiness.

Is this a worthwhile mechanic? a realistic mechanic? a fun mechanic?

Personally, I would scrap distress/poverty/illiteracy etc

It is the illusion of complexity, but there is no player decision to be made.

 

[BiteInTheMark]

What should be evident is that yields have value as a means to an end.

True. More yields or a greater efficiency in yield generation is a benefit you always want anyway. Gaining less unhappiness by achieving this goal is redundant, gaining more yields is already the benefit.

Is this a worthwhile mechanic? a realistic mechanic? a fun mechanic?

2. I would say realistic, yes. People are happier if they have jobs with good payment, enough healthy food, education and free time activities. But is it a fun mechanic? No, cause it's supposed to be a control mechanic, denying too powerful and easy ways to win the game.
I would really like to see a elementary discussion about the goals of the happiness system, cause it seems, people thinking different about it. (and only saying it should limit expansion is a very vague goal, it needs specific definition, when the happiness system works proper to do adjustments to it)

Personally, I would scrap distress/poverty/illiteracy etc

It is the illusion of complexity, but there is no player decision to be made.

3. The fact you are going to catch as much yields anyway, your statement is true. But then you have to answer the question, which system do you want to achieve the goal of controlling overexpansion and heavy warmongering.

 

[tu_79]

True. More yields or a greater efficiency in yield generation is a benefit you always want anyway. Gaining less unhappiness by achieving this goal is redundant, gaining more yields is already the benefit.


2. I would say realistic, yes. People are happier if they have jobs with good payment, enough healthy food, education and free time activities. But is it a fun mechanic? No, cause it's supposed to be a control mechanic, denying too powerful and easy ways to win the game.
I would really like to see a elementary discussion about the goals of the happiness system, cause it seems, people thinking different about it. (and only saying it should limit expansion is a very vague goal, it needs specific definition, when the happiness system works proper to do adjustments to it)



3. The fact you are going to catch as much yields anyway, your statement is true. But then you have to answer the question, which system do you want to achieve the goal of controlling overexpansion and heavy warmongering.

1. You compared Public Works to Workshops, concluding a workshop is more desirable because it also achieves happiness in the same scale as PW, while giving more yields. If so, the effect of PW needs to be twice or thrice bigger than a workshop, happiness wise, to be worthwhile. I can't opine since I haven't tested it, so I trust you when you say the effect is too low.

2. You did ask for a happiness purpose definition several times, but i'm uncertain about what you exactly mean. Could you give some examples of what you are expecting?
For me, happiness mechanics have two purposes.
First and foremost, it limits overpowered strategies such as growth, expansion and warring.
Secondarily, it punishes excessive focus, requiring the player to produce a little bit of everything. Call it development. Call it yields mix.

So there are 4 main factors adding to unhappiness (growth, expansion, warfare and underdevelopment) and when unhappiness is too high, bad things happen. So you can push any of those factors as long as the other ones are under control. And as the game progresses, the limits on what we are allowed to do become more flexible by the grace of new resources or buildings.

In this context, a public works is just a tool for those who crossed boundaries that allows them to recover faster.
Can this be done without the project? Well, yes, if we assume that every player that whenever faces happiness problems is going to build a public works, we might as well let it occur automatically.
For example, any time that a city has more unhappy people than half its size, it will riot. Every 5 turns, the city will gain a permanent -1 unhappiness, and while a city is rioting it can't build anything, except the consulate for captured cities. In practice, this means that excessive expansion will punish the players with a few production turns lost, but they will be in better position for overexpanding next time. Will you be able to time riots so they don't interfere with your strategy?
It might not be a good idea, though, for those island cities that will be unhappy for a while until they can get some buildings on it.

 

[FaarmAnimal]

One of the problems is that players don't have the information to know they are overexpanding because the hit comes when they finish researching a tech.

Rather than hacks like the PW, it makes more sense to disassociate happiness from technology.

 

[pineappledan]

This needs to move to to happiness discussion thread. This discussion is now overtaking this thread

 

[FaarmAnimal]

This discussion is now overtaking this thread. That's a good one lol.

 

[Gazebo]

This is exactly right.

Gazebo will claim that he likes the granularity of the current system.

What should be evident is that yields have value as a means to an end.

No other mechanic in the game is influenced in this way other than happiness.

Is this a worthwhile mechanic? a realistic mechanic? a fun mechanic?

Personally, I would scrap distress/poverty/illiteracy etc

It is the illusion of complexity, but there is no player decision to be made.

Don't put words in my mouth or try to predict what I'll say to make an argument. That's infuriating.

We're not overhauling the happiness system because some people don't like PW. That's absurd.

Next topic.

G

 

[FaarmAnimal]

I'm sorry Gazebo

I genuinely didn't mean offense. It was only that we have been here before and that is what you said before, I merely presumed that you were holding the same position.

My apologies,

 

[FaarmAnimal]

Looking forward to the next version.

How is it going?