New Beta Version - March 14th (3-14)
- Thread starter Gazebo
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So I decided to try this new system again with the latest update... I played until reniassance until i grew too bored of this new happiness system and reinstalled the old 2-17-3 patch once again.
Here's a few thoughts on my experience:
-The tradition opener seemed fixed with the +2 happiness added to it. When unhappiness was going down to 67% due to growth, it jumped right back up when I picked my first policy. So far so good. But then as others has experienced, did I earlier not foresee the problem of Spain, but can now easily imagine how Spain and fast growing civs, not going tradition, might end up with spawning rebells at their doorstep.
-I'm not going to comment on happiness as stable or not since I didn't consider it hard, an issue, or something that was bothering me before this change to the system - other than that I throughough my game didn't see it drop below 83%, whatever that means (earlier it meant either negative or positive faith, gold, culture, food and science). Oh, it was this one time, when capturing a city-state it temporarily dropped down from 98 to 76 , but it quickly went back up again. I had no problem working whatever specialist I wanted to work.
-Early economy feels harder due to 2 gold per luxury (in rare cases 3 is offered). I even found myself going into the negative even though I wasn't building units for warefare. This getting 2 gold/turn feels very dull compared to my current "2-17-3" game, when I quite early managed to strike a deal of 6 gold/turn (as a America I need gold!)
-Fun factor descreased due to no more "shop around", even though this way of trading always felt annoyingly clumsy due to the fact that you have to click through every AI leader to see what they'll offer for your "goods" [mod request if possible]. 2 gold/luxury feels less immersive and fun. I also couldn't make sense of the UI on what surplus of luxuries was in my current possession (they are not shown, as before, due to having no value?). I found myself repeatedly contacting other AI leaders just to see what I had available for trade.
Also, as I have expressed before, trading luxuries feels dumbed down, since I don't know "why" any party would want to trade something that simply doesn't matter at all (besides WLTKD's, and in rare cases, city-state quests). Earlier it meant, that I could dig myself out of a whole, or even getting those few extra % to get +10% of everything, which was a fun factor. Yes, even getting out of a miserable state of affairs >-10, could be the cause of great satisfaction ("I did it!"). And not only so - the difference between -10 and +10 was huge concerning all those variables connected to it.
Happiness before = faith, culture, gold, food and science.
Happiness today = food
I had -30% growth in some cities, but since fixing growth is just uninteresting compared to how it was before when fixing happiness was equal to fixing my "economy" making an comeback or creating an edge with (faith, culture, gold, science and food) - I couldn't be less bothered about building buildngs to deal with local problems - I acctually didn't care at all. But as I understand it, this is kind of the point with the new system, that I can now focus on other stuff and no longer do I have to bother about this? Back in 2016-17 I even used to move "working tiles" around to gain a few points of happiness. The difference of working 1 culture, science, gold compared to not working it, could sometimes be the difference of 1 happiness. This kind of micromanaging of my citites was very pleasurable and it gave a great depth to the game. The joy of reading the UI, seeing what a city "produce, needs, new need" isn't there anymore and hasn't been for a while. For those who use governors and automate their workers must be perfectly happy with were we are at today.
-allying city-states not as important anymore, and the fun doing this has decreased significantly. I found myself not bothering at all about building diplomatic units. Earlier it could be a huge thing allying a city-state having two unique luxuries currently not available to you (gaining, faith, culture, gold etc. through more happiness). This even more so when it comes to merchantile city-states, they are now completely worthless. The value of befriending a merchantile city-state in early game is today equal to +1 gold/turn.
But I got the idea this morning, that in the future I can maybe install enginseer's city state mod to some what solve this problem for myself - great!
-resources like salt, and all others with a monopoly bonus of giving a surplus to food, feels devaluated and not as interesting anymore. Even wonders such as Tempel of Artemis get a touch of this decreased fun factor too since my capital in this game grew quite nicely with an general happiness bonus of 35-50%. India is a civ that I can't see myself play at all for the same reason. Perhaps this is connected to the fact that I went tradition?
-Citadels has been reduced to a mere strategical defensive building. I can't put into words, the many thoughtprocesses that went through my mind, that no longer is required because I simply don't need to think about expanding my territory using citadels onto valueable resources currently unavialble to me. It's like when my mind tries to do it, I halt and realize, "don't bother they don't mean anything anyways".
I should probably wrap this up somehow. I can relate to the "smooth sailing experience" of others, not having to bother at all about happiness. This felt quite nice some how, but the experience also feels alot more "shallow" compared to how it used to work when happiness was tied to one's entire economy and when luxuries acctually was worth something. I admire the effort behind this and I greatly appreciate it, but I will sit by the sidelines from now on, ready to jump back in if trade & luxuries are ever to be made interesting again.
I appreciate the post, but I’ll admit, you might be the only person I’ve encountered who seemed to enjoy the tedious micro of the other happiness system. Also, while the new system isn’t perfect, you are looking at the old system with rose-tinted glasses. The random happiness swings, the spirals, the arcane UI, the learning curve barrier to entry...all of those things were major problems.
You’re also viewing the new system as complete - this is a beta. Rather than waxing poetic about what was, perhaps focus on how we can enhance what is?
G
tu_79
Deity
Where can I find how much each luxury in my empire is affecting my cities happiness? Or, how can I know whether a new purchased luxury will have an effect on the secondary cities?
Edit. I'm just getting all luxuries I can get, as always, but I'm not sure what it is actually doing now.
Edit. I used to look here, but the info is not complete:
Edit. Could be this? 'Empire Luxuries/Monopolies', 2 happiness in medieval in my capital for all my luxes? 2 in Barcelona, which has more than 10 people, and 1 in the rest.
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Txurce
Deity
What if we start by deciding how much local and/or global happiness each luxury should give — what feels right, out of context — and then consider how to depress the resultant excess happiness with growth penalties?
So under the old system, a luxury granting 2 happiness was pretty good. When it was changed to 1, it was on the edge of being unacceptably low....depending on who you talked to.
I think those are the lower limits to work with. Whatever that equivalency would be in the new system. I can say we are definitely under that limit in the current iteration, I do consider luxury trading "worthless" at the moment.
Omen of Peace
Prince
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To reinforce what has been already said:
- happiness penalties shouldn't impact worker / trade unit / work boat production. I have no issue with it impacting military units and settlers. For diplomatic units and archeologists, this could go either way for me since these are just nice-to-have.
- luxuries should be more impactful in terms of happiness, and in terms of trading with other civ (as has been mentioned, they tend to trade for ~2 gp nowadays vs a much bigger interval before 1 - 10 gp/turn). I would say the first 3-5 luxuries should grant at least +2 happiness; after that, I could imagine that diminishing returns are necessary in some cases. (I haven't delved into the formulas that were used over time - the old one, the one proposed by ilteroi, the current one, so I can't be more specific.)
For reference, I play on Small and Standard maps, so I'm not familiar with Large/Huge constraints.
- happiness penalties shouldn't impact worker / trade unit / work boat production. I have no issue with it impacting military units and settlers. For diplomatic units and archeologists, this could go either way for me since these are just nice-to-have.
- luxuries should be more impactful in terms of happiness, and in terms of trading with other civ (as has been mentioned, they tend to trade for ~2 gp nowadays vs a much bigger interval before 1 - 10 gp/turn). I would say the first 3-5 luxuries should grant at least +2 happiness; after that, I could imagine that diminishing returns are necessary in some cases. (I haven't delved into the formulas that were used over time - the old one, the one proposed by ilteroi, the current one, so I can't be more specific.)
For reference, I play on Small and Standard maps, so I'm not familiar with Large/Huge constraints.
HorseshoeHermit
20% accurate as usual, Morty
Prefer to that if luxuries have a constant value of happiness, but happiness gives diminishing returns.
pineappledan
Deity
Perhaps if the local luxury bonus was reduced to .5
for every local resource, we could make room for unique luxuries to have more of a global effect. Currently, there is too much happiness bloat for local and global luxuries to both be effective.
for every local resource, we could make room for unique luxuries to have more of a global effect. Currently, there is too much happiness bloat for local and global luxuries to both be effective.
tu_79
Deity
I proposed it (this is the advantage of proposing thousand things, sometimes one of those hits the nail). It was 1 flat happiness, plus 1-3 happiness depending on average city size (total population / number of cities) for each different luxury. The novelty was to sum up first the total number of luxuries, so decimals were not lost. (We were trying to reduce swinginess at the time). Ilteroi added a degradating scaler, so every new luxury were reduced to 95% of its possible value.
G has adapted this somewhat, but cities need to reach sizes of tenths (10-20-30) to notice any difference, apparently.
Let's say we replace the 1 flat happiness with the local happiness bonus (which is what I think G has done), and the variable bonus 1-3 still depends on the size of the city.
It should be
NumLuxuries * min(3, AverageCitySize / 10),
where NumLuxuries is the number of different luxuries available at the empire, and AverageCitySize is the mean city size of the player. For example, if we had 4 luxuries available, 6 cities and a total population of 30, it would give
4 * min(3, 5 / 10) = 2 happiness.
But I fear that currently, min(3, 5/10) is giving 0, since it returns an integer. To avoid such rounding, this could be calculated as this:
min(3 * NumLuxuries, NumLuxuries * AverageCitySize / 10)
Am I mistaken?
Edit. Actually,
min(3 * NumLuxuries, NumLuxuries * AverageCitySize / 10) / NumCities,
since the bonus must be distributed among all cities.
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Perhaps if the local luxury bonus was reduced to .5
Can't calculate .5 as a value, since happiness isn't managed as a decimal.
Close; replace AverageCitySize with the actual size of the city.
I'm on the fence about this. I agree that empire resources aren't as useful as before, and trading too. I actually really like the 'distributed modulo' that was introduced earlier, it would be easier to balance if the entire remainder of empire division didn't go to the capital. It would allow me to push resources back to the empire level as well, which would be nice.
G
tu_79
Deity
I think we all liked the idea of distributed empire happiness. Should it be upwards (from the newest city to the older ones) or downwards? This is, to the capital and below, or sparing the capital?
Another thing to decide on luxuries. Should they scale locally (CitySize) or globally (AverageCitySize)? Scaling globally, the smaller cities (those that are usually the worst) would get an edge.
BiteInTheMark
Deity
No, he isnt. I think the most people try to fix the next system into the direction they wish it would be and hope it will get better. Nearly anything is better than the broken national-median system in the previous version, but the version before with global median was working mostly as intended.
Everything you say negative about the previous happiness system is also true for this new version. The system goes crazy if you wait too long with new cities, cause a single citizen can have huge effects to percentual global happiness. Spirals can be created by this too, if rebels appear, plunder luxuries or your settler productions is slowed down extremly to solve it. The UI is arcane too, nobody knows what one more luxury will bring. And now people are talking about more changes to solve little problems, making it even more complicated than the previous versions and less understandable for new players.
I thought a change to city happiness level might make things easier, but the changes youve made make it even more complicated and need more mechanics to let the system work.Cities have local happiness and local unhapiness which influences the city directly, but also global happiness which gets distributed weirdly on the cities, and the final result is again transported to a global happiness comparison which influences the cities again locally. Happiness from luxuries is pure magic. The advantage from luxuries is reversed from good for tall to very good for wide. The more cities you have the more happiness generates one luxury, additional to the more luxuries you gain by beeing wide. While we had former a smooth distribution of modifiers from -30 to +10, we have now steps with huge effect differences, and everything can change from one turn to another.
I dont see a reason why this system should be superior to the previous one. I appreciate your work you invested into the mod and the happiness sytem. But the changes are going again into the completly wrong direction into more mechanics, more complexity, less transparency. The saved median mechanic and the unhappiness prediction UI were already a wrong investment (my opinion), even they look good on paper, they only try to mitigate the effects of a problem, but not to solve the problem themselves. (as example what I mean)
If half the system is local happiness and other half is empire happiness, why even the try to go down to a local happiness to simlify it?
I'm not as critical of the new system, but I do think it's a serious problem that it's very unclear how much additional happiness a new lux will bring (or 2, 3, 4 etc), if any. Even if the function that controls the luxes works well to smooth the AI patterns, its also important that it's something a human can understand and respond to. Nothing feels worse than trading 2gpt for a lux trying to dig out of a happy pit and getting no happiness for it.
Even a tooltip indicating what happy the next lux will bring isn't totally sufficient, since if it brings 0 you wouldn't know if you needed 2 or 3 or how many more luxes.
Txurce
Deity
This is being addressed.
"I think the most people try to fix the next system into the direction they wish it would be and hope it will get better"
Once again, your compelling arguments take the day.
"but the version before with global median was working mostly as intended."
No. No, it wasn't - you of all people should know this, you commented on nearly every thread and post that complained about the prior system and said something along the lines of "see? the system is broken!" But hey, keep trying to play both sides.
"The UI is arcane too, nobody knows what one more luxury will bring. "
It's really not. There's one issue - empire wide luxuries - that is in flux. Everything else is far easier to understand.
"Happiness from luxuries is pure magic."
Or math. Either way.
"While we had former a smooth distribution of modifiers from -30 to +10, we have now steps with huge effect differences, and everything can change from one turn to another."
Smooth yes, but it was never engaged in a 'smooth' way - swings of 10-20 were common, which mean a swing of 20% national yields (if it happened to go from +10 to -10, which was not uncommon). And yes, the current system has 'steps,' but the buffer between them is quite wide, so it allows for more 'play' if there is a swing.
"But the changes are going again into the completly wrong direction into more mechanics, more complexity, less transparency."
Everything you said is untrue. The new system is less complex (all happiness/unhappiness calculations are localized), has fewer moving parts (no more median math, as buildings are integer unhappiness modifiers now), and more transparent (every modifier and function is exposed to the player).
I realize you don't want to like this, and I realize that disliking things is a boost to your ego, but - once again - you are flat-out wrong. Not just subjectively wrong, but objectively wrong. I would appreciate your opinion more if it were grounded in anything other than abject obstinance and antagonism.
G
tu_79
Deity
Guys, this is an experimental beta. We're learning by doing. It is by no means complete, so let's try to fix it.
I don't think that letting everything be local is a good idea. What would be trading a luxury good for in this case? Or where should bonuses from city states apply?
The more immediate fix I can think of is not punishing the production of civil units while unhappy.
Another fix could be more readability for the effects of growing. You know, currently I'm reading 4 happiness in the city, and there are 6 sources of happiness, but since the city has only 4 citizens, only 4 happiness apply. This would allow my city to grow to 6 pops without worrying about unhappy people, but I don't see this clearly from outside the happiness tooltip.
I don't think that letting everything be local is a good idea. What would be trading a luxury good for in this case? Or where should bonuses from city states apply?
The more immediate fix I can think of is not punishing the production of civil units while unhappy.
Another fix could be more readability for the effects of growing. You know, currently I'm reading 4 happiness in the city, and there are 6 sources of happiness, but since the city has only 4 citizens, only 4 happiness apply. This would allow my city to grow to 6 pops without worrying about unhappy people, but I don't see this clearly from outside the happiness tooltip.
Txurce
Deity
Given your objection to everything being local, I again tried to think simply.
Let's say that making all luxuries global is ideal out of context, since it addresses the benefits of trade and doesn't penalize cities without a luxury. In this scenario x population requires 1 luxury to stay happy, and so on. A deficit slows or stops growth, and a surfeit increases it. The increase is consequently self-regulating. A decrease can be addressed by expansion, trade, Wonders, policies, etc. Buildings wouldn't help, since they're local.
Local unhappiness could also come from population, but from the era as well. With each succeeding era, new buildings, techs allowing tiles to be developed, and other Wonders and policies would all alleviate local unhappiness. It effectively comes down to an equation that incorporates size and era. So, for example, a smaller city may not need a med lab or museum to stay happy. (This approach would penalize low-hammer cities, but I think that's okay. They shouldn't be as successful, but the deficit can still be addressed by either importing hammers via trade routes, or rushing improvements with gold.)
One thing I'm cutting out is the 'pop scaler' for resources. It's not an interesting mechanic, and it makes the whole system arcane. Better to deal in absolute values.
G
tu_79
Deity
Easier said than done. I'm not sure if I understand what you want to say, either.
Is it going back to flat happiness per luxury, like in vanilla? Each different luxury you gain for the empire will make 4 people happy (+4 global happiness actually). Getting a happiness surplus makes the empire more efficient, so cities grow faster. Kind of what you said.
Or is it something local like +1 happiness in every city per each different luxury in the empire?
Because this one would scale horribly. Bigger maps, with more luxuries, would allow for taller cities, breaking any balance we might attempt.
Isn't it how it works now? Techs are used instead of eras, but the effect is the same (even better).
Take a look at your cities. You get something like +6 happiness from many sources, and then 8 unhappiness from your pop needs, in a 10 pop city. So you end up with 2 unhappy people. Should you increase this city to 16 pop, unhappiness would rise (needs take city size into account) but happiness would not, so your city would gain 6 extra unhappy people, requiring more happiness buildings.
I don't get it. Which scaler? From needs? From local happiness source? From global luxuries?
If it is global luxuries, think how this would affect different map sizes.
Txurce
Deity
1. Right the first time — flat global happiness per luxury.
2. Yes, that's kinda how it works now.
I'm essentially saying put the two of them together.
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