New Beta Version - October 10th (10/10)

[pineappledan]

On the newest version, you have the option to freeze swings by locking growth, but it does come at a cost. If you keep growing it still swings quite a bit.

I have to mange my happiness and I have to use the stop growth butten sometimes.

I rightfully felt punished for settling too quickly and not paying attention to limiting my growth

I have had a very hard time with happiness in the Industrial for a long time now, mainly because of too much growth. In this game I used stop-growth and wealth for long stretches in order to stay competitive, and eventually came out of it with level 2 tenets.

I asked him, if he had used the stop growth button and if he know about the saved median mechanic. His answer:

I just generally stop listening when someone suggests to stop city growth as a happiness fix. It so often comes off as "play worse; you lost because your cities weren't bad enough". Having large, powerful cities with lots of infrastructure is exactly what lost you the game.

If having an invisible, arbitrary target for what level of population is "too much", then that really hurts my enjoyment of the game. It's at odds with the idea of 4x, that I have no repercussions for getting as much //// as I can manage to get, but invisibly, and arbitrarily can lose you games because is so sensitive to your rate of production, that too much of it can explode your needs.

This is made worse by the existence of growth-oriented civs, and civs with food bonuses, which at this point I'm willing to write off as a noob trap. India's obviously the worst offender, but Aztec and Polynesia also come to mind. It's never explicitly communicated to the player that you need to only grow as little as possible to remain competitive on /// metrics, and that "growth for growth's sake", as some people here like to call it, is actively punished.

 

[BiteInTheMark]

@Txurce
Thank you for your answers.
I get some conclusions about this information.
1) Like the most other people, you also report the main happiness issues in the Industrial age. Independent of the source of it, we could increase the need reduction in front of that era, so the happiness didnt decrease that noticeable, and compensate it a in later era by decreased values.
2) It looks like AI nations are too easily afraid of other nations. I think, some numbers have to be fixed.
3) The way how people think about “good and normal" city size gets more and more scary. In my eyes are 15-25 citizen cities at end of game big villages. You need atleast 30 pop to work the most specialists and good tiles at same time.
Atleast it's a little proof Iam not that bad at city and empire management, if Iam able to hold a 50 capitol and 35 secondary city empire with 50+ happiness.

Edit: @pineappledan
I saw your comment now and have to say..... AMEN BROTHER.
Nearly all balancing of this mod comes from only watching AI only games. But someone forgot the human in it.

 

[Kim Dong Un]

How much more unhappiness from needs should you expect from jumping King to Emperor+? At King everything feels fine this version, but I can still get away with neglecting units and just focus on infrastructure because it's well, King...

On higher difficulties I don't see how any of you manage needs unless you really micro/stunt growth, which is obviously not ideal.

 

[Workerspam]

I just generally stop listening when someone suggests to stop city growth as a happiness fix. It so often comes off as "play worse; you lost because your cities weren't bad enough". Having large, powerful cities with lots of infrastructure is exactly what lost you the game.

If having an invisible, arbitrary target for what level of population is "too much", then that really hurts my enjoyment of the game. It's at odds with the idea of 4x, that I have no repercussions for getting as much //// as I can manage to get, but invisibly, and arbitrarily can lose you games because is so sensitive to your rate of production, that too much of it can explode your needs.

This is made worse by the existence of growth-oriented civs, and civs with food bonuses, which at this point I'm willing to write off as a noob trap. India's obviously the worst offender, but Aztec and Polynesia also come to mind. It's never explicitly communicated to the player that you need to only grow as little as possible to remain competitive on /// metrics, and that "growth for growth's sake", as some people here like to call it, is actively punished.

Have you played the latest patch? If not, please do. Because I have yet to experience any happiness issue that caused me to stop growth in my cities. And yes, that includes an India game where I took Mandirs and planted 5 pioneer cities as soon as I unlocked Banking to expressly push my happiness levels (they dipped to -7 at one point but never spiraled out of control and I never had to limit growth; by late Atomic I was over 60).

Right now I view this mechanic purely as a panic button to use if I ever do find myself painted into a happiness corner.

 

[tu_79]

Have you played the latest patch? If not, please do. Because I have yet to experience any happiness issue that caused me to stop growth in my cities. And yes, that includes an India game where I took Mandirs and planted 5 pioneer cities as soon as I unlocked Banking to expressly push my happiness levels (they dipped to -7 at one point but never spiraled out of control and I never had to limit growth; by late Atomic I was over 60).

Right now I view this mechanic purely as a panic button to use if I ever do find myself painted into a happiness corner.

I could say that I had not unhappiness problems before 10/10 version. This is something that happened to others, yet the complaints from newbies were recurrent.
So what we need is reports from unexperienced gamers, or intentionally bad play from veterans.

 

[Gazebo]

Nearly all balancing of this mod comes from only watching AI only games. But someone forgot the human in it.

That’s absurd. You are a complete fool if you truly believe this. The hundreds of threads on balance on this subforum are a testament against your willful ignorance.

G

 

[Txurce]

Have you played the latest patch? If not, please do. Because I have yet to experience any happiness issue that caused me to stop growth in my cities. And yes, that includes an India game where I took Mandirs and planted 5 pioneer cities as soon as I unlocked Banking to expressly push my happiness levels (they dipped to -7 at one point but never spiraled out of control and I never had to limit growth; by late Atomic I was over 60).

Right now I view this mechanic purely as a panic button to use if I ever do find myself painted into a happiness corner.

Something that's confusing about this statement is that it sounds like you're saying "I can't create serious unhappiness even when I try." In my game everything was fine as well by Atomic, but I have significantly more happiness problems than you. It would be great if you would lay out how you preclude unhappiness. I don't think it's as simple as being competitive in techs and SPs, having most of the the right buildings, or reducing the number of specialists. One odd aspect of happiness in my games is that a city may list distress as the #1 malus, but switching to Wealth lowers unhappiness.

EDIT RE VASSALAGE: I just started a game in which India became afraid after I built up a large navy and extracted tribute from nearby CS. Later, I liberated two of its cities from Denmark. India promptly demanded its independence. The point here being that the vassalage equation is opaque, but doesn't require obvious adjustment in one direction or another.

 

[BiteInTheMark]

That’s absurd. You are a complete fool if you truly believe this. The hundreds of threads on balance on this subforum are a testament against your willful ignorance.

G

But it’s also important to remember that most of my independent balance decisions stem from AI observation.

How's the new 'staggered' happiness on city growth treating everyone? The AI seems to like it.

• Tweaked values slightly to increase 'curve' and potency of unhappiness late-game

2) A consequence of this (and possibly the suppression of AI growth bonuses) is that late game unhappiness was too low (at least according to Gazebo AI test) since city grow much slower., so the values were tweaked to increase unhappiness in late game back to a "reasonnable level"

 

[matlajs]

Imo these happiness dropps starting in late game seem to me bit harsh. It is like looking for powerfull combo, which helps me handle happines before i am able to culture-rush some more powerfull happiness policies-tenets.I believe, that freedom does this best of all, especially specialist. That pressure to build everything everywhere, while maintanance costs are just crazy and in the end it still doesn't help IS frustrating. Order especially is a lackluster in regard of happiness upkeep .

I can't remember a game from latest ones i have played, where i didn't have happiness problems for a while. Cities on auto-management just love to work specialist, while it itself raise unhappiness from urbanization and in the same time those yields are by far not enough to erode unhappiness of its kind, while the others raise immensely up. It is like having a completely happy empire , where all the cities have just one unhappiness here and there from this and that and suddenly, after 1-2 more techs are researched, everyone is unhappy in every possible way, except maybe 1-2 yields in which i am intterest most.

The funniest thing,is, that those dropps are best to solve by setting all the cities on growth. At least with Fealty + imperialism, where i had enough yields by not working specialists and not getting urbanization problems.

 

[John.B.C]

Have you played the latest patch? If not, please do. Because I have yet to experience any happiness issue that caused me to stop growth in my cities. And yes, that includes an India game where I took Mandirs and planted 5 pioneer cities as soon as I unlocked Banking to expressly push my happiness levels (they dipped to -7 at one point but never spiraled out of control and I never had to limit growth; by late Atomic I was over 60).

Right now I view this mechanic purely as a panic button to use if I ever do find myself painted into a happiness corner.

I share your experience with India, last game a few turns with limit to growth, that was it (just to get control of the situation). And my Capital reached +60 pop. India was babybooming and as a nation she was very happy about it! Me thinks @pineappledan is pulling a straw man here.

 

[BiteInTheMark]

I share your experience with India, last game a few turns with limit to growth, that was it (just to get control of the situation). And my Capital reached +60 pop. India was babybooming and as a nation she was very happy about it! Me thinks @pineappledan is pulling a straw man here.

A strong capitol can deal with the population modificator, especially if there are some capitol based benefits.
How big were your secondary cities?

 

[John.B.C]

Here's my four cities:

My other cities weren't extremely large due to quite poor land.

 

[pineappledan]

Me thinks @pineappledan is pulling a straw man here

As an alternative to avoiding growth, perhaps we could look at luxuries as a different short term option for solving unhappiness issues? I think I’d be happier with the system if I felt like luxuries were pulling more weight. What level of happiness per luxury do people think would be fair?

 

[ofmiciv5]

with the recent addition/revision on the top panel regarding happiness, it adds more congestion on the top panel for players like me who only have a max of 1366 reso.

can you please help me with this? can you give me the code and where to insert it that will totally make the resources invisible throughout the game on the top panel? later on the panel will be a mess by modern era. thanks.

 

[CrazyG]

I'll put an idea out there. What if we rebalance luxury scaling with the specific goal that luxuries are worth about 3 each by industrial era, because industrial era seems to be where all problems on this patch and basically all others occur.

I just generally stop listening when someone suggests to stop city growth as a happiness fix. It so often comes off as "play worse; you lost because your cities weren't bad enough". Having large, powerful cities with lots of infrastructure is exactly what lost you the game.

I agree, but I think its an okay option as a panic button (though you should try to avoid clicking avoid growth and instead just work different tiles and more specialists)

The happiness swings I mentioned hapened in one turn. There were never two big swings in a row. It wasn't always after researching a tech — losing trade luxuries had a much more obvious effect.

This is a really big improvement, unless you somehow manage to get a large number of cities to grow two turns in a row swings will have far bigger gaps under the new system.

 

[CCruise]

I share your experience with India, last game a few turns with limit to growth, that was it (just to get control of the situation). And my Capital reached +60 pop. India was babybooming and as a nation she was very happy about it! Me thinks @pineappledan is pulling a straw man here.

Dude are you kidding? You are playing with extra luxuries not included in VP! That's not how things get balanced around here! Bad John.


@Gazebo Please listen to @pineappledan he summed it up better than anyone else. (@ top of page 13)

 

[Aristos]

thats so unnecessary.... seriously. like if there was realism when fighting gattling gun vs pikemen. and it nerfs melee units.

this is a made up problem and i'm seriously concerned about why this community is discussing realism of arbitrary game mechanics, instead of what really are the big hitters, like the new player experience, the current state of happiness, balance, you name it. but this mimimi is really disproportionate. rant over.

What is "so unnecessary" is your rant over a proposal that I did just because I saw some people questioning the system... I am fine either way. Who do you think you are? You don't know me, why are you assuming things you don't know about me? Mimimi? Do you have trouble reading and understanding that, in any case, I was trying to propose something to maybe help other people and not myself?

 

[John.B.C]

Dude are you kidding? You are playing with extra luxuries not included in VP! That's not how things get balanced around here! Bad John.


@Gazebo Please listen to @pineappledan he summed it up better than anyone else. (@ top of page 13)

I use them for diversity, and not because they give me a "bonus" or something "extra" (like playing communitas with "legendary start" for instance - would that be balanced?). I consider the mod to be almost as game changing as an UI-mod, perhaps with a few exceptions. The game is actually played on "continents", with resources set to "standard". And as this India game, and my other games [this far on 10-10] has shown me: pineappledan didn't sum it up at all; he pulled a straw man,which you seem to believe in too. Sure I have to keep an eye on my happiness, but in no way has it ever been spiraling out of control down from 40 to -20 to -60 etc.I can't see that ever happening to me. It can be a challange from time to time (in a good and fun way), but not in the nightmarish way as it was back in, was it maybe may/june somewhere?, when the game was almost unplayable due to some "typo" [?] by Gazebo.

I'm kind of puzzled though, since I think the happiness system works just fine right now. Perhaps a tweak here and there could be done, but, overall, I think the game play is pretty stable. But by reading some posts on this forum, it almost feels like some people are still playing the nightmarish version I left behind 4-5 months ago.

 

[pza]

What is "so unnecessary" is your rant over a proposal that I did just because I saw some people questioning the system... I am fine either way. Who do you think you are? You don't know me, why are you assuming things you don't know about me? Mimimi? Do you have trouble reading and understanding that, in any case, I was trying to propose something to maybe help other people and not myself?

the first part of my post was referring to your proposal. therefore i left out a blank line and then ranted about the actual "problem". please do not try to read personal attacks into my posts.

 

[Gazebo]

So you are a fool, then. I don't use that word lightly: you are selectively ignoring the massive amount of feedback that makes its way from the users of the mod back to me. This is a projection of your own callous narcissism, plain and simple. I've always been clear in stating that every new version of the mod is released for the express purpose of eliciting feedback. As I said: if you don't see this, then there's really no reason for you to be here.

Anyways, speaking with everyone else, @ilteroi has been hard at work creating a 'smoothed' luxury happiness scaler that, ideally, will help with the industrial slump many players feel. Once we find a nice number for that I believe that it will resolve @pineappledan 's concern.

Now, on to that: the industrial slump that players notice is not a bug, and it is not intrinsically a bad thing. Having an era in which the happiness crunch hits is a powerful reminder of the 'downside' of the industrial explosion of urbanization. It is a feature of human history barely featured in Civ, and I'd be sad to see it go.

G