It also makes it sound personal.
It is personal. A friend of him was rejected by the game when he faced that problem. I know how difficult is to convince friends to play VP, the last thing we need is the game not behaving for them.
It was turn 311 according to the log. As an experiment, we could give that save to everyone here and see how quickly they manage to fix it.
Yes, that could give us the minimum number of turns needed for fixing, but since noobs don't really know how to address things, they will need even more turns.
Here's the github post which has the autosave. In the original save, you'll notice a drastic drop the turn of starting the save...
Link?
I'm also interested in some facts. How many villages have your cities, how many with passing trade routes? How many farms per city? Great People Improvements? How many buildings are available for building in your cities? What are the typical unhappiness values in your cities (2 distress, 4 poverty, 3 boredom)? And finally, what steps would you take to get out of that situation?
An issue I run into is if I already have a stock exchange, I can never reduce poverty again.
Actually there are ways to increase gold production. Statecraft policies, Industrialism policies, in case you didn't take them already, the Statue of Liberty, moving trade routes, planting a Town, replacing farms with villages, sfsf. But if you already did that and still suffers poverty, then I agree you have to rely on your global happiness, because that poverty will remain in the city.
If, however, you're at 20 happiness and the next turn your 'real' happiness drops to -36, but the buffer only drops you to 17 happiness, you will a.) get an alert that your happiness is headed for negative, and will get be there in x turns at this rate b.) have x turns to start fighting the problem while your empire continues to produce science, gold, culture etc. as normal
Now think like a mischieving son (or daughter). He'll see the happiness drop and think, oh, something happened, but I don't know what. He'll do nothing. At 0 happinness he will start thinking, oh, something is truly happening, but things are still ok, so let's keep doing things as usual (aka growing cities to the point of impossible recovery). At -20 happiness the empire is on revolt, its cities have 4 or 5 more population each one, there are 6-8 buildings that are missing for keeping things under control, territory is full of farms and empty of other improvements. All this while you fight war with one or two other major civs and your workers are busy fixing pillaged farms from the recurrent event.
In the next game, he will learn that waiting until -20 happiness is waiting too long, so probably he will try to address things starting from 0 happiness, if ever. But the reaction still comes 20 turns late (assuming he was at 20 happiness to begin with).
[Related off-topic: In the time when Spain was leading in wind turbine plants, electricity productors wanted to raise the prices. The government pacted with the producers a buffer, so prices would stay the same for a few years, in the hope of a drop in the cost of the technology. The costs kept rising, but the consumers received the wrong signal, so they (we) consumed. Five years passed, then the producers added to the electricity tariff the excess of the tariff of the past years, interests included. Now we are paying the relativelly highest electricity tariff in Europe, only second to Malta, an energetically isolated island.]
You see, unhappiness is not a bad thing if it does not bad things to you. Unhappiness must hurt. But it must hurt in such a way that allows for recovery. A soft punishment in time.
Look at the other buffers in the game.
-War weariness has a period of grace, then it starts punishing the player that has high loses, gradually. War weariness take a while to recover, but the action you make is immediate: stop fighting, sue for peace, raze cities if the other civ does not want to comply. Meanwhile, the penalty affects the ability of the player to wage war.
-Research stopping without gold is not exactly a buffer mechanic. It is a soft punishment for getting out of gold, before the hard punishments start to hit, like losing random units.
So, what the players really need is to feel a soft punishment in time, so they start reacting (seeing your happiness drop a few points is not alarming, it happens all the time), and this penalty must help combat the source of the problem. If you insist on depleting GAP, don't let it happen over -10 happiness. Unhappiness also reduces growth, so it also limits the reach of the unhappiness spiral, but it happens globally and late, in my opinion.
Having unhappy people consume more food (growth, if you prefer) in every city solves all the points above. You feel the problem in advance, as the cities that are more unhappy are not growing properly. There's a punishment (slow growth) that at the same time prevents things getting out of control in time (it does not wait for the global unhappiness). City manager has proven to handle happiness properly, the problem usually comes from players not letting AI control workers so they end up with very few villages and tons of farms. If a player obsessed with growth notice that the citiy with tons of farms is not growing as expected, he will check and see that there are happiness problems in that city.
