pza
Prince
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2017
- Messages
- 365
It depends on what people want, and the kind of end product G and the community wants. Do we want a game where combating happiness is an overriding concern? Do we want happiness below 0 to be a normal thing, to the point where having positive happiness for more than half a game is bizarre?
If this were up for a vote, my vote would be 'No'.
- I want to play Civ against other civs, not against a happy face on the top ribbon
- Having unhappiness be the norm makes a lot of bonuses for golden age points (mastery, Korean UA, etc.) meaningless until you can get these mechanics under control. Why have sources of GAP when they just decay off?
- The state of the current happiness mechanic reminds me a lot of the discussion about WoW's rest mechanic, in that I think there is an issue with framing. Being constantly unhappy, all other things constant, is arguably bad game design. The game uses happy/unhappy to signal that a player is doing something wrong. Even if all the bonuses and maluses were kept the same, but the flip between happy/unhappy happened where -10 is now. Then frame the current % damage malus as a damage BOOST for happiness on empire. Mechanically, nothing would change, but it would cause a lot less mental anguish for players overall. Less stick, more carrot.
re that last point, I don't think that's what actually should be done, but it serves to demonstrate the point that the game currently is telegraphing "U SUCK" to the player for a generous portion of your play time. People, especially people coming from vanilla, might find that reason enough to give up on VP. People are used to having a mechanic limit growth, but there's virtually no point in any of my games where I havent been at least -4. That's the game telling me explicitly that my empire, as a whole, is below median, regardless of how I actually rank. And that blows.
For my part, I haven't played a single game past turn 150 on this current build because I have found the endless unhappiness harshing my buzz.
Really great breakdown of what happiness should be, and what the dangers are. @Gazebo please tell me you agree, and reaching for an optimal state here is one of the main targets of balancing.
Disclaimer:
I'm not saying everything is bad right now. I'm saying that he's right when he says that happiness is an indicator of success, that combatting unhappiness the whole game is not fun, and unexplainable, unforseeable amounts/spikes of unhappiness is absolute venom for new players, especially since the happiness system is quite different from vanilla and difficult to understand.