New Version - June 12th (6-12)

I haven't done anything to my happiness and frankly I've found happiness to be far too easy this patch. I'm not paying any attention at all to what my cities are doing, they've grown uninhibited almost all game with nearly constant WLTKD in a fairly wide empire and 10ish of my cities have over 20 pop and close to 100% happiness, with a handful of ~15 pop puppets I'm looking to possibly annex. I'm working and getting quite a lot of specialists too. This is all in late industrial currently but since roughly medieval I've ignored happiness entirely with no issues.

The one problem I have with the current unhappiness mechanic is that the "needs on growth" is often wrong, and sometimes by a lot. I'll have a city tell me it will get a bunch of unhappiness on growth only to get happier when it finally pops. It is pretty annoying that you either have to do a lot of manual math to figure out if growth is actually fine or not.

 

As I see it, the more cities you have, the more population growth has to be controlled. This one is not unplayable. At least in my game I only had to slow down a little bit during Classical (where a prolonged war caused me problems) and the rest was smooth.

 

More like the more cities you have, the faster you reach a point where growth has to be stopped everywhere permanently and any acquired occupied city is 100% unhappy. In my game the population growth meant that I had to stop growth everywhere permanently as I reached 10+ cities regardless of infrastructure, and acquiring anything more was impossible without unhappiness. This is awful, unfun and game-ruining. All the AIs had a -10% CS penalty (so 75%-50% unhappiness) in every post ancient-era war I can remember and some did that even in ancient era, and many had a -20% penalty later on. From what I remember, any "wide" AI had -20% CS, except most AIs stood way smaller than they did before so they were not as wide compared to before - they didn't want to expand out of unhappiness, I assume, and as a consequence most of the land was unsettled.

 

Quick question on "public works"...do they show up in the list of buildings a city has built? If not, how do you know how many times one city has built them? Are the effects permanent or do they last only during the building phase of the "public works"?

 

They are permanent, not sure about the rest.

 

It's extremely hard to reconcile the differences in these two posts, especially if Bwawb's AI civs are roughly as happy as he is.

 

Could it be a difficulty issue? Some details of the game setups and civs would be helpful.

 

Perhaps city placement is different. Maybe one player had simply better terrain. I find it much more difficult to maintain happiness in cities with a lot of food and little gold-producing resources for example.

Also different policies. I was barely scraping by going Authority into Fealty with warring. I imagine if I had tried to go this wide with the other trees, then I may have been in more trouble.

 

I'm on Emperor, pretty standard settings, Continents++, playing Byzantium w/ 4UC, and for context I'm 15 city warmongering with about 10 annexed and 5 puppets IIRC, I'll have to check all the details. All but 1 of the nonpuppets are 20+ pop and due to Byzantium's 4UC Hippodrome I get a ton of free WLTKD so they've been growing pretty much nonstop. I'm pretty sure I have like 40 excess happiness or something ludicrous, I remember my capital having 24 happiness and maybe 5.

Other civs in the game haven't notably struggled (with happiness, my 4 vassals struggled with something else), and Korea as an example is doing incredibly well so they can't be having many issues with working specialists. I kinda doubt it is any incredible starting position due to that and the fact that I've got cities from 5 different starting positions on my continent, see the before mentioned warmongering.

I'll post a pic when I get home but if anything my cities have grown far taller than I ever expect to see as a wide warmonger.

 

It could be related to the 4UC mod.

 

4UC Byzantium gets +2 gold and +2 culture to each city, gives free WLTKDs which increase my growth far more than vanilla, and some bonuses to WLTKD. Arguably I should be facing more unhappiness issues since my cities are growing much faster than they would as vanilla Byz but with minor additional yields outside of WLTKDs.

4UC mostly just artificially speeds the game up due to yield inflation, but my growth is being inflated a lot more than anything else.

 

Regardless, using it as a comparative example of how the current patch is working isn't very useful.

 

I think, early game civs suffer a lot in this patch, AI and for the player.

I tried playing Carthage, Indonesia, Celts, Persia, and I can't exploit their strength at the ancient-classical era, either leaving me with low-pop five cities, or a weird spiral of unhappiness when I conquered a nearby civ with their early UU. I somehow managed to return at 100% happiness by trading lux, allying mercantile city-states etc, but it is not enough, I can't work even 1 specialist on my cities.

I play on immortal, I think the AI are suffering from unhappiness, I've seen Progress Assyria with 10+ pop cities on classical era, with only three cities (which is weird), and is suffering from unhappiness. Never seen Rome having four cities and playing peacefully. I can see lots of settlers on the AI's capital, which is either they don't have enough space to settle, or they were suffering from unhappiness.

 

I also play on Emperor, Epic, 4UC, and my experience is completely different. Everyone was unhappy and pretty much no AI wanted to expand much more than 4-6 cities, and if they got to 6 - perma -10%/20%. In fact, even smaller AIs had that penalty, so no wonder they left even great terrain with great features untouched.

This is exactly what I saw and what happened in my games before I messed with happiness never to return to the "vanilla", AI wasn't truly expanding, left huge amount of land unsettled and was constantly unhappy anyway.

 

Why does this keep happening? Certain civs are getting tiles and tiles like this making it so they can't be stopped. Some have 20 thousand hammers and when they declare war on you they just keep popping out unit after unit and you can't do any damage to the city because they put it in defense mode. I even went into IGE and had to nuke one city about 50 times just to get its life to half.
Every game this happens.

 

It's usually a bad install or a conflict with another mod.

Advice is typically to reinstall a without any other mods other than VP.

 

I'll keep track of my new game whenever I start it up. I actually lost that insane Byzantium game because by the time I was able to even look at going to take over Korea they were about 20 techs ahead of me, and I didn't feel like even attempting to try an invasion against units 2 tiers higher than mine. But they definitely weren't having issues working specialists considering they managed to snowball like that while being next to Songhai.

I'll play something a bit different than normal to see if my experience is just because I'm extremely used to playing warmongers. I'm wondering if playing on Epic is a cause of things screwing up for Enrico.

 

I do have to post it here because for some reason GitHub forgot my nickname, or I'm just too dumb to remember the password but recovering account doesn't work because it doesn't recognize my email either... anyway:

Asking tribute goes through a weird cooldown bug. Standard Speed. The turn you ask tribute you get a -500.000 modifier just to make sure you can't ask twice in the same turn, the turn after it sets to -600 and then every turn it lessens by 75. 5 turns later the penality is -225. So far so good. But!

Spoiler :

6 turns later the penality is gone (should have been -150, is 0), only to go back to -225 the turn later, and then it resumes the correct behaviour. So for all practical purposes the penality goes down 2 turns later, or I am that lucky to have troops in the CS proximity during the bugged 6th turn and enjoy a quicker tribute round. There're no AIs who could have possibly asked tribute in that turn.

I'm pretty sure this issue persisted for many patches but hey I only paid attention and documented it now that github hates me, so asking some kind soul report it for me.

 

I've had similar issues happen as well, it was really frustrating when it kept happening when I was trying to abuse Tyranny.

 

What beliefs did you choose for your religion? Constant WLTKD + theocratic rule + 3 religious buildings could potentially gain tons of happiness