New Version - May 19th (5-19)

[XplosiveLun]

Yeah, it takes time to accept conquered cities to go away. But that's just how reality works. Empires come and go. Still, I haven't never seen "city-states wall" in any game. Though I think that's a cool idea to represents new nations born in conflicts, especially where regions suffered the most and begin to see them as a separate political entity because they think their overlord does not cater their needs.

 

[BiteInTheMark]

@Gazebo
You were claiming, tall play would be too easy, and the high unhappiness penalty for specialists is for creating a competitive happiness system. Tall<->wide
While I agree, that happiness wise tall nearly always wins, the changes you've made doesn't change anything.
Tall play is mostly linked with CV and the social policies tradition/artistry/... /freedom.
Besides the normal buildings everyone is able to build in every of its cities, there are now too many things which reduce the unhappiness by specialists. Guilds can reduce specialist unhappiness, artistry buffs those buildings with even more happiness, happiness by great works and specialist unhappiness reduction, additionally you see more antiquary sides, which can be transformed in more happiness generating landmarks. Also freedom, which is the best option for a tall CV, gives the most happiness bonuses, alone the specialist unhappiness reduction/gain makes up to +4. The other 2 tenets also give +2 happiness. And even more, you made now 2 world wonders which are mainly linked with CV, both able to reduce specialist unhappiness everywhere by +1.

May I ask, why you want to create a happiness system competitive for tall play and then overcomplicate the whole happiness system and give tall play the best options to be happy?

 

[Moi Magnus]

Wow, cool! I wonder how hard it would be to force a city to fall to 50%, your own or enemy

Currently it is pretty hard (if not impossible).
Few month ago, when unhappiness was much more strict, I've seen an AI have half of its cities progressively turned into City-States, that was quite fun to watch.
But that's kind of difficult to have a system where unhappiness is both "not frustrating for the player" and "hard enough for city flipping to be common".

 

[XplosiveLun]

How do you guys think of gold with the new urbanization mechanic? Do you find it hard to maintain an acceptable gold level? The source of gold is now mostly limited to commerce buildings and trade routes. With merchant specialist become unavailable in earlier age, It makes banking a more important technology. Trade route also become more valuable.

 

[Gazebo]

@Gazebo
You were claiming, tall play would be too easy, and the high unhappiness penalty for specialists is for creating a competitive happiness system. Tall<->wide
While I agree, that happiness wise tall nearly always wins, the changes you've made doesn't change anything.
Tall play is mostly linked with CV and the social policies tradition/artistry/... /freedom.
Besides the normal buildings everyone is able to build in every of its cities, there are now too many things which reduce the unhappiness by specialists. Guilds can reduce specialist unhappiness, artistry buffs those buildings with even more happiness, happiness by great works and specialist unhappiness reduction, additionally you see more antiquary sides, which can be transformed in more happiness generating landmarks. Also freedom, which is the best option for a tall CV, gives the most happiness bonuses, alone the specialist unhappiness reduction/gain makes up to +4. The other 2 tenets also give +2 happiness. And even more, you made now 2 world wonders which are mainly linked with CV, both able to reduce specialist unhappiness everywhere by +1.

May I ask, why you want to create a happiness system competitive for tall play and then overcomplicate the whole happiness system and give tall play the best options to be happy?

The specialist bonuses for wonders scale with empire size, so while it does help tall, it helps bigger empires even more. And all empires regardless of size tend to have a core of specialist cities - that doesn’t change. The big difference is that a tall empire will tend to have a bit more excess happiness per city, so they can get golden ages and support more specialists overall.

Ideally neither tall nor wide is favored. Testing has shown this to be more true in this version than prior versions.

G

 

[tu_79]

How do you guys think of gold with the new urbanization mechanic? Do you find it hard to maintain an acceptable gold level? The source of gold is now mostly limited to commerce buildings and trade routes. With merchant specialist become unavailable in earlier age, It makes banking a more important technology. Trade route also become more valuable.

It should balance itself. If you expand heavily, you take some progress policies and you get the money, or you threaten city states for tributes. If you don't, you should have happiness enough to work on some merchants.

 

[Bhawb]

It isn't remotely hard to push someone under 50% happiness during extended wars, its actually one of the best tactics to force an AI to capitulate when you want a stronger vassal and already have their capital/best cities. You only receive back 50% of the WW you inflict IIRC, and with Authority that should be reduced to 37.5%. Add in:

With wars that you are winning, you can certainly drop the enemy below 50%. WW is just part of the pain. Pillage their luxuries and they lose that form of happiness. Pillage roads and isolation becomes an issue. Pillage food tiles and famine starts settling in. You don't need Ideology and I certainly wouldn't rule wars out if you want the hurt the AI badly. Drag the war out so the AI loses cities without you getting warmonger penalty might be more viable now with the change to 50%.

and remember that pillaged tiles, trade routes, luxuries, isolation, dead units, all the aspects of ravaging their lands not only directly lead to WW unhappiness for them and loss of yields causing more unhappiness, but they have secondary effects like famine, pillaged tiles unhappiness, forcing the AI to build units and delay infrastructure, loss of specialists, negative GPT, etc., all of which hurt their happiness but don't factor into WW. So you have unhappiness from WW they inflict on you, a fraction of WW you inflict on them, and from conquered cities, but they have unhappiness from almost every possible source of unhappiness.

One thing I would suggest to people who aren't used to warmongering on this new happiness is to always keep your happiness much higher than you would playing peacefully. I try to keep it above 100% and rarely let any city have much unhappiness unless I'm not planning on going offensive soon (in which case you should let it dip a bit to boost city strength). If you enter a war with 100% happiness when your opponent only has 80%, you're able to float a lot more WW than they are, and you can easily push them below 50% while you'd still have over 75%.

From my past few games, all of which were warmongering on Emperor, its been the best tactic to really cripple enemies even when I knew I couldn't/didn't want to take much off of them. Once you've got them in a stranglehold they can't fight back since the unhappiness completely shuts down their ability to build units, so the only limit is how much unhappiness you can float.

 

[XplosiveLun]

Right, Progress and tributes, totally forgot... That would actually help a lot. I've taken a lot of Authority lately on Emperor and is losing quite some gold. I'm still quite looking forward to potential alliance with city-state relationship so I'm hesitate to demand tribute. That said, last game I frequently lose ally status and eventually conquered a few of them. My general opinion is that it's still quite hard to fill at least one specialist in the classical era with a average-sized empire. With capital being the first city to have one, usually civil servant. When gardens and writing guilds become available, filling specialist becomes possible. Also at this stage, cities become populous enough to work on most of the high-yield tiles and have a few to work as specialist. it is possible for Great People of the same type to emerge around 3 times at the industrial age.

 

[Recursive]

Exactly. Some players hate to see their hard conquered cities go away, but it is a relieving valve for over expansion, so you can take a few of your neighbors cities, let unhappiness turn them into city states and enjoy that safe buffer, where you no longer share a border with that neighbors. Meanwhile your units got some combat experience and your neighbors are weakened.

Yeah, it takes time to accept conquered cities to go away. But that's just how reality works. Empires come and go. Still, I haven't never seen "city-states wall" in any game. Though I think that's a cool idea to represents new nations born in conflicts, especially where regions suffered the most and begin to see them as a separate political entity because they think their overlord does not cater their needs.

The neighbors' cities would revert to their old owner, so that doesn't work.

 

[tu_79]

The neighbors' cities would revert to their old owner, so that doesn't work.

Wasn't this happening after ideologies?

 

[Recursive]

Wasn't this happening after ideologies?

Revolts can happen at any time in VP, and it follows that order of priority I mentioned above.

 

[Enginseer]

Revolts happened in vanilla, but was extremely rare(rarer than finding a natural wonder) since revolutionary wave has to be in effect (which the AI immediately swapped to a new ideology whenever possible).

 

[azum4roll]

Has anyone tried Babylon in this version? Does the new specialist mechanic hurt their early science?

 

[Txurce]

I test every new version with Carthage first, going 10-15 wide. In my current game (t304, late Industrial) global happiness hasn't dropped below 74 despite frequent wars. Controlling it is easier than at any point in years, for me. Some cities can handle multiple specialists, others zero or one. I'm pumping out plenty of science, so tend to agree with Gazebo's sense that specialist scarcity doesn't rock the boat too much, and Tradition civs don't have a notable edge.

Big picture, the mod is in really good shape.

 

[Rafs]

Is anyone having issues with the interface (specifically I'm having problems with trade routes showing cities in my empire being disconnected when they are not, and the global unhappiness measurement is wacky and makes absolutely no sense).
pic in spoiler

Spoiler :

I've tried reinstalling the game, the patch, EUI, and I still have this problem.

 

[Borussia]

Is anyone having issues with the interface (specifically I'm having problems with trade routes showing cities in my empire being disconnected when they are not, and the global unhappiness measurement is wacky and makes absolutely no sense).
pic in spoiler

Spoiler :

I've tried reinstalling the game, the patch, EUI, and I still have this problem.

Could you please upload this savegame here or on GitHub?
I would like to look if I can find the bug and if it can be fixed, continue playing that game.

 

[Bromar1]

Exactly. Some players hate to see their hard conquered cities go away, but it is a relieving valve for over expansion, so you can take a few of your neighbors cities, let unhappiness turn them into city states and enjoy that safe buffer, where you no longer share a border with that neighbors. Meanwhile your units got some combat experience and your neighbors are weakened.

Since puppets have no happiness, only annexed cities can flip right? And if that's the case, is it really worth annexing a city to let it flip? You will be stuck with the permanent +7% science and culture malus for obtaining a new city

 

[Rafs]

Could you please upload this savegame here or on GitHub?
I would like to look if I can find the bug and if it can be fixed, continue playing that game.

I don't mind, but I'm using the 3rd and 4th UC, by pineappledan and his collaborators, so the savegame wouldn't work without it. I was having this issue without the mod though (that's why I reinstalled everything)

 

[tu_79]

Since puppets have no happiness, only annexed cities can flip right? And if that's the case, is it really worth annexing a city to let it flip? You will be stuck with the permanent +7% science and culture malus for obtaining a new city

Only the cost for the first conquered city will remain. The others will return the cost to normal when you lose them. But anyway, it looks like you can't do this with cities conquered to others (unless they were former city states) and this is not worth it to do with settlers.
It may be not so bad if you let a city or two to be returned to his founder after you've vassalized him.

Edit. I might be wrong. It rarely happens to me.

 

[FaarmAnimal]

Is anyone having issues with the interface (specifically I'm having problems with trade routes showing cities in my empire being disconnected when they are not, and the global unhappiness measurement is wacky and makes absolutely no sense).
pic in spoiler

Spoiler :

I've tried reinstalling the game, the patch, EUI, and I still have this problem.

What mods are you using?

With EUI and huge map, you must be running close to the RAM limit.