On unhappiness and growth in Wide empires

[Legen]

The suggestion I have in mind is to make Wide inherently have less food than Tall, as population growth is far more likely to result in an unhappiness trap for the former than the latter.

The main issue is that happiness is currently a population limiter (as it should be in my opinion), but perceived as a city number limiter or infrastructure check instead. The complaints rarely focus on how much population they have, but about having built everything they reasonably could and still being unhappy. And these complaints are on players with Wide empires, formerly on Authority play, and recently on Progress. When told to to select "avoid growth" in their cities, they mention how it feels wrong for them to play in an suboptimal way.

A natural way to make these scenarios less likely then is to make the population of their Wide empire grow slower in the first place. Instead of having to be conscious of their empire growing too fast, growth could be tuned to something that they have to consciously pursue instead.

One adjustment is on the food yields on the policies, as some of the Wide-oriented trees have more food than the Tall-oriented ones. Progress, Fealty, Imperialism and Order come to mind, with the former two in particular having sizable food yields on the secondary cities in comparison to what their Tall-oriented contemporary alternatives provide. Just like Authority lost food on Tribute before, these trees could lose these food yields in favor of something else, while their Tall-oriented contemporaries could see some food or growth adjustment.

The second adjustment is to have some form of growth penalty on secondary cities, akin to the present tourism penalty. These secondary cities have much less room than the capital to fix happiness issues and tend to be where happiness issues compound out of control. Having population growth naturally slow down as the empire expands could be a safety net, as a slower growth gives more warning time to players that haven't noticed the empire's unhappiness mounting up.

The third adjustment is to make food-based buildings less mandatory for happiness management. Buildings like the Aqueduct have unhappiness negators that Wide players have to pursue sooner or later, all while accelerating the population grow that is leading them to an unhappiness trap. These food/growth oriented buildings could have such happiness switched for effects present in other buildings that Tall favors, such as the urbanization reducer in the Library.

A fourth possible adjustment is to have the governor AI devalue food yields based on empire size and policy choice. It makes more sense for a Tradition or Artistry civ to value food and growth more than a Progress or Fealty one, even the the latter trees were to lost their food yields, and I'm not sure if the governor is capable of such distinction.

 

[Casworon]

I love this idea of making population growth a more active component. But may I offer a solution.

Have we considered housing buildings? Where your population grows to a certain size and then stops due to running out of housing and then you have to actively build housing buildings to raise the cities population cap.

This has a similar effect as people crossing and uncrossing the avoid growth button and only growing when they know their happiness can take it. But rather than stunting themselves which feels wrong, its something you build, so the feeling is of expanding and growing rather than self limiting which is a feeling players seem to prefer.

Though from the sounds of it your solution if it works might leave this not needed. As the slowed growth deals with the happiness problems anyway