Harrier said:
An indicator why brief info in-game is still preferable to more lengthy descriptions online.
I have read the wiki. With no in-game context, that information is not particularly useful in a strategic sense.
The wiki acts like a vague sense of guidelines for stability, which are only useful up to a point. They don't really help in-game strategy in any significant way, since the feedback in-game is so poor about which factors are currently affecting you.
I never said -all-. And knowing the major factors that affect combat, health, happiness, income, expenses, diplomatic relationships, etc has not made Civ less fun. In fact, it's knowing those factors that opens the game up strategically and gives you the info you need to form your strategy. With such poor feedback about stability, it's largely pointless to include it in your strategy, beyond the biggest, most obvious factors.
As I said previously, a brief pop-up summary of each major header, listing roughly how you're doing in each main factor, would be fine. Even just a pop-up (or warning/praise message) showing factors that are way outside the norm (for good or bad) would be a huge improvement. I'm not saying there needs to be an exact readout of every number in the formula. I'm saying that "CITIES = ***" is too vague. It amazes me that anyone thinks that provides enough information to be strategically useful.
I never had questions - I've beaten most of the UHVs on Monarch, and have figured out enough about Stability to avoid the biggest pitfalls and use it as a weapon against the AI (take their capitol, watch them collapse).
But when I see a thread like this where is a user is so frustrated by stability that they'd like to remove it, I don't instinctively jump to its defense. Instead, I asked myself, "Why is this person (and many more) frustrated by Stability?" To me, it's because the mod does a very poor job of giving positive/negative feedback to the player.
Stability often feels like a random event: "Hey, the game randomly decided you're unstable!" Some of the factors are so big that they give very obvious feedback by changing the )|( display almost immediately (like the loss of a capitol). Other factors have very nice feedback from the mod (like instability caused by democracy). But the rest of the factors are so well hidden they become strategically irrelevant.
The original systems in Civ are designed to provide enough feedback so that the player gets better at dealing with them in-game as they play. In not allowing the player enough information to even include stability in their strategy, the mod fails to make it a part of the game the player can learn and improve at beyond the basic level. Whether that's realistic is meaningless because it's terribly flawed gameplay.
An ideal example would be the player thinking, "Hmm, if I do this, it will harm my stability, but help my empire in other ways - is that worth the risk?" Instead, in many cases, the situation is more like, "I have no idea how or how much this will affect my stability, so I may as well not even think about it."
Let me emphasize again since people keep missing it: I am not suggesting that every aspect of the system's formula be laid bare on the screen. I am merely suggesting that the current feedback is insufficient for the standard the rest of the game sets. It is insufficient to allow the player to truly consider the system strategically. It is insufficient in many instances to even feel like a functioning true system of the game and not just a random die roll or bug.
