Should there be a "Quality of Life" property?

[cakedaemon]

So a bit of background: I've been playing the mod for some time and have made it to the modern era, where there are lots and lots and lots of new factories and sports buildings and so much more that are popping up, but one thing I've noticed is that the property system by this point in the game is effectively obsolete - fire seems to do nothing, crime is easily controlled by the sheer abundance of security buildings like the Security Bureau and the like that come along at that point, disease is easily handled with Hospitals and Vaccine Labs and Mortuaries and other buildings, and even Pollution is readily tackled with the use of the various ordinances you can get with Ecology that basically wipe out pollution entirely in the form of -100 Air or Water pollution options. It makes a fair bit of sense when you think about it; massive epidemics and city-levelling fires are pretty much a thing of the past in the developed world, and the game mimics that process of development well in the way that you have to build the infrastructure of a city up to get those benefits...but this strikes me as a bit of a shame, as you've got no real factors to look out for in that area by the time you enter this point in the game.

I'll admit, that is a bit of a sidepoint from what I really want to mention here, and that is the possibility of a new, Quality of Life property that grows progressively more and more important as the game progresses, similar to Education, but with much greater faucets and sinks for its strength. The general aim is for it to serve as a sort of hub to the property system, a way the different values might affect one another and make the system feel both more immersive and more reactive to the actions that the player takes. I've tried to make a bit of a proposal here, using the kind of format I'd use on Games2Gether for the Endless series of games, but it should get the point across

What is the Quality of Life property?

As I mentioned above, albeit more briefly, the Quality of Life system would be an entirely new property added to the set that is currently in the game, working through all the eras but starting to truly ramp up into its full power as one enters the Industrial and then Modern ages. The quality of life that the people of a nation has played an enormous role in the history of our world, from the peasants revolts of Medieval Europe to the fall of the USSR, the general situation of the common man has played, plays and will play an enormous role in the way that our civilization works, and it is this great influence that this system will try to capture. The Quality of Life property represents neither happiness (as people can be happy whilst living in poor conditions), nor healthiness, nor education nor crime, but is in some ways the sum of these things in that all of them play an important role in the quality of life that the citizens of a city in game might have, yet one that feeds back into them nearly as much as it is fed. In short, it can be taken as something of a measure not just of a civilization's successes, but as a summary of its wealth beyond the simple income and treasury. To put it into material terms: the value of its buildings, the abundance of its goods, the comfort of its people, these are all things that build up the quality of life of an empire's peoples, and its these things that feed into the property.

What does it do and how does it work?
This is the real meat of the concept, because whilst the above sections explain a bit of the background, this is all about what it adds to the game: I've already explained how it serves as a sort of hub for the properties system and how it ties them together, but that was just words, so have a few examples. In the real world, there are few houses so nearly well desired as those that are near universities, and so the construction of a university in a city - and especially a famous one such as Oxford - would have a great impact on the quality of life in the local region, where young adults would be able to seek out education locally and near their friends and family, resulting in that building being a plus to the QoL system. Others such as Jails, however, are a negative impact on the local community, just as coal mines are due to the infamous working conditions, as do power plants and bunkers and other such things, all part of the balancing act between the two.

Houses now have value to encourage investment: As it stands in 38.5, there is actually relatively little effect on, and from, the housing system - it tends to be something of minor detail, a complete and utter after thought and so much so that it seems to be there more for simple cosmetic reasons and for completion than to have any meaningful impact on gameplay. With the introduction of a Quality of Life system, however, housing actually has a serious value, as the quality of homes in the empire is possibly one of the single largest impacts on the living standards of its people. Rather than simply going obsolete as new buildings arrive, old buildings remain, but are given either an outright negative modifier or a greatly reduced positive one, symbolizing that the building's living standards are now no longer up to scratch - a noblelord's estate might very well dwarf the comforts of the housing of the lowborn folk outside the castle walls, but as the industrial age comes and brings forth modern plumbing, electricity and telecommunications, the building is simply no longer cut out for the wealthy of society and the latest comforts, and will be replaced by modern mansions that have such things built in. This provides a serious reason, more than just the benefits of the building itself, to build things such as telephone networks and sewer systems and so on, for despite their maintenance costs, they'll play an enormous role in the structure of your civilization and the lives of the masses. To help balance things, however, it may be wise to add more requirements to the different generations of buildings, like mass transit for the various high density pop buildings, symbolizing the construction of a complex and versatile road network that makes high rise buildings viable for commuting to work.

Manufactured goods become much more important: This is something that primarily affects the cities of the post-industrial revolution, where cities swell rapidly with more and more pops and as a great many new forms of items become available, but is also a factor throughout the entirety of the game. Caveman2Cosmos has a truly epic number of items, ranging from masks to cars, and these items will now have a direct impact on the quality of life of people simply by having access to them; masks, clothes, jewelry and alcohol in the earlier eras will act as a vital means of providing the necessary quality of life bonuses to keep the empire from falling into puritanical conditions, but as society transforms with rising technology and as the pressures on the individual grow, so too will the ways of keeping them comfortable as electricity not only revolutionizes the way the nation functions, but the way its people live their lives. Conveniences like washer dryers and dishwashers, life changing items like refrigerators and cars, luxuries like televisions and games consoles, all of them will have a major impact on the day to day routine of the people who live in your nation, and the QoL system gives them that impact by making them the engine of the system come the industrial age: there is at last a true difference between empires of that era, where one's people live the dream of a car in every drive and a fence around every home, and another where the people live in spartan conditions and need to queue for their daily bread and where there is but one television in the entire street.

The properties system is no longer pure good or bad: as it is right now in the current version of the mod, there's generally no reason not to want to, say, build as many crime control buildings in a city as possible, because the unhappiness they generate is easily drowned out by sheer number of happiness producing buildings in the game. The introduction of a Quality of Life property counters this effect on the game, because it makes the production of these buildings and the training of such units have a direct impact on another property - people don't like living near jails, yet alone Alcatraz, so such buildings now come with a trade off in that they negatively effect the quality of life of the local area; the player can no longer simply go to a city with crime, select the law enforcement tab and buy every building on the list and walk off, knowing that the city is done - they will need to consider what impact this might have on the living standards of the people there, as buildings that would otherwise be nothing but positive are now given a downside, increasing the strategy. Could the city absorb the damage to the living standards that comes with all those police units, or is there a more efficient way for me to do this? Maybe I should build that Jail there, but also put an Elementary School there to help balance the impact on the quality of life? Or maybe that Meal Center is a good way to get the best of both? Or maybe I could bring in celebrities or other entertainers to the city and use their bonus to neutralize the problem?

It is a slow property system: Practically all the other property systems in the game respond quickly to the player's actions, good or bad, unless they have already developed them to the extremes - Crime develops its first act very early on, at just +75 points in the form of Truancy, which gives a penalty to research speed. Effects on the buildings are thus relatively light in that buildings like Jails only remove double digit numbers...whereas the Quality of Life system has values that start in the triple digits and effects that require four digits to truly come alive. This makes it a slow burning property system, converting to video game format the amount of time it takes for changes in the living standards to actually propagate through society - even if the empire suddenly gains access to a great many new factories for consumer goods, it takes time in the real world for such things to permeate society and for the great majority to have access to such things, and the same now applies to the game. In my point of view, a full burning effort should take 15-20 turns to either raise or lower the level, a virtual generation of people that matches the 1 turn = 1 year system of the later eras of the game, whilst also adding the thematic slowness to both improving and degrading the condition. .

Here are some more technical examples of how this system might look and work: - bare in mind I'm doing this from memory, so the regular stats might be a bit off, but it should still show the various effects I've got in mind and I've put some notes with them in brackets to explain the logic.

University:
+25 Education
+250 Quality of Life

Housing - Cottages:
+300 Quality of Life (compared to earlier buildings such as shanties and prehistoric era tents, Cottages aren't that bad...)
-500 Quality of Life with Civil Engineering. (...but once modern brick houses, with electricity and indoor plumbing arrives, they quickly start to show their ages as the population desires more comfortable and modern living spaces.)

Jail:
-20 Crime
-1000 Quality of Life (People don't really like living near prisons, for various reasons; their presence makes the community feel unsafe not only because of the prisoners within and the risk of a jailbreak, or even because of the people that come to visit said prisoners at guest hours, but because of how it reflects society and the need to have the prison in the first place.)

Police APC:
-25 Crime
-1000 Quality of Life (Though police APCs are entirely superior to the police car units that come around at nearly the same point in the game, the highly militarized nature of such vehicles makes the population feel unsafe, as if martial law is about to be declared at any moment, as if the authoritarian jackboot is about to fall on them.)

Mall:
+5 Wealth
+3 Happiness
+500 Quality of Life (Mall's aren't just packed full of stores, but often also have tons of other little venues inside that serve to draw people to the mall, called anchors. These can be things like movie theaters, bowling alleys and so on, and ready access to such things makes most CivCitizens comfortable people indeed, simplifying the daily shop and providing a pleasant place to visit.)

Blender Factory:
+3 Wealth
+1 Unhealthiness
+10 Flammability
+50 Quality of Life (Though the blender factory doesn't provide any production useful to the state, it does take in a large number of workers indeed, providing comfortable working conditions and reasonable pay, but the main boon of the factory...)

Blenders:
+200 Quality of Life (...comes from the final product. With the blender factory up and running, blenders can be bought by the general population at any retailer, giving various shop buildings a boost to their wealth generation as is already the case...but their existence and availability also serves to boost the quality of life of the empire's inhabitants for all the reasons that other consumer electronics, such as vacuums and dishwashers, might.)

Car Factory:
+5 Wealth
+2 Unhealthiness
+25 Flammability
+100 Quality of Life (Like the blender factory, the car factory provides a great deal of jobs for the local community, important for countering the natural decline of the quality of life as a city grows and becomes home to more and more people, but because the car factory is bigger than the blender factory, this effect is doubled...)

Cars:
+600 Quality of Life. (...and because cars are so important to the daily life of so many people and because the item takes so much more to build, the impact of cars and car dealerships on the general population is much, much higher. The abrupt loss of gas will thus have a massive impact on the living conditions of people in the post-industrial age, simulating the 1973 oil crisis and the impact it had on the lives of the common man.)

And for fun, a hypothetical list of levels, five above and five below and one in the middle, with some notes as to the general situation:

Quality of Life - Utopian (Star Trek TNG era Federation; food aplenty, people are able to do whatever they wish with their time, entertainment of any form is on demand, the cities are masterworks of artwork as well as engineering, etc. If you want something, it is generally available quickly and cheaply here. This level is practically impossible to reach until the late game, as the technology to build this kind of society just doesn't exist until at the very least the nanotech age and beyond.)

Quality of Life - Decadent (When people think of the late Roman Empire, with fat old men lain back on their seats watching gladiators fight and die in the arena whilst slave girls feed them grapes and wine, they're basically thinking of this level. The cities are beautiful, lives are easy, and you can spend a lifetime in comfort and leisure.)

Quality of Life - Opulent (Have you ever seen the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? Large and marvelous looking houses, multiple cars in the drive, fulfilling and well paying work, perhaps even a servant or two, this is the general aspiration that most people might aspire.)

Quality of Life - Luxurious (1950s USA, for the cliche middle class family - a house with a white picket fence, a car in the drive, one of those new fangled vacuum cleaners...basically the American Dream, compressed into a QoL level.)

Quality of Life - Comfortable (The general condition of most people in the developed world today, wealthy or otherwise. Though their lives might not be as luxurious as they might wish or as easy, they generally lack for nothing; luxuries and consumer items are available for them, the question is whether or not they have the means to do so.)

Quality of Life - Satisfactory (The mid level of the board, where things hang in perfect balance.)

Quality of Life - Poor (The first negative level, the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crash in the worst affected areas would go here; though things aren't too bad off, life has certainly grown quite a bit harder than it was but a few short years before as a lack of wealth bleeds the people. )

Quality of Life - Harsh (1920s and 30s USA, stuck in the pain of the Great Depression, fits here. Though there are a variety of goods still available on the market, even if the economy is struggling, work is hard to find...and a lack of work means a lack of means to obtain such items even if they are available. Housing quality has dropped sharply as people struggle to maintain their properties, and Hoovervilles are starting to form.)

Quality of Life - Terrible (The final years of the Soviet Union and the immediate aftermath of its collapse could go here or in Harsh, depending on your view of things, this level of QoL has the shelves nearly completely bare of any luxury items like chocolate or exotic fruits, cars have waiting lists...you get the general appearance.)

Quality of Life - Ruinous (Warlord states in Africa following decolonization would go here, as would ones in active, heavy civil wars. Supply chains are either breaking down or have done so completely, and life is very, very hard for the average citizen, who needs to mind their consumption of things like food and water.)

Quality of Life - Apocalyptic (1945 Germany would be a good demonstration of this one - the general social structure is held together by a thread, the cities are in ruins, rationing is in effect even if starvation is held off...even basic comforts like shelter are rare.)

Civics could also add variants of the above, based on certain criteria; having Nationalism, for example, could replace the first few negative levels of the system with increasing levels of rationing, showing a nation increasingly mobilizing every available resource for war and the survival of the state, and communist nations could have similar things as well. There could even be different standards of living that replace the earlier versions as the tech tree progresses along, perhaps once every two eras, showing the rising expectations that people have of their country and their home.

Thoughts?

 

[raxo2222]

Looks neat, but we have few hundreds of buildings and tens of resources per era.

Balancing this would be hard.
Any +-X or +-X% input from property pseudobuildings is easily flooded by sheer amount of buildings.
Civics, traits and so on dilute property pseudobuilding effects too.
Basically max property level have much smaller impact on fully developed city, when you just reached Transhuman era, than on moderately developed city of Industrial era.

Essentially property pseudobuilding % effects would have to override final productivity, just like final productivity (simple sum of all +-X% modifiers) overrides base productivity.
Now we have base of 100, booster of 500% and property pseudobuilding, that changes something by 50% just appeared.
Final boost would be 550%.

If property boosters were indepedently changing base boost, then we would have 500% * 1.5 = 750% final boost.

But that is pretty dangerous zone now.

 

[cakedaemon]

Looks neat, but we have few hundreds of buildings and tens of resources per era.

Balancing this would be hard.
Any +-X or +-X% input from property pseudobuildings is easily flooded by sheer amount of buildings.
Civics, traits and so on dilute property pseudobuilding effects too.
Basically max property level have much smaller impact on fully developed city, when you just reached Transhuman era, than on moderately developed city of Industrial era.

I thought about this myself, and its one of the reasons I think it would be best to go with larger numbers for the system, which causes it to scale a better over time. Here's a little something I drew in paint, to give a sort of example to the kind of model I'm talking about here:



These are two charts, comparing how the property systems work, with the green line representing the player's ability to overcome the downsides and the red the negative influences. Think of them as all the pluses and minuses, placed side by side, going from the stone age on the left and the late game on the right. The general system as it works for most of the game, especially with crime and disease, is something of a rollercoaster - you contain the problem in one era only for it to come back in the next era due to a sudden wave of obsoletions (law buildings in particular are guilty with this problem) or because other buildings have caused such growth that the technology you have on hand isn't enough to scale with the issue until you have the next set of technologies to deal with it. A good demonstration of this is in the Classical and Industrial eras, both ones where the disease and unhealthiness systems can often shoot right past your ability to deal with it without training lots of apothecaries or doctors.

The one on the bottom is the system I'm proposing for the QoL - rather than having sudden rises and pitfalls, the system grows slowly over the eras, remaining closely balanced between the positive and negative system even as the number of QoL sinks and faucets rise and are in turn balanced by older QoL sinks and faucets going obsolete...until it suddenly explodes as the player enters the industrial era, where the rise of electricity and mechanization provide an enormous number of new goods to be consumed by the general population at the same time that increasing burdens on society (heavy industry, which also explodes at that era of the game, along with transportation buildings like docks and airports, in turn simulating noise pollution, as well as things like regular polluters such as powerplants and military structures) provide a sink for it, which causes the system to self balance: the system wouldn't be using incremental increases (ie, 5 > 10 > 15 > 20 > 25) but exponential ones ( 5 > 10 > 30 > 60) which keeps it in pace with the base level growth of existing bonuses and a relevant factor, all the way into the late game. Alternatively, because it'd be basically impossible to reach the higher or lower levels until advanced technology is available, the higher and lower levels could be safely locked away in the lifestyle techs and have bonuses and maluses tailored for each specific era, until Utopian standard is unlocked in the late game.

 

[raxo2222]

Ah so you would have different QoL pseudobuildings for each era.
For example QoL - Comfortable would have different boosts in different eras, so final effect on productivity would have similar strength.

Currently property pseudobuildings have constant thrust, but mass of cities tend to be greater in later game (which can decrease, when cities lose population and buildings).

On other hand if QoL pseudobuildings depending on era have different thrust, then smaller and less developed cities would see bigger changes in productivity than more developed ones in later eras.

As for property itself being slow to rise and fall, buildings and resources would have low +- property impact.

 

[cakedaemon]

For example QoL - Comfortable would have different boosts in different eras, so final effect on productivity would have similar strength.

Exactly. Building's like Art Galleries gain additional culture as people research the art techs like Dada and Pop Art, but there's no reason the same concept can't be applied to the pseudobuildings, just with the bonuses coming from the different era/lifestyle gates, allowing them to grow in power as the game progresses and keeping them a factor from the start of the game till the end. .

On other hand if QoL pseudobuildings depending on era have different thrust, then smaller and less developed cities would see bigger changes in productivity than more developed ones in later eras.

True, but the high cost of each QoL stage would mean that a small, freshly planted city won't have significant pulls in either direction, so will end up sitting at the lower levels rather than being pulled too far in one direction - a newly plopped Aircraft Settler city, for example, would have all the QoL gains from being integrated into its empire's resource net, but the QoL loss from several pops and some of the buildings that came with it, so its progress up or down would be relatively slow. This keeps them at the balanced moderate levels (the mid-tiers from comfortable to poor, for example), where the effects haven't grown so much as to be dominating. Think of a steep staircase: the gap between each step is large, but it takes quite a bit of time and effort to move between each level. A young city wouldn't be able to easily move up or down the staircase, so would end up spending a lot of time at its present level until growing factors (ie, pollution and crime, serious impactors on QoL) either pull it down or upwards and give weight to its movement, so whilst they would get substantial jumps or drops in power as they go up or down a step, they won't be moving up or down too often for it to be constantly fluctuating...and as they grow into large cities, that trend will start to stabilize more as they enter higher levels of positive or negative QoL, and grow into the bonuses from those phases.

 

[Faustmouse]

While this sounds pretty neat, I think that most of it could be achieved if Happyness would be properly balanced; which is also not an eary task to do, but far easier than your proposal.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I always had the concept of an Entertainment property in mind that would overlap with some of the intent here. I'd be interested in seeing a modmod on this but it's far too large a can of worms to be opening in the core for now. Other projects would have far greater priority, such as an Electricity property. The concept seems sound and fairly well thought out though so if it could be made into a modmod and perfected from there, this is a good time for someone to work on that sort of thing since there aren't likely to be rapid changes to the core for a bit at this stage.

 

[cakedaemon]

While this sounds pretty neat, I think that most of it could be achieved if Happyness would be properly balanced; which is also not an eary task to do, but far easier than your proposal.

Maybe, but the QoL system above isn't actually meant to replace Happiness, but to serve alongside it - they're two sides of the same coin, that may be so, but they are still separate concepts even if they do have a fair bit of overlap between them. Happiness is much more straightforward over all, in that it is well...happiness, and is caused by doing things that make people happy. The Quality of Life system is focused primarily on things that make the people better or worse off, or makes them feel better or worse off. In short, if happiness is about the short term mood of the pop, Quality of Life is about the long term and the general aspirations of the city's population over all. A real world example of the contrast between the two would be modern day Detroit: though the quality of life there isn't exactly anything to boast about and would be Harsh-to-Terrible on the top chart, the people there aren't outright unhappy because of it, they've just got limited opportunities if that makes sense, since I freely admit that probably didn't come out quite right

I always had the concept of an Entertainment property in mind that would overlap with some of the intent here. I'd be interested in seeing a modmod on this but it's far too large a can of worms to be opening in the core for now. Other projects would have far greater priority, such as an Electricity property. The concept seems sound and fairly well thought out though so if it could be made into a modmod and perfected from there, this is a good time for someone to work on that sort of thing since there aren't likely to be rapid changes to the core for a bit at this stage.

Point me in the right direction of where to start and I'll see if I can't put together a prototype for the Prehistoric era, using the various goods there to build a small scale version of the system

 

[Shoobs]

I'm fully against this. We are already slowing quality of life through tourism, education, pollution, crime and disease.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Point me in the right direction of where to start and I'll see if I can't put together a prototype for the Prehistoric era, using the various goods there to build a small scale version of the system

How familiar are you with modding to begin with? (Don't expect a fast response from me on this.)

 

[cakedaemon]

How familiar are you with modding to begin with? (Don't expect a fast response from me on this.)

I did some graphical tweaks to one of the ones in the Extra Civ pack to correct some issues and that's the limit of my experience with Civ4. I've got more with Civ5 where I added a whole custom civ to the game and had it entirely working, but canned that project because the artwork was atrocious (and when I say that, I mean atrocious) and have much more with Paradox games where I've coded a couple of events for fun and even a few custom system generators in Stellaris. Give me a rundown where all the important bits to do with the property system is, and I should probably be able to figure out the rest myself

 

[Thunderbrd]

I'd start by getting familiar with things through this thread: here!

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

I am going to have to reread this at a later stage but how does this fit in with the current Housing System and should it?

 

[Raven Destroyer]

QoL Might replace Happiness by moving all things into QoL Pseudobuildings, just my two cents, would make balancing Happiness a lot easier?

 

[Thunderbrd]

QoL Might replace Happiness by moving all things into QoL Pseudobuildings, just my two cents, would make balancing Happiness a lot easier?

Wouldn't replace it, just would create more manipulation of it that would make it and other game elements more meaningful would be the intent.

 

[cakedaemon]

I'd start by getting familiar with things through this thread: here!

Will do, but not right now. Working on one of my stories and preparing for a move!

I am going to have to reread this at a later stage but how does this fit in with the current Housing System and should it?

In the present version of the game, housing tends to do rather little - it has no real direct effect on gameplay, but tends to be a reaction to events that happen in game - the player obtains bricks, so Brick Huts are built, the player builds a telephone network, so Apartments appear, and so on. But this is an entirely isolated system that does nothing to truly affect the game in a meaningful way: resources aren't consumed or generated by it, the buildings simply exist and have no further contribution to the game beyond the simple immersion and roleplay value of being able to look at the building list and have the player go "oh, my people live in shacks " or "wow, look at all these villas! ", but that strikes me as the waste of a brilliant, useful system. Houses are possibly one of, if not the, most important part of the day to day life of all the world's peoples, and for good reason: it is in our homes or the homes of others that we rest, eat, love and grow. For this reason, they're one of the primary backbones of the QoL system, the keystone that makes it able to support the weight of a growing society: until the development of consumer goods in the industrial era, the conditions of the population in the form of their housing is going to be the most important means of supporting the national standard of living and reaping the rewards.

I've probably worded that badly, so here's a Maslow pyramid to get the point across more efficiently:



Some of these are quite difficult to translate into the game - I imagine self-actualization, as a concept, could potentially be derived as an impact of great persons or wonders in the city, but that's something that I would consider safe to consider as outside the scope of the game, whilst esteem could be a function of happiness and represent the respect of the state to the people and visa versa, but that seems difficult to implement. But everything from belonging and down can be part of the QoL system and done so with ease: the housing system in particular would be one of the primary backbones of the pyramid's foundation, as the quality of one's shelter plays an enormous role in their day to day quality of life. Someone who has a satisfying job, a happy family life and so on, but lives in a shack, for example, is likely going to want to get out of said property as quickly as possible...and on a more personal note, I imagine each and every person in this thread has some form of attachment to their home as well, so often showed in films and books and television shows and the like as people being sad or reminiscing about their old houses after moving out. Going from bottom up, the foundation of the pyramid, and thus the QoL system, is the availability of the essentials for a person's - and thus a civilization's - day to day routine: translated into game terms, that is a security of food (so a starving city is going to rapidly lose QoL), a supply of water (so coastal and river cities have the highest QoL until things like aqueducts and the like come along to provide guaranteed water supply) and so on, until you reach shelter. Low tier shelters provide a baseline level of QoL, causing the system to stabilize towards the mid-tiers - think of them like the vigilante pseudobuilding that forms when Crime gets too high, which can outright stabilize a crime level in a city or even cause it to regress until the pseudo building disappears only to reform because of the growing crime again, resulting in a loop - but true gains beyond this stabilization come from above average living conditions.

In other words, low wealth housing > medium wealth housing > high wealth housing, with impact being the lowest in the low wealth and the highest at the high end - this encourages players to take expensive buildings that might not otherwise be worth it for the sake of raising the living standard of the city and thus the quality of life for its people. One could possibly even gate the higher wealth housing buildings behind the QoL system in that they require a certain level - say, housing conditions degrade into the poorer levels as you go down into the negative levels, and rise as you go upwards, thus simulating the growing wealth of the population and the development of living conditions or post-war reconstructions like Germany, where the nation was in such ruin after World War Two that millions of houses had to be completely rebuilt and could only be done so after the other organs of the nation were restored.

An in game example would be this: the Greek city of Knossos finds itself on the frontlines of a war between the Greek Empire and the Chinese Empire, and sits at the center of many great battles. Repeated attacks on the city have destroyed much of its infrastructure, repeated sackings (city captures) have stripped the wealth of the population and left them afraid to even rise from their basements and other such shelters for fear of being ran through by a Chinese blade, and it is a harsh place to live from all the chaos. Yet the war ends with a Greek victory, and the people of Knossos are free to start to rebuild...yet the damage done is so great that, even once the countryside is rebuilt, the city garrisoned and its wells unblocked of the corpses of the slain, the population are still impoverished. Their homes have been burnt, their workplaces destroyed, their family members killed. The city is scarred, and will take years to rebuild and grow back into its full power, even once the physical damage of the war is gone.

That is the QoL system in action: the city is saved physically and the population may even be happy again, but their livelihoods lie in ruins and will take years to fully grow back to pre-war conditions. This makes things like medieval chevauchée warfare not only possible in the game, for destroying the enemy infrastructure outside the city will bleed the resources it needs to maintain its standard of living and leave a fortress, even if still stocked with food, bleeding productivity and wealth to a collapsing standard of living (even peasants want to live comfortably, even if their idea of comfort is a big ol' pint of ale, a hot meal, a pretty girl and a warm bed), but an entirely sound means of waging warfare. Raiding warfare to weaken an upstart enemy without trying to capture heavily fortified cities becomes an effective way of waging war, but more, desperate and hard fought defenses will result in a nation in need of more complicated rebuilding than simply throwing twenty workers at a region and waiting six turns, as the cities themselves have been damaged and seen a transformation...



...like that of Dresden in WW2.

For the second and above tiers, those are relatively clear: Safety Needs would be met by hospitals and fire stations and so on, as well as reliable employment...and most importantly, property and resources, otherwise known as consumer goods, which are the vacuums and blenders and dishwashers and other such resources already in the game but which currently lack any use whatsoever. The love and belonging section is mostly outside the scope of the game, but the belonging side is not, as the belonging it refers to can just as easily refer to a national identity, of the people's connection to the culture and state of which they are a part, which can be used to justify things like monuments and so on having a QoL bonus because of how they represent the history of the nation of which the population is a part, filling them with patriotic pride. Or not, I'm just spit balling on that one

Note: I'm not saying we replicate the above hierarchy of needs, but rather use it as a guideline for which things should have bigger or smaller impacts on buildings, effects and other such things to build up the QoL system.

 

[sorcdk]

Concerning the happiness reballance and this QoL property, one way we could go about it is to increase the unhappiness per citizen, but Quality of Life level would then give hapiness per citizen, effectively meaning that the same amount of base happiness/unhappiness can support a larger population. This would be grounded in the simple reason, that you need more distractions (happiness) to not go rioting if your Quality of Life is low than if it is high. This is one of the reasons we rarely see rebelions in the developed nations nowadays, since the quality of life is so high that people have to be really unhappy before they do something like that. Also note that a sharp increase in the unhappiness/unhealth per citizen may also deal with some other problems, such as managing whether cities grows into the skies too early, which is currently mostly managed by wasted food and crime/disease.

 

[Noriad2]

Reason not everybody lives in the perfect best house is because most people can't afford it. To truly model it, you'd have to model individual population groups and their income, much like the game Victoria II does. I'm not sure if an approach like that is compatible with the Civ system.

 

[cakedaemon]

Reason not everybody lives in the perfect best house is because most people can't afford it. To truly model it, you'd have to model individual population groups and their income, much like the game Victoria II does. I'm not sure if an approach like that is compatible with the Civ system.

Ture, but Vicky's system actually has the same abstraction that I'm trying to make here on the pop screen: you've got the cup of water that represents essentials, the cup of beer that represent wants, and the cup of wine that represents luxuries. The same general thing applies to the QoL system

Though I will say Vicky has some funky stuff going on. There's an actually limited amount of cash in the financial system because it doesn't simulate inflation and only has a limited number of faucets (events to be precise) that are outweighed by a massive number of sinks that remove cash from the game and send it off to the Negative Zone, which causes the entire economic model to completely collapse in late game as prices spiral out of control. There was actually a way to use it offensively in multiplayer by overperforming economically, vacuuming as much cash as you could into the treasury, then just leaving it there before watching everyone go bankrupt because there's no cash in circulation anymore to keep pops comfy. Besides, just spam liquor factories and you're golden

 

[Noriad2]

Though I will say Vicky has some funky stuff going on. There's an actually limited amount of cash in the financial system because it doesn't simulate inflation and only has a limited number of faucets (events to be precise) that are outweighed by a massive number of sinks that remove cash from the game and send it off to the Negative Zone, which causes the entire economic model to completely collapse in late game as prices spiral out of control. There was actually a way to use it offensively in multiplayer by overperforming economically, vacuuming as much cash as you could into the treasury, then just leaving it there before watching everyone go bankrupt because there's no cash in circulation anymore to keep pops comfy. Besides, just spam liquor factories and you're golden

That is not "funky stuff", that's historical and correctly modeled in Victoria II. In the 19th century money was usually based on a gold standard. Which means that the only valid way to increase the amount of money in circulation was to dig up more gold in a mine. Inflating the currency at will by printing more money is the prerogative of a fiat money system. While fiat money existed in some form in some areas, most official currencies had to be backed by actual gold. Only during the 20th century (near the end of the game, or past it) did countries abandon the gold standard.
And yes, economies of specific countries have suffered severely due to gold shortages during the 19th and early 20th century. So this is modeled correctly in Victoria II.

Victoria 2 has fluctuating prices based on supply and demand. So I don't know why you say that it "doesn't simulate inflation".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard