Sick of AI happiness bonus?

[elthrasher]

I don't mind the tech bonus, production bonus or other bonuses the AI receives at higher levels, but the happiness handicap seems like the most significant buff the AI receives. On deity the AI only gets 60% of the unhappiness a player gets. Add that to growth buffs and production buffs and the AI can have scores of high-pop cities very quickly. All the player can really do at this point is go to war and raze most of those cities because the player can't handle all the unhappiness.

So I wanted to see what would happen if I took away the AI unhappiness. I edited CIV5HandicapInfos.xml to change the deity AIUnhappinessPercent from 60 to 100, then played a few turns. I didn't notice any change right away, probably because the AI starts with workers and can improve their luxuries right from the start.

So I opened up CIV5HandicapInfos.xml again and changed AIUnhappinessPercent to 1000. This should make the AI with its two cities have (3 + (2*2)) * 10 = 70 unhappiness (apparently AI caps start at 2 pop). Here's the result:



And as you can see Genghis isn't having much luck improving his resources, considering rebels are constantly spawning and pillaging them.



Interestingly, city-states are also affected by this. I strolled past Monaco and it was a total warzone with barbs spawning constantly. So this is just for yucks. Obviously not a serious game. I'll bet I could win with one city even on deity since the AI can never grow or expand at -28 unhappiness and as I push the tech up, the barbs will get stronger. I may try a bit more with the unhappiness percent at 100 and see if that stops AI ICS. Anyone else played around with this?

 

[Tatran]

Interestingly, city-states are also affected by this.

I've changed the numbers in globaldefines file trying to see the effect of rebels.
I couldn't notice anything special, because I didn't change the AI happiness.
But one of the city states had a deer tile pillaged for a very long time, despite having a worker stand-by.
So, I guess the rebel mechanic is broken, because the AI refuses to restore its tiles.

 

[elthrasher]

Not sure if anyone is interested in this experiment, but so far putting the AIUnhappinessPercent up to 100 on Immortal has actually been making the game harder. With less of a happiness buffer, the AI will build more military and fewer cities. So before, there'd be a pile of lightly-defended cities and now there are few that are armed to the teeth making an early DoW more likely (the AI actually needs your luxuries now) and more effective.

 

[Sonereal]

Wait. So you're saying that the AI's happiness bonus is so huge, it's actually weakening it?

 

[Tatran]

Not sure if anyone is interested in this experiment,

I will give it a try.

 

[elthrasher]

Wait. So you're saying that the AI's happiness bonus is so huge, it's actually weakening it?

Um...no I'm saying the happiness bonus makes it play stupidly by settling a bunch of cities up to the limit before building much in the way of military and that the other bonuses it has mean that a lot of the time you sort of need the AI to play stupidly or it would be unbeatable.

But I haven't done a lot of testing yet.

 

[Sonereal]

Um...no I'm saying the happiness bonus makes it play stupidly by settling a bunch of cities up to the limit before building much in the way of military and that the other bonuses it has mean that a lot of the time you sort of need the AI to play stupidly or it would be unbeatable.

But I haven't done a lot of testing yet.

But the fact is is that the AI's happiness bonus does hurt it early on while, at the same time, makes it unbeatable later on. That's my problem.

 

[Tatran]

After 2 games I'm done with this experiment.
The AI builds indeed less cities, but growth stagnates also.

 

[elthrasher]

After 2 games I'm done with this experiment.
The AI builds indeed less cities, but growth stagnates also.

So you're saying the edit makes the game easier for you? I switched back to standard settings and the game is definitely easier for me when the AI does have this happiness bonus. It's almost like it needs the bonus or its other advantages create a real imbalance.

 

[Polycrates]

Really interesting experiment with some very interesting results!

Just wondering though: The value that you've changed, what's the original value and how much have you changed it? Is the intent that the AI has exactly the same happiness as a human player? And if so, have you verified that the AI do indeed have the same happiness? I ask because I know that someone in the modding forum found that there was something odd about the values the game uses to calculate AI happiness, and there was some additional offset from settler level or something. Sorry I can't be more specific.

Anyway if changing it so drastically causes stagnation, I wonder if there isn't some sort of in-between sweet spot where the AI gets a bit of a happiness bonus (like in all the other civ games), but not enough so that they're playing a completely different game. Have you experimented with different values?
Anyway I'm following this with great interest, and I'd love to give it a try myself. Very nice!

 

[vexing]

I ask because I know that someone in the modding forum found that there was something odd about the values the game uses to calculate AI happiness, and there was some additional offset from settler level or something.

they all start at chieftain difficulty. i don't know fully what benefits chieftain difficulty provides, i think the happiness might just be a flat amount though?

 

[elthrasher]

they all start at chieftain difficulty. i don't know fully what benefits chieftain difficulty provides, i think the happiness might just be a flat amount though?

If the AI is at chieftain level, that means it starts at 12 happiness (instead of 9) and gets 6 (instead of 5) happiness per luxury. I didn't touch that. What I did is on immortal difficulty raise the AIUnhappinessPercent from 75 to 100. That 25% reduction in unhappiness is just huge, as anyone who has followed the Piety tree can tell you.

 

[Polycrates]

If the AI is at chieftain level, that means it starts at 12 happiness (instead of 9) and gets 6 (instead of 5) happiness per luxury. I didn't touch that. What I did is on immortal difficulty raise the AIUnhappinessPercent from 75 to 100. That 25% reduction in unhappiness is just huge, as anyone who has followed the Piety tree can tell you.

Oh absolutely. What I was saying though was that someone messed around with the Settler level happiness bonuses and found they actually had an impact on the bonuses at all the other levels as well. So the formula is messy, perhaps bugged, and just generally more complicated than just that one variable. But hey, what works, works! I think I might try 90 as an intermediate value next game - I think it's fair enough to give them a bit of a happiness bonus, as long as they're in the same ballpark as the player.

 

[cman2010]

yeah the ai does not need this much of a bonus.

 

[pickle]

it is a bit silly having a small - medium empire compared to the ai and struggling to keep in the positives, say +1 to +5 most of the time then getting the how happy popup and seeing all the AI at +20 and higher

 

[Buckets]

If you're interested, I've created a mod that removes all AI happiness bonuses:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=408513

 

[cman2010]

If you're interested, I've created a mod that removes all AI happiness bonuses:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=408513

this is great for people that still want to play the game and have not quit playing like most.

 

[elthrasher]

If you're interested, I've created a mod that removes all AI happiness bonuses:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=408513

That's interesting. I'll bet the AI has a harder time dealing with the happiness mechanic than a player would and needs some kind of boost to be competitive.

I haven't experimented with simply removing the handicap as much as I'd like to. So far it's always made the game much harder for me. I can generally beat Immortal pretty easily because of bad AI tactics. I remove that unhappiness handicap and it goes crazy building military to the point where tactics simply aren't an issue anymore. In my last game, I switched back to default settings and suddenly I'm taking over the world all by myself again.

I wonder how well-considered all these settings are. Is it something like make the AI equal to the player on prince, then scale it up to twice as strong as the player on deity? Such an approach wouldn't really examine the complexities of the game. So does the happiness handicap make the game easier on purpose or was it just tossed in because immortal is supposed to be hard? Was immortal supposed to be harder? Is it just me and my play style?

Ultimately, what I hope the developer would do is say, okay, we'll give the AI a 75% unhappiness handicap, which should have X effect and make the game Y harder for the player. The AI will, given the chance, settle every settle-able site on the map. Is this what the developer wanted?

 

[Leuf]

It's possible they scaled up the happiness bonuses along with the rest of the bonuses until they got the difficulty they wanted, but never experimented with different levels of happiness independently. If there wasn't a happiness bonus maybe the other bonuses would have ended up lower.