The 'Anarchy Bucket'

[AlpsStranger]

I was one of Civilization V's most vocal defenders based upon the pre-release information, and I still feel that the game is, viewed as a whole, quite good. I enjoy the general direction they are attempting to take the series. The execution, however, does have a few glaring problems at the moment. I am sure these can be corrected if proper remedial action is taken. If it is taken quickly then these issues may even be forgotten before they have time to fester.

I have what I consider a reasonable suggestion for fixing the clearly imbalanced "ignore happiness" strategies that I see cropping up. This argument is being made purely on its own merits as I am not a person of note in the community. I ask that this thread be used to discuss the merit of this suggestion and not devolve into personal attacks or debates about the quality of Civilization 5 as a whole. You can do that on the *entire* forum outside of this post for all I care.

Stop reading now if you do not agree with the following.

- Ignoring happiness should not be a viable playstyle. It exists outside of the bounds of the intended mechanics.

- Prolonged and severe unhappiness should be something close to a lose condition.

- Civilization 5 should use mechanical devices common to Civilization 5, not Civilization 4.

The anarchy bucket itself is actually quite simple. Whenever you cross the Very Unhappy threshold the raze icon appears in place of the golden age icon. (Golden Age bucket is kept, but is hidden for clarity) The value is, just to throw a number out there, X/100. Every point of unhappiness beyond the threshold for very unhappy is placed in the anarchy bucket. The anarchy bucket points can only be depleted by positive happiness values.

So what happens if it fills up? You enter anarchy. Anarchy should be devastating and even a single turn in such a state should seriously reduce your chances of winning the game. I would suggest something like the following:

- Research Stops

- Military units cannot be built or purchased

- Every city begins to raze itself ( cities that cannot be razed will raze down to 1 population )

- 5% of your military, rounded up, deserts and flips to barbarian

- Cities take severe health damage, as if under siege

- AI civilizations, sensing weakness, are very likely to attack

- Claimed tiles begin to recede fairly quickly

- 10% if your tile improvements, at random, pillage themselves

Nobody should be able to endure anarchy as part of any kind of wonky exploit. Keeping your happiness in the black is a core part of Civilization 5.

 

[Franks]

Stop reading now if you do not agree with the following.

- Ignoring happiness should not be a viable playstyle. It exists outside of the bounds of the intended mechanics.

- Prolonged and severe unhappiness should be something close to a lose condition.

- Civilization 5 should use mechanical devices common to Civilization 5, not Civilization 4.

Yup

- Every city begins to raze itself ( cities that cannot be razed will raze down to 1 population )

Sounds extreme, but I like the idea.

- 5% of your military, rounded up, deserts and flips to barbarian

I think this value is too low. Someone entering anarchy is clearly a careless warmonger (not that I'm not a careless warmonger) and should take a huge hit for neglecting his population. 1/4 of his army turning against him would do the trick. Coup d'État style. The flipped units should be called Rebel forces.

- Cities take severe health damage, as if under siege

Yes.

- AI civilizations, sensing weakness, are very likely to attack

I think the disbanding of military units is enough to provoke this.

- 10% if your tile improvements, at random, pillage themselves

Maybe 1 tile/turn would be more interesting.

Nobody should be able to endure anarchy as part of any kind of wonky exploit. Keeping your happiness in the black is a core part of Civilization 5.

Definitely, great idea

 

[PTM]

Yeah, I always liked the stability aspect of Rhye's and Fall and was disappointed to find that Civilization 5 didn't incorporate something like it out of the box. At the same time, I also agree that happiness isn't really working as intended right now. Right now, warmongering is penalized heavily thanks to the coupling of very high occupation costs with astronomical courthouse cost, yet a high unhappy value - because it never gets game-breakingly punishing - does nothing but encourage you to just keep conquering. I mean, you're not going to remove all that , so you might as well just destroy everyone, especially since -one billion won't cause a loss.

 

[skallben]

They should hire Bruic or whatever his name, the dude who did Revolutions mod for cIV. Wonderful modwork.

 

[AySteve]

Every city begins to raze itself ( cities that cannot be razed will raze down to 1 population )

Thats a good idea. Means that you shouldnt end up stuck in permanent unhapiness and be unable to do anything about it because your population will be going down. One of the problems with the unhapiness now seems to be that its difficult to build the hapiness buildings to get out of it when you have that production penalty in place

 

[Lord Tirian]

I like the idea of an "anarchy bucket" - not so keen on the way you describe how it should work though, auto-raze is a neat idea to make it self-correcting (i.e. getting rid of excess population), but the idea of fringe cities vanishing randomly due to revolts is weird.

I'd rather see the farthest cities starting to form city states. This is self-correcting as well, but gives a) more things to interact with, b) a chance to correct your mistakes (i.e. you can "undo" the anarchy in time by befriending or conquering the newly formed city states) and c) fits neatly into Civ5's "City States matter" theme.

Cheers, LT.

 

[AljayBoy]

They should hire Bruic or whatever his name, the dude who did Revolutions mod for cIV. Wonderful modwork.

@ Skallben

I believe your thinking of JDogg5000. He's the guy that created the great Revolutions mod for civ 4. Bruic created 'unofficial patches' that tweaked the overall game and fixed numerous bugs and exploits.

But either way, lets hope both of them continue to mod sort out civ 5!

 

[skallben]

@ Skallben

I believe your thinking of JDogg5000. He's the guy that created the great Revolutions mod for civ 4. Bruic created 'unofficial patches' that tweaked the overall game and fixed numerous bugs and exploits.

But either way, lets hope both of them continue to mod sort out civ 5!

Oops, yeah. You are right of course.
Apologizes to Bruic and Jdogg!
Anyways, that is another very talented modder in the civ community. If not Firaxis totally botches up the SDK or something stupid I expect we will see lots of flavours of CiV goodness, just gonna take some time.

On subject:
I really think the effects of anarchy should be tied to social policies. Anarchy is not synonumous with chaos and total civil war necessarily, it's just absense of government. The rainbow have many colors if you get my drift. Societies and cultures differ.

I would believe that for instance in america where there is a strong sentiment against government interference, the effects of anarchy would be different from, say North Korea and it's totalitarian control apparatus.

 

[BjoernLars]

Excellent Idea!

 

[Siggy_23]

The problem with the city state idea is that nothing prevents you from just conquering them again ... its what you do anyway ...

I'm also not sure that unhappiness should be such a huge problem, it should just force you to become more totalitarian in your rule, I think once your anarchy bucket is full you should take a production hit and the game should start spawning "rioters" in and around your cities forcing you to keep more and more of your military at hole to control your population.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Simpler idea....
when in -10 unhappiness, cities stay in resistance
AND
While cities are in resistance, the original owner controls the territory.

 

[Nick Doom]

How about when in Anarchy all the that has been mention in top post and

10% chance a city will be flip back to its original owner
If the owner is dead he is liberated and at war with you
Maybe they get your military that defects away from you


as people with out a guv would some time look to lach on to one

 

[Frosty_AUT]

I second the concept of an "anarchy bucket". It just seems natural and logical that after some turns of severe unhappiness, your nation would start falling apart.

However, I don't like the idea of combining a huge number of random negative effects when it would be much simpler to have anarchy work the way it did in Civ IV. Everything just stops. No research, no production, no city growth and no wealth being accumulated (also, you can't rushbuy things). Losing an entire turn can make quite a difference. You could still move your units, but I'd also suggest that they take a massive hit to their combat strenght and maybe even lose a movement point.

In case one turn of anarchy doesn't sound harsh enough, the duration could depend on the number of cities and the number of times your civ was in anarchy before (kind like Golden Ages become shorter each time, anarchy becomes longer).

 

[buffoon]

i like the idea of uprisings. how did it work in civ2? i remember barbarians surrounding my burning cities. What happens when their unhappy from over expansion, or something, and not due to occupied cities?

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Well if we wanted to totally balance it, then
-1 to -9 ->slow natural growth
-10 ->slow natural decline ( food "excess" is capped at -1)

This way it is a simple population cap.
If you go over the cap by acquiring more cities+population, your population will 'rebalance' to the new level.

 

[Camikaze]

I think this is a very good idea.

A suggestion to add: perhaps instead of having a single number that you hit, causing anarchy, you could instead have a steadily increasing chance of anarchy the more unhappiness you have, with no happiness meaning there is a 0% chance, and the upper limit being about 90%.

Also, maybe instead of having the exact same effects each time, there could be different and more targeted consequences. For instance, if a lot of unhappiness is coming from a particular city, instead of going into anarchy, perhaps that city could just break off. Or maybe sometimes a civil war of some sort could break out.

There were a couple of threads rather relevant to this, about a year ago.
Argetnyx's Empire-Crashing Idea
Rebellions, Civil Wars and Civ Disintegration

 

[ehecatzin]

I really like your suggestion, as it stands now nothing is stopping you from keep on getting unhappiness and keep on the conquering spree.

It would be nice if the penatlies were flavored to your social policies as the anarchy bucket keeps on filling, like factions or the population focing you to give up certain SP or take another anarchy hit.

Also if civil war could happen with the anarchy bucket (it would be nice) it would be interesting if cities would defect to another nation only AFTER a civil war has broken out, to prevent you from simply anexing it back again. it could even have a flavor message like: "X city asked X civ for protection, trying to flee the war"

perhaps it could also be implemented in the way of massive migration, in which you could loose population to civs that offer refuge to them.

 

[mamuz]

> Research Stops

Too radical. Malus is enough.

> Military units cannot be built or purchased

No way.

> Every city begins to raze itself ( cities that cannot be razed will raze down to 1 population )

Sounds good. But, it should be proportionnal to the level of unhappiness.

> 5% of your military, rounded up, deserts and flips to barbarian

As i said in another thread, i prefer to see apparitions of new insurgeants units who fight exclusively against your Civ (and don't give promotion to your units during the fights : this point is important). Unhappiness leads more to Revolution than to Anarchy in my state of mind, that's why.

> Cities take severe health damage, as if under siege
> AI civilizations, sensing weakness, are very likely to attack
> Claimed tiles begin to recede fairly quickly


Sounds good.

10% if your tile improvements, at random, pillage themselves

I don't like it. I think new insurgeant units can do this job.

My conclusion :
Don't be too extreme. It should stay possible to win by managing unhappiness. But, i agree with you. Unhappiness should be more annoying.

 

[Psyringe]

Interesting suggestion. I agree that "ignore happiness" exploits should be fixed - though I could also see the strategy itself kept viable, as long as it's balanced with other approaches instead of being clearly superior. In Civ4, the "specialist economy" (or later, "espionage economy") weren't intended by the devs, but evolved out of the system. Specialist economy is a good example for an unintended strategy that fit well into the game and that was balanced with the "conservative" approach (cottage economy). Espionage economy arguably didn't fit quite as well (though it still does to some extent), and was a bit overpowered in high difficulty games. I think "ignore happiness" strategies might enrich the strategic options available in a similar way as EE did in Civ4. Therefore, I think that balancing the strategy (instead of fixing the exploit) might be an even better option.

However, if fixing (not balancing) the exploit is the goal, then the suggested method would work quite well, yes.

 

[Camikaze]

"Ignore happiness" strategies could be positive from the point of view of strategic options and variations, but not if they are too easily and unrealistically developed, allowing for no consideration of happiness at all. Getting yourself into a position in which you can ignore happiness is one thing; being able to ignore it due its weakness as a feature is another.