The war mechanics (and why Civ II did it better)

Didn't read all the comments but.

After Industrial era, you can blitzkrieg all you want with the Order ideology. Once you get the Free Courthouse + +2 happiness per monument policy, you have enough happiness to keep conquering cities. Considering how I first heard the term blitzkrieg from the last 2 great wars, it kind of makes sense you can start doing so after the Industrial era.

I do not expect ancient era to "blitzkrieg" with their limited technology. In this sense, your 1st suggestion is already implanted well in the Ideology system added in BNW.

My last game, for example, I was pretty much at war the entire game. After the Order policies, the last 3-4 civilizations I was pretty much at war continuously and didn't lose happiness.
 
Didn't read all the comments but.

After Industrial era, you can blitzkrieg all you want with the Order ideology. Once you get the Free Courthouse + +2 happiness per monument policy, you have enough happiness to keep conquering cities. Considering how I first heard the term blitzkrieg from the last 2 great wars, it kind of makes sense you can start doing so after the Industrial era.

I do not expect ancient era to "blitzkrieg" with their limited technology.

NOTE: You didn't get Courthouse if you aren't annex them right after you capture the city.
 
Personally I think Civ 4 is the best in this regard, I have played civ 3.

It simply doesn't make sense to have barbarians spawning in my capital where they should be spawning in the occupied territories.

With that said, I've never dropped down below -20 unhappiness except for very rare few times. Happened to me maybe 2-4 times over few years of playing civ 5. So easy to avoid it is.
 
NOTE: You didn't get Courthouse if you aren't annex them right after you capture the city.
This is a minor detail. I learned it after I took the policy. Annexing the city right away becomes better than simply puppeting it, essentially. Since after the rebellion is over, you can choose to build the Monument and get the +2 happiness from monuments (it usually take 1-2 turns too). Or else the AI usually pick some crappy building to build like Walls or some random stuff you don't need.
 
I liked how that one guy described rebels in his "failing" game. He conquered a Zulu town, some rebels spawned, he crushed the Zulu activist.

Technically though, I always thought of this sentiment: you conquer a city, resources and attention are now divided towards that city. Folks usually aren't happy having things diverted away and BAM unhappiness. For the player/leader, conquering sounds awesome. And for the people, initially, but people...rather get the luxury goods.

BUT, to truly whet your appetitite for SPECULATION (not discussion...because its moot in terms of implementation), you should whether you take a hit to either gold, growth, production, or happiness. This works better in systems where a city is soecialized and therefore would require certain things. Conquering a city with a large agricultural community would need different things from the conqueror than conquering a heavy urban city.

Either way, if you HAD to discuss replacing the system, happiness works well.

Also...it's a game.
 
I'm only looking for discussion on how this might be better designed.

If you only want to discuss, it would be better not to have a topic title saying "Civ II is better" on a Civ V board. It kind of starts things off on the wrong foot.

With that being said, Civ V's happiness system is an abstraction. Just like how "tourism" is more like "soft power", happiness is an abstraction that bundles up different ideas and concepts. It's meant to represent war weariness, societal stability, cultural/national/"civilizational" pride, urban discontent/stratification, entertainment (coliseums, luxury resources, etc.), and probably some other stuff I can't think of. And because it represents so many things and is an abstraction, there's going to be certain liberties taken to make it an enjoyable game. As someone mentioned earlier, gameplay wise, is kind of like stored kinetic energy. Expanding causes the rubber band to stretch out, and if the rate isn't slowed down, then a rapid contraction will inevitably occur.

If one wants to create a game where rapid conquest is possible, but still keep the happiness system, then maybe something like a delayed unhappiness could work. Something like you conquer 3 cities, and you can spend some resources to make sure they're at least not pissed off for now (so the conqueror can continue conquering), but this happiness is sort that papers over the problems of conquest with "brute force" (not necessarily militarily, maybe you spend a lot of money, or deploy a spy to run the secret police in the city, etc.) . So, later on, if you don't work to resolve the problems, the pent up unhappiness is unleashed and you have a full blown rebellion on your hand. Something like that perhaps would work, particularly if the future unhappiness is paid back, with interest kind of thing. I'm just throwing this idea out, not sure if it's even workable.
 
I have not played a late game Autocracy Domination type of game, but theory-on-paper estimates make me think that it is viable to declare perpetual war under Autocracy and eventually rule the world. +2 happiness with Barracks/Armory/Military means +6 happiness per city, on top of Courthouse itself providing +3. Provided you have enogh income to sustain city purchases, this can be self-sustaining.

Of course, if you don't start out with a happiness excess nor with a booming economy enough to sustain purchases in war areas - well, doesn't this represent the limit of what your empire can achieve? It's not the war per se that's limiting expansion. It's empire resources.
 
I really liked Civ IV's "war weariness" system. It gave happiness penalties during wartime that increased the more you fought, especially if you were fighting in foreign lands. (The penalty was much smaller for fighting in your own lands, which makes sense; nothing unites a country like having to protect the motherland.) This system forced you to set a realistic military objective and then achieve it and call for a cease-fire before your cities buckled under the unhappiness. And it made a lot of sense: your people will only go along with so much of their sons dying in military adventurism.

I thought that Civ V desperately needed some kind of war weariness system; I thought it was absurd that it made no difference to your nation whether you are at war or peace. With no incentive to make peace, wars could just stretch out over hundreds of turns. I mean, history has had the Hundred Years War, and some peoples have held grudges for centuries, but a 2000-year war is hard to take seriously.

Luckily, BNW did bring us such a mechanic: trade routes! You can trade with a peaceful neighbor, even an unfriendly one. And a single enemy unit can pillage one of your trade routes. So you're costing yourself money by keeping up a perpetual war. Good enough for me!
 
Would you prefer they bring back the huge stacks of doom? That was blitzkrieg in a nut shell.

Hell no! :)

If you only want to discuss, it would be better not to have a topic title saying "Civ II is better" on a Civ V board. It kind of starts things off on the wrong foot.

With that being said, Civ V's happiness system is an abstraction. Just like how "tourism" is more like "soft power", happiness is an abstraction that bundles up different ideas and concepts. It's meant to represent war weariness, societal stability, cultural/national/"civilizational" pride, urban discontent/stratification, entertainment (coliseums, luxury resources, etc.), and probably some other stuff I can't think of. And because it represents so many things and is an abstraction, there's going to be certain liberties taken to make it an enjoyable game. As someone mentioned earlier, gameplay wise, is kind of like stored kinetic energy. Expanding causes the rubber band to stretch out, and if the rate isn't slowed down, then a rapid contraction will inevitably occur.

If one wants to create a game where rapid conquest is possible, but still keep the happiness system, then maybe something like a delayed unhappiness could work. Something like you conquer 3 cities, and you can spend some resources to make sure they're at least not pissed off for now (so the conqueror can continue conquering), but this happiness is sort that papers over the problems of conquest with "brute force" (not necessarily militarily, maybe you spend a lot of money, or deploy a spy to run the secret police in the city, etc.) . So, later on, if you don't work to resolve the problems, the pent up unhappiness is unleashed and you have a full blown rebellion on your hand. Something like that perhaps would work, particularly if the future unhappiness is paid back, with interest kind of thing. I'm just throwing this idea out, not sure if it's even workable.

The Civ II reference was for discussion purposes on the ideology part. But I agree the discussion went off on the wrong foot and hasn't quite developed as I hoped.

Your last paragraph is interesting. It's the core of what I'm trying to get at. In fact I think you should be forced to spend cash and military power on the annexed regions. I can swallow that a lot easier than thinking "I captured a great city but I'll raze it because it doesn't deliver me the incense my people want to burn so badly that my whole economy hangs in the balance".

Of course, if you don't start out with a happiness excess nor with a booming economy enough to sustain purchases in war areas - well, doesn't this represent the limit of what your empire can achieve? It's not the war per se that's limiting expansion. It's empire resources.

Correct, but why not change what resource takes a hit?

At the moment you can pull, let's say +500 gpt, but still not be able to conquer because of happiness (even if you only want to prevent losing the Rationalism opener bonus - not even talking about -10 or more). This also means happiness does not merely reflect what your empire is capable of, like many others suggested. Although I think it's an elegant idea to label happiness as the empires ability to sustain larger territory.

Just to clarify once more, I'm not saying Civ should be a war game only, with unlimited expansion. I'm only looking at other ways to prevent unlimited expansion, that are more in line with the real world. Because even though it's a game we are simulating the development of real world civilizations (hence, the name ;) ).
 
The effects of unhappiness are that you lose large amounts of growth and science. Probably for the bettter part of the game. To make it worse your soldiers become weak, useless fools when your empire is unhappy. These effects don't reflect the real world and are, in my humble opinion, flawed by design

This is actually realistic, if only for today's time. If your population is generally disagreeing with its government on the wars it's fighting, fewer people are willing to pursue a career in the military, so recruiters have less of a pool to choose from which results in less able people becoming soldiers and officers.
 
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