(Un)Happiness Brainstorm

[balparmak]

From hokath’s thread on late-game buildings, it’s clear the community wants more city specialization more freedom in what to build, since unhappiness acts like a rubberband in city development, imposing a pressure to have everything in every city. That’s not possible without changing the underlying unhappiness mechanic though.

Since dev time is limited, any change needs to be well thought out and justified first. I doubt a total overhaul is feasible now, so the scope should stay as small as possible, bonus points if it doesn’t require major AI changes.

One idea would be allowing overflow from excess yields to counter unhappiness from lack of other yields. That seems feasible to me, and we already kinda have that with projects converting production. A passive, less-efficient overflow can co-exist with that.

Even this small change needs a lot more thought though: how should yield conversion work? Keep it as a static modifier, or let policies, beliefs, techs, and buildings modify it throughout the game? I'm not a numbers or balance guy, so making this into a fully fleshed proposal is beyond me. I can work on a proof-of-concept modmod if anyone helps me polish this idea though.

This is just one idea, and doesn't have to be the focus of discussion here, if you have anything, shoot.

edit: Changed the framing from specialization to more freedom in what not to build.

 

[hokath]

So to be clear, you are suggesting specialization without a commensurate unhappiness cost?
The alternative would be a trade-off design.

Then, the question becomes one of how the threshold are set and what the base happiness from num cities versus population looks like. For example, if you increase the amount of happiness per lux, you would have more happiness to "play with".

 

[azum4roll]

I disagree with specialization via generic buildings. National wonders (and other limited buildings) should be what specialize cities. You already have a minor specialization choice on which buildings to research and build first.

 

[redrum68]

Yeah the biggest issue I have is that most of the cities outside your capital end up having pretty much the same buildings. The needs system pushes you to build evenly so you don't have much choice. My suggestion would be allow half of need overflow to cover other needs that are negative. That makes it so you can potentially have cities focus on certain yields and cover needs but its less efficient so you probably still have some happiness trade off.

 

[CppMaster]

I disagree with specialization via generic buildings.

Why?

 

[azum4roll]

Why?

How are you going to do it?

1. Add a ton of buildings so that you can't possibly build them all
This makes you choose buildings, but doesn't necessary lead to specialization (you don't have to pick the same type of buildings).
2. Make later buildings much more expensive so you can't possibly build them all
Same problem as above. This is better for Progress/Industry/Ironworks balance though.
3. Make buildings mutually exclusive
This creates "permanently missable bonuses", something that's hard for the AI to handle (see policies and beliefs, and also wonder/guild placement). They don't know the cost of NOT having the other choices for the rest of the game.
4. Add penalties to buildings, e.g. -5% culture on science buildings
Permanent penalties are also bad for the AI for the same reason of not knowing how much effect they'll have for the rest of the game.

 

[looorg]

If one is brainstorming in general about (Un)Happiness I think the main concern should be the unhappiness spiral that always seems to happen, you get a little unhappy and then boom the event system triggers and the spiral of unhappiness events come into force and it's sometimes quite hard to break out of so you spend eras hobbling along. Trying to use various "tricks", like locking pop-growth in happy cities so they'll remain happy or trying to get rid of population etc. It seems all the systems now enforce unhappiness once it has happened.

Late or Late-late game doesn't usually have a happiness problem. It's a mid-game issue most of the time I would say. In the end nothing much happens. All the cities have more or less all the buildings and are just doing projects or pushing out units.

 

[azum4roll]

you get a little unhappy and then boom the event system triggers

Events are out of balance concerns.

Unhappiness currently doesn't directly spirals (only growth and unit production is affected), only indirectly through spawning rebels, flipping your cities, and slowing down your progress in the long run.

 

[CppMaster]

How are you going to do it?

1. Add a ton of buildings so that you can't possibly build them all
This makes you choose buildings, but doesn't necessary lead to specialization (you don't have to pick the same type of buildings).
2. Make later buildings much more expensive so you can't possibly build them all
Same problem as above. This is better for Progress/Industry/Ironworks balance though.
3. Make buildings mutually exclusive
This creates "permanently missable bonuses", something that's hard for the AI to handle (see policies and beliefs, and also wonder/guild placement). They don't know the cost of NOT having the other choices for the rest of the game.
4. Add penalties to buildings, e.g. -5% culture on science buildings
Permanent penalties are also bad for the AI for the same reason of not knowing how much effect they'll have for the rest of the game.

Ok, so do you disagree with specific implementations of the idea, but not the idea itself?

 

[CppMaster]

Other ideas:
5. Nerf buildings, so not all buildings are worth building all the time. Could make more conditional yields. In Endless Legend and Endless Space there are plenty of buildings that are worth only under some circumstances, so it's not good to build them all.

6. Completing a building increases cost of other buildings. Kinda like with policy costs, but much less drastic. That way, you would need a better reason to build a building.

 

[Mwalls]

I feel like the solution could be that if a city has excessive capability to produce something it should offer more happiness than they currently could to counter the unhapiness of other resources in shortage. This makes sense in reality too since people around the world feel happy not about the same kind of stuff, it could be good food, could be music, could be art & environment etc.

 

[jdevo]

The city-building side of things in Vox Populi has always been the weakest part of the mod. It's the reason I keep going back to Civ4 and Civ6, the city building in those games is just more interesting and fun. I think the main issue with building in this mod is the fact that each building does too much.

I'd love to get to a place where you don't need to build a barracks or walls in most or all cities.

 

[detroitrex]

I have a couple partial thoughts. First off, I am not a modder or a programmer in any way shape or form. Installing a mod is about the limits of my ability. I am eternally grateful for the very clever people here who build this project so morons like me can play around. Second, these are not complete thoughts. They are a couple of ideas (probably not new or especially clever or even complete) that address narrow aspects of what this thread is imagining. Some of this is probably obvious, but that doesn't mean it's not worth spelling out.

I.
If the goal here is to have a "culture city" and a "science city" et cetera, I feel like we're going to keep coming back to some set of buildings that are kind of like mutually-exclusive national wonders: you can only build one and a city has to choose one of the set: The culture city gets the culture one, the science city gets the science one and so on. It feels like a pretty straightforward way to accomplish the goal. I would like to offer a potential fleshing-out of this concept. First each specialization should open up in stages. Three always feels like a good starting point for anything that has stages, so let's go with that for now.

Building yields in general probably need to come down so that we can pump them back up with specialization buildings. I'm not going to attempt to put numbers to things, but I can imagine 3 distinct tiers of science (for example) specialization buildings. Maybe the first one comes online in the classical, the second in the industrial, and the third in the atomic. Probably need tier 1 to build tier 2? I dunno. Tying it to a specific tech, though, I'm not sure I like that. Seems both boring and overincentivizing a beeline. Can we tie a building to completing an era (research every classical tech, unlock the tier one science specialization building?) Is that a thing we can do? I think that might create an interesting strategic choice: push ahead or grab the last couple techs to get the specialization building? Also, there's no reason that all specializations have to be on the same era schedule. culture buildings could open in a different set or eras, for example.

If we can't tie buildings to completing an era, can we tie them to opening an era? Open medieval, unlock the "classical" science building. I think it would be interesting to tie a building to something other than getting an individual tech.

II.
needs: a specialist city is possibly going to have deficiencies elsewhere, alongside a massive surplus in its specialized resource. A well-specialized empire will have a bunch of cities all having this problem. No idea how feasible it is, but it would be great if the culture city's surplus culture could go into a pool (probably at a discounted rate: for argument's sake let's say for every 2 surplus culture it pays 1 into the pool) and then that pool gets used to "pay" the science city's culture deficit. If this is infeasible, could it be structured as some sort of fake, in-the-background culture ITR being sent from culture city to science city? You guys know the feasible mechanisms far better than I, but the key idea here is that specialized cities should be able to cover each other's needs. Your breadbasket city should feed your empire, while your money city pays their bills.

III.
whither Tradition? I would like to propose a modification to the tradition tree if we go the modified-national-wonder route for specialization: on the finisher, the capital is released from the mutually-exclusive part and can multi-specialize. Tradition's whole trick is the super-capital after all. Otherwise I think you're torpedoing tall play.

 

[Alpakinator]

So the main problem is that we dislike being forced to build all the buildings there are to make the cities happy. There's no way to specialize cities a lot, because unhappiness from non-specialized yields will cripple the city growth and weaken the whole empire. Did i get this right?

So the redrum68 above-need overflow covering for other unhappiness sources is a great idea IMO, that partially fixes this problem. As a side effect it allows for higher populations in cities, increasing the value of farms and buildings which are currently less valuable than alternatives, unless you're winning and there are less happiness problems. This ties to the current pro-snowball, anti-underdog needs system, that is a a problem which loorg mentioned, but I'm not sure its fitting to talk about it here. Anyway...

However, there's limited specialization currently possible in the game. Diplomatic specialization with national wonders that give % bonuses don't compound, they're additive, just like almost all % bonuses of any building. So having a single diplomat city doesn't make you build diplomats more efficiently than 2 half-diplomat cities with half of the diplomat buildings. The only 2 specialization ways that work are:
- combining buildings with base yields and buildings with corresponding % bonuses. So a single diplomat city would make sense is that city was also specialized for maximum base .
- Stacking promotions, bonuses. So a single diplomat city would make sense if all the promotions that diplomats get from national wonders, were local only too the city with this national wonder. Similar with military national wonders (that's already the case with Heroic Epic).

Are we ok with only these 2 types of specializations?

Additionally, the cities will still have incentive to build other buildings after there's nothing to build that fits their specialty. It's because almost all the buildings are worth building in all cities, just with different priorities. Barracks are a priority to build in a culture city in the center of the empire, because supply is very important and 1 is worth the 1 maintenance. Same with walls, because supply.

Are we ok with that? If not, like CppMaster said making each subsequent building more expensive is a decent way to fix that, or nerf the buildings. Another way is to put a cap on the amount of buildings a city can have, linked to the city population. Then they could use the production for processes if theres nothing they can build. For once it might become worth it to ever use the Farming process to speed up population growth. Also it'd make destroying buildings very important. We finally would have modern cities without walls and watermills.

Edit - but a big problem with restricting building all buildings is AI as azum4roll said. It's a big one, so unless there are people willing to spend 10s of hours changing AI c++ code or changing flavors of buildings to somehow account for the effect of not having them in the city, it'll remain a problem.

 

[jdevo]

Yeah, these are good ideas. I'd prefer that barracks just give melee/anit-cav units experience only, instead of science as well unless you pick a pantheon that adds yields to barracks. Also like the idea of of stables only giving mounted units experience, tht way you can specialize where you're building melee vs. mounted units. Same with walls, I'd rather have walls just give cities more defense and separate unit supply from it so that you only build walls on the frontier or along borders.

I'm not a fan of having to remove or destroy things you've already built. Seems anti-fun. It's one of the reasons why Civ7 is such a disaster.

I also really like the idea of increasing the importance of farms and high food cities.

 

[CppMaster]

I'm not a fan of having to remove or destroy things you've already built. Seems anti-fun. It's one of the reasons why Civ7 is such a disaster

What do you mean?

 

[jdevo]

What do you mean?

Alpinkanator mentioned the need to destroy buildings above.

 

[azum4roll]

5. Nerf buildings, so not all buildings are worth building all the time. Could make more conditional yields. In Endless Legend and Endless Space there are plenty of buildings that are worth only under some circumstances, so it's not good to build them all.

6. Completing a building increases cost of other buildings. Kinda like with policy costs, but much less drastic. That way, you would need a better reason to build a building.

Both lead to working processes instead of building things.

 

[azum4roll]

So the main problem is that we dislike being forced to build all the buildings there are to make the cities happy.

You don't build all the buildings because they make the cities happy (or not unhappy). You build them because... what other choices are there? Military units have a cap, diplo units have a cap, trade units have a cap, workers cost maintenance and are soft capped to how many tiles you can improve, and public works don't give yields. You're just left with processes, which are "boring".

I personally don't see a problem with this. You get buildings to build so you build them. The only problem is running out of buildings to build, so

1. Add a ton of buildings so that you can't possibly build them all
This makes you choose buildings, but doesn't necessary lead to specialization (you don't have to pick the same type of buildings).
2. Make later buildings much more expensive so you can't possibly build them all
Same problem as above. This is better for Progress/Industry/Ironworks balance though.

these are the solutions I would pick, which doesn't lead to specialization (which I don't care about). They'll have to all be rebalanced so they're worth more than working processes though.

Yeah, these are good ideas. I'd prefer that barracks just give melee/anit-cav units experience only, instead of science as well unless you pick a pantheon that adds yields to barracks. Also like the idea of of stables only giving mounted units experience, tht way you can specialize where you're building melee vs. mounted units. Same with walls, I'd rather have walls just give cities more defense and separate unit supply from it so that you only build walls on the frontier or along borders.

I'll use these as an example. Now your interior cities don't need/want to build these buildings. They have no choice but to start working processes, or build the barracks and start churning out units. Just like currently when a city runs out of buildings to build, but earlier.

 

[CppMaster]

Both lead to working processes instead of building things.

Yes, and units. There is no point in building for the sake of building.