whole bunch of design/game issues and questions

[Kniaz]

Before I get into a bizzare game ending that I just came accross, I want to tell you a bit of a background. I was playing on Medium level, with 5 nations. All of the bizzare stuff started happening at 2200 AD.

After I have successfully conquered 2 nations, I had 56 cities with Technocracy which caused a great deal of distress throughout the empire (cities max - 45). I was strong enough to attack the second strongest civilization, but I didn't want to just attack, I needed a reason. So I launched my Diplomacy manager and demanded a city from them. They refused so I threatened to declare war and they agreed. Alright, I said I will still find a reason to attack you. So I demanded another city, they refused, I threatened to declare war and they agreed. Hmm ... So I demanded they capital, they refused, I threatened to declare war, they agreed. Damn. So I thought fine, let me talk to the third strongest, maybe they will give me a reason to attack - I asked for a city, they refused, I threatened to attack they agreed. Alright, I thought, let me see how many cities would the second-strongest nation would be willing to give up. So I went back to them, demanded a city, they refused, I threatened to declare war, they agreed. 27 cities later, they only had 2 left and finaly refused even after I threatened to declare war. Aha! Finaly, I declared war and promptly captured one of the remaining cities. The last city I could not get to on this turn. (Did I mention that all of what I have just described happened during the same turn?) Now I had a dilema, since the nation had a lot of units scatered around next to the cities that were just given to me and I had no way to defend them, so I just went back into the diplomacy manager and offered a cease-fire agreement along with 20k in cash. Needless to say, the offer was accepted and I relieved to think that I will have enough time to buy a leviathan in each of those cities and finaly capture the last remaining city of this nation on the next turn. With that in mind, I ended the turn. Whew! It took 7 minutes to complete the turn. When it was finaly time for me to play my turn, I found out that my whole empire has revolted and is now under new leadership and I lost.

So here come the questions:
1) What kind of a diplomacy strategy it is to give up 30 cities simply because of the threat?
2) The highest number of cities you can have under any government is 60. I had 60 cities before I could discover a government that would allow me to have 60 cities. So the only way for me to win a bloodlust campaign is to destroy other cities with eco-rangers (assuming that Nanite Defuser has been built) ?? Pretty limited.
3) There aren't enough entertainment improvements in the game to maintain any acceptable level of happiness even if all of the cities have nothing but entertainers as specialists. How do we maintain the happiness level with that many cities?
4) About my whole nation revolting. How is that possible? Even my original cities (18 or so) have revolted even though they had happiness level of 80+.

So, any thoughts/ideas/comments are certainly welcomed.

Thanks.

[Martin Gühmann]

Every city about the limit will reduce the happiness level by one. Therefore you the happiness level was already decreased by 11. After you added 30 cities again to your empire the happiness level was again decreased by 30. Now your cities had a happiness level around 40. The effect is that every city revolts.

Therefore it is not posibble to win a bloodlust campain without destroying cities without changing the rhules. Obviously the people of Activision don't play their games. Otherwise why should they say that their game is bug free and complete.

But there is a way to cope with it:

Open the govern.txt in ..\ctp2_data\default\ directory.
Search for your current governmet.
Find the TooManyCitiesThreshold of your current governmet.
Increase the value there to something what you think.
Here is an example the original LIne for technocracy is:

TooManyCitiesThreshold 45

Change it to:

TooManyCitiesThreshold 1000

And now technocracy allow to have 1000 cities without any penality.

But there is a second way to cope with the problem:
In CTP1 the was a wonder called AI entity that was able to set every citizien content. The AllCitizensContent flag can be used in the CTP2 wonder.txt:

Open wonder.txt.
Select a wonder of your choice.
Add the AllCitizensContent flag.

Now an example:

############################################################

WONDER_AI_ENTITY	{ 
   DefaultIcon ICON_WONDER_AI_ENTITY
   Description DESCRIPTION_WONDER_AI_ENTITY
   Movie MOVIE_WONDER_AI_ENTITY
   EnableAdvance ADVANCE_MIND_CONTROL
   ProductionCost 12000
   AllCitizensContent	
   BreakDownChance 0.03 35
}

############################################################

Not the BreakDownChance flag don't work in CTP2, I added to get the rebellious effect of the wonder, but it can't be found in the ctp2.exe. The effect of the AllCitizensContent that the happiness level is set to 75. Now you can conquer the world, raise the workday to a maximum, reduce the pays an rations to an minimum, without any trouble about happiness.

-Martin