City unhappiness

[Harlan]

It occurred to me today that one thing CTP2 needs improvment in is city unhappiness. I don't feel challenged by this. Basically, its not something I worry about for quite a long time. In Civ2, one of the first things you'd want to build in a new city was a Temple (CTP2's Shrine). Now its usually not a big priority until the city gets large.
I understand in the DiffDB file, there is this for each difficulty level:

BIG_CITY_SCALE 1.0 # how much each unhappy person matters
BIG_CITY_OFFSET 5 # population above this size are unhappy

Which seems pretty straightforward. But then there's the whole overcrowding thing, which I don't really understand (when does it start, how serious is it?). What does the BaseOvercrowding number in the citysize files mean? And then there's unhappiness through pollution, and other factors.

What do other people think about city unhappiness (is it "off"?) and the best way to balance it? Maybe for instance, have the BIG_CITY_OFFSET start at 0 for any difficulty level, but have the BIG_CITY_SCALE amount differ by level? That way, you know every extra person you get is making the city a little more unhappy, and its always good to build more happiness improvements.

[Savant]

I've noticed that too. I am engineering a "saved game" scenario and lo and behold all these cities are throwing celebrations! It's unbelievable how happy these cities of size 10 are to have a shrine.

I expected size 10-15 cities to need the first three happiness improvements (shrine, theatre, arena) to be tranquil.. but NO! They are staying up all hours of the night in drunken revelry keeping me from sleeping even when I have shut the PC down!

I'm sitting in the family room now and I can hear giggling going on in my office.. the civ'ers are grinding to la vida loca and spilling chips, dip, and drinks all over and I'll have to be the one to clean up after their debauched binary asses!

Tomorrow, I swear.... that is the end of their party. Their arenas are going to be like the colosseum come 2000 AD, their theatres will be like the original Olde Globe... ashes, and their shrines will resemble today's Parthenon. Then I will hunt them down.. into the tile improvements, never letting up. I will be their Jobert!

Um... well, you see I am quite upset about their ribald ways.


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'Blood will run'

[colorme]

I actually changed the wages,rations, and workhours numbers in const.txt, by making the mean value higher, and the increments smaller (so you'll need to give up more happiness to increase these). Since then,I've had to maintain happiness actively. In particular, I cannot set the wages, rations at the lowest level without keeping the workhours too the lowest, to avoid cities rioting.

So, I believe I've fixed the happiness problem in my game.

The problem though is that with the above change (higher mean values), the specialists become useless, unless you increase their effect too.

[Harlan]

Coflek,
The solution to your problem: have four sets of files, each in a different scenario folder. When you want to play on a small map, you go to one, large map another, one for each map size (or closest match to, if its an irregular sized map). These files differ in numbers relating to distances, like max number of cities and distance from capital penalty. Its obvious to me that one number can't work for all four. I've mentioned this to Wes for his mod, and he says he'll do it, but only further down the line once more important changes are accomplished.

Yes,

The unhapiness problem seems to be associated only with the empirae size being to large, which seems to me to be a bad restriction too if you wan't to play on the gigantic, or even larger maps.

At the beginning there is no unhapiness, and that is an issue, it would be good if there were such constraints as happiness at the beginning(makes a game more challengning on tougher levels)

On thre other hand you have government type/ no of cities ratios which should be considerably widened (60 is way to little for 70x140 map - not to mention 140 x 140 maps that I would like to play later, Europe, India etc, or 210 x 210 world map) for the later governments so conquest doesn't become a two way strggle - trying to disband cities at one end and conquering at the other, only to keep the empire happy. in my perspective it kills the gameplay. If I could at least pick the city and disband it even if it is size 20 not only size 3 and downwards just for the gameplay sake. in the current game I still have two cities under size 10 and all the rest above.. just reached Corp. Rep. 45 city size limit... and have -4 hapiness because i have just got 49th city. just waiting for new government... pressing end of turn until the end of the game useless. And i still have 1/2 of the world to conquer...

CTP limit of 120 was not enough for me, not to mention 60 now(even though the city radius is much larger)..

The solution would be to give an option od late game government that can have large number of cities, plus getting the citysize limit to ctp 1 levels. Or maybe happiness could go -1 per 5 or 10 cities over the limit. Not -1 per 1 city over the limit.


Currently the only way out of this might be switching to anarchy where the limit is 1000 cities... . but I guess this is not adviseable until player discovers all the advances. Or playing on the smaller maps which is not really a solution.

Perhaps this issue should be adressed as well as the no unhappiness at the beginning of the game.

[WesW]

I have been thinking about the new happiness system myself. Remember that happiness is directly related to crime, and that a few percentage points really add up over time. Not as much as the benefits of the lowered sliders though, I assume.
Gerdin sent me a copy of the his mod today (who knew he had his own mod?). Anyway, in looking through his govt stats, I noticed the flags for positive and negative coefs in the three slider areas (food, prod, and wages). They are all set to 1 right now. I am going to set them to 4 for positive and 6 for negative, and see how that works. This should mean that moving the slider one notch causes these changes to happiness, and that the resulting changes to crime should about equal the benefits or penalties incurred from the slider areas.

Harlan,

thanks for reply... i just need to learn which lines to change??? do you know? And I should read the post from scorpion first to understand the sceanrios better.

I'll try to do this for my next game...

[MrFun]

ColorMe, you mention that you changed increments. I'm not sure what you mean by those - what lines are they on in the Const.text?

I already changed the mean values. Are the increments in the lines immediately above or below the mean values?

[colorme]

MrFun,

I mean the 'notches' in const.txt. That's what controls how you make happiness vs resource trade-off.
If each notch is large (e.g. gold slider is 4 gold per
notch), then you can increase happiness only at the cost of losing more gold. But then conversely, you can save a lot of gold by decreasing happiness slightly.
The AI is unable to make use of this concept, and keeps building happiness improvements (even in cities that are having a ball!). So, I set these notches to smaller values.

BTW, I'm still very frustrated at the AI's inertia. Have spent weeks on modifying everything and anything possible, and it still doesn't help. Someone commented that even barbarians, when they STACK TOGETHER, lose their appetite for attacking. If this is true, it is very disheartening, 'cos it points to some fundamental flaw in the game engine.

[Alpha Wolf]

I had a city with a hoplite and an archer behind city walls. The barbarians had multiple stacks of up to 8 and a total of over 30 in the immediate area. Yet they never attacked. I pulled together 2 stacks of 6 went to help. i picked off the barbarians everytime they'd split a stack to less than 4. Eventually I lifted the "siege" without losing a single unit. All but a couple of the barbarians were hoplites, which probably explains their lack of aggressiveness.

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History is written by the victor.