Moding in City Unhappyness

[Bluevoss]

Does anyone know where the code is for determining and displaying city unhappyness? Can it be added to, and changed?

I would think this should be a simple add, and would love it if someone could manage. I've mentioned it before, but will again. The game does not give negative effects for population in regards to happyness. Shrines, threaters, and arenas are useless, since all they do is make a content empire happy.

In DBDiffs, there are two variables (for each level), BIG_CITY_SCALE and BIG_CITY_OFFSET. OFFSET tells you when population unhappyness for going about a certain level kick in, and SCALE tells how much. So OFFSET=5 and SCALE=1.0 means you get an unhappy point for each pop over 5. You could set scale to 0.2 or something and lesson the effect.

Me, I think this would be a great thing. It would bring back some city management, and slow down some of the production and city growth.

Question, does the AI react in his production to discontent?



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Bluevoss-

[Chris B]

Why not put in a trigger where cities with low happiness revolt to a civ with a nearby army without a fight?

[Bluevoss]

Thats not what I'm after. There should be revolt chances built in. Its just that the cities don't riot very often - usually only when they are small, hardly ever once they get big. I just build a shrine and thats that for a thousand years.



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Bluevoss-

[Harlan]

I started a thread about this a while back. Its since "grown cold" though, and I don't know where it is due to the splitting of forums. My beef then is still true, that unhappiness isn't a big enough problem, and that large cities don't get unhappy enough. I just wrote something on this to Wes in an email, so I'll post it here too:


>Btw, I was fooling around yesterday, and experienced the same thing Harlan
>has mentioned with city happiness not being linked to city size. Maybe this
>has something to do with the cheat menu, like the way it turns pollution
>off?

Aha! Finally you believe me on this! So there are times you haven't experienced this, or is it something you've just noticed? Some comments I've seen (lots of people complaining about this) and some playtesting outside my scenario makes me think this is true all the time, not something that was turned off, but I could be wrong. If you have a full city in an ordinary game, there are many things that can make it appear the city is getting unhappier as it gets bigger, cos of units outside the city, distance from capital, production pollution and population pollution and so on. But I've tried this outside my scenario, starting a new game, and instantly cheat-raising the first city to size 60, and I see no extra unhappiness. I've never touched the text files that come with the game, so unless my copy of the game is corrupted, or it only happens with the cheat menu on, I think this is a gamewide problem. I also have failed to see overcrowding effects, but maybe I was looking in the wrong place (I'd expect it to show up in the status menu). Even if it does work, it doesn't seem like an easy thing to manipulate, unless we've missed something in the files.

Which is why I recommend you do what I've for my scenario: mess around with pollution to simulate unhappiness with larger cities. I completely turned off the dead tile thing and production pollution is nearly irrelevant, but you don't want to go that far for the standard game. But to greatly increase population pollution, while raising the bar for the creation of dead tiles, I think is good. Then some manipulation of the buildings would be good too, to have more emphasis on buildings that reduce the population pollution effect (there is a flag for just this, its first (and only?) used with Public Transportation). For instance, an Arena, rather than give general happiness relief, could just give population pollution relief in ancient times, while costing alot. Thus, such a thing could be very effective in a big city like ancient Rome where they need their "bread and circuses", but pretty much a waste on the small town. Since it costs alot, the player would have to be smart on which towns to build it in. I like this kind of thing, where the player has to think about the wisdom of building something or not, rather than just building the same thing in every city.

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Let me add to these comments. I'm pretty happy with how things are working regarding unhappiness in the Alexander scenario I'm currently improving. I'm getting a sense from playing a bit and comments from playtesters that unhappiness is challenging now, but not too hard. But one couldn't just take these exact numbers of the changes I did and use them for a regular game, cos they're done to fit the scenario's situation just so. The basic ideas I explained above is one solution that could be generalized, though.

In an ideal balance, I would think one should need to build Shrine as one of the first things in a city, or suffer consequences. In Civ2, I almost always built City Walls, Granary and Temple (i.e., Shrine) as the first three buildings, but in CTP2 I could go several thousand years and maybe not need one Shrine.

[wheathin]

Harlan, good points as usual. Cities do not get progressively unhappy as they get larger. Just open the National Manager in an average game - without arenas or basilicas, all my large cities (12+ pop) are over 80 in happiness, and that is *with* Democracy (no martial law), and all the sliders at their most oppressive (total of -5 per city!). Sure I've got Ramayana, but that's only +3.

Things are broken in this game regarding unhappiness, overcrowding, and wage/food/work sliders. And it seems that they are broken in ways that SLIC or .txt mods cannot completely fix.

[Harlan]

Wes,
To me its mostly irrelevant if they intended it to be this way or not. Either way, I don't like it. And its not just a little off, its way off.

I also disagree with your comments on crime. You're only getting a hit on crime if your cities are significantly unhappy. As wheathin points out, most of the time one's cities never even get close to riot levels, so crime caused by unhappiness is a moot point. Even if it wasn't, the way crime works is obscure to most people, and unless you're a statistical analyst, one isn't going to make a reduction a top priority. I think the way crime works needs to be tweaked to make this more urgent. Have a higher percent of crime happen, but less effect per percentage point. The end result is the same, but if people see a crime level of 30%, they're much more likely to do something about it than if they see a level of 15%, which doesn't sound too bad (even though in the long run it is).

[WesW]

I have been playing a game for the first time in weeks, I guess, and I don't think that the game is malfunctioning, it's just that the programmers took a different approach to unhappiness than the previous civ games did.
There are a lot of things that can cause unhappiness, like too many cities, pollution, etc. As long as you stay away from these things, your people's happiness level will stay at a certain level, which will in turn set the crime rate, which is what is most important with the new setup.
Before, you built things to keep the people from rioting, now you build them to decrease the crime rate, or increase efficiency, however you want to look at it. A building like the Shrine, which increases efficiency by 1% over the length of the entire game is a pretty important improvement, imo.
Population pollution is set to kick in at size 16 normally. You could reduce this number to simulate overcrowding more drastically.
You could also reduce the starting max city size, which is currently 18, and is raised by another 14 with the Aqueduct. You could reduce this to say, 8, and reduce the Aqueduct's effect to 8 or so. Other improvements would gradually increase it as needed, but only as much as needed, determinant upon play-testing.

I will take a look at this again, and see how things appear to work in the game. But let's try and not jump to the conclusion that it is messed up just because it works on a different theory than previous games.

[wheathin]

If crime is the only serious result of unhappiness, that means that controlling crime becomes too important in the game. Why is that bad? It reduces flexibility in strategy and gameplaying. Regardless of whether you need food, gold, science, or production, you should build a courthouse first. You don't choose between granary, bazaar, academy, or mill.

We had a similar problem in CtP at first - regardless of whether you wanted gold or science, you always built markets/bazaars.

And this doesn't seem to address the underlying problem: because the pollution/overcrowding values kick in so high (16!!), cities grow happily unfettered until at least the industrial revolution! That seems totally illogical - unhappiness, riots, and overcrowding should be regular problems much earlier in the game. While crime may be a big problem, as far as I can tell crime does not lead to riots.