Proposed Happiness Fix

[labguy23]

There has been a ton of feedback about the happiness system. Some people think it is OK. Some don't. I am of the mind that it is in need of some significant tweaking. I am also a pragmatist and realize it isn't really feasible to completely overhaul the system. So, I started working on a solution to the problem that doesn't require a complete overhaul and would help balance many parts of the game.

I think most people are in agreement that the ICS strategy works very effectively. Many cities with populations in the 8-10 range are superior to nearly every other tactic. This stems from the fact that each new city allows the building of a new set of happiness buildings. High population cites are extremely difficult to support, so the most effective way to grow population and dominate technology is to spread, spread, spread while keeping your cities small. There is no downside to this strategy.

Currently, the happiness calculation looks like this. Unhappiness = Total Population + # of Cities. This is a linear progression. What is needed is a system that punishes unchecked expansion and rewards high population. I believe I have found it.

*Warning: Math Alert*

Unhappiness = (ROUNDDOWN((Single City Population^0.5) * 2) + ROUNDDOWN(# of City^1)) - 1

This method calculates each city's unhappiness value seperately. For instance, my third city has a population of 10, that means it produces 8 unhappiness. Each city's value is added to the other city's values to generate a total. (Math nerds with notice that x^1 = x. I did this on purpose and will be used later to make sure the happiness values scale properly based on the size of the map you are playing on.)

This equation creates a scaling effect. It rewards small numbers of large cities while punishing civs with large numbers of small cities. If you have 5 very large cities, your unhappiness will be significantly lower than it is now. If you have same population but spread across 15 cities, your unhappiness values will be much higher than it is now.

This also have the effect of frontloading the unhappiness costs. When you drop your 16th city, you will notice that your unhappiness rises by 16 immediately. The good news is that your unhappiness will increase very slowly as that city gains population. Sure, the city cost you 16 unhappiness initially, but it can grow to size 36 for only 10 additional unhappiness. (This minics the way Civ4 gave you a significant gold hit when you dropped a new city but could eventually be offset as the city grew and developed.)

Large civilizations can stil be very large, but they will need possess to a very solid happiness structure in order to continue to add additional cities. Simply spamming new cities without the infrastrutre to support it would very happiness prohibitive.

Conversely, civs with very few cities would need minimal infrastructure to maintain happiness equilibrium. If you build even a few happiness buildings, you would have a significant happiness surplus allowing you to push through golden ages much, much faster helping offset the benefit of civs with many cities. With larger cities easily possible for smaller civs, that means the tech and gold advantage for civs with more cites start to shrink. Larger cities will help offset the what seems high production costs of late era technology. This means that small civs could relatively easily field effective armies.

By changing the exponents on population and # of cities, you can easily tweak how quickly unhappiness costs increase per city. This allows the unhappiness to be tweaked based on map size (which is why I left ^1, so it is obvious where to tweak the exponent value).

I believe this change slow down the city spam, while allowing civs with fewer cities to still be very competitive and not be so easily out paced by expansionists. I think larger, sustainable cities will bring back some of the epic feel that makes Civ so fun.

This doesn't solve the problem of puppeting/annexing cities. That is a seperate problem and needs to be addressed as such. That is a discussion for another thread. (I am in favor courthouses that are cheaper, with no maintenance, and with a happiness bonus.)

I have lots of excel sheets and other data that helped me think up this system. When mapped out, this proposed change becomes much easier to visualize.


On a side note: both I and my wife who are avid Civ fans thoroughly dislike this installment. Granted, other versions of the game have been released with issues, but this is the first game in the series I can't even bring myself to play. I haven't played it in nearly two months. I've been holding on to this post for a long time confident that it would make zero difference, but I thought, "wtf, I might as well try."

[Turukano]

Just what we need. More fixes on the mythical patch.

[wayninja]

There's nothing wrong with more fixes, but patches should not be held back until they contain everything. There should be a target set for a balance between time and content and patches released when those targets are hit. It should be a sliding window, with teams working on current and future targets simultaneously. If you have good change control and proper QA test plans, this shouldn't be that difficult.

[Turukano]

It has been six weeks. They identified the issues and and fixed them in their models. Now we are getting rumors that it will be several more weeks. This is just poor management.

[MadDjinn]

The formula isn't bad. There does need a rebalancing of the happiness problem for ICS. (Ie, it's a problem that it's so easy)


but given some highlights from the upcoming (at some point) patch related to ICS, an overhaul might be a bigger issue:

# Lowered bonuses received from Maritime city-states. (Added 11/18)
# Reduced effects of Forbidden Palace and Meritocracy (Happiness per city). (Added 12/3)
# Buildings can now no longer provide more Happiness than there is population in a city (wonders are excluded from this). (Added 12/3)

They are trying to deal with the core parts of the ICS with the above. They missed one, but hopefully the changes aren't painful. Really, they should have just raised the unhappiness per city, not mess with 2 of the 3 per city happiness increase /unhappiness decrease basics. The 'max benefit' part from the happiness buildings change may likely backfire in other ways. ICS strategies don't usually add multiple happiness buildings per city due to the costs and lack of need. No one goes max happiness buildings to try for golden ages, due to their horrible costs. Luxury resources are the only way at this point to get into golden ages, which means more cities anyways.

(this part just prevents storing policy picks for Order)
# Policies must be selected the turn they are earned. (Added 11/18)
of course, they then add:
Added game option to disable turn-blocking promotions and policy choices. (Added 12/3)

So they patched, then unpatched needing to select policies in one go. Who knows what they were thinking...

These seems necessary for a reason I'll point out later:
# New Building: Circus Maximus (National Wonder for happiness track). (Added 12/3)
# Unhappiness beyond a certain point breeds rebels within your empire, based on the number of cities a player has. (Added 12/3)
# Reduced amount of food needed for cities to grow at larger sizes. (Added 12/3)
# Liberty branch balance (Settler training bonus now only applies to capital). (Added 12/3)

All of the above are meant to mess with ICS, though finally there's something other than 'poor production' to handle mass unhappiness when you've given up on it later in the game. Settler training bonus coming from just the capital will be slightly annoying, but realistically, once you hit a certain point, gold rushing is faster.

I really hope the following just prevents flying into Industrial (and therefore fast Order Policy tree opening) and not against my usage of the Great Library (in the strategy section) early in the game.

# Multiple Tech Tree tweaks to address “slingshot” tech exploits. (Added 12/3)

[tfordp]

...
(this part just prevents storing policy picks for Order)
# Policies must be selected the turn they are earned. (Added 11/18)
of course, they then add:
Added game option to disable turn-blocking promotions and policy choices. (Added 12/3)

So they patched, then unpatched needing to select policies in one go. Who knows what they were thinking...



Seems they didn't unpatch it, they've just added the option in the set-up to store the policies and promotions or not, as you see fit.

[Dale]

So they patched, then unpatched needing to select policies in one go. Who knows what they were thinking...

Maybe it didn't work well in testing. Some testers might have wanted to be able to store a policy so if you were only a few turns off a new era, you could wait a couple turns then grab one of the newly unlocked policies.

Maybe that was the logic?


I really hope the following just prevents flying into Industrial (and therefore fast Order Policy tree opening) and not against my usage of the Great Library (in the strategy section) early in the game.

# Multiple Tech Tree tweaks to address “slingshot” tech exploits. (Added 12/3)

I would guess they worked out the maths and realised it only cost 50% of the beakers to hit biology than it did to hit steam engine, and thus put in a couple extra ties between techs to even out the beaker count.

[leliel]

So they patched, then unpatched needing to select policies in one go. Who knows what they were thinking...
This is actually a very good thinking.

They fix something what they believe requires a change and make it a new default. However they still leave a possibility to uncheck it. This adds one more option to the game and also makes sure that players that do not like a change or want to play differently still have a chance to do that. If it goes for me, I'd like to see more decisions like that.



# Multiple Tech Tree tweaks to address “slingshot” tech exploits. (Added 12/3)
I still think it would be wise to allow techs research only 2 eras away from last uncompleted era. Say you start in Ancient Era so you are able to research techs up to Medieval era (included), however Renaissance era is out of your reach unless you research all techs from Ancient Era. Since there is no way to know who has what techs and trading is not allowed I see this exploitable.

Since tiles and economy do not play a major role in this game now, it's not a big deal to skip most of the techs and rush the bottom branch of the tech tree. Very quickly getting powerful units that are unstoppable at the time. Also conquering means more cities, faster tech research, etc..

[Menestrel]

What about talking of the hapinness fix sugestion instead of the Patch? There are multiple threads for this.

Great idea. Math can always solve our problems :)

Would you mind making your excel file available?

Regards,
Menestrel

[joeecz]

It rewards small numbers of large cities while punishing civs with large numbers of small cities. If you have 5 very large cities, your unhappiness will be significantly lower than it is now. If you have same population but spread across 15 cities, your unhappiness values will be much higher than it is now.

The current system of happiness/unhappiness in Civ V isn't perfect but from real world view your system is illogical. Tell yourself, where would you like to live: in huge city with millions of people surrounded with concrete or in small village sunken in nature?
I think that globalized happiness/unhappiness system is the problem. In Civ IV it is set per city and buildings in every city influence happiness only in its city where have been build. And that's a logical and right way.

(sorry for my english grammar)

[inseeisyou]

I appreciate the effort you have put into this. If you check the patch notes they have gone in a different direction to address this problem however, which is to cap the amount of happiness a city can produce from buildings to its population. (excluding wonders). It will deffinatly address the issue of many small population cities supporting the big ones with excess happiness. I'm curious how this change will go over however since we already have folks complaining about how difficult it is to get happiness and grow. Maybe the new Circus Maximus national wonder will ail their woes?

I also think the forcing promotions and policies but with an option to disable is perfect... I mean who can argue with options? Just choose which one you like. I will play with forced promotions because being able to save up two or more healing promotions on a unit was one of the most OP things that allowed me to wipe the computer so easily.

[shafuq]

i already wrote my ideas on another thread. so i'll just copy'em here:

------------------------------------------------

the happiness system:

* whats the overall logic with the current one? the way i see it: no matter your population there are smileys and frowns by default. build a new city: 2 frowns, city has grown: 1 frown, built a circus: 3 smiles...

i don't know about you but i don't find the current way very fun or logical.

what about if every born citizen or newly built city produced a neutral face. and depending on various factors the neutral faces went from neutral to positive or negative? wont that be much better than the way it is? for example you razed one of your cities (or maybe went to war); this could cause a global unhappiness of 5 citizens for 30 turns. on the other hand a great person being born provides a bonus of 2 smiles for 10 turns. same could be done with the construction of any wonder.

what I'm trying to say is every citizen doesn't have to be either happy or angry, especially without a logical reason. most of us are "okay" with the way everything is. we're not gleeful maybe.. yet we definitely don't wanna start a riot! so add the concept of neutrality and make the populations mood dynamic. something that we should always wanna check and keep under control.

and about golden ages... i believe they should also have some impact on culture and science. something like a %10 bonus sounds good. also in order for great people to start golden ages a change should be made that requires consuming 2 different type great people to do the job. that should make these periods of time more rare and special.

http://forums.2kgames.com/showthread.php?99344-FAN-Suggestion-Thread

[labguy23]

I would love to post my excel sheets, but I'm unsure how to attack, link, etc to this forum. I might be able to link it to a different forum (such as Civ Fanatics), but I haven't spent the time. I was curious what sort of response I would get.

[labguy23]

I'm not trying to create realism. I'm trying to regain the epic feel previous games had. The "small ball" ICS approach I find very unappealing and the very opposite of epic.

[MadDjinn]

Maybe it didn't work well in testing. Some testers might have wanted to be able to store a policy so if you were only a few turns off a new era, you could wait a couple turns then grab one of the newly unlocked policies.

Maybe that was the logic?


It's possible, but keeping in mind that you can already SHIFT-ENTER bypass forced choices (like free tech choices), adding an option to ignore seems odd. Maybe they just want to bypass people using the above and may remove that ability.



I would guess they worked out the maths and realised it only cost 50% of the beakers to hit biology than it did to hit steam engine, and thus put in a couple extra ties between techs to even out the beaker count.

hmm, seems like something that should have been done before the game was exposed to the world. Either way, I'm hoping it means that the paths which you can use a few GS's to flip through multiple eras in one go will be fixed. (there's a few of those)

[MadDjinn]

I would love to post my excel sheets, but I'm unsure how to attack, link, etc to this forum. I might be able to link it to a different forum (such as Civ Fanatics), but I haven't spent the time. I was curious what sort of response I would get.

You'd have to get it hosted (plenty of free choices there) and then use the [URL= "adfda" ]sdf [/ URL] tags. (there's even a simple button where all you have to do is press it and copy in the URL)

[labguy23]

Ok, I making my Excel sheet availabe. You can download it here.

http://www.mediafire.com/?ert11yv4eyfsyvf

The first worksheet is my proposed change. I used the equation listed in my previous post to chart out the happiness costs of each city. Along the top is population of the city. Along the left is the # city (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc). They way you use the chart is this: If you want to know how much unhappiness your 3rd city of size 16 is going to create, you follow 3 from the left until it intersects 16 across the top (value: 10). If you want to know you total unhappiness, you would calculate each seperately and total them (there is an example of this on the Examples tab).

The 2nd worksheet is how unhappiness is calculated now. You would calculate total unhappiness using the same method as for the first worksheet. You'll notice how linear the current unhappiness progression is compared to my proposed solution.

The 3rd work show the difference between my proposed changes and the current system. It becomes very obvious that unhappiness costs are very front heavy. You will take a big hit when you initially drop a city, but those cities become much happiness efficient as they grow in size.

The last worksheet shows an example of my suggestion in action and paints a picture of how smaller civilizations will be able to compete with larger ones. I showed an example where 3 different civs all have exactly the same population. The only variable I changed was the number of cities. You can see how difficult it would be to support a large number of cities. At the same time, the ability for civs with fewer cities to grow, support their happiness needs, and continue to be competitive is greatly enhanced. Whereas the difference in happiness needed with the current system is very slim.

Larger cities also create the need for improvements that allow cities to grow faster (they are virtually useless now as very large cities are EXTREMELY hard to support without having very numerous number of cities to build happiness buildings in). In addition, your cities will be more productive in generating both gold and hammers. This means expensive buildings that are out of the question now become more viable. In addition, you will overall lower maintence costs as it now possible to support large cities without have 15-20 smaller cities (and corresponding happiness buildings) to support it's happiness. Sure, I built a building that is 8 maintence, but that is offset by not needing 15 happiness buildings at 2 gold per pop.

Anyway, that's it. I'm interested to hear everyone's feeback.

[Menestrel]

Ok, I making my Excel sheet availabe. You can download it here.

http://www.mediafire.com/?ert11yv4eyfsyvf

The first worksheet is my proposed change. I used the equation listed in my previous post to chart out the happiness costs of each city. Along the top is population of the city. Along the left is the # city (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc). They way you use the chart is this: If you want to know how much unhappiness your 3rd city of size 16 is going to create, you follow 3 from the left until it intersects 16 across the top (value: 10). If you want to know you total unhappiness, you would calculate each seperately and total them (there is an example of this on the Examples tab).

The 2nd worksheet is how unhappiness is calculated now. You would calculate total unhappiness using the same method as for the first worksheet. You'll notice how linear the current unhappiness progression is compared to my proposed solution.

The 3rd work show the difference between my proposed changes and the current system. It becomes very obvious that unhappiness costs are very front heavy. You will take a big hit when you initially drop a city, but those cities become much happiness efficient as they grow in size.

The last worksheet shows an example of my suggestion in action and paints a picture of how smaller civilizations will be able to compete with larger ones. I showed an example where 3 different civs all have exactly the same population. The only variable I changed was the number of cities. You can see how difficult it would be to support a large number of cities. At the same time, the ability for civs with fewer cities to grow, support their happiness needs, and continue to be competitive is greatly enhanced. Whereas the difference in happiness needed with the current system is very slim.

Larger cities also create the need for improvements that allow cities to grow faster (they are virtually useless now as very large cities are EXTREMELY hard to support without having very numerous number of cities to build happiness buildings in). In addition, your cities will be more productive in generating both gold and hammers. This means expensive buildings that are out of the question now become more viable. In addition, you will overall lower maintence costs as it now possible to support large cities without have 15-20 smaller cities (and corresponding happiness buildings) to support it's happiness. Sure, I built a building that is 8 maintence, but that is offset by not needing 15 happiness buildings at 2 gold per pop.

Anyway, that's it. I'm interested to hear everyone's feeback.

First thanks for making or Excel file avaiable.

Second congratulations on a great job.

It really makes evident how few cities empires have a MAJOR disadvantage over spread empires. And we are not talking about population. Since it is the same in both cases of your examples.

With your suggestion the burden on happiness is no longer only on population. But the number of cities have a impact on it as well.
The Roman Empire fell because spread too much. Just as Alexander's and Gengis Khan empires got divided after they died

I undestand the latest patch will address a few issues of ICS. But I can only see it being delayed or harder to execute by current tweaks. Not solved!

So I would very much like too see your work get into consideration for future patches. That way empires of few cities and lots of Population are more commom. And small AI empires will stay competitives, just as Humans small ones in MultiPlayer *.
*Can name a few people happy with this one.

Also even in future era large portions of the planet will remain unclaimed. And a Settler rush for Oil or Aluminum actually happens. Today by the time Modern Era begins the whole world is colonized and Strategic Resources are luck.

Regards,
Menestrel

[Antony_Lee]

you know what, 2K are actually more keen with many cities with equal population.

see Info on Next Patch:
•Buildings can now no longer provide more Happiness than there is population in a city (wonders are excluded from this). (Added 12/3)

this mean you can no longer build vacation town which have lots of circus and what ever to allow your capital grow bigger.
I know it came to the designer concerns on exploit of ICS. but after totally removing of holiday town. No large city would be possible, especially the astronomical food cost later on.

actually, i believe it would be much easier to favorite large city by changing the following, while it still limit the effect of those pure holiday town.

Theatre: + 4 happy -> -20% unhappy in city it located.
Stadium: + 4 happy -> -20% unhappy in city it located.

[labguy23]

you know what, 2K are actually more keen with many cities with equal population.

see Info on Next Patch:
•Buildings can now no longer provide more Happiness than there is population in a city (wonders are excluded from this). (Added 12/3)

this mean you can no longer build vacation town which have lots of circus and what ever to allow your capital grow bigger.
I know it came to the designer concerns on exploit of ICS. but after totally removing of holiday town. No large city would be possible, especially the astronomical food cost later on.

actually, i believe it would be much easier to favorite large city by changing the following, while it still limit the effect of those pure holiday town.

Theatre: + 4 happy -> -20% unhappy in city it located.
Stadium: + 4 happy -> -20% unhappy in city it located.

The happiness issue is one of scaling. The change you propose benefits civs with many cities as much as it does those with few. There needs to be an efficiency benefit for smaller civs; otherwise, you are still suffering from the same issue the plagues the game now.