continued from Part 1.
Let’s get on with the changes.
Adjusted Unhappiness vs. Population total – Capping
This is a core mechanics problem that lets AIs and players actually generate happiness from local buildings. Right now, ‘local’ happiness gains from buildings are limited by the population in the city. So if you have a 10 pop city, you can utilize 10 ‘local’ happiness to offset it. If you have 8 population, but 10 ‘local’ happiness, you’re only going to get 8 happiness. Which seems correct. The problem is that you can get modifiers to reduce your ‘local unhappiness/population’ in a city, but still be allocated ‘local’ happiness based upon your population. In the above example, if you happened to have Monarchy and this city was your capital, with 10 population and 10 ‘local’ happiness, you would only have 5 unhappiness via population but still gain the benefit of all 10 ‘local’ happiness. This means that you will effectively generate 5 ‘global’ happiness, which more than offsets the cost of planting a new city! This breaks the concept that ‘local’ happiness is exactly that – ‘local’.
Nowhere is this more obvious than with the Indian Civ. ALL of their cities have ‘local’ unhappiness reduced by 50%. So all you have to do, in the current system, is generate enough ‘local’ happiness to overcome the 6 unhappiness/city; in each city. This is not as hard as it sounds, especially when there is a large raft of repeatable ‘global’ happiness in the game.
So we should limit the happiness gains of ‘local’ happiness to the adjusted unhappiness from population, rather than the raw population total.
Reducing Repeatable Global Happiness – Social Policies
The second obvious change is to make Organized Religion, (monuments/temples/monasteries) Professional Army (walls/Castles/etc) and Humanism (Universities, Observatories, Public Schools) be ‘local’ happiness boosters, rather than ‘global’. This means that each of those buildings will allow a city to increase its population, and not help it to overcome the 3 unhappiness/city. Mass expansion based upon Meritocracy and Organized Religion (5-10 pop cities, dependant on other local buildings such as a circus and stoneworks) shouldn’t be happening. It makes the game too ‘easy’ as well as drive a ‘wide’ empire strategy, which prevents any thoughts of ‘going tall’. Even worse, if your population in each city is low, and you had multiple ‘local’ happiness buildings in place, you could stack these happiness booster buildings in small trading post spam cities to effectively transfer the happiness to some core ‘tall’ cities.
This change will drive more population/city, but prevent easy city spam tactics. This also means that a ‘wide’ empire strategy will not actually need Honour, Piety or Rationalism to expand. It will allow the option to go into Order, Patronage or Commerce instead (as well as using luxuries for happiness), thereby increasing the overall strategic depth of the Social Policy trees. (and tech paths to open them) Managing puppet cities will be, indirectly, a little easier as they tend to grow unless severely suffocated early on. Gaining a late game Indian City, by anyone else, is usually a ‘one at a time’ sort of process as the population left in the city will likely still be more than what your own cities have for population. To avoid the massive continued unhappiness hit, you usually need to burn the city down for awhile before annexing it. (or nuke it, but that’s a different section)
Adjusting the ‘Global’ Happiness plan
Your primary source of ‘global’ happiness comes from luxury items and wonders. In the current system, you rarely need luxury items as you have the ‘repeatable global happiness’ Social Policies as well as Notre Dame and a few other wonders. As long as you aren’t over expanding, you generally only need a few unique luxuries to cover the unhappiness during the build up of new cities. This directly leads to the Research Agreement spam issue.
As well, due to all of this happiness floating around, there’s really no need to go with the Order Social Policy Tree, as the Freedom Specialist spam choice comes earlier and you never have to worry about happiness anyways. There’s no real need to even mention how useless the Autocracy tree is in comparison to both of those trees, but we’ll do it anyways. It’s useless. (done) So we need to make some changes to ensure that a super wide strategy benefits from the Order Policy Tree, and a mass puppet->annexed city/domination empire benefits from the Autocracy Social Policy tree. Tall/semi-wide strategies should be able to get more out of Freedom than either Order or Autocracy. Oh, and then there’s that other Social Policy tree, something called ‘Commerce’.
First off, let’s state that wonders, Natural wonders and the Circus Maximus, should obviously stay in the global happiness bucket. Luxuries stay there as well, but under this new system you’ll have to keep more of them around if you’re really expanding or want a Golden Age. At least for a while anyways. So let’s give them a small boost, since it should be fairly obvious right now that you’re going to be losing a lot of global happiness with these changes.
Protectionism (Commerce) is a good choice to place this change. Boosting owned or traded luxuries by +1 seems bad in the current system, since it isn’t useful enough to go that deep into the Commerce tree. Let’s change that to +2 happiness per luxury, be it in your own territory or traded with an AI. Getting Luxuries from City States has its own Social Policy in the Patronage tree, so there’s no need to also increase those. This might actually make Commerce worth taking again, since this is a trade based increase. (I have other thoughts about the Commerce tree, but this isn’t the place for that) This also means that, since you’re using luxuries to combat city based unhappiness, you’re actually going to have to set up a real economy before RA spamming – rather than just selling a luxury + Open borders. So getting into Commerce will help with that, other than just for Protectionism.
Before Meritocracy and trade routes, one unique luxury will cover one city, just as it does now. With Meritocracy, and a trade route, each unique luxury item you have will cover two cities worth of unhappiness. (you still need more for an Indian civ, but that’s the point of the UA) After Protectionism, a single luxury (now 6 happiness/unique) will cover three cities. That’s a 1/3rd increase in total number of cities and therefore population/gold/science/culture, including new luxuries and strategic resources.
Adding the opening Policy in Order to Meritocracy will mean that a single unique luxury will cover four cities without Protectionism, and six cities with it. This is as far as ‘per city happiness/unhappiness reduction should go. Being able to drop/counter the per city unhappiness down to 0 shouldn’t happen. With eight unique luxuries on a Standard sized map, you can have 48 total cities by the end of the game, which is likely 30+ cities more than you needed anyways.
Your default happiness, 9 at higher difficulty levels, will still allow you to cover more cities (once they’re up) and some population in new cities while they make their happiness buildings. So you’re not hurting for ‘global’ happiness to cover over the period of time and population for each city to grow and be viable on it’s own ‘local’ happiness.
Oh noes, ICS is not ‘viable’ since there’s a finite number of cities you can plant! Whatever. It’s not actually viable anyways, since you can’t actually plant and work 100 cities in a real game in time for every one of them to be effective.
Oh noes! Rapid Early Expansion will be a lot harder! Yeah, and? If you spam settlers out to six cities early in the game and aren’t already ensuring that they land on new unique luxuries, or clusters of old ones to trade for new ones, let alone building happiness in each city, then that’s a problem. Sadly, it’s a really effective way in the current system to get to 30 population very early in the game. Something a tall civ could never match, even with two cities. Especially since those six new cities will have far more available luxuries, strategic resources, and tiles to work.
Of course, now you have a situation where ‘tall’ civs can sell more unique versions of luxuries, provided they have enough other happiness to cover their population. Which is a nice advantage to have, given that you can only add one population/turn to a city.
Other Global changes
Meritocracy is a really bad place for another % decrease in population unhappiness, so let’s remove it. Going ‘wide’ already has enough advantages, so having 1 happiness/20 population extra just seems a little weird.
Let’s add +1 happiness per ‘happiness building’ to Landed Elite. (Circus/coliseum/theatre/stadium) Sure, Aristocracy already has 1 happiness/10 citizens in a city, but Tradition (generally a ‘tall’ skewed Social Policy tree) can do with another way to allow you to expand out to a few cities and grow taller. This also allows a ‘tall’ civ to cover the early happiness issues when growing before Theatres become available. Which is generally a very limiting prospect, outside of your capital, unless you happen upon a wonder that gives extra happiness.
Overall, while it’s possible for a ‘wide’ strategy to stay small while trying to gain from both Tradition and Liberty, the Social Policy costs would be too high to effectively manage both as a decent strategy, unless you’re willing to wait until the late renaissance to expand. Which is generally far too late if you have neighbours.
read more in part 3.
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