It seems that current happiness sytem can't hold up, and creates more problems than benefits. Main issues:

- it forces to build every city in similar shape, either triangle or 2 hex thick wall. It don;t even prevent snaking (2 hex row is similar to snake).

- It punishes choosing regions of untypical shape, like those with complex coastline, or unpassable mountain in middle.

- after critical moment each districts gives just more and more happiness, so everything become fervent.



So here is alternative:

- there is no happiness from any level of district

- you can move worker to 6th pool as "idle" or "landwork". Each such worker gives 5 happiness.

- Boroughts still can upgrade districts, which gives prestige and possibly other FIDS.

- The starting empire happiness is 100 (or any other value), but each city drops it by 10. Also in each city, each worked tile cost 5 happiness.



Such system has some interesting consequences:

- there is interesting trade off, each expansion takes 2workers from any other city to sustain which is solid price, and definetly will slow down ICS.

- snaking is possible, however snake district cost 3 workers, while rounding up just 1, and rounding up additionally could give more prestige or FIDS from high level districts.

- the sytem is fluid, players could go around lack of certain luxury, or can conquere enemy cities. But price is set fair.

- the system is simple enought and do not add to many objects, we can already move around workers.

- It makes sense that worker could be either specialist (give some value of specific FIDS) or dedicated to landwork and give mix of different FIDS.

- since we need to spend some of workers on happiness the late game snowball effect is low down.



It is important to notice that late game each worker can give 16+ FIDS (+ bonus), so loosing each one is worth fortune.

It sounds quite nice, though that doesn't fix the issue that overcrowded cities are currently always a good bet.



There is certainly a lack of happiness oftions right now. If the systems allows more kind of happiness boost, it will allow more kinds of happiness hits.

The idea of using pop for happiness is not bad, it should be constrained by techs imho. For me the systems should punish or at least make clear that overcrowded cities are difficult to manage (by overcrowded I means bigger than their district size and empire tech and policies should allow - it happened to me in other games that cities with a big food base would end up filthy and rebellious if not attended). In that thread I propose basically that available pop can produce at least as much FIDS as terrain/districts do, after what every pop produce almost nothing such is aither idle or used for other goals. Unlocking techs to make those available people work toward hapiness would be a neat solution.



Of course if that happens the level 2+ district will be more balanced compared to land grabbing level districts, since terrain based FIDS will be more important.



About what cause hapiness penalty, I think we should ideally have



- expansion

- overpopulation

- war events

- some political tradeoffs



Currently the plan system works but feels simplistic, after a while you grab that bonus (we lacks options). It should feature more varied tradeoff. I remember in Civ4 (and mods) stuff like city states, imperial, royal political options. You could have the freedom to handle your empire the way you felt. In general choosing the right terrain, (aka anomaly), having a quite tight cluster of city should reward you, but you must have the tools to manage normal happiness with tradeoffs. Fervent should be excpetionnal and the kind of thing you get by focusing really on the aspect.



In the end the question is do we want easy to manage cities with the only aim being over producting the opponent, or having a system that can make you derail your empire if you take bad decisions?

But what overcrowded means?

Maybe cities are just representacion of our claiming over region, and "overcrowded" means that population is working outside main city. In the villages or outposts, which are just not visible on the map since that would obscure the vision.

Also different factions could have different toleration for crowd. Like necrophages could behave like ant nest, and dust lord are floating armors without personal space.

Even wildwakers could not be so touchy, and have some tolerance. It will be a bit odd that when we can build another district we also have to do so.



Of course there are some other options, like:

Pop min, pop max per boroughs. Like if we have 1 borought we can upgrade on pop 2, and can support no more but 4. Above 4 will just not rise (but we can storage a food) untill we build more streets.



Or that boroughs limit building amount. Like each borought gives 2 slot for improvments. Some improvments dosnt count (founder stone, city hall, expansions).

This concept i like, since it opens some planing of each new borought.

If we take that acception of overcrowded - working outside the city - then current system with the population would work. -but maybe not as efficiently.

I was thinking of more "too many people in a small area", which can't sustain them.



I agree different factions should have different tolerance, it would be very fitting indeed. SO far only the necrophage have a different city mechanic but it yields the strange result that they have high districts count with the same population, aka less dense cities, a bit weird for the nest theme.



Yeah I see that having to build districts can feels too restrictive. But the current way this works you grow pop as a free bonus and a way to expand the city. Plus that weird happiness interaction. (expanding makes people less supportive?)

I like the building slots idea, it should just be clearly unerstable in the interface. Maybe higher districts for more slots or special building slots?

I agree that significant improvements in the happiness system are needed.

The main problems as I see them:



1) A dead spot at city size 3-4 in which happiness is extremely low (-30 and -40) and prior to districting starting to dominate the happiness equation. I'm also not exactly sure why super-large cities are super-happy (doesn't seem to be the case in New York City).



2) Certain city shapes are FAR more efficient than others, which forces players to adhere or lose significant FIDSI.



I really like the idea that city districts can level up.



How about the CHOICE of which city districts that level up are not up to the player but rather start and emanate outward from the city center? So, when the city reaches size 4 or 5 (I recommend 4 with a smaller FIDSI increase and a smaller penalty and bonus), the city center levels.



Example using district leveling with size 4.

Once the city reaches size 4, city center levels to lvl 2.

size 5, a district adjacent to the city center to lvl 2.

size 6, a district adjacent to the city center to lvl 2.

size 7, the closest lvl 2 district to the city center levels to level 3 and the closest lvl 1 district to the city center levels to level 2.

size 8, the closest lvl 2 district to the city center levels to level 3 and the closest lvl 1 district to the city center levels to level 2.

And so on.



Now the above, without modification, will strongly encourage snake cities (more non-district hex income), so we need to discourage that somehow.

So, each district that is adjacent to another 3 or more districts, receives a happiness bonus equal to the highest level of adjacent district. This will encourage clustering around the city center for the bigger happiness bonuses but at the cost of non-district hex income. This has the advantage of not being so penalizing of failure to build the "perfect 2 hex row" city.

Starfire512 wrote:
I agree that significant improvements in the happiness system are needed.

The main problems as I see them:



1) A dead spot at city size 3-4 in which happiness is extremely low (-30 and -40) and prior to districting starting to dominate the happiness equation. I'm also not exactly sure why super-large cities are super-happy (doesn't seem to be the case in New York City).



2) Certain city shapes are FAR more efficient than others, which forces players to adhere or lose significant FIDSI.



I really like the idea that city districts can level up.

Both those issues stems from the current happiness, and the limited terrain impact : aka, it's not worth it trying to "snake" because population can easily self sustain, industry is not that relevant (lack of heavy projects) and superior districts produce plenty of dust and science and influence.

If the dev balance terrain/population/district outputs it could end up better. There should still be "best shapes" but only for a given context.



Maybe make techs/era augment even more anomaly outputs? Maybe make district rarer and lower the bar for superior levels? (for instance 3 pop/district and 3 districts for +1 level?)

This is just one of the many issues introduced by the poor burough / city management system currently implemented.



I would much rather see this fixed, instead of just trying to slap fixes on each of the many problems it creates.

Ok, but how would you "fix" it? Make it the same as every other 4x system. I really like the uniqueness of districting. Maybe there is another 4x game out there with this but I am not aware of it.

Warlock kinda works with a district system. Each population allow you to add a district that will either produce from the tile it's in, or give a city bonus or unlock some units. But the similarities stops there. There is no industry whatsoever, units are always produced at the same rate, but their upkeep can be quite high and uses different types of ressources, which was actually a nice idea, for instance many military units take food from their origin city.

I guess I need to play Warlock: Master of the Arcane more. I certainly didn't recall that being a mechanic. Sigh, too busy.

Starfire512 wrote:
Ok, but how would you "fix" it? Make it the same as every other 4x system. I really like the uniqueness of districting. Maybe there is another 4x game out there with this but I am not aware of it.

The current system feels like a lot of game play baggage added simply to support itself.

• Adding districts for more FIDS and influence makes sense. The city is bigger and it generates more.
• Surrounding with other districts to "level up" makes sense (as long as the mechanic is clearly explained) - the "central" districts are more influential.
• Larger cities make the citizens unhappy - this makes sense.
• Large cities in a certain shape do not make the citizens unhappy doesn't make sense
  
  

The influence boost (coupled with techs that give other leveled-up District-related bonuses) should be enough of a benefit for a player to consider leveling up districts over snaking for FIDS.



City improvements to offset unhappiness is really all that is needed. These improvements take resources to build and Dust upkeep. As you city grows you'll need to invest more and more in these. There's no need for the leveling up of districts to offset unhappiness...



Of course, the numbers (output from improvements vs. terrain, building costs & upkeep, happiness formula) need tweaking too, but the current District system (and associated happiness effects) doesn't add a lot to the game while creating confusion.

Actually, one thing that sprang to my mind that that though they look cool, higher districts don't seem like place that help feed the population.

So in short it could be.



->no happiness relation with district directly

->level 1 distrinct expand borders

->level 2+ requires lower levels surrounding them, are built as improvements, provide dust/science/influence boosts*, removes food production from their tiles.

* level 2-3-4 may additionnaly unlocks special improvements/elite units if those are implemented.



The city ends up being the shape you want depending on what production you need. Looser agricultural/mining towns or high grade science/financial and politics centers.

Happiness is regulated by population numbers and others empire factors.

The main problem for me is this "black hole of happiness" and enought districts making pepople happy from some reason. Makes all cities look similar (pyramid), and promotes regions of specific shape. Which results in boring. I hope this specific rule will gone before release.



I think that the mian purpose of happiness purpose is to counter snowball effects of large empires. Large empires really could just set city, buyout buildings, and pump it with food stockpiles (also bought), and have another big city in notime, this is how snowball rolls. The problem is that it makes game to dependant from random factors in early game, one unlucky moment and you are lost, perfect start and rest of the game is just a clickfest - none is fun. And by random factor i mean for example war, which could just happen and stop our growth, while others will happy snowball.

Some ludology dude said that "if game is for sure lost for one player in mid of session, but he can still determine who will will, this is bad game".



There are some classic ways to deal with unhappiness:

- buildings

- auto techs (like empire size aproval)

- luxuries

- Region specific resources, like anomalies or maybe some of minor factions.



However i see value in more orginal gimmicks. The civ5 has a nice gimmick of luxuries influencing happiness, and that make a simple but fun mechanism of hunting this extra luxuries (or trading them off). Gimmicks are fun since orginal, even better if gimmicks are active but not annoying (more active than just building single building, less micro than clicking button each turn) Sample gimmicks:

- blood sacrifize (we have it)

- slavery - enemy city conquest and buring and pilage

- for peace deal or for war or for trade routes or some other type of goods acquire (could be too much elements)

- sacrifizing production by either workers (dedicated to form a rock band) or tiles (building temples on tiles?)

- Grand Work, like literally building this olympics, like you can produce olympcics in your city for temporary happiness bonus. Or building some very awesome building, temple of greater good, or astronomic observatory. Wow that would be cool if you could build expansion with model of some world wonder. Stunning.

- for fallowing faction path, like if as Vaulters we focus on this science (as our fathers did)



There is probably more good gimmicks, just black hole of happiness is a bad one.