Happy with the Happiness?
I think the happiness in SE IV is much better than in SE III, where it was too easy to keep your population happy.
However for the AI the happiness is a problem: once things go wrong for an AI empire and planets start to riot, it soon develops into a runaway process that leeds to the collapse of the empire. The AI will not react as a human player with priority construction of pacification centers and the positioning of troops and ships on rioting colonies. Therefore the riots usually Last for indefinite times and the empire production deminishes, which makes things go worse and the happiness decreases further.
Now you can of course modify the happiness files and create new ones for the AI to compensate for this weakness. I have e.g. a "collective" happiness type, where the AI almost never get's angry. This works rather well in single human player games, although I found it quite difficult to evaluate the effects of the modifications exactely: you only have the crude state of the planets happiness as jubiliant, happy, and so on.
So my first suggestion would be, that you have the exact happiness points and the change in the turn indicated for each planet. You can make this an option in the game setup. This would help modify the happiness files greatly and shouldn't be too hard to implement for MM.
Second there is no way (as far as I understand) to see the happiness type during a game. This opens the possibility to cheat and choose an happiness type, that should be reserved for AI only, in a multiplayer game.
Therefore my second suggestion would be, that you see the happiness type of an empire, as you can see the demeanor. Again make this an option in the game setup for those who think this gives too much information to the enemy. This too should be rather easy to implement.
What do you think?
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Hybrid Mode
