PvK Balance Mod Version 1.1 posted (for SE4 Gold Version 1.91 - Patch 4)

[Alneyan]

I happen to have a question about your mod PvK: why lowering Happiness give many points? According to the general consensus, lowering Happiness hardly hurts the Empire. (That is, according to many players in KOTH and the Newbie FAQ)

Unless the patch altered something, lowering Happiness shouldn't make your Empire more prone to suffer from riots. I played with average Happiness and with 50% happiness and my planets were rioting as fast in both cases, only troops and UPC would prevent these riots.

Beyond this small question, great work! I will have a closer look at your mod once I start a solitaire game, so that the enemy Empires will be both varied and still effective. (Playing against 19 Clones isn't exactly appealing, nor is playing against much weaker Empires)

[ February 29, 2004, 16:34: Message edited by: Alneyan ]

[PvK]

It's only easy to counter if you lower it moderately, and I this mod only returns a fair number of points if you reduce it a lot, at which point it does become a disadvantage. As I write in the readme & web page:

PvK wrote:

Threshold lowered to one in order to reduce reward for lowering happiness
a small amount, since in the unmodded game a little unhappiness is easy
to counter with troops. A lot of unhappiness can be a problem however, so
the Negative Threshold cost was increased. Positive Threshold can be low,
because for the most part, a high value gives diminishing benefits which
can be accomplished by others using troops. Minimum setting of -50 gives
750 points (and would be hard to survive long enough to develop troops
before riots took over).

So I don't think you can abuse it as you can in the unmodded game. I'd say it's worth 750 points to have to endure the effects of -50 Happiness.

One can counter the effects of unhappiness when one has the technology and resources available, mainly using troops, but this requires the player to focus on this immediately, and throughout the game. The effect is worse for a typical low-tech single-planet start, than for high-tech start where you can deploy troops on turn one, but it will still waste your time and resources and lower your research and intel by at least a bit throughout the game. I'd say this is probably well worth 750 points for -50, even if you become expert at dealing with it. It might be a somewhat over-valued, or not - I'd be interested to hear more discussion.

At -50 happiness, for example:

* By turn 2, the homeworld happiness will drop from Happy to Indifferent (loss of 10% production bonus, or 20% compared to someone else's Jubilant planet).
* Usually, two turns after a planet is colonized, it drops from Happy to Indifferent.
* An average-research low-tech empire suffering from -50 happiness will take about 10 turns to get to Construction 1, and another 10-15 to get to Troops 1, even if those are the first techs they go for, which in itself is a disadvantage, since they will probably want to delay useful early-game research to do that first. If they get attacked while they don't have anything useful researched, it could be game over. If they do research other things, they're going to suffer a lot of unhappiness effects.
* Alternatively, a player can build some cheap ships and leave them in orbit to keep happiness up, but that too is a waste of time and resources.
* Even in a high-tech game or late-game, the need to worry about happiness on every new planet is a distraction and an expense.
* During major wars with large empires, a major setback (large fleet and/or planet loss) can cause many planets throughout a large empire to riot. The rate at which they recover gets multiplied by the number of planets they have, as does the cost of building even more troops for all of them.

(Note too that if you read this thread's history, we discussed this and most of the other values, and pretty much everyone agreed [or some slightly thought something should be higher, where others slightly thought it should be lower] on most of this. There may still be some things that can be abused here or there though, so do let me know if you have any other ideas.)

PvK

[Alneyan]

I might be a bit stubborn and what not, but do you have any formula highlighting how 50% happiness affect the happiness level on a given planet? Or rather, how does reducing the characteristic alter the happiness level? I had a look at the happiness.txt file, but saw nothing regarding this. (I am not speaking about increasing happiness, as this effect is known)

Here is the quote from the Newbie FAQ I was referring to:

1.2.4 Happiness: Every five percentage points you increase your happiness makes 0,1% people happier every turn. For example if you increase happiness 10% it's the same effect if you have one troop on your every planet. If you drop your happiness to 50%, it makes 1% of your population angry each turn. Natural decrease is 2% (neutral 5%). The result is 1% happy people each turn. (Asmala)

According to this calculation, it means natural decrease (or increase here) is higher than increasing happiness (or raising it here), and the only side effect would be if you were experiencing battle losses and other harmful events. There you would only gain a +10 each turn instead of +20 to help offsetting the happiness decrease due to these events. Or am I missing something obvious here? It is also possible the patch introduced a few changes to how happiness was handled, as I admit I am not yet familiar with the changes.

I read the whole thread before replying to check if the negative effects of lowering too much happiness have been discussed before, and it looks like it wasn't, unless I missed a page of course, as it wouldn't be unusual given my natural silliness.(Environmental Resistance was discussed, however.) My other questions were answered by reading the previous Posts, so I will not bug you about how to tweak AI files and the consequences of it or something along these lines.

[PvK]

Originally posted by Alneyan:
... According to this calculation, it means natural decrease (or increase here) is higher than increasing happiness (or raising it here), and the only side effect would be if you were experiencing battle losses and other harmful events.

I expect they add together, so you go from natural -2% per turn, to natural -3% per turn. Assuming the FAQ is correct - I noticed a couple of errors in the FAQ just while searching for this.

I ran a test just now in 1.91 and the effect isn't as strong as I expected, so you may well be right that it isn't worth as much as I thought.

What's the common wisdom on number of troops to offset a -1%/turn happiness? 10? Let's see... 5? Geez. (I remember I had good reasons for removing that factor from Proportions mod - I didn't remember them being that good.)

Let's see. The top brackets are 15% apart, while the lower ones are 25% apart. So all else being equal, assuming the FAQ is correct, a planet would drop 10% production in 5-9 turns, instead of 7-13 turns. Of course, in practice, events tend to dictate happiness level.

Overall, looking at the supposedly-correct FAQ numbers, I'm tending to think you're right. Happiness itself is a big factor, but the Happiness attribute looks extremely minescule in effect, if the FAQ is right. Maybe I need to run my test game longer, and/or do another test. (Except I have no free time to do that.)

Any other opinions or sources of info on this?

PvK

[Alneyan]

It looks like the natural decrease is actually a variation back to Indifferent level. Jubilant Empires tend to go back to Indifferent if there are no troops or an UPC on the planet, and Angry worlds can go back to Indifferent level as well. (I have never seen a rioting world going back to another level on its own though)

I ran a test with two Empires, one with 100% happiness and the other one with a mere 40% happiness. (50% Environmental Resistance and 50% happiness) Here are the results:
- Both Empires go back to indifferent level in the first few turns. (On turn 2 for 40% happiness, on turn 3 for 100% happiness) I will assume it would be the same if you raise happiness, unless you do go overboard on this characteristic to offset natural decrease.
- After many turns, both Empires remain at indifferent level, thanks to this natural decrease. If there were no natural decrease, the worlds of the 40% happiness would slowly go down in happiness. (With 1,2% more angry people every turn, your Empire would collapse easily I guess) Then troops would obviously be a priority, and lowering Happiness to 50% would be very risky to say the least.
- However, my 40% happiness didn't seem to be able to overcome the effects of losing several planets (including the homeworld) and battles, as all the worlds were on angry. On the other hand, the 100% happiness Empire eventually recovered from these effects, although the process needed about 15 turns to go back to Indifferent level. Please note that in a regular game, other attacks would have been likely, thus offseting this natural increase if no troops/UPC are present.

So, it seems like the only disavantage when lowering happiness is that you are a bit more vulnerable to happiness loss than before. But you will still have +1% happiness per turn, so it should be enough to deal with minor events such as the loss of a few ships here and there. If the situation is much worse, such as the destruction of several planets each turn, I would believe there isn't much left to do and +2% happiness will not help as losing a planet means -5% happiness. In both cases troops seem the only proper solution along with the UPC, and you would need 10 troops per planet to offset the 50% happiness disadvantage. (Or you could rely on the UPC with its +6% happiness per turn at level III)

[PvK]

Thanks Alneyan!

I'm convinced. My values were based on the assumption that lowering Happiness to 50% would be more like -5% or -10% per turn, and would keep going all the way to rioting. Your tests show that the effect is minescule in the extreme - essentially a non-factor (sigh). Therefore it's only worth perhaps 1/5 to 1/10 as much as I had it (and just plain ridiculously less than the unmodded value).

If you have time, I'd be interested to know if raising Happiness to the maximum has any worthwhile effect, or if it just delays the drop to indifferent by a couple of turns.

PvK

[primitive]

Don't forget this line from happiness.txt (Peacefull)

Any Planet Colonized := -10

This is more than enough to keep a 50% empire jubilant for a while in most games. The problem is to remember to have your troops and UPC's ready before you run out of colonizable planets

[Alneyan]

I ran a test in the early game, and here are the results:

- For 150 happiness: the homeworld remains happy for 6 turns, is Indifferent the next turn, then becomes Happy against, and so on. (I checked for 120 turns)
- For 170 happiness (150 Environmental Resistance, the Artisans Culture, and 150 happiness): the homeworld stays Happy for 100 turns, and so it seems the value needed to fully offset natural decrease. (But you will not go to Jubilant)

These results are a bit better than what I expected, and it seems that +5% happiness does slightly more than increasing the happy people by +0,1% a turn. (+2% per turn is needed to offset natural decrease) But the effect isn't impressive, as other events would likely alter happiness. Thanks for mentioning this bonus about colonizing planets Primitive, I now understand why I am always at Jubilant, even with 50% happiness. (bar such trivial events involving enemy fleets, troops and the Primitive one)

So raising happiness would give a small boost to your Empire by helping a bit to reach Jubilant status (other events or troops/UPCs are needed though), and would help to reduce the happiness loss when harmful events happen. However, once again, if these events are truly nasty, 150% happiness will not help much and you *will* be in trouble if you don't have many troops and UPCs able to keep your subjects peaceful as an armada is heading their way.

[PvK]

Yeah. There are also bonuses for building ships, and for having ships (or, say, construction bases) in orbit over a planet.

Happiness rating... another non-factor - sigh.

PvK

[Fyron]

You could always raies the max to 200, min to 0, and halve all of the costs associated with it. Make it possible to actually get a bonus or penalty.