Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

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Zireael
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#31 Post by Zireael »

I like eleazar's idea and I really need to grab a new build.

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Vezzra
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#32 Post by Vezzra »

Zireael wrote:I like eleazar's idea and I really need to grab a new build.
I'm going to produce new ones tonight...

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#33 Post by Geoff the Medio »

qsswin wrote:...I like the fact that Geoff's would allow the planet to eventually "leave the union."
I do think there should be some mechanism for a variable-rate but almost always at least several-turn process for the descent of planets to rebellion. Excluding cases of manually-ordered espionage / social manipulation by other players, rebellions should never be sudden or unwarned to players, and there should be some degree of effect, preferably continuous, between "everything's OK" and "we are now an independent colony".

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Krikkitone
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#34 Post by Krikkitone »

Well just in general

Low happiness has some 'building up over time to a maximum' negative effect on troop strength.
(Call it Rebel Activity... X-Happiness=Maximum Rebel Activity, Rebel activity increases by (X-Happiness)/(Troops) each turn)
Troop Strength is reduced by Rebel Activity

If Troop strength=0 while happiness<X planet declares independence

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#35 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Krikkitone wrote:Low happiness has some 'building up over time to a maximum' negative effect on troop strength.
(Call it Rebel Activity... X-Happiness=Maximum Rebel Activity, Rebel activity increases by (X-Happiness)/(Troops) each turn)
Troop Strength is reduced by Rebel Activity
That essentially means adding (yet) another meter to track a rather obscure value. I think / insist a simpler mechanism can be worked out.

Edit: The preceding is probably unfair... See below.

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Vezzra
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#36 Post by Vezzra »

Geoff the Medio wrote:I think / insist a simpler mechanism can be worked out.
Of everything that has been proposed so far I like the rebel troop mechanics you suggested best. It's simple, elegant and does everything we want...

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Sloth
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#37 Post by Sloth »

Geoff the Medio wrote:..., and there should be some degree of effect, preferably continuous, between "everything's OK" and "we are now an independent colony".
I think these answers have already been discussed, but here is a combination of most stuff:

If happiness is below a certain threshold, target meters (industry, research, trade, ?) will be reduced (For example if the threshold would be 100 and your Happiness is 70 all the affected target meters are at 70%).

If Happiness is 0, the target Troops meter is set to 0 (siterep will warn you of an independence war). If Happiness is still 0 and Troops drop to 0 (which will eventually happen when the target meter is 0) -> independence.
All released under the GNU GPL 2.0 and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licences.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#38 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Sloth wrote:If happiness is below a certain threshold, target meters (industry, research, trade, ?) will be reduced...
There are some problems with that:
* It make happiness mainly / primarily a penalty or deduction from what the player would otherwise get. This is generally an un-fun way to structure game mechanics. It also means there's little reason to boost happiness above the minimum needed to avoid a penalty.
* It doesn't make much sense in various situations. There are likely numerous bits of content that increase the resource output meters that shouldn't have any dependence on happiness. Automated factories, for example.
* It's difficult to arrange the effects system to ensure that such a numerical penalty would work as intended. You'd need to make sure the penalty would be applied at the end after all other effects, which might conflicts with how other things are set up.

An alternative is to structure the effects that determine some species-related meter adjustments so that they have a happiness dependence. Some effects / content would make sense to have a happiness dependence, and others wouldn't, but if it's set up properly then boosting happiness provides a way to increase planet output of resources. With suitable selection of techs / species / buildings by players though, there would be a variable amounts of dependence on happiness between empires.
If Happiness is 0, the target Troops meter is set to 0 (siterep will warn you of an independence war). If Happiness is still 0 and Troops drop to 0 (which will eventually happen when the target meter is 0) -> independence.
That sounds similar to what I proposed, except with a sudden change of what's going on with 0 happiness, rather than a gradual change / variable rate of troop loss depending on how many rebel troops are present.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
Krikkitone wrote:Low happiness has some 'building up over time to a maximum' negative effect on troop strength.
(Call it Rebel Activity... X-Happiness=Maximum Rebel Activity, Rebel activity increases by (X-Happiness)/(Troops) each turn)
Troop Strength is reduced by Rebel Activity
That essentially means adding (yet) another meter to track a rather obscure value. I think / insist a simpler mechanism can be worked out.
To be fair, I think that Krikkitone's suggestion - or the part of it before the () - actually isn't much different from what I proposed earlier. The () part does sound like it involves multiple extra meters / values to track rather than the single rebel troops I've proposed, but the intended result is similar.

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qsswin
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#39 Post by qsswin »

With v0.4.2 coming up, we might want to start thinking about making happiness-related changes now (for after the release, obviously!).

While I think that there is a consensus about how happiness will be determined (planet-dependent conditions, allegiance to empire, Influence meter of empire) we still need to figure out just what happiness will do.

The most important goal for happiness, it seems, will be to balance large empires. Other goals include some use for espionage and making species more interesting.

Currently, proposed effects for happiness include:
[*] Increasing rebel troop meter, eventually freeing colony, with low enough happiness
[*] Lowering production with low happiness
The problem that Eleazar has mentioned with the "riots" (or Civ4) method of happiness is that a system that gains you no benefit and can be ignored until something happens, when you must waste production restore the balance, is not particularly fun. (I think that high happiness did sometimes get you a "we love the emperor day" in Civ4 occasionally, which reduced some sort of upkeep.) Certainly we should have some sort positive benefit to happiness.

Some ideas:
Increase production based on high happiness (could make balancing hard)
Make influence in particular, or troops, or something else dependent on happiness

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eleazar
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#40 Post by eleazar »

qsswin wrote:...Certainly we should have some sort positive benefit to happiness.

Some ideas:
Increase production based on high happiness (could make balancing hard)
Make influence in particular, or troops, or something else dependent on happiness
I think enough things increase production. I'd prefer to leave happiness out of it.

In my mind (for further down the development line) the main benefit of high happiness is an increase in the Approval rating (previously referred to as "allegiance") of a species. Species that highly Approve of an empire should be harder to conquer or maintain control of, and ships/colonies may try to defect from empires they have a low approval for.

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Sloth
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#41 Post by Sloth »

eleazar wrote: In my mind (for further down the development line) the main benefit of high happiness is an increase in the Approval rating (previously referred to as "allegiance") of a species. Species that highly Approve of an empire should be harder to conquer or maintain control of, and ships/colonies may try to defect from empires they have a low approval for.
Yes, i think this can even become a strategy to support:

1. Conquer a planet of an opponent or somehow gain control of a species in an opponents empire.
2. Give the species a paradise world (Happiness Focus) to increase their Approval rating.
3. Lower happiness in an opponents colony with the species (via Espionage) to instigate a riot.
4. The colony will declare independence.
5. The colony will join your empire, because the species has a high Approval rating of your empire (should require some kind of action, maybe Espionage).
All released under the GNU GPL 2.0 and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licences.

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eleazar
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#42 Post by eleazar »

Sloth wrote:1. Conquer a planet of an opponent or somehow gain control of a species in an opponents empire.
2. Give the species a paradise world (Happiness Focus) to increase their Approval rating.
3. Lower happiness in an opponents colony with the species (via Espionage) to instigate a riot.
4. The colony will declare independence.
5. The colony will join your empire, because the species has a high Approval rating of your empire (should require some kind of action, maybe Espionage).
Yeah, something like that.

With a species-wide approval meter, it would be much easier to pull something like that off with a species with few planets / low population, since adjusting the happiness of one planet would have a much greater effect on the whole.

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Krikkitone
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#43 Post by Krikkitone »

qsswin wrote:With v0.4.2 coming up, we might want to start thinking about making happiness-related changes now (for after the release, obviously!).

While I think that there is a consensus about how happiness will be determined (planet-dependent conditions, allegiance to empire, Influence meter of empire) we still need to figure out just what happiness will do.

The most important goal for happiness, it seems, will be to balance large empires. Other goals include some use for espionage and making species more interesting.

Currently, proposed effects for happiness include:
[*] Increasing rebel troop meter, eventually freeing colony, with low enough happiness
[*] Lowering production with low happiness
The problem that Eleazar has mentioned with the "riots" (or Civ4) method of happiness is that a system that gains you no benefit and can be ignored until something happens, when you must waste production restore the balance, is not particularly fun. (I think that high happiness did sometimes get you a "we love the emperor day" in Civ4 occasionally, which reduced some sort of upkeep.) Certainly we should have some sort positive benefit to happiness.

Some ideas:
Increase production based on high happiness (could make balancing hard)
Make influence in particular, or troops, or something else dependent on happiness
I think the key idea there is for happiness to be competitive...
using military as an example...
low military= you lose planets to other players
high military=you gain planets from other players

Happiness should basically be the same. (but with different interactions with espionage, military, etc.)

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qsswin
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#44 Post by qsswin »

eleazar wrote:
Sloth wrote:1. Conquer a planet of an opponent or somehow gain control of a species in an opponents empire.
2. Give the species a paradise world (Happiness Focus) to increase their Approval rating.
3. Lower happiness in an opponents colony with the species (via Espionage) to instigate a riot.
4. The colony will declare independence.
5. The colony will join your empire, because the species has a high Approval rating of your empire (should require some kind of action, maybe Espionage).
Yeah, something like that.

With a species-wide approval meter, it would be much easier to pull something like that off with a species with few planets / low population, since adjusting the happiness of one planet would have a much greater effect on the whole.
How would we prevent positive feedback loops? I.e., if happiness improves approval and approval is supposed to influence approval, we'd need some mechanic to prevent unlimited growth.

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eleazar
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#45 Post by eleazar »

I don't see or intend a "approval is supposed to influence approval" step in the process. Some older drafts had a circular structure, but i think that would be more confusing/troublesome that it's worth.

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