Stability and happiness in separate meters

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

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LienRag
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Stability and happiness in separate meters

#1 Post by LienRag »

After some games in single player and one (nearly 80 turns now) multi-player, I believe that the Stability mechanism suffer from two fundamental flaws :

- Linearity : as long as it'll be linear, it'll be a puzzle to solve (which building do I build where ? which policy do I adopt ?), and not much more.
That has some interest in itself, which quickly run out of fun though; and more importantly, it has some interactions with general strategy, that makes it not entirely meaningless, but it's not enough.
Also, it will have no immersive quality : it'll stay numbers, not living beings.
As long as it's linear, we'll have the same discussions that we have now : we discover that Stability requirements makes the game unplayable, so we lift them by adding mechanisms that allow to reach these Stability levels required to play.
But these mechanisms don't really bring agency to the player, as they are required to prevent the constraints that the Stability requirements introduced...
So it's basically more micromanagement, not more strategic thinking.

Imho it should be more of a "Can't stop" mechanism : should the player push its luck further in order to gain rapid development ? But at the risk of losing a lot if he goes too far...
That can be achieved by thresholds of happiness/unhappiness, each that can be triggered randomly (with a probability depending on the player's action, of course) and that once triggered, will be very difficult to reverse.
So if a player makes his Gysache too unhappy, it'll take him let's say 50 turns at least to reverse that with continuous high investment : so he may decide either to spend that investment, hoping to reap the rewards later; or to consider the Gysache lost and leave them all to independance.
That's a complete and meaningful strategic decision, and one which necessity will change each game, depending of the level of unhappiness the player pushed them unto; so making the game more interesting that what we have now.

- Monotony : I know there's been a lot of discussion about whether to keep Happiness and Stability as two meters or to mix them in a single one, but after experiencing what has been implemented I believe what we have is not working.
A unique meter means that we're back to adjusting cogs until we find the right value, there's not the tension between objectives that creates meaningful strategies.
If making the populations happy/friendly/approving is separate from making them subservient, then we have this tension.
I have played games (well, at least one : Stronghold) that have these two mechanisms, but as mirrors : you get "happiness" or "fear" but the effects are the same; that is not interesting at all.
By making these mechanisms (making population happy vs making them fearful) long-term vision against short-term pragmatism, then we'll have imho a very interesting dialectic : do I invest in making my population happy, to great cost but safe against enemy action ? Or do I not care if they hate me, as long as they obey me ? Which of course would fare way worse were I to lose my grip on them...
Do I do the same for all my Species, or do I sacrifice some of them to make the others unhappy, with the risk that repression against the unhappy ones will also make my chosen ones somehow unhappy ?

I believe it probably would be better to actually have two meters, especially since Species-Empire relations are in the roadmap, and of course a terrified Species will not have the same consideration for an Empire than a happy one.

But if that's not an option for 0.5.0, a possibility to salvage the dialectic I wrote about would be to completely separate stability requirements between those about happy workers and those that apply to terrified workers, so that it's possible to have a (relatively) thriving Empire with low stability everywhere, as long as the boni gained by making the population happy are forfeited and resources are spent to fight rebels.

I'm thinking of making nearly Production boni work with a Stability of 5 or even 0 (again, I'm speaking in the case we keep Stability as the only meter, so a level of 5 could be obtained by a minimum investment).
Influence bonus would be for some (based on repression) also available at low Stability, but for most of them (like Luxuries) only at higher Stability.
A minimum of Research should be possible on a fear-based strategy, but many Research boni would have higher Stability requirements.

An important part is that methods to manage an Empire through violence and fear should not raise Stability, but prevent its consequences : rise the Terror Suppression effect of ships¹, rise the threshold at which rebel troops will attack when there are no enemy ships around/planet is connected to Empire, things like that.

¹ I find this policy way too micro-managy to be a viable long-term solution, but at least it has some originality in it, so even if we get rid of the micro-management aspect some day we can take some inspiration from it.

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Oberlus
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Re: Stability for 0.5

#2 Post by Oberlus »

Are you going to make any proposal?

Otherwise, change title of thread to something like Discusing stability and happiness in two meters for 0.5.

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LienRag
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Re: Stability for 0.5

#3 Post by LienRag »

Well, I've more or less made two proposals (or at least given two possible directions for the design to look towards), using thresholds to break linearity, and for the second problem, either dividing the meter in two or at least separating "happiness-bringing" policies/game mechanisms from "quelling rebellions" ones.

Since my proposals would involve modifying a bit of back-end code, it's difficult for me to be more specific.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Stability for 0.5

#4 Post by Geoff the Medio »

LienRag wrote: Tue Jun 08, 2021 5:43 pm...least separating "happiness-bringing" policies/game mechanisms from "quelling rebellions" ones.
I don't think there needs to be separate happiness and stability meters to make a distinction between different mechanisms for dealing with potential rebellions. Similar to as suggested, policies can directly modify rebel troop levels or ground troop regeneration rates without adjusting stability, for example, to "quell a rebellion" without affecting stability. I think I'll modify Terror Suppression to directly modify rebel troop levels...

Also, there can and probably should be policies that have a maximum stability limit to receive their bonus, not just minimum stability requirements.

Having species have more of a memory of past events it's probably a post 0.5 thing.
it'll be a puzzle to solve (which building do I build where ? which policy do I adopt ?), and not much more.
[...]
But these mechanisms don't really bring agency to the player, as they are required to prevent the constraints that the Stability requirements introduced...
So it's basically more micromanagement, not more strategic thinking.
Your use of "micromanagement" to describe adopting policies and deciding where to producing buildings isn't the same sense as it's meant in most previous design discussions, which was more so "having to do the same repetative actions in many places without it involving much meaningful decision making". For example, ordering every planet to produce every building, probably in the same order, because more is always beneficial to have. Policies are not micromanagment because, while it might be difficult to know what is the "best" policy, you adopt them for the empire in one place. Building placement position-dependent penalties are somewhat more micromanagement-like, but are in part intended to make it a more meaningful decision about where to locate them.

But regardless, there are other ways to introduce time-dependent or more strategically interesting considerations to stability, like time-dependent effects and perhaps the above-mentioned policies that work or work differently at low stability, not just high stability always being optimal.
we'll have the same discussions that we have now : we discover that Stability requirements makes the game unplayable, so we lift them by adding mechanisms that allow to reach these Stability levels required to play.
But these mechanisms don't really bring agency to the player, as they are required to prevent the constraints that the Stability requirements introduced...
So it's basically more micromanagement, not more strategic thinking.
You seem to view stability as just a thing that gets in the way of playing the game that was there before stability was introduced, with the various ways of gaining stability irrelevant in their mechanics aside from that they give some stability. But part of the point of adding stability and influence and policies was to add new considerations and thus ways of playing the game. Rather than colonizing or taking over every available planet, and using every available species for its single best trait, making the same set of optimal buildings at every possible location every game, the idea is for players to have to prioritize for particular locations or to consider whether the benefits of another colony or species in the empire are (currently) worth the additional influence and stability costs, or if they want to devote resources to making it easier to support having more species, or whether skipping a particular beneficial building might make sense due to the stability costs it will impose, etc.

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Re: Stability for 0.5

#5 Post by wobbly »

I can understand some of the sentiment and frustration here, as in its current state, its hard to do some very basic things. I have planets with researched focus races that I can't switch to research as their stability dips below 10, I lose Nascent AI and then I lose instead of gain research. Just about every decision seems to revolve around whether I'll hit or miss certain stability break points.

I'm hopeful that when it's all finished it'll be great. In its current state its a massive managerial chore that gets in way of even basic playing, rather then a bunch of interesting decisions.

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Re: Stability for 0.5

#6 Post by Oberlus »

Wobbly, would it help to make the thresholds mark the maximum effect and get only a percentage if bellow threshold?
There could still be minimum thresholds, just closer to zero.

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Re: Stability for 0.5

#7 Post by LienRag »

wobbly wrote: Wed Jun 09, 2021 7:29 pm In its current state its a massive managerial chore that gets in way of even basic playing, rather then a bunch of interesting decisions.
I'm way too tired to answer coherently Geoff's remarks, but your phrasing indeed sums the problem up better that my improper use of the word "micromanagement".


Oberlus wrote: Wed Jun 09, 2021 7:42 pm Would it help to make the thresholds mark the maximum effect and get only a percentage if bellow threshold?
There could still be minimum thresholds, just closer to zero.
I proposed multiple thresholds for many effects (high threshold for max effect, lower for partial effects), which is quite similar. Multiple thresholds (different for each tech/policy/building/whatever) would allow more leeway in design (so designing quite different behaviours for boni), percentage bellow threshold as you suggest would need less pedia entries.
Which would bring the better immersion and/or the more strategic diversity ? I don't know.


wobbly wrote: Wed Jun 09, 2021 7:29 pm I'm hopeful that when it's all finished it'll be great.
Well, that's why I wrote the original post even though I was also too tired to explain myself clearly¹ : I believe that as you say, many of the problems we have is a question of tweaking the existing and finding the right equilibrium, but also that there are fundamental problems (notably the linearity and absence of dialectic between happiness and repression) that will prevent these Stability mechanisms to ever work as intended without some addressing of these core questions.



¹ But I wanted to write it for weeks if not months without ever finding the right inspiration, and with the "freeze" to come it got quite urgent.

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Re: Stability for 0.5

#8 Post by wobbly »

Oberlus wrote: Wed Jun 09, 2021 7:42 pm Wobbly, would it help to make the thresholds mark the maximum effect and get only a percentage if bellow threshold?
There could still be minimum thresholds, just closer to zero.
I'm not sure yet. It gets rid of the problem, but reduces clarity of mechanics. I'll think about it. I think you need to be hitting key points most of the time through natural decisions. Tangentially the addition of "Bureaucracy" policy looks interesting.

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Re: Stability for 0.5

#9 Post by Krikkitone »

I think there a a few important points.
Separating “love” and “fear”
there are a few ways to do this, but the idea is that they have different effects and are triggered differently

Both prevent rebellions / strikes-economic slowdowns / military desertions / foreign spies (ie stability)

Love would encourage foreign military/planets to defect to you and welcome your spies

Fear is more strongly dependent on your local power right now. (likelihood of getting caught)...so it is really good at stopping low level rebellions...but it can encourage rebellions/enemy spies if your troops/spies are weak in the area

Love is dependent on people believing you are good for them (so empire actions/situation or propaganda)

Love should probably have both a short term (what have you done for me/that I like lately) and a long term (loyalty/identity)

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Re: Stability for 0.5

#10 Post by LienRag »

Krikkitone wrote: Fri Jun 11, 2021 11:45 am Separating “love” and “fear”

Things didn't go the way I wanted, and I'm not sure whether this spaceship has sailed or not.

But anyway, one way to make such separation compatible with what we have now is to "tag" Stability modifiers, so that they can be addressed in Policies, Research, or whatever.

Simplest is to have two tags, "adhesion" and "constraint", so that for example a "citizen science" Policy could sum all of "adhesion" Stability boni and give a Research bonus based on the total (minus all stability mali).

But I guess that it's better design to just have the "tag" field for each Stability modifier, which opens for later new tags (like "manipulation") if someone needs them someday.
Maybe it should be possible to have multiple tags for a Stability modifier.

Would that need a big backend change ? I'm not sure that it can be done purely in FOCS...

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Re: Stability and happiness in separate meters

#11 Post by wobbly »

There's opinion and stability. There was discussion at a dev meeting that opinion should do "something" without just being the same as stability.

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Re: Stability and happiness in separate meters

#12 Post by LienRag »

Oh, right.
I knew about Opinion but didn't understand how it could indeed be considered as working a tad similarly than happiness.
It's species-wide rather than by-planet but I guess we have to find a way around that rather than ask for a new mechanism.
Not sure that tags for stability modifiers would be bad, though.

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