DESIGN:Separate riot/revolt from just happiness

[MrBaggins]

There is a significant problem connected with having the riot/revolt statuses being set by particular levels of happiness...

The human can always (well... usually) deal with keeping the happiness level just over the level where riots happen, even in newly captured cities, or new colonies. For me rioting has happened for maybe 0.1% of citygameturns. I've *never* had a city revolt. Ever.

Riots and revolts can and do happen to the AI... they are, for the most part, significantly destabalizing... which is, in many ways, a good thing

So... whats my suggestion?

Separate the value out... each city has a new value, called "unrest".

The largest modifier to unrest is still happiness... that is if the happiness below a certain level, the base level of unrest is a certain value.

Another significant modifier to unrest would be conquest distress... and you can't just wipe that out by getting the happiness in check... you have to actually get the happiness level above the "happy level", or 85 currently. Above this... the value of the extra unrest is reduced.

Some additional unrest issues should be : starvation, slaves and city improvements. I'd also like to see maybe something to do with city disparity (so colonies might have unrest, like, India and the Americas for example,) but I'd like to put more thought into the mechanism by which it happens.

I'm also suggesting that the military units don't make a city happy. They suppress unrest. At a rate of 10 per unit, up to the allowed maximum of units in govern.txt.

Here's a little example to illustrate everything...

You're doing some early campaigning... you send a stack of 12 mixed troops into Wien but only 3 make it. The city is distant, and has some population pollution issues... you shuffle the empire sliders, and introduce some entertainers in Wien, to get the happiness above, say 80, so there is no additional unrest other than the basic conquest unrest, and the city isn't starving.

You still have (say) 50 percent conquest unrest. Even if you wanted to suppress more than 30 unrest, you couldn't because your government, republic, won't allow it.

Each turn, the game checks to see if there is unrest in any cities, and if the unrest is greater than the amount of suppression in a city, then it "rolls" against the unrest... in this case, 20%. If it "rolls" 20 or less, then the city is in a riot state. Unrest is increased by 5 percent, (and this happens to "near" cities too). For the purposes of the next roll... for revolution, unrest is at 75% of its value, and suppression at 125%.

So.. in this case, in the event of a riot, for the purposes of checking if there is a revolution, unrest would be at 41 (75% of 55) and suppression at 38. So there'd be a 3% chance of a revolution.

A city needs to get either more suppression, or to a state of happy (85) for a riot to end. (harsh?)

With a revolution, I think partisans should appear, if there are units in the city, rather than a revolt. These would be a partisan unit, proportional to, and reducing the size of, the city. (Perhaps if a city revolted, ALL slaves would revolt, as partisans)

So... thoughts, comments, suggestions?

[drulius]

I like this idea, it sounds like a definite enhancement, but playtesting will reveal the truth. On first appearance though, it seems like it would be relatively easy for a city to go into revolt and relatively difficult to get out. Perhaps the riot/revolt percentages could be a separate difficulty setting like barbarian intensity, so that only on the most difficult setting would happiness monitoring present a supreme city management challenge.

I actually lost a city to revolution in my latest playtest game. The Koreans forced me to declare war on them by refusing to stop their piracy. I took several of their cities before I hit the Fascism city cap. Fortunately I was able to switch to Technocracy and get room for more cities. Unfortunately, I only used the empire and national manager screens to set my sliders and check for happiness on my first turn of Technocracy's administration. On the next turn I was surprised by riots in every city with my happiest city at 68 or 69. The Korean city I had conquered a turn or two before revolted and started a new civ.

[MrBaggins]

Agreed about the playtest... and agreed about the actual numbers involved. I'd consider it a work in progress with some promise.

BTW... vote yes, drulius

[MrBaggins]

*bump*

[tyrantpimp]

I think this is a good idea i would like to see it come to life but of course i have to vote banana sorry

[The Big Mc]

sounds good but like tyrantpimp i like Bananas

[J Bytheway]

Sounds interesting, but it has a danger of becoming a viscious circle from which you cannot escape. Perhaps different governments would have different methods for dealing with it - you said Republic suppression was limited to 30%, presumably because they can't be too "harsh" with their citizens, but perhaps they could bribe them instead, or something like that.

[MrBaggins]

Yeah.. I'm not sure about whether to make it a hard to break out of loop... or just test every turn... but then... if unrest is only... say 20%... the city will only riot 1 in 5 turns.

As for Republic only allowing for 30 of unrest suppression, I meant to say that this was for Military suppression.

City Improvements like Theatres, Stadiums and Temples would have suppression modifiers, (as well as happiness modifiers,) too (and with GovernmentsModified, we could have these improvements be more effective in suppression for Governments like Republics.)

Given the ideas we've been working on, with regard to trade, luxury trade should be possible, too... which will help in these regards too...

I like the idea of bribes. I'm not sure how to implement them. Thoughts?

---

My concern about all of this is the penalty to the player aspects...

This system could indeed cause some cities to split off and form their own empire.

This is obviously a big negative occurance. I'm giving options to avoid this, plus a system, that if you stay within this won't happen...

I still wonder... is this a game concept that human players can handle... a realistic, though significantly negative occurance?

Do human players want to play in a system where new distant or captured colonies are perfectly assimilated, or where there are risks that the ethnic differences cause rifts?

I think that Government changes cause old issues to reemerge amongst cities where there have been issues before (I.E. GB-India, USSR-Bloc countries, Late Roman Empire-Northern & Eastern Empire,) and that wealth disparities cause unrest too (So, cities less improved than the capital would have more unrest. Combined with other issues, like distance penalties... these could push these cities over the edge... think somethiing like GB-US War of Independence)

[J Bytheway]

Originally posted by MrBaggins
I like the idea of bribes. I'm not sure how to implement

In it's simplest form it would simply be "Pay X gold per population to reduce unrest by 1 point". This would represent throwing gifts to the mob, perhaps holding street parties, etc.

If you're prepared to make it more complex, then you should certainly include diminishing returns for persistent use, and furthermore, newly conquered cities would come to expect this kind of treatement and generate even more unrest if you didn't give it to them.

[KHOMAR]

In our world,unrest in democracies is a cause of decadence,in the poor countries,unrest is a stimulant for religious extremism.In game terms,unrest could be reduced in certain civs(depending on the government),with the profit to a decadence value which affects regard of other civilizations or in the need of a strong leader(population needing of religious govt/dictatorship, or important changes in the civs/with others civ) under penalty of riot/revolt.

[MrBaggins]

Originally posted by J Bytheway
In it's simplest form it would simply be "Pay X gold per population to reduce unrest by 1 point". This would represent throwing gifts to the mob, perhaps holding street parties, etc.

If you're prepared to make it more complex, then you should certainly include diminishing returns for persistent use, and furthermore, newly conquered cities would come to expect this kind of treatement and generate even more unrest if you didn't give it to them.

A fine implementation. I guess on a right click menu for the city (if it has any unrest), and a button in the city tabs too, but obviously an option to do this en masse, in the Nation Manager, to avoid micromanagement... I guess it would be no more or less micromanaging than adding entertainers... and more realistic too, I'd wager.

This could simulate and abstract a whole bunch of effects, like war reparations, tax reform/repealing/breaks (avoiding the Boston Tea Party?) or plain bribes for the mob (like in Roman times.)

Originally posted by KHOMAR
In our world,unrest in democracies is a cause of decadence,in the poor countries,unrest is a stimulant for religious extremism.In game terms,unrest could be reduced in certain civs(depending on the government),with the profit to a decadence value which affects regard of other civilizations or in the need of a strong leader(population needing of religious govt/dictatorship, or important changes in the civs/with others civ) under penalty of riot/revolt.

I disagree that unrest has anything to do with "decadence" in Democracies. Decadence has to do with disparity of wealth between one nation and others...

I agree that unrest in religious governments would cause religious extremists to cause problems... but wouldn't this be modelled by revolts, with fanatics being created (instead of "partizans") ?

If you're saying that these extremists would be targetting FOREIGN nations... then... thats really not modelled in game terms right now... nations attack other nations as a whole... terrorism can happen, but its essentially state sponsored.

I'm not sure if it would work well in game terms... I.E. a struggling AI Theocracy has unrest, and therefore religious extremists attack a "decadent" neighbor... you... the human player, and provoke war. I don't see how this makes a better game.

Why not restrict unrest to internal effects, and leave provocations like this to intentional AI action.

[Myrddin]

Seems an interesting idea BUT

Will the AI be able to cope with it?


If it can then I'm in favour, but city flipping, especially recently conquered ones seems unpopular with a lot of Civ3 players

[MrBaggins]

Well.. the AI can't deal with the current system well.. so whatever we do... we have to do some work, either way.

I'm sure that the AI could be programmed to deal with this system. Dealing with issues in cities, is a finite problem. The real issues come with the AI dealing with units on the map.

Unrest at the level of causing revolts should generally occur in a few situations... BAD pollution, abusive empire size, distant colonies, newly conquered cities, and recently distant/conquered cities during a Government revolution. If these are happening, then the AI is basically doing at least OK, if not well, particularly if its having problems with bad pollution, empire size or conquered cities.

The problem with the existing system... is that there is no significant risk whatsoever, with the human player, having revolts. If we just get the AI to work with this system, we really didn't move CTP2 forward, just removed happiness from the equation.

The shortcoming of the Civ3 system... and why certain players don't like it, is that you don't have options to deal with it... certainly you can prepare for it to some degree.

Having separate unrest, but giving the option of improvement building, garrisoning AND bribing (even though it shouldn't be cheap,) no player would be unable to have some options to deal with the problem, unless they'd planned so badly, but in that case, they should be penalized.

Well... thats my view anyway.

[Mihai]

I think that to have unrest and hapiness as two separate things is a good idea.
Having troops in the city is making unhappy people less eager to revolt (reduce unrest), but it won't make them happier. Also slaves will always have something on their heart, no matter how many arenas and theaters there are. Acctually maybe there should be ALWAYS a chance for the slavers to revolt - smaller if there are many troops, but bigger than zero. By same idea, abolitionist will have their chances proportional with number of slaves and their proportion in the total population.
We can have to sets of buildings and wonders : some will reduce unrest and some will increase happiness.

[Solver]

The idea is good, definitely. Sure, it seems like riots would be very hard to get out of, but playtesting would show. It would have to be made, though, so that distant cities with unrest are still useful. We want to avoid the Civ3 problem when cities that are distant are basically useless. Also, happiness should have then some other role than merely being a factor in the unrest formula.