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Superstring
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Hannover, Germany
Jan 2002
time: 06:35
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As there is AFAIK no thread in this Future forum concerned with unhappiness concepts I'd like to induce some discussion of it via this thread.
To cut things short I suggest that loss of shields/gold should always be a consequence of unhappiness and not directly because of distance to the capital or being a recently conquered city. The concept of corruption was introduced to put limits on the easy expansion of civs which would otherwise be mandatory by the 'bigger is better' mechanism. No problem with having corruption in far away cities but it should be because of unhappiness of the people, not because of the distance. The difference is there is lot more possible to do against unhappiness than against city distances. So corruption could be removed via measures against unhappiness. This would also imply that even in your capitol corruption would be possible if you neglect it and the people become unhappy.
The simple formula would be: Loss of 1 shield and 1 gold per unhappy citizen.
IMO the true importance of that concept lies in the chance to make it the first step of the important introduction of the people's will into the civ game. As for now every civ is more or less a dictatorship under the rule of its player no matter what the government is named that the player is running. It's a very complex task to rebuild this game with a feelable will of ones own people in EVERY type of government, even if the methods at hand to keep them quiet .. um .. satisfied might differ.
Till now unhappyness is simply an extra task to master and not connected much to running your civ expansion process (read: war machinery). A kind of additional nuisance to avoid, but no central concept. So everybody only tries to avoid riots but does not actively seek to make their people happy, because that reduces productivity or costs money. Unless we don't consider rulers and politicians selfish bastards (Who would ?  ) it's more realistic they'd make people's happiness their number one priority other than the question, how to get their hands on that tasty peace of land the nighbor owns or to finish that wonder in time.
If history tells us that's a much to brightly painted picture, than at least let there be a proper reward in doing so, even if you can choose to be a bastard also.
In any case make the peoples attitude more central to the game not only via occasional riots. 
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08-04-2004 00:40
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