Empire Size and Happiness

[MikeDuk]

Something about Empire Size and Happiness doesn't make a lot of sense for me.

I am playing at Freecivweb.org, with a huge map (size = 38) and 63 AIs, and they spread like the plague and build many cities. My goal is to win the game through military conquest, not the space race.

My government is a democracy, where in the classic ruleset:

• "Empire size at which only three workers per city are content" = 14
  "How many more cities make an additional worker unhappy in each city" = 16

Theoretically, a big democratic empire should be hard pressed to manage unhappiness, because of that size. I have played games where I had 220 cities and I had to check tax rates constantly every time I added 16 new cities to my empire.

My empire right now consists of 650 cities (total craziness, yeah, and there many cities to be conquered yet). Every turn takes a lot of time but I am enjoying it.

I have built all the wonders that affect happiness (Cure For Cancer, Michelangelo's Chapel, J.S. Bach's Cathedral, Women's Suffrage, Shakespeare's Theatre). I am building temples and colisseums in every city above size 3, and markets (even banks) where there is enough trade. In a few cases, cathedrals.

BUT!

My tax rates are 30% luxury and 70% gold. Isn't that weird?

650 cities and "16 more cities make an additional worker unhappy" mean 39 additional unhappy workers.

[cazfi]

Happiness is clipped at every happiness processing step (I don't remember if freeciv-web client shows them like native one does), i.e., no more than 100% of the people can be unhappy after applying empire size factors. Following steps need to improve happiness from that situation only, not from "of my 10 citizens, 40 are unhappy".

[MikeDuk]

Thanks, cazfi.

So that means that, after a Democracy has reached a certain size (number of cities) where 100% of citizens would be unhappy (before applying luxury tax, wonders, etc.), increasing the empire size is not going to contribute more towards widespread unhappiness. That is, I don't have to worry more with 1200 cities than with 620, happiness-wise.

[cazfi]

Yes.

Those rules should be unhardcoded to make it at least possible for rulesets to adjust the behavior.