I would think this should be a simple add, and would love it if someone could manage. I've mentioned it before, but will again. The game does not give negative effects for population in regards to happyness. Shrines, threaters, and arenas are useless, since all they do is make a content empire happy.

In DBDiffs, there are two variables (for each level), BIG_CITY_SCALE and BIG_CITY_OFFSET. OFFSET tells you when population unhappyness for going about a certain level kick in, and SCALE tells how much. So OFFSET=5 and SCALE=1.0 means you get an unhappy point for each pop over 5. You could set scale to 0.2 or something and lesson the effect.

Me, I think this would be a great thing. It would bring back some city management, and slow down some of the production and city growth.

Question, does the AI react in his production to discontent?

>Btw, I was fooling around yesterday, and experienced the same thing Harlan
>has mentioned with city happiness not being linked to city size. Maybe this
>has something to do with the cheat menu, like the way it turns pollution
>off?

Aha! Finally you believe me on this! So there are times you haven't experienced this, or is it something you've just noticed? Some comments I've seen (lots of people complaining about this) and some playtesting outside my scenario makes me think this is true all the time, not something that was turned off, but I could be wrong. If you have a full city in an ordinary game, there are many things that can make it appear the city is getting unhappier as it gets bigger, cos of units outside the city, distance from capital, production pollution and population pollution and so on. But I've tried this outside my scenario, starting a new game, and instantly cheat-raising the first city to size 60, and I see no extra unhappiness. I've never touched the text files that come with the game, so unless my copy of the game is corrupted, or it only happens with the cheat menu on, I think this is a gamewide problem. I also have failed to see overcrowding effects, but maybe I was looking in the wrong place (I'd expect it to show up in the status menu). Even if it does work, it doesn't seem like an easy thing to manipulate, unless we've missed something in the files.

Which is why I recommend you do what I've for my scenario: mess around with pollution to simulate unhappiness with larger cities. I completely turned off the dead tile thing and production pollution is nearly irrelevant, but you don't want to go that far for the standard game. But to greatly increase population pollution, while raising the bar for the creation of dead tiles, I think is good. Then some manipulation of the buildings would be good too, to have more emphasis on buildings that reduce the population pollution effect (there is a flag for just this, its first (and only?) used with Public Transportation). For instance, an Arena, rather than give general happiness relief, could just give population pollution relief in ancient times, while costing alot. Thus, such a thing could be very effective in a big city like ancient Rome where they need their "bread and circuses", but pretty much a waste on the small town. Since it costs alot, the player would have to be smart on which towns to build it in. I like this kind of thing, where the player has to think about the wisdom of building something or not, rather than just building the same thing in every city.

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Let me add to these comments. I'm pretty happy with how things are working regarding unhappiness in the Alexander scenario I'm currently improving. I'm getting a sense from playing a bit and comments from playtesters that unhappiness is challenging now, but not too hard. But one couldn't just take these exact numbers of the changes I did and use them for a regular game, cos they're done to fit the scenario's situation just so. The basic ideas I explained above is one solution that could be generalized, though.

I also disagree with your comments on crime. You're only getting a hit on crime if your cities are significantly unhappy. As wheathin points out, most of the time one's cities never even get close to riot levels, so crime caused by unhappiness is a moot point. Even if it wasn't, the way crime works is obscure to most people, and unless you're a statistical analyst, one isn't going to make a reduction a top priority. I think the way crime works needs to be tweaked to make this more urgent. Have a higher percent of crime happen, but less effect per percentage point. The end result is the same, but if people see a crime level of 30%, they're much more likely to do something about it than if they see a level of 15%, which doesn't sound too bad (even though in the long run it is).

We had a similar problem in CtP at first - regardless of whether you wanted gold or science, you always built markets/bazaars.