[PvK]

It's only easy to counter if you lower it moderately, and I this mod only returns a fair number of points if you reduce it a lot, at which point it does become a disadvantage. As I write in the readme & web page:

PvK wrote:

Threshold lowered to one in order to reduce reward for lowering happiness
a small amount, since in the unmodded game a little unhappiness is easy
to counter with troops. A lot of unhappiness can be a problem however, so
the Negative Threshold cost was increased. Positive Threshold can be low,
because for the most part, a high value gives diminishing benefits which
can be accomplished by others using troops. Minimum setting of -50 gives
750 points (and would be hard to survive long enough to develop troops
before riots took over).

So I don't think you can abuse it as you can in the unmodded game. I'd say it's worth 750 points to have to endure the effects of -50 Happiness.

One can counter the effects of unhappiness when one has the technology and resources available, mainly using troops, but this requires the player to focus on this immediately, and throughout the game. The effect is worse for a typical low-tech single-planet start, than for high-tech start where you can deploy troops on turn one, but it will still waste your time and resources and lower your research and intel by at least a bit throughout the game. I'd say this is probably well worth 750 points for -50, even if you become expert at dealing with it. It might be a somewhat over-valued, or not - I'd be interested to hear more discussion.

At -50 happiness, for example:

* By turn 2, the homeworld happiness will drop from Happy to Indifferent (loss of 10% production bonus, or 20% compared to someone else's Jubilant planet).
* Usually, two turns after a planet is colonized, it drops from Happy to Indifferent.
* An average-research low-tech empire suffering from -50 happiness will take about 10 turns to get to Construction 1, and another 10-15 to get to Troops 1, even if those are the first techs they go for, which in itself is a disadvantage, since they will probably want to delay useful early-game research to do that first. If they get attacked while they don't have anything useful researched, it could be game over. If they do research other things, they're going to suffer a lot of unhappiness effects.
* Alternatively, a player can build some cheap ships and leave them in orbit to keep happiness up, but that too is a waste of time and resources.
* Even in a high-tech game or late-game, the need to worry about happiness on every new planet is a distraction and an expense.
* During major wars with large empires, a major setback (large fleet and/or planet loss) can cause many planets throughout a large empire to riot. The rate at which they recover gets multiplied by the number of planets they have, as does the cost of building even more troops for all of them.

(Note too that if you read this thread's history, we discussed this and most of the other values, and pretty much everyone agreed [or some slightly thought something should be higher, where others slightly thought it should be lower] on most of this. There may still be some things that can be abused here or there though, so do let me know if you have any other ideas.)

PvK