Culture and Happiness building names

The names of culture and happiness buildings are very strange. Colosseums are amphitheaters, and colosseums lead to theaters, instead of amphitheaters leading to theaters.

I recognize they're trying to represent the difference between sports (colosseum, stadium) vs cultural productions (amphitheater, opera, museum). The theater seems most out of place in this pattern. What's a possible representation of competitive entertainment in the medieval-renaissance period? Tournaments?

Maybe some kind of representation of the archetypical medieval town fair / festive holiday? I really don't know what to call it though.

The Amphitheater-Theater thing is the most jarring imho. The Colosseum-Theater-Stadium line is okay, but what's the difference between the Amphitheater, Colosseum and a circus? (i like that smilie)

for culture I would thus shift away from public venues and make them more in line with the Monument, Museum and Broadcast Tower.

Mausoleum? Nekropolis/Graveyard?
Victory Column? Inscription?

Or go with Town Fair as albie_123 suggested.

But even then, the distinction between culture and happiness seems fluid...

albie_123 said:

Maybe some kind of representation of the archetypical medieval town fair / festive holiday? I really don't know what to call it though.

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Festival Grounds?

A theatre in the modern context is apt to be more of the movie theater than the amphitheatre thinking.


I haven't had that much trouble distinguishing. All they basically did was take one concept (entertainment via plays and music) and spread its effects over two buildings and techs with two effects. A stadium isn't really any different from a colosseum anyway, it is just modernised. If they have two buildings for "sporting events" then a couple for plays with distinct effects is fine. I suspect the happiness portion is intended to reflect democratic access to speech and venue, and performance (made possible by the printing press) while the earlier building represents the art of performance theater and musical rendition. It isn't that hard to justify via abstraction.

City Hall for Happiness, Theatre for Culture? No Amphitheatre?

mitsho said:

City Hall for Happiness, Theatre for Culture? No Amphitheatre?

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This sounds great imo.

City hall never makes me very happy

I am not sure how that would tie in with printing press era technology, but I could see that the imposition of law and order via a more responsive local government office and less arbitrary bureaucracy has positive benefits on social welfare.

mystikx21 said:

City hall never makes me very happy

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For me happiness is really a combination of citizen happiness and country stability. That is why you gain unhappiness from new cities. Its not that the new citizens are just monstrously unhappy, its the additional strain on your country's government to handle the new cities.

In my opinion, happiness is about stability and the ability of the government to suppress unrest.
So it could include militia, town watch, police stations, as well as bread-and-circus type things like stadiums.

Culture is about political institution building. It's weird that opera houses contribute to Democracy or Naval Tradition, but it's fine.

But I really don't have a huge problem with the buildings as they stand.

Sport? medieval-renaissance?

How about Jousting Grounds?

I'm thinking of renaming...

Theater -> Fair
Amphitheater -> Theater

What about a more radical shift: Theaters -> Newspapers?

They do come about at printing press, and newspapers did a lot more than theaters at that time.

Good idea! Going for something that sounds like the name of a structure, how about News Press?

Sounds good! I actually can't think of any other appropriate word, perhaps Publisher, but that implies less of a building.

(I hope this is going on the Printing Press tech as well. )

But for a simple renaming they sound anachronistic, not? Printing PRess is late for a tier two culture building... I'd support the idea in general though.

What about news bureau (or news agency as the national equivalent?).

mitsho said:

City Hall for Happiness, Theatre for Culture? No Amphitheatre?

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This sounds best so far IMO.

Ahriman said:

In my opinion, happiness is about stability and the ability of the government to suppress unrest.
So it could include militia, town watch, police stations, as well as bread-and-circus type things like stadiums.

Culture is about political institution building. It's weird that opera houses contribute to Democracy or Naval Tradition, but it's fine.

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And I totaly agree with this argumentation for it.

News press sounds good if we can come up with a better name for it. News bureau is a decent one. What's the NW? The times?

Publishing House? It represents all print entertainment with one building.

Stadiums and colosseums are basically the same thing. I'd like to rename Colosseums to Arenas. The dominant form of modern entertainment is movies, which focus on pure entertainment value, so they make sense as the modern happiness building.

I also want the game to represent the most important advances in health, some of which were sanitation systems, vaccines, and antibiotics. These aren't represented well in the game right now. Sanitation is a universal concept, while aqueducts are more associated with the Romans. I'd like to rename the Aqueduct to Sanitation System.

The more I learn about things like smallpox, the more I realize how monumental it was for our species to exterminate these diseases. It's something we never learned much about in school. We should have something directly represent the massive global vaccination programs against diseases like smallpox and polio. The Medical Lab represents developing new medicine from the 1950s onwards, but the smallpox vaccine was discovered two centuries earlier in the 1700s. I'd like to rename the Medical Lab to symbolize the cost and effort of the modern global vaccination program itself.

The building lines could be:

Meh, Movie Studios are quite connected/similar to Broadcast Towers (which I'd guess go from Radio to Television). What about Hotel Complex? Casino? Or why not Amusement Park? (You know, everything from Disneyland to Sea World to public swimming pools).

Zoo's would also fit in that area and were a distinct construction of the 19th century, if you'd want a Industrial Age Happiness Building.

Radio has lots of popular talk show programs discussing social topics and news, while movies focus more directly on entertainment. I think there's a pretty clear distinction. There's some crossover like film documentaries or music radio, but these don't make nearly as much money as their other counterparts.