A Reluctant Warmonger could use a hand

Hello all,

I'm looking for some guidance about wrapping up a Domination Victory (Arabia, Emperor, Pangea, slightly smaller than standard - random size). Particularly on how to control happiness.


I don't normally play for Domination victories, but after doing a standard tradition start found myself hemmed in and with two militaristic city state allies... So I expanded via conquest, and decided to go for a Domination Victory.

I annexed two capitals fairly early, so have four cities under direct control. I also have a further seven cities Puppeted. I have not razed any cities so far.

I have two capitals remaining to take. The Maya were the strongest militarily, but will loose their capital very soon. (Their army is destroyed and I have four bombers and three rocket artillery around their city - but then the guests arrived...) After that there is one more capital to take, but the Ottomans are less advanced in tech and their capital is very close to the Mayans. That should be a short fight.

The difficulty is that my happiness is bobbing around between -5 and -10. The puppeted cities could build Zoos or Stadiums but choose not to....

Should I have been razing more cities? I have taken to gifting peripheral cities to the weakest civs so I can use the cities to leapfrog my bombers then clear them out once they have served their purpose.

Edit: Second question: Is it possible to raze a city by choice at a time other than after capture?

Thanks

Yes you should have been razing cities that don't have extra happiness (extra luxury and colloseum/circus). You can sell them too if you want.

And no you can't raze a city once it's no longer in "angry" state (forgot the name).

Cheers - I should probably have razed a couple more than I did.

I also realised I underestimated the importance of religion here... I have a production focused religion that I didn't bother to spread terribly aggressively to the puppets... If that was happiness focused I would be in a better place.

But the major city I took which pushed me right down is still "in resistance" - so I might be able to raze that eh? May well give that a go. It's a massive city, so I will probably have the Capital taken before its out of resistance.

Yes if you go warmongering happiness religion is the better choice. And yes Im fairly sure that you can chose to annex and raze cities in resistance.

If you are still below 10 unhappiness and have superior military I think you can pull it off. Just try to grab some happiness from your next ideology tenet or make friends with the right city states to keep it down. But it sounds you don't have that many turns left to victory, so I would just take the last cities and ignore the unhappiness.

Raze cities that are useless and/or cost too much happiness.

You could also employ the "blood mill", allowing the enemy to re-conquer a city to reduce its size. This will most likely destroy more buildings, but also get its size to one quarter.
In the later game a size 20+ city is very difficult to absorb happiness-wise, getting it down to 5 makes it a lot more manageable (while also cutting the resistance time).
This is especially useful for capitals (who tend to be big) as you cannot raze them.

Razing can be stopped, so you can also raze cities (for some turns) that you intend to keep, but be aware that this counts as annex and incurs a higher happiness penalty than puppeting.

Once I start closing in on negative happiness (dropping below +10 happiness usually) from a warmongering spree, I start annexing puppeted cities.

A puppeted city produces less unhappiness than an annexed city without a courthouse, but in general, more than a city WITH a courthouse - and you can construct or buy happiness buildings in an annexed city to further reduce your negatives.

When I know I'm going full scale domination, I also generally go for Autocracy as it has the highest potential local happiness boost (+3 from courthouses, +1 for each defensive building aside from walls, +2 for all barracks style improvements, total of +12 local happiness - though admittedly, from buildings you wouldn't generally build everywhere, but late game you're rolling in gold, so I just buy them as needed) as well as some nice boosts to combat.

Thanks for the advice all - I won the game last night.

Next ideology tenet I took was +1 happiness for each advanced tech building (school, research lab and one other I think). That got me a little bit better positioned. I should have taken that one earlier. I had taken the +1 happiness per world wonder instead, which was better at the time, but didn't grow as quickly.

Ridiculously, taking the Mayan capital noticeably increased my happiness. They had something like 8 world wonders there, including the Taj Mahal, so I got +12 happiness from the wonders as well as a luxury, colosseum and circus.

Between the new tenet and the bonus happiness from conquering the wonders I ended up with about 20 happiness about three turns after I had -5 happiness.

The Ottomans succumbed quickly...

RatesAnalyst said:

Thanks for the advice all - I won the game last night.

Next ideology tenet I took was +1 happiness for each advanced tech building (school, research lab and one other I think). That got me a little bit better positioned. I should have taken that one earlier. I had taken the +1 happiness per world wonder instead, which was better at the time, but didn't grow as quickly.

Ridiculously, taking the Mayan capital noticeably increased my happiness. They had something like 8 world wonders there, including the Taj Mahal, so I got +12 happiness from the wonders as well as a luxury, colosseum and circus.

Between the new tenet and the bonus happiness from conquering the wonders I ended up with about 20 happiness about three turns after I had -5 happiness.

The Ottomans succumbed quickly...

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Yeah, the National Wonder happiness boost (common among all ideologies) actually is pretty terrible for conquerors. There just aren't that many national wonders - most of the time, I'll probably build only 3 or 4 of them in a given game.

Every other happiness boost from ideologies is significantly better for conquerors, since they all rely on buildings that you can build in every city, so they scale to the size of your empire.

I'd built 5 or 6 wonders directly by that point, and as I had already overrun the French I did have a number of World Wonders courtesy of them, too. But I should have realised I had far more scope to build more public schools than I did to build more wonders. Live and learn.

Though the puppeted cities disinclination to build happiness buildings is annoying.

I am terribly confused. How can someone be reluctant to be a warmonger? Terrible.

Seriously though my last game I had taken two caps early on and got 2 cities in a trade deal. Instead of razing them I kept them and tried for more happiness. I got to a point where it was impossible to create any more happiness in my empire (hadn't visited all ai at that point) so I sold the two cities for a pathetic amount of GPT and some horses. The trading partner just razed them for me.

RatesAnalyst said:

I'd built 5 or 6 wonders directly by that point, and as I had already overrun the French I did have a number of World Wonders courtesy of them, too. But I should have realised I had far more scope to build more public schools than I did to build more wonders. Live and learn.

Though the puppeted cities disinclination to build happiness buildings is annoying.

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The happiness boost from that policy only is for NATIONAL wonders. Regular world wonders don't count for it. If it counted world wonders, it'd actually be a pretty good policy to pick, since it'd make the happiness hit from conquering a big wonder spammer's capitol easier to deal with. I still wind up getting it on my massive domination games, simply because in those games, any happiness is good to have, and it's an easy policy to grab since it has no prerequisites.

Since it only counts national wonders, it has a maximum of +13 happiness, if you build every single national wonder (and there are several that I don't build on domination games simply because by the time they're available, I may have 15+ cities to build the prereqs in, like the national intelligence agency or the national visitor center, which require expensive buildings that I otherwise have no use for in most cities).

My current game I'm going for an overwhelming score (mostly by capturing everything early but the weakest AI's capitol, then building pop until every bit of happiness I can generate is gone), therefore I'm going for every single happiness policy I can get my hands on, and I did pick this one up. Might regret it though, if I wind up one policy short of getting Commerce's final policy (that generates an extra +2 happiness per luxury, which is pretty big).

MrDumpstertrash said:

I am terribly confused. How can someone be reluctant to be a warmonger? Terrible.
.

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I'm starting to like it.... It can be very effective.

Though I also get the feeling Liberty is somewhat designed for war mongering. One happiness per connected city? Useful since if you overrun an empire...

SDEngineer said:

The happiness boost from that policy only is for NATIONAL wonders.

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Hmm - wonder what caused it then? I definitely took a 19 pop city (down from 38) and ended up with more happiness than when I started! Must have been some of the other wonders, I think. I did notice one that had -10% unhappiness from non-occupied cities (Forbidden Palace?), but it was the occupied ones that were the problem..

Notre Dame is a straight 10 happiness wonder.

I also need some help with warmongering. I've won many games on Deity but only once with Domination, and that was around something ridiculous like turn 360. I like starting fights with either Artillery or Bombers, but when I get Artillery AI usually has GW Bombers in like 15-20 turns and then I have to pull back and bring AA guns (and research that) so I've never gottten to a point where I can successfully win a Domination VC on Deity without a problem. Most games I've tried to bomber rush I switched to Science and won that.

RatesAnalyst said:

Hmm - wonder what caused it then? I definitely took a 19 pop city (down from 38) and ended up with more happiness than when I started! Must have been some of the other wonders, I think. I did notice one that had -10% unhappiness from non-occupied cities (Forbidden Palace?), but it was the occupied ones that were the problem..

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Notre Dame is huge, as another noted (+10 global happiness), but the Forbidden Palace can be pretty big too, and even if it doesn't help your occupied cities, it reduces the unhappiness in all your non-occupied cities - and considering those are likely to be much larger than your occupied ones, that can be quite a big boost.

One thing you need to understand about building happiness is that it is mostly local. Each city's buildings can only fix it's own local unhappiness - they don't add to a "global pool" - if you have a size 7 city, and you build a total of +9 happiness buildings, the city's population doesn't count as having +2 happiness, it counts as having +0 UNhappiness. The global happiness then comes from adding up all the cities local unhappiness to get a total, and then adding the sources of global happiness (wonders that add happiness directly, luxuries, and mercantile city state gifts, and the base global happiness for the difficulty level you are playing at).

So if you have 3 size 25 cities each with +10 in happiness buildings, even though a LOT of your unhappiness is coming from your occupied buildings generating -10 happiness each (for example), something like the Forbidden Palace will still do a LOT to help out, since those size 25 cities are still each producing substantial unhappiness (just masked by all your luxuries) - in the case above, it should reduce your unhappiness by 7.5 or thereabouts, nearly as much as the Notre Dame wonder.

Figure I'd go into puppet/annexed/annexed with courthouse happiness a bit more, since it's vital to understand how this works if you want to be a good warmonger

One thing that is very important is that a puppet city produce a LOT more unhappiness than an annexed city with a courthouse (which the game treats as a city you settled for happiness purposes). On average, a puppet produce about double the unhappiness per population. An annexed city without a courthouse produces about TRIPLE the unhappiness.

So that size 38 city that you took (and turned into a size 19 city), even as a puppet, still produces about 38 unhappiness from population (2 per population, up from 1 per population for a "normal" city). Once you annex it, it would produce roughly 57 unhappiness (~3 per pop, ouch). However, if you then build a courthouse, it only produces 19 base unhappiness. So if you had -10 unhappiness with that city puppeted, you should immediately be able to go into positive happiness simply by annexing the city and rush-buying a Courthouse in it (which should take you to about +9 happiness).

Numbers are approximate (it's not EXACTLY double and triple the unhappiness, but pretty close to), but as a warmonger, it's really good to know the above. You may not want to annex/courthouse every city (to keep science/social policy costs reasonable), but you very definitely want to annex/courthouse the bigger cities to keep yourself out of the happiness hole that those cities will put you in.

InDubioProReo said:

I also need some help with warmongering. I've won many games on Deity but only once with Domination, and that was around something ridiculous like turn 360. I like starting fights with either Artillery or Bombers, but when I get Artillery AI usually has GW Bombers in like 15-20 turns and then I have to pull back and bring AA guns (and research that) so I've never gottten to a point where I can successfully win a Domination VC on Deity without a problem. Most games I've tried to bomber rush I switched to Science and won that.

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Not sure what I can say besides that you should simply tech faster. Just play like a regular science game up to Dynamite and if you get them between T150-170 you're fine for a couple conquest, then add bombers.

InDubioProReo said:

I also need some help with warmongering. I've won many games on Deity but only once with Domination, and that was around something ridiculous like turn 360. I like starting fights with either Artillery or Bombers, but when I get Artillery AI usually has GW Bombers in like 15-20 turns and then I have to pull back and bring AA guns (and research that) so I've never gottten to a point where I can successfully win a Domination VC on Deity without a problem. Most games I've tried to bomber rush I switched to Science and won that.

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Start fights earlier? Is it too obvious?