vanatteveldt
Emperor
I am playing my first game as India (small, small continents, emperor) and am running into trouble in the late game because of the local happiness cap.
When I first looked at India, e.g. using the guide on the war academy, I naively thought that India had a "break even" happiness at city size 6, and got only better afterwards. This matched my early and mid game experiences, where I struggled initially to found 4 cities and keep them happy, but had all the happiness I needed mid game as the cities matured to size 20+ and luxuries from the other continents came into play.
What I never realized until I started searching specifically for it, is that India also has a lower local happiness cap than other civs. Since I think the information is quite scattered and maybe not widely known, here is what I found out:
This has important consequences for the late game. In my (admittedly limited) experience, early and mid game has mainly global happiness coming from difficulty baseline, natural wonders, and luxuries. This actually increases in the mid game as trade brings in more different luxury resources and possibly more mercantile allies. Wonders, religion and social policies give some global happiness but this is not that much, as most beliefs and tenets actually add local happiness to buildings such as gardens, temples, factories etc.
In the late game, you can experience a drop in global happiness as diplomatic problems can cause luxuries to become unavailable and you can get extra global unhappiness from public opinion. Thus, the global (un)happiness becomes very relevant. You have a relatively fixed pool of global happiness from luxuries, wonders, difficulty, etc, and each city can be improved to produce full local happiness using the tenet bonuses, contributing 3 (normal) or 1 - 5 (india) global unhappiness that has to be 'payed' from the fixed pool of global happy. Since all (?) the extra late game happiness is local happiness, this is a relatively fixed equation.
So why does India suck? If you can play a peaceful game, cruising to space, culture, or diplomatic victory with a "tall" empire, everything is fine as the big cities actually produce less global unhappy than for other civs. However, if you are forced (or choose) to acquire more cities, you often end up with a largish number of smaller cities, with can all easily contribute 4 or 5 to the global unhappiness, instead of the 3 for most civs. Especially puppet cities are bad, as they generally don't grow well because of the gold focus, and they might not build enough to maximize local happiness.
For me, this means that India is severely limited in late-game options. Of course, you can say that India is meant to be played peacefully, but no other civ has a UA that actually penalizes you the way India does, not only in the explicit extra per-city unhappiness, but also through the different local cap. This penalty means that a more aggressive late game is very difficult to sustain as India.
Suggested solution: India should have local happy cap of 3+N/2; in other words, the surplus unhappy of an Indian city should be 3 just like for any other civ.
When I first looked at India, e.g. using the guide on the war academy, I naively thought that India had a "break even" happiness at city size 6, and got only better afterwards. This matched my early and mid game experiences, where I struggled initially to found 4 cities and keep them happy, but had all the happiness I needed mid game as the cities matured to size 20+ and luxuries from the other continents came into play.
What I never realized until I started searching specifically for it, is that India also has a lower local happiness cap than other civs. Since I think the information is quite scattered and maybe not widely known, here is what I found out:
- All building-based happiness, including all the late-game happiness from tenets that give +1 happy per factory/seaport etc., is "local happiness"
- Local happiness is capped by city size. For most civs, this cap equals the number of citizens, so you can completely cancel out the #citizen based happiness, and every city 'contributes' 3 global unhappy to the empire.
- For India, local happy is capped at 2/3 the number of citizens (+.5 and rounded down). So, the contribution to global unhappiness with full local happiness is 6 - N/6 (since each citizen adds 1/2 unhappy but can support 2/3 local happy, 2/3-1/2=1/6)
- So, with full local happiness the break-even point is 18 population per city, where the city adds 6+9=15 unhappiness but can support 18*2/3=12 local happiness, for 3 surplus unhappiness. A city of size 30 with the full 20 local happiness only has 1 surplus unhappy (6+15 unhappy - 20 happy = 1), so 'exports' 2 hapiness above what a non-indian civ can do. However, a recently founded/captured city of size e.g. 6 has (6+3-4=)5 surplus unhappiness even with full local happiness.
This has important consequences for the late game. In my (admittedly limited) experience, early and mid game has mainly global happiness coming from difficulty baseline, natural wonders, and luxuries. This actually increases in the mid game as trade brings in more different luxury resources and possibly more mercantile allies. Wonders, religion and social policies give some global happiness but this is not that much, as most beliefs and tenets actually add local happiness to buildings such as gardens, temples, factories etc.
In the late game, you can experience a drop in global happiness as diplomatic problems can cause luxuries to become unavailable and you can get extra global unhappiness from public opinion. Thus, the global (un)happiness becomes very relevant. You have a relatively fixed pool of global happiness from luxuries, wonders, difficulty, etc, and each city can be improved to produce full local happiness using the tenet bonuses, contributing 3 (normal) or 1 - 5 (india) global unhappiness that has to be 'payed' from the fixed pool of global happy. Since all (?) the extra late game happiness is local happiness, this is a relatively fixed equation.
So why does India suck? If you can play a peaceful game, cruising to space, culture, or diplomatic victory with a "tall" empire, everything is fine as the big cities actually produce less global unhappy than for other civs. However, if you are forced (or choose) to acquire more cities, you often end up with a largish number of smaller cities, with can all easily contribute 4 or 5 to the global unhappiness, instead of the 3 for most civs. Especially puppet cities are bad, as they generally don't grow well because of the gold focus, and they might not build enough to maximize local happiness.
For me, this means that India is severely limited in late-game options. Of course, you can say that India is meant to be played peacefully, but no other civ has a UA that actually penalizes you the way India does, not only in the explicit extra per-city unhappiness, but also through the different local cap. This penalty means that a more aggressive late game is very difficult to sustain as India.
Suggested solution: India should have local happy cap of 3+N/2; in other words, the surplus unhappy of an Indian city should be 3 just like for any other civ.
