I think you may not realize that any local happiness generated in city beyond the amount of unhappiness generated by that same city, has no effect. That's why it's local.
Local Happiness and Unnecessary Complexity
- Thread starter myb7721
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I think you may not realize that any local happiness generated in city beyond the amount of unhappiness generated by that same city, has no effect. That's why it's local.
buchengshi
Warlord
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Are you sure about that? Has it been changed (again)? The last I knew, local happiness couldn't exceed the population of the city - not the amount of unhappiness being generated. So a pop 16 city could get up to 16 happniess from buildings/policies, even though the unhappiness could be much lower (6.2 by my math).
It's been a part of Civ V from day one so I'm not sure why you think its new. The only difference is now they are showing you explicitly what is Local Happiness and what is Global Happiness instead of labeling it all as "Happiness" and leaving it to you to figure it out.
Seriously. Colosseum and Chichen Itza for example have always provided only local happiness.
Big J Money
Emperor
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myb7721, at first I thought you had a fantastic idea (even though a lot of people are misunderstanding you) but I think there is one flaw.
Not all unhappiness is generated from local population. (ie not all unhappiness is 'local' unhappiness).
So saying that a building lowers unhappiness is just turning the problem around the opposite way, because you'd still have to specific that it only lowers 'local unhappiness'
They should have done what Civ4 did with gold and wealth -- have two separate icons each for local happiness/unhappiness and the global kind. And then show the TOTAL global that each city is contributing. In fact, this would make it super easy because you could glance at a city and you'd only see red or yellow and know immediately if it was a 'good' or 'bad' city.
This is somewhat reminiscent of Civ3, but far simpler.
Edit: Crap, can someone now please specify to me whether wonders provide local or global happiness?
Not all unhappiness is generated from local population. (ie not all unhappiness is 'local' unhappiness).
So saying that a building lowers unhappiness is just turning the problem around the opposite way, because you'd still have to specific that it only lowers 'local unhappiness'
They should have done what Civ4 did with gold and wealth -- have two separate icons each for local happiness/unhappiness and the global kind. And then show the TOTAL global that each city is contributing. In fact, this would make it super easy because you could glance at a city and you'd only see red or yellow and know immediately if it was a 'good' or 'bad' city.
This is somewhat reminiscent of Civ3, but far simpler.
Edit: Crap, can someone now please specify to me whether wonders provide local or global happiness?
Not to split hairs, but Colosseums and the like provided global happiness at launch. It was patched later such that the amount of happiness provided was limited by the cities populations (effectively making it local).
Only if you have reducers to the unhappiness per population (Gandhi/Forbidden Palace/SPs). Most happiness buildings pre-G&K were limited by the populaton of the city (Colloseum/Circus/Theatre/etc) meaning that unless you generated less than 1 unhappiness per population they didn't generate more happiness just neutralized the cities unhappiness.
All local happiness does in G&K is give a clearer outline of what policies/buildings/etc use that mechanic.
In vanilla CiV, I've actually controlled an entire continent on a huge map as Gandhi and had over 250 happiness despite the number of cities (30ish or more) I possessed because of that mechanic. Local happiness works the same way in G&K - in theory it's supposed to just neutralize a cities unhappiness but with unhappiness reducers and global happiness it's still possible to hit those peaks with any leader.
Edit: Crap, can someone now please specify to me whether wonders provide local or global happiness?
Wonders are global. Unless something specifies 'local' it is global.
Not all wonders are global. Taj Mahal in vanilla was local, I'm not sure about Gods and Kings.
The OP understands what 'local happiness' means, people keep explaining it. The issue is it adds complexity to an otherwise very simple system, and is the result of ICS strategies being objectively better in the early days of ciV.
In the very least, it could be made MUCH clearer what give local happiness, and how much each city is generating independent of global conditions.
The OP understands what 'local happiness' means, people keep explaining it. The issue is it adds complexity to an otherwise very simple system, and is the result of ICS strategies being objectively better in the early days of ciV.
In the very least, it could be made MUCH clearer what give local happiness, and how much each city is generating independent of global conditions.
MadDjinn
Deity
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erm.. that's not going to happen anymore though (randomly OT).
Ghandi is specifically nerfed to not be able to generate global happiness from local happiness (not sure how much, but it's not 1-1 anymore), and the courthouse bug got fixed, so +6 unhappy/city is back for him.
The reason it is explained as Local and Global is instead of removing unhappiness seems pretty obvious; it would needlessly nerf things that give a -X% to unhappiness. So to change that would require some pretty intensive change and description for Metirocacy (sp?) and Forbidden Palace.
In the city screen there is a happiness section I believe, mouse over it.
If for instance you have a size 2 city with a circus and then buy a colosseum it would add no happiness.
I've asked this twice already but didn't really get a clear answer.
There isn't a happiness section for each city as far as I can see. I can't find any mouseover tooltip or whatnot that tells me how much unhappiness the city is producing or how much is countered by local happiness. The only reference to local happiness I see is the tooltip for the buildings that provide it. It specifies that it can't provide more happiness than there is unhappiness in the city. But I can't really know what that is. Unless there's something completely obvious or simple I'm not seeing or understanding.
TakenItEasy
Chieftain
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I think people are taking this change a little too lightly. Note that the puppet city AI will continue producing worthless happiness buildings well past the population limit.
In my last game, I had 6 non-occ and 18 puppet cities and noticed that my happiness variance seemed too high with huge swings such as +45H to -5H in a short time. I could see puppet cities building happiness buildings to compensate, I tried creating more land units to garrison in cities, I put my workers to work at reducing food in puppet city tiles to slow growth, but my progress seemed stunted.
Then I noticed that garrisoned troops weren't adding +1H in some cities. After investigating I saw that I wasn't getting all the H I was producing and finally realized that local happiness was capped by population. I then realized that I was using ineffective or even counter productive strategies in many cases.
Examples: if a puppet was over the cap in LH, instead of slowing growth, I should have been using my workers to speed up growth in those PC's to raise the cap while slowing it down in others where population far exceeded LH to reduce the UH/H gap. I needed to be selective in cities to garrison troops, Some puppet cities that had stagnated with low populations were building useless theaters while granary's were still not built. I would have either razed or annexed those cities long ago.
Unfortunately, there was no easy way to know which cities were over the cap. I finally did a full inventory of all 24 cities for all sources of Happiness. Even then it wasn't clear since nothing identified which sources were global and which were local. I had to use the the Economics report that broke down happiness into something like 5 or 6 categories and basically had to puzzle fit sources into categories until the math added up. In some cases I had to load up old auto-saves to see before/after wonders or policies. In others I would do temp saves and sell buildings to see which numbers changed and by how much.
I saw that 10 of the 18 PC's were over the cap and still had H buildings in production! Close to 40H was being wasted!
As far as the Local/global catagories it was anything but simple with no apparant guidelines.
Notre Dames +10H was global but Chichenitza's +4H was local. Aristocracy policy was global while military caste policy was local. Even strager was Neuschwanstein Castle's +2H was local but the +1H/Castle it awarded was global. This caused an even more confusing effect that a castle in the city screen with mil.caste and Neusch. showed +2H but 1 was local and 1 was global.
I only play Immortal/Diety and simply ignoring these massive leaks is not acceptable yet trying to deal with them is without the data is a logistical nightmare for large empires even for someone as anal as myself.
And it's far worse than many may think. Recent changes in the AI since G&K cause the puppet city AI to still focus on gold but with a secondary emphasis on production over growth (it used to be the opposite). This keeps PC's populations small and the cap is easily surpassed.
Finally consider this. In a late stage large empire, if you want to build the Eiffal Tower or adopt the Humanism policy, do you know if the H awarded is local or global?
Even if you somehow knew it will be local, what percentage of your cities will be pushed over the cap as a result? Will you get all the full benefit? 80%? 20%?
How do you play the game without knowing the rules?
In my last game, I had 6 non-occ and 18 puppet cities and noticed that my happiness variance seemed too high with huge swings such as +45H to -5H in a short time. I could see puppet cities building happiness buildings to compensate, I tried creating more land units to garrison in cities, I put my workers to work at reducing food in puppet city tiles to slow growth, but my progress seemed stunted.
Then I noticed that garrisoned troops weren't adding +1H in some cities. After investigating I saw that I wasn't getting all the H I was producing and finally realized that local happiness was capped by population. I then realized that I was using ineffective or even counter productive strategies in many cases.
Examples: if a puppet was over the cap in LH, instead of slowing growth, I should have been using my workers to speed up growth in those PC's to raise the cap while slowing it down in others where population far exceeded LH to reduce the UH/H gap. I needed to be selective in cities to garrison troops, Some puppet cities that had stagnated with low populations were building useless theaters while granary's were still not built. I would have either razed or annexed those cities long ago.
Unfortunately, there was no easy way to know which cities were over the cap. I finally did a full inventory of all 24 cities for all sources of Happiness. Even then it wasn't clear since nothing identified which sources were global and which were local. I had to use the the Economics report that broke down happiness into something like 5 or 6 categories and basically had to puzzle fit sources into categories until the math added up. In some cases I had to load up old auto-saves to see before/after wonders or policies. In others I would do temp saves and sell buildings to see which numbers changed and by how much.
I saw that 10 of the 18 PC's were over the cap and still had H buildings in production! Close to 40H was being wasted!
As far as the Local/global catagories it was anything but simple with no apparant guidelines.
Notre Dames +10H was global but Chichenitza's +4H was local. Aristocracy policy was global while military caste policy was local. Even strager was Neuschwanstein Castle's +2H was local but the +1H/Castle it awarded was global. This caused an even more confusing effect that a castle in the city screen with mil.caste and Neusch. showed +2H but 1 was local and 1 was global.
I only play Immortal/Diety and simply ignoring these massive leaks is not acceptable yet trying to deal with them is without the data is a logistical nightmare for large empires even for someone as anal as myself.
And it's far worse than many may think. Recent changes in the AI since G&K cause the puppet city AI to still focus on gold but with a secondary emphasis on production over growth (it used to be the opposite). This keeps PC's populations small and the cap is easily surpassed.
Finally consider this. In a late stage large empire, if you want to build the Eiffal Tower or adopt the Humanism policy, do you know if the H awarded is local or global?
Even if you somehow knew it will be local, what percentage of your cities will be pushed over the cap as a result? Will you get all the full benefit? 80%? 20%?
How do you play the game without knowing the rules?
TakenItEasy
Chieftain
- Joined
- Sep 13, 2012
- Messages
- 17
AFAIK, until someone creates a mod to display city LH output in the city screen there is no good way to handle it.
For now the best way is to go to the economic overview window/Resource & Happiness tab, then expand the Local City Building list to display each cities LH production then compare to city pop.
I am still sorting out what sources are what but so far:
All standard H buildings are Local including stone works.
NW:
Local: Circus Max.
WW:
Local: Chichen Itza, Tah. Mah, Neusch. Castle +2H in city
Global: Eiffel Tower both +5H and 1H/2Pol, Neusch. Castle +1H/Castle (all cities)
Forb. Palace effects Unhappiness so doesn't apply.
Policies:
Global: Aristocracy (Doesn't count for occupied cities including puppets)
Local: Military Caste, Prof. Army, Humanism
Monarchy effects Unhappiness so doesn't apply.
Local Luxury Res, Traded Lux Res, City State, Natural Wonders:
All Global
Religion:
I recall that the next patch will define Founder beliefs as global and Follower beliefs as local. I can't recall what they said about Pantheon but I'm guessing global.
Unfortunately this implies it's changing from something else currently. I do know that the religious buildings I've checked so far are local and assume it's consistent.
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- Sep 21, 2012
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I haven't noticed any happiness indicator on a city screen.
I guess local happiness really means potential happiness. If a city is generating 4 happiness from buildings but has a 2 population, only 2 happiness will be added to global happiness.
So guess what? You're actually wasting maintenance money without the game just telling you straightforwardly. So I guess either sell those buildings or increase food...
It's a confusing way of doing it. It should simply be "+1 happiness for every X-number of citizens in a city" instead.
I guess local happiness really means potential happiness. If a city is generating 4 happiness from buildings but has a 2 population, only 2 happiness will be added to global happiness.
So guess what? You're actually wasting maintenance money without the game just telling you straightforwardly. So I guess either sell those buildings or increase food...
It's a confusing way of doing it. It should simply be "+1 happiness for every X-number of citizens in a city" instead.
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