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The growth penalty is a flat percentage hit to your food surplus, which equates to the same percentage hit to your growth rate. It ends up feeling very intuitive. Therefore happiness by itself won't cause starvation, but it really hurts the growth rate of all of your cities. The first "unhappy" level is far more than a 20% hit. You really want to keep your citizens :)!

:cool: Somehow I knew it would be something like this. I feel like I'm starting to see the patterns and design ideology the game is using. I bet that starvation also doesn't ever occur somehow. Perhaps lack of food causes unhappiness or something, which slows the growth of other cities. (/wild speculation)

Heck, I'll even be so bold as to suggest that running out of money doesn't randomly destroy your buildings, but has some other obviously bad, but less frustratingly negative effect.
 
:cool: Somehow I knew it would be something like this. I feel like I'm starting to see the patterns and design ideology the game is using. I bet that starvation also doesn't ever occur somehow. Perhaps lack of food causes unhappiness or something, which slows the growth of other cities. (/wild speculation)

Heck, I'll even be so bold as to suggest that running out of money doesn't randomly destroy your buildings, but has some other obviously bad, but less frustratingly negative effect.

I was actually quite looking forward to besieging a city, parking my units on its food resources and starving its inherent hit points down to a level where my troops can take it. Although that would also work pretty well if starvation caused unhappiness instead.
 
Unhappiness not causing starvation doesn't mean there isn't starvation. They can't remove starvation, because if they did, you could build up a huge city and then switch every worker to production and ignore food altogether.

In the close E3 demo video, when the presenter is in the city screen and takes a citizen off working a tile to make him a specialist, the population growth indicator changes from yellow (and what looks like "STAGNATION") to red (and what looks like "STARVATION").
 
I bet that starvation also doesn't ever occur somehow. Perhaps lack of food causes unhappiness or something, which slows the growth of other cities. (/wild speculation)

Heck, I'll even be so bold as to suggest that running out of money doesn't randomly destroy your buildings, but has some other obviously bad, but less frustratingly negative effect.

Starvation does indeed still exist, but you are correct about running out of money having a different effect. When the gold article comes out on Monday it'll detail what that is ;)
 
Starvation does indeed still exist, but you are correct about running out of money having a different effect. When the gold article comes out on Monday it'll detail what that is ;)

Haha Greg I love how your such a tease with the info.
 
Building maintenance will lead to more micromanagement to handle an aspect with negative vibes. "Can I afford this building in the long run.... Let me get my City spreadshead to calculate...".
It makes the highly abstracted (and often unfathomable) Civ4 City maintenance cost more explicit, but I don't like it either.
 
Lack of maintenance costs for buildings in Civ IV led to just mindlessly producing every building that was available, whether your city needed it or not. Making it a choice is good gameplay, provided that a) you have the information at hand you need to make an informed choice (without having to consult a spreadsheet), and b) there is a useful alternative for a city to produce.

Given the increased importance of currency in Civ V, having a small city that doesn't need that Colosseum just yet produce Wealth instead may be a much more attractive option than it was in Civ IV.
 
Yea, I doubt you'll have a near-zero or negative gold income unless something is really wrong. It'll just make building placement have to be intelligent rather than the temptation of civ 4's 'build all buildings!' (which is suboptimal even there). It encourages specialization, and adds decisions to buildings that were otherwise no-brainers. Also, it helps discourage ICS when combined with happiness limits on cities, as you can't just spam cities and happiness buildings in them without a cost.
 
Starvation does indeed still exist, but you are correct about running out of money having a different effect. When the gold article comes out on Monday it'll detail what that is ;)

I am glad that we see you guys posting here :) I cant remember anyone doing that at civ4.
 
Building maintenance will lead to more micromanagement to handle an aspect with negative vibes. "Can I afford this building in the long run.... Let me get my City spreadshead to calculate...".
It makes the highly abstracted (and often unfathomable) Civ4 City maintenance cost more explicit, but I don't like it either.

I think it actually make it easier. Say I'm going to build this building that cost me a certain amount of gold per turn in exchange for some other benefit, say 2 gold per turn for 4 happiness. I can estimate if I think that is worth it. Or I could build a unit for defense. In Civ4 it was always tempting to build the building, as the building was free, but the unit cost maintenance.
 
Don't forget that in Civ 5 happines is global, so there still be the tempation of building the collosseum in that small city...
 
Don't forget that in Civ 5 happines is global, so there still be the tempation of building the collosseum in that small city...

Hmm, but thats about it. You would be unlikely to build a library in a small city with insufficient population to work as specialist...
 
Don't forget that in Civ 5 happines is global, so there still be the tempation of building the collosseum in that small city...
True, good point. But it's also yet another example of how making Happiness global breaks down in terms of intuitive expectations... now we're building a Colloseum in an empty city to increase happiness elsewhere in the empire.

Like so many other details of the global Happiness system, it's got a pretty high "WTF" factor.
 
True, good point. But it's also yet another example of how making Happiness global breaks down in terms of intuitive expectations... now we're building a Colloseum in an empty city to increase happiness elsewhere in the empire.

Like so many other details of the global Happiness system, it's got a pretty high "WTF" factor.

Not really. A.) The city itself causes unhappiness via... being a city, and it's population. But (B.) even in a situation where let's say a city of significantly small population has loads of +happy buildings and thus is a net happiness "producer" to maintain the glory of the empire...

Disneyland.

I'm pretty sure people in Boston, or New York, or Washington D.C. are affected by the +happiness bonus that Disneyland, constructed in Anaheim, grants.

On a smaller scale... Not every town has movie theaters; some people drive several town distances to get their happiness bonii from the movie-going experience.

All manners of scales and comparisons are debatable... but the point is; A collisseum in a town contributing to the net happiness makes sense when one accounts of one thing; Tourism and/or the general movement of the populace across and within the borders of any empire and nation.
 
This can be fixed by requiring minimum population to build certain buildings. I'd say small cities could build temples, but only large cities could build cathedrals. I'm not sure if this is actually in the game, but perhaps it could be modded in.
 
I'm pretty sure people in Boston, or New York, or Washington D.C. are affected by the +happiness bonus that Disneyland, constructed in Anaheim, grants.
A modern example like Disneyland doesn't work very well in ancient eras when communication and travel were virtually nonexistent. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, tourism did not exist; the vast majority of people lived and died within a few miles of where they were born. A collosseum in ancient times was a structure for local entertainment.
 
Interesting question - do all happiness buildings provide global bonus (i.e. +3 happiness), or some buildings provide local bonuses (i.e. 1/2 unhappiness from this city)?
 
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