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[vanilla] Complete Guide to Happiness (vanilla)

WeaselSlapper

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Complete Guide to Happiness - Complete Guide to Happiness

Complete Guide to Happiness
All Happiness and Unhappiness Explained

Introduction

The status bar with happiness indicator (smiley 4) and golden age bucket (124/1210)
with its hover breakdown of happiness and unhappiness sources
Happiness...

Read more about this resource...
 
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Well done,
It's missing a couple of things:

Courthouses : The court house eliminates the city portion of unhappiness in the city; making the city even better than one your built even without Police State

Democracy: A lot more complex than that. These are actually calculated on a per city basis with rounding before combining back together.
What it really means is:
A. The first specialist in every city improves happiness.
B. The second specialist in a given city will have no affect whatsoever.
C. The 3rd specialist in a given city will generally improve happiness. (Exception if you have Monarchy and are in the capital, in which case due to interactions with the Monarchy policy, it won't and you'll need a few more specialists.)

Also, I think an unemployed citizen counts as a specialist for Democracy.
 
I have a question about happiness:
On high difficulties, how much extra happiness does the AI have?

Is it just the default of Chieftain, or is it more? How much?
 
handicaps are deserving of their own article,
AIs have the chieftain happiness difficulty bonuses of 60% of normal, +3 starting, and +1 per luxury,
in addition at the levels above prince they have 90%, 85%, 75%, and 60% of base that gets multiplied: at deity they run at 36% of normal unhappiness.
 
"The 50% happiness gets rounded down on a per city basis, so an odd number of specialists will maximize happiness gained: 1-2 specialists add +1 happiness, 3-4 add +2, etc."

It gets rounded up.
 
:confused:I am sure I have read some contradictory advice somewhere on this site and am hoping - as an expert on happiness you can help. Is it useful to build happiness buildings (non multiplier effect ones) in more than one city? I read somewhere, and now I can't find it, that there is no point building more than one theatre, circus etc as the +2 (or whatever) adds to the total happiness of your empire and is not cumulative from haveing multiple circuses/theatres etc. please help.
 
No, they provide happiness for each building. So building a circus in one city will give you +2 :c5happiness:, and building one in another city will give you an additional +2 :c5happiness:. Likewise, the population of each city contributes to unhappiness.
 
It's possible somebody got confused, because as noted in the main article there are cases where building a circus, theatre, etc. will have no effect on happiness - that is when the city is smaller than the total "local" happiness buildings present. They may have watched their happiness number not change when a circus was completed and not realized the real mechanic.
 
Courthouse: removes occupied status from an annexed city reducing per population happiness and occupied city penalty - there is a longstanding bug which additionally makes courthouses permanently remove the standard per city penalty.

The bold part is wrong. Annexing the city is what removes the per city unhappiness penalty from that city. I just tested this. Prior to annexing I had 45 unhappiness from number of cities. After annexing I only had 42 unhappiness from number of cities. Then I bought a courthouse and still had 42 unhappiness from number of cities. The courthouse itself worked exactly as it was supposed.
 
no.
refer to the first screenshot, you will notice under unhappiness "5 from number of :c5occupied: occupied cities"
this is what happens with one annexed city as it should.
when the annexed city gains a courthouse, the occupied city penalty is removed and the normal per city penalty is not regained.

this is easy to view - upon annexing a puppet, happiness drops by 2 + floor(population / 3), eg a two pop city drops happiness by two, as the per city penalty goes from normal 3 to occupied 5 and the per population goes from 2 to 2.666 which gets floored back to 2.

upon gaining a courthouse, happiness increases by 5 + floor(population/3), eg a two pop annexed city gaining a courthouse increases happiness by 5. the per occupied city penalty is correctly removed but not transferred back to the normal city penalty side.
 
if courthouses remove the city unhappiness,and it is difficult to manage puppet growth,is there really ever a point to puppeting cities?
 
if courthouses remove the city unhappiness,and it is difficult to manage puppet growth,is there really ever a point to puppeting cities?

yup.

They're great for TP spam >> Gold production.

plus extra science and culture. They're really bad at producing happiness buildings, unless you're unhappy.

Plus, they let you keep land+culture borders as is, thereby keeping everything without the problems of actually working them.

annexing/courthouse gives you control, but also has a 5 gpt expense while also raising culture costs and Golden Age happiness targets. On top of that, you have a higher cost for national wonders (plus needing to have this city build the specific building).
 
if courthouses remove the city unhappiness,and it is difficult to manage puppet growth,is there really ever a point to puppeting cities?

There are other strategic concerns as well.

As MadDjinn pointed out, puppetted cities still count towards your territory. If you happen to gain control of your opponent's city that supplies any important strategic resource, that resource transfers over to you. Puppetting the right city can immediately deny Uranium to an opponent, and as long as the city remains standing and in your control that doesn't change.

Going for a domination victory adds another aspect. Air units fighting on large landmasses require a base city and on larger maps may need to "city-hop" without taking the time or resources to fully annex or 'raze-and-replace' cities in newly conquered territory.
 
Military Caste gets mentioned but Oligarchy doesn't get mentioned. The two synergize really well because it means +1:), +2:culture:, and a unit you don't have to pay upkeep for. I know this article is about happiness, not gold, but putting a unit in every city to gain the +1:) +2:culture: from Military Caste can possibly be economically unfeasible, especially if you want to use military caste in the classical era while capturing lots of cities. If it's economically unfeasible, you can't implement the policy in the first place. Basically a waste of a policy.

Furthermore, If you compare a garrisoned city in a civilization with Military Caste to a coliseum, the coliseum provides twice the amount of happiness for the same upkeep in the classical era. As upkeep per unit gets more and more expensive as the eras go by, it becomes more and more inefficient to place units in cities strictly for happiness (with a +2:culture: kicker). Oligarchy, on the other hand, removes the largest negative of applying Military Caste. As a bonus, city attacks are stronger due to Oligarchy. Normally this is negligible unless you get ambushed, but having a large army and many enemies due to the army's size + diplomatic penalties from declaring war on other civ's friends makes the chances of ambush higher than having moderate army size and a less aggressive foreign policy.

Also, even if an economy is healthy, Oligarchy can make Military Caste even more attractive and the gold saved can buy courthouses/happiness buildings or even more units.

Lastly, there's a diplomatic boost/penalty to using Military Caste. If you're putting units in all your cities, this can seriously deter other civs into declaring war on you due to a large army. Sometimes it will even make some civilizations fear you. On the flip side, it can cause an arms-race as other civs try to keep up (which can be a good thing -- it means they're not improving their cities). Also, some civs won't like you for having such a large army -- Mongolia is a shining example -- and you'll get denounced.
 
Fair points about Oligarchy, but I really don't think that buffing Military Caste is worth the social policy pick. The extra gold saved won't compare to the extra happiness from something like Organized Religion. Given that it's comparatively easier to come by gold that it is to come by happiness prioritizing gold doesn't make much sense. You also have to bear in mind that unless you can provide for the unit upkeep anyway that unit is going to be stuck inside that city (or only allowed out so long as the treasury can maintain the deficit).

It's also a little unfair to compare Military Caste (a social policy) to a colosseum (a building). The two aren't really comparable in the sense that they're not competing with each other. It isn't a case of Military Caste or Colosseums, it's a case of Military Caste or a different social policy and Colosseums or a different building.

The question is whether or not buffing Military Caste is better than Military Caste with an independent social policy. However, if you're going for the Tradition finisher with Military Caste then yes, you do have a point. There's a nice synergy there that will save you a bit of gold.
 
I am confused about the whole local happiness from buildings thing. I know that the happiness generated from certain buildings, specifically the Colosseum line, can't exceed the total population. But does this include walls, castles, etc from professional army or universities, observatories, etc from humanism? For example would a city with a population of 4 and the obvious SPs "produce" more than 4 happiness from buildings if it had the entire colosseum line and all the defensive buildings and humanist buildings?

There would of course be no benefit from the Stadium but wouldn't everything else add to the empire's total happiness?
 
There would of course be no benefit from the Stadium but wouldn't everything else add to the empire's total happiness?

This is also a burning question for me (though obviously not quite burning enough to stop conquering the world/travelling to AC/awing the world/paying off the world long enough to do the experiment). Stating it more simply, for buildings that give happiness because of a social policy is the happiness "local" or "global"?
 
Stating it more simply, for buildings that give happiness because of a social policy is the happiness "local" or "global"?

I did some quick tests and I've found them to be global. At least in the case for the buildings I tested (walls, castle), so I'm going to assume other buildings like this are global as well. In short my city of 4 population was producing 7 happiness from buildings.
 
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