New Features @ Civ V homepage

ns of past games in the Civilization series will notice that happiness has received a bit of an overhaul in Civilization V. Most notably, happiness is now an empire-wide value, rather than specific to each city. In today’s community feature, I detail how happiness works.

Overview

Happiness is a measure of your citizens’ contentment. As a rule, the larger your total population, the unhappier everybody gets. An unhappy population doesn’t grow very rapidly, and a very unhappy population will affect the fighting quality of your armies as well.

Causes

The amount of happiness that your civilization begins with is determined by the game’s difficulty setting. The moment your construct your first city, that number will begin to decline.

There are many things that cause happiness and unhappiness:

* Natural Wonders: Each Natural Wonder you discover permanently increases your civilization’s happiness.
* Luxury Resources: Improve resources within your territory or trade for them with other civs. Each kind of resource improves your population’s happiness (but you don’t get happiness for having multiple copies of a single luxury.)
* Buildings: Certain buildings increase your population’s happiness. These include the Colosseum, the Circus, the Theatre, and others. Each building constructed anywhere in your civ increases your overall happiness (so two Colosseums produce twice as much happiness as one, unlike Luxuries.)
* Wonders: Certain wonders like Notre Dame and the Hanging Gardens can give you a big boost in happiness.
* Social Policies: Policies from the Piety branch provide a lot of happiness, as do a few policies in other branches.
* Technologies: Technologies in themselves don’t provide happiness, but they do unlock the buildings, wonders, resources, and social policies that do.
* Raw Population: As your civ grows, the people get increasingly unhappy and demand more stuff to keep them amused.
* Number of Cities: As the number of cities in your civ grows, so does your unhappiness. In other words, a civ with 2 cities each of population 1 is unhappier than a civ with 1 city of population 2, even though they both contain the same total population.
* Annexed Cities: If you capture and annex foreign cities, your population doesn’t much like it.

Unhappiness

There are two levels of unhappiness. Neither is very pleasant.

When your happiness is negative and your happiness icon is looking sad, your population is “unhappy.” An unhappy population’s growth rate is significantly slowed, but there are no other ill effects.

When your happiness is negative and your happiness icon is looking angry, your population is “very unhappy.” If your population is very unhappy, your cities stop growing altogether, you cannot build any Settlers, and your military units get a nasty combat penalty.

Remember that unhappiness is not permanent. You can always increase your citizens’ happiness – no matter how pissed off they are at you – through the methods outlined above.

That about sums up Happiness in Civilization V. I am personally a big fan of the new take on happiness, and when you get your hands on the game I hope you will agree!

All About Cities

Cities are vital to your civilization’s success. They allow you to build units, buildings, and wonders. They allow you to research new technologies and gather wealth. You cannot win without powerful, well-situated cities.

Cities should be founded in locations with plenty of food and production and with access to resources such as wheat, fish, and cattle. It’s often a good idea to build a city on a river or coastal hex. Cities founded on hills gain a defensive bonus, making it harder for enemies to capture them.

Working the Land

Cities thrive based upon the land around them. Their citizens “work” the land, harvesting food, gold, production and science from the tiles. Citizens can work tiles that are within three tiles’ distance from the city and that are within your civilization’s borders. Only one city can work a single tile even if it’s within three tiles’ distance from more than one. Because of this, it’s important to carefully consider how closely together to build your cities!

As your city grows, it automatically assigns its citizens to work the lands around it. It seeks to provide a balanced amount of food, production, and gold. You may order a city’s citizens to work other tiles; for example: if you want a certain city to concentrate on generating gold, or production. In wartime, for example, it might be a good idea to focus on production to get military units trained quickly, or you might want to focus on gold to upgrade your obsolete units.

Fans of previous games in the Civilization series will be familiar with the concept of “improving” tiles to provide even more food, gold and so forth. Workers return in Civilization V and can be ordered to construct improvements such as farms, mines, trading posts, and so forth. A detailed overview of all of the improvement types will be coming in a later feature!

Specialists

Specialists are citizens who have been assigned to work in a building constructed in their city. There are four kinds of specialists: Scientists, Merchants, Artists, and Engineers. A Library, for example, allows one or two citizens to be assigned to work in the building as Scientist specialists. Not all buildings allow specialists to be assigned to them.

When a citizen is assigned to be a specialist, that citizen is no longer available to work in the tiles around the city; therefore the city loses the food, production, or science that citizen would otherwise bring in. (However, if the city has more citizens than it has tiles to work, the specialist may have no negative effect upon production at all!)

Specialists provide the following benefits:

* Artists increase a city’s cultural output and speed the creation of Great Artists.
* Merchants increase a city’s gold output and speed the creation of Great Merchants.
* Scientists increase a city’s science output and speed the creation of Great Scientists.
* Engineers increase a city’s production output and speed the creation of Great Engineers.

Buildings

A city is more than a bunch of homes. It contains schools and libraries, markets and granaries, banks and barracks. Buildings represent the improvements and upgrades that you make in a city. Buildings can increase the city’s rate of growth, can speed production, can increase the science of a city, can improve its defenses, and can do lots of other good things as well.

A city that has no buildings is pretty weak and primitive and will probably remain fairly small, while a city with a lot of buildings can indeed grow to dominate the world.

With the single exception of the monument, which has no prerequisites and is available to build at the start of the game, you need knowledge of a specific technology to construct a building. For example, you must learn bronze working before you can build a barracks.

Some buildings have resource prerequisites as well – for instance a city must have an improved source of horses or ivory nearby to construct a circus. Also, some buildings have building prerequisites. You can’t build a temple in a city unless you’ve already constructed a monument there.

There’s one downside to buildings: most of them cost gold to maintain. The price depends upon the building in question, and can range from 1 to 5 per turn. The gold is deducted from your treasury each turn. A later feature will explain more about gold, including how you earn it and what else it can be spent on.

Expanding Territory

As a city gains culture, it will acquire additional tiles in the surrounding unclaimed territory. The faster it gains culture, the faster its territory will grow. Each city acquires territory depending upon its own cultural output. When it reaches a certain level, it will “claim” a new tile (if any are available.)

You can also expend gold to “purchase” tiles; this is entirely independent of the city’s own acquisition based upon its culture.