Local happiness counter on a city's screen

Like a lot of people when I'm building a wide empire I have many if not most cities that are only as big as the local happiness they have or are capable of having. This can sometimes be hard to keep track of. I have to look through the list of buildings in the city and add up the happiness they provide to get the limit of people it can hold before affecting empire happiness. But I'll have a lot of cities so and can't remember what the limit is for each of them so I have to add it up again every time population goes up to decide if I need to stop it.

Determining the maximum local happiness can be hard dues to things like circuses, and stone works, that aren't available for every city. Then there are religious buildings and effects and civics that add happiness to buildings. Like the follower belief asceticism, where shrines provide +1 happiness in cities with 3+ followers. I'm not even sure if that's local happiness. I think I heard it isn't.

There's a screen that shows the local happiness from each city but that's far from the city screen where you'd be looking at its population and determining if you stop growth or not. Plus it doesn't tell you if it's exceeding it or how much it could have if everything available to it was built.

So what I want it a counter on the city screen that shows the total local happiness can get from the currently built buildings so I'll know if the current population is above, below or equal to it. That would be good enough but also I'd want a count of the possible local happiness the city can get from available buildings so if I'm not at the empire wide happiness limit at the time I can let cities grow and build the required buildings while that happens.

Does anyone find it odd that this isn't already in the game?

What's the difference between local and global happiness?

DudewiththeFood said:

What's the difference between local and global happiness?

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Local happiness is that created by buildings in cities, global happiness is created by luxuries, policies, things of that nature.

I'm actually working on a mod that includes local happiness at this time, so your wish should be fulfilled shortly.

3335d said:

Local happiness is that created by buildings in cities, global happiness is created by luxuries, policies, things of that nature.

I'm actually working on a mod that includes local happiness at this time, so your wish should be fulfilled shortly.

Click to expand...

A more important distinction would be that global happiness has no cap, while local happiness is capped by the cities population. A city cannot generate a surplus of happy citizens.

3335d said:

Local happiness is that created by buildings in cities, global happiness is created by luxuries, policies, things of that nature.

I'm actually working on a mod that includes local happiness at this time, so your wish should be fulfilled shortly.

Click to expand...

Glad to hear it. I still wish is was in the base game because I'd want to get achievements. I had a clock mod (just adds a clock) and later found out it kept me from getting achievements.

Snes said:

A more important distinction would be that global happiness has no cap, while local happiness is capped by the cities population. A city cannot generate a surplus of happy citizens.

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That means it just counters population unhappiness. If you're going tall it doesn't often become a factor. Cities are always over the cap. But wide you have to watch because you need that happiness for more cities.

I know they made local happiness because before it was possible to have one pop cities with all the happiness buildings counter population from other cities allowing for infinite new cities. I'm wondering if it could have worked it it wasn't capped at the cities population unhappiness but the empires population unhappiness. You would still gain unhappiness from # of cities but small cities with excess happiness building would essentially be vacation towns for the big cities.
It would still probably be exploitable though. I just wish I knew about this exploit before it was fixed. It might have been fun to see how badly I could abuse it to win.

I just recently realized I can open the economics screen by clicking on my gold readout while in the city screen and look at the list of local city happiness there. It still doesn't tell me population is below the maximum or not so I'd still have to add it up myself to decide if a city should grow.