Local Happiness vs Global Happiness

I have played quite a few civ 5 games and yet I still don't understand the distinction between local happiness vs global happiness. I would say 2/3s of my games have been Civ5 vanilla and 1/3 in G&K and I have completed 3 games of BNW. For some reason I am just learning about this now.

Is this something new that was added in the expansions? Can someone please explain the relationship between the two?

Global Unhappiness is created by founding new cities and ideology

Every population point raises unhappiness by another point. If you build say a circus in a city with only 1 population, the circus will cover the 1 unhappiness from that 1 population. When it reaches 2 population, the circus will cover the 2 unhappiness.

The Population of a city and buildings in a city are local happiness/unhappiness.

Things that deal with global happiness include religious founder beliefs [Not the religious buildings], luxuries, city states, etc.

But I have seen other things that seem to imply there is a mathematical relationship between the two.

So X(local happiness) = global happiness where is X is some multiplier.

Is X less than one, equal to one, greater than 1? Even crazier, does X exist

burfmeister31 said:

I have played quite a few civ 5 games and yet I still don't understand the distinction between local happiness vs global happiness. I would say 2/3s of my games have been Civ5 vanilla and 1/3 in G&K and I have completed 3 games of BNW. For some reason I am just learning about this now.

Is this something new that was added in the expansions? Can someone please explain the relationship between the two?

Click to expand...

Local happiness is exactly the same as global happiness, except that you can't get more "local" happiness out of a city than its total population. Somethings however provide straight out global happiness though, like eg. wonders and don't care about the city's population.

Edit: To see how much "local happiness" each city is providing click on the Additional Information scroll on the top right corner of your screen > Economic Overview > Resources & Happiness. There you can see how much LH each of your city is providing, and you can also see that it is added to the Global Happiness total just the same as any other source of happiness.

To elaborate further on the post above: Once your cities reach 15+ pop local happiness stops been a factor, whatever you build will function.