India will be a MONSTER!

India's UA:
Population Growth (India): Unhappiness from number of cities doubled, Unhappiness from number of Citizens halved.

So in a screenshot above India would get +5 from cities and +40(!!!) from population...

O_o

Sure, it will probably be harder in the end game when your empire gets huge, but seriously, +40 ... Just think about what you can do - huge cities, free trade of happiness resources, anyone wants to help with thinking of more? I bet it'll be one of the most popular civs to take on Immortal+ difficulty...

- no real need for happiness buildings, and therefore maintenance cost drops down

And those screenshots are from where? I don't see any mention of India in them.

From one Polish forum, I won't tell which one cause someone might get scolded again xP


you don't have to see India, imagine what India would have in such situation

I don't see any mention of India in them.

Click to expand...

That's his point. If this is for a regular non-India civ, then with India's ability the faction would get +10 unhappy from number of cities and only +41 unhappy from population.

Instead of the +5/+81 displayed in the screenshot.

How do we know that screenshot isn't of India? Maybe those numbers have already been doubled/halved.

I'm having a very hard time telling how big the empire is. It has a LOT of road maintenance (35), which might come from a newbie player putting them everywhere. It also has low trade compared to its other income, so it sounds like it's a high population / low city empire. In that case, India would benefit a lot.

Even if that screenshot is from India, then a normal civ in the situation would have +3 unhappy from number of cities and +162unhappy from population.

Which seems unlikely.

35 from roads doesn't seem unreasonable. If they have railroads, thats only 17 tiles (and one still on roads).

Mercade said:

And those screenshots are from where? I don't see any mention of India in them.

Click to expand...

We are assuming the numbers are NOT for India; thus while this CIV is currently getting 5 unhappy from #-of-cities and
81 unhappy from population

India would get
10 unhappy from #-of-cities (double)
40.5 unhappy from population (halved)

Net; 35.5 less unhappy

Celevin said:

How do we know that screenshot isn't of India? Maybe those numbers have already been doubled/halved

Click to expand...

Logic.

If you get double the penalty from number of cities and half of the penalty from population then if screenshot above would belong to India they would have 2.5 city and 162 population total.

Well, 2 minutes ago I thought I was the first to provide a more detailed explanation...

2 minutes ago everyone was posting, including myself

I would imagine India would want to play on small maps. There would be less cities so their penalty would be less and their bonus would be the same.

Except, on small maps you might not have enough space to build your metropolises without overlapping tiles.

India will want to build cities further apart.

To be honest I think it's too much, and they'll balance it out before the release. But in any case, having huge cities with little to no happiness penalty is nothing to sneeze at

There's more to it than that. I believe maintenance costs adjusted based on map size in Civ4. Therefore unhappiness from number of cities might scale as well.

I might be wrong, so can a Civ4 theorycrafter clarify?

See, this is what I've been trying to tell people. Unhappiness from population is (a lot) bigger than population from number of cities, so India's power is quite powerful, and they should easily be able to support a large empire.

well, 6 happy from natural W & 9 happy from difficulty level just having a net happiness of + 5 :

that doesn't seem so great, maybe the player could build some more happy buildings !

India can sustain empire as large as others but new cities are harder to manage at the beginning and easier after a certain point.

I would bet that the city unhappiness penalty is dependent upon map size for the reason that each city is more important on smaller maps.

You are also making yourself more vulnerable to attack; and depending on how military supply works someone with the same population - but more cities - is probably able to field a larger army due to increased number of tiles (and thus resources) available to them (without relying on city-states) and a larger supply threshold.

Now, the presence of Golden Ages and their tie-in with happiness will help offset this production disadvantage somewhat.

My gut, too, says that 50% on population is too much. 25% on population and, depending on whether it is map-size dependent, either +100% or a static +2 or +3 unhappy per city would put break-even around 8-12 population points. If the break-even point is too low then while the advantage is merely good in the early game it becomes super-great toward the modern when, for any given map size, the ratio of population/cities is going to be high for everyone.

I find the name a mis-nomer as well since growth (a function of surplus food IF you are happy) is not really being affected (aside from avoiding unhappy) but rather population capacity (a function of both happy and food) is.

Guardian_PL said:

To be honest I think it's too much, and they'll balance it out before the release. But in any case, having huge cities with little to no happiness penalty is nothing to sneeze at

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We don't know yet how the Indian UA interacts with Social Policies that reduce unhappiness. If the 50% stacks with the 33% in the capital that you get from legalism, you would get a 83% discount. Although it is more likely that the 50% is applied at the end, so you would only get a 66% discount.

snipperrabbit!! said:

India can sustain empire as large as others but new cities are harder to manage at the beginning and easier after a certain point.

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This ^^

India strategies will consist of staying with 1 city for a while, because with a starting happiness of say 6, (9 is quite an easy setting) that is 6 normal population but for India it is 12, so India can get up to 13 pop on their first city (which would be a very productive city) without upgrading happiness, this would certainly be a good starting strategy for India if you had enough food to do it.

alanthreonus said:

See, this is what I've been trying to tell people. Unhappiness from population is (a lot) bigger than population from number of cities, so India's power is quite powerful, and they should easily be able to support a large empire.

Click to expand...

Well, at one point we didn't have much evidence of this, so nobody really talked about it. India's special ability is one of the hardest to gauge.

Secondly, gold maintenance in Civ4 definitely wasn't linear. Every new city increased the maintenance in every city, leading to a really explosive cost if you weren't careful. If it's not linear in Civ5, it might adjust my feelings on India.

Having said that, it's *definitely* a solid ability. The detriment is taken away simply by playing to its strength by not having many cities.