happiness (again)

I liked civ IV city based happiness more than global. It was natural and easy to understand. But i didnt said anything wrong about this change to global until i played and tested this by myself. So here i am after five full (and won) large/epic/king games.

As i understand reason to move happiness to global was to make game more "streamlined" so people have easier time to figure what is going on. But the problem is that actually
a) nothing changed - there is still the same amount of "work", especially that you visit cities anyway
b) simplification created wierd behaviours

a.
In prevoius game i more or less knew what is going on in each city so there was no need to visit every city every turn to check if city is revolting or not. Especially later when i had notification than some city will grow next turn or even become unhappy (i dont remember if its mod or not since i was playing only with mods). Right now, when im balancing my unhappiness around zero (with my budget to keep positive) i dont know sometimes which cities i should cut down if i dont have other options (like buildings or resources). So i have to check almost every city i have and try to somehow avoid unhappiness and see if it is already "cut" or not yet. To me its the same amount of work in both cases. Simplified or not. But in global version it created artificial strategy so i can decide which city i have to be big - but it doesnt really matter.
Furthermore in civ IV managing cities was much more like you were controlling parts of your empire which translated to its whole effectiveness. Right now i cant find myself in this new mechanic.

b.
- now when i play i have to avoid growth in most of my towns (if i want to build farms and i should in normal game because in reality farms take most room on earth not trading posts) but this cut me from income.
- if i dont avoid growth then i have to build trading posts only, because production bonus are low and farms are no-no. (shouldnt trading posts clear forest also?) And i can just buy anything i want (why production at all in this game except wonders?) So current strategy is to just spam trading posts and in my current games food production without farms was enough.
-granaries and other food buildings. They are good sometimes but most often i have already too big population so i almost never build them. Especially with so long production times there is always something more important to build. In civ IV they had alot more uses and were more important.
-global happiness create gamey tactics like creating small city only to have happiness buildings in it to incrase global happiness. Its not realistic and not fun. Especially that i have to worry so that city wont grow (and personally when im building empire i want my cities to grow so this is the opposite i want to see in game). And it incrases my cost of policies - something i dont want.
- and the opposite, small conquered city should not always impact my whole country happiness. Maybe with some policies but then we had to revert back to civics ...
-in previous game how much city will grow was mostly dependant on place where it was positioned. In some places it could even outgrow capital. But in this game its not the case. Every city could be big but game forces me to keep them small. So there is no strategy in placing them. And no strategy with managing them (like in civ IV you may say but well ...)
-conquered cities require you to build courthouse. But since its cost is high and maintenance is high noone who wants to be effective will keep such city and just raze it and build own one. Its stupid. To me if this had to stay, then cities should be not razeable at all. Especially that capitals you cant raze anyway. But that would limit conquering other countries even more.
-and finally martrime states giving you food. Do they really wanted we will feed our people always with imported food?

Im comparing games to reality when game mechanics dont work or are not fun. And in this game they dont. To give you example, why my population is unhappy because its big. How unhappy china should be in this case? Or big cities like New York? Something have to be changed with balance, and if possible - redesigned to single city happiness. Looks like even guru of gaming Sid can make mistakes and have to learn even having 20 years civ experience.
But maybe i am wrong. What is positive in global happiness, maybe you can tell me because i cant find any single thing.

To quickly compare two conquests in both Civ IV and V:
- civ IV when you got too many cities you were slower with research. Which is realistic. And you had few unhappy cities you had to manage.
- civ V when you conquer another nation you raze half his cities because you will stop producing things and even loose army strength (dont know why). But your research will be even higher because you have more population now ...

So you cant say that adding global happiness stops you from conquering whole world. In civ IV it was also the case but you wasnt razing cities or doing other crazy stuff ...

I say that was more of a rant than anything else . There is no problem with happiness .. you can have any size empire you want because not all your cities will have 25+ population, which is the softcap someone calculated, without social policies benefit .

Get more resources and happiness buildings and you will be fine .

still ... building a small city w/ happiness buildings to up your net happiness is kinda silly.

yet effective if you use your gold to rush those buildings.

Tasunke said:

still ... building a small city w/ happiness buildings to up your net happiness is kinda silly.

yet effective if you use your gold to rush those buildings.

Click to expand...

And this is whole point of my post. In IV when you had too big empire too fast you crippled your research because cities were not producing enough gold to cover city maintenance. And it was no way to avoid this. In current release they switched from working and realistic feature to "maybe working on small maps" feature but not realistic and with exploits.

I think i found rather simple solution to counter people who are spamming one pop cities only to have happiness building in them. What if circus and other buildings would add happiness instead of flat +3 they would add percent of current population of city where this building is in? Like 25% population of that city is happy. That way small cities would have much less impact on whole empire. And such buildings in them would actually cost more than add happiness.

I think there are many simple solutions to this problem. The thing here is that Firaxis didn`t beta test the game properly and so wasn`t aware of the game`s problems in the first place.

They had the Frankentesters

I think global happiness is just something people assume when they judge the game... when looking at the game as a whole, its a good game, sure perhaps a few pacing issues ... not only is there no form of local happiness, but I'm relatively certain there is no way to boost *local only* happiness.

That'd be kinda cool though ... imagine the sprawling empire is WAY unhappy with military penalties ... yet Everything in the capital city is sparkling rainbows.


While global happiness is nice, the option of local would also be nice imho. Local buildings would probably be cheaper ... or maybe they would have a national limit (so as not to build them everywhere?) ....

Hard to say ... maybe even have them more expensive than global ... so that its just your high-productive buidlings in a low happy environment that might want them. Also, local happiness doesn't contribute to golden ages ... only your (empire as a whole) happiness.

I agree with the OP that the Global Happiness System is a bit whack as it is now. I think it is a new interesting idea and with potential but really needs to be reworked.

Also warmongers getting great benefits in research is something that really removed the gem from my doughnut.

I wrote two extensive essays on ways to improve these faults. See the two links in my signature.

My only complaint with the system in ciV is that the AI doesn't appear to abide by it even at Prince.

In my empire, I may have 8 cities of pop 6-ish struggling to break even by spending every available on happiness buildings. I have no "pointy sticks" to speak of.

Meanwhile, the AI has 11 cities (4 puppets) of pop 9-ish all surrounded by military units with +35 . How? WTH

Tutkarz, I completely agree with your assessment.

Civ4's system of city maintenance cost with distance to capital was by far the most sensible mechanic. Much better than the "corruption" system of previous Civs. A larger, far flung empire would incur more administrative costs and Civ4 mechanism reflected that. And the "health" system was also a good and simple check and sensible system to check too rapid a growth of individual cities that is entirely historically realistic.

So for Civ5, they introduced this new "global happiness" mechanic to replace these. But in all respects it is bad. For one thing a lot of the things that make a nation "unhappy" in Civ5 don't make sense as you point out. For another, purely local buildings in some far flung little village somehow has "global" effects. Maybe if these were national small wonders but some local theatre or such in Nome, Alaska??? And what does "unhappiness" have anything to do with growing bigger and being a bigger Civ as you say???

Even if, say, we want to "dumb" down or streamline this aspect so we didn't need to any longer micromanage happiness on a per city level, the whole mechanic simply makes no sense. This was clearly a step backward. Some better mechanics could have been used that required no micromanagement (if that was the point to get away from per city happiness management) rather than this totally nonsensical global happiness.

OTAKUjbski said:

My only complaint with the system in ciV is that the AI doesn't appear to abide by it even at Prince.

In my empire, I may have 8 cities of pop 6-ish struggling to break even by spending every available on happiness buildings. I have no "pointy sticks" to speak of.

Meanwhile, the AI has 11 cities (4 puppets) of pop 9-ish all surrounded by military units with +35 . How? WTH

Click to expand...

I suppose this is counter-balanced by only requiring two pointy sticks to completely demolish an AI, since it's pants at warfare.

I think they should have gone with a mechanic for food moving along your trade network. Globalizing food makes more sense than happiness, overall.

The problem with global happiness is the gamey way it was implemented. Compared to Civ4's per city maintenance cost and per city health and happiness whose mechanics had some resemblance to things that made sense, Civ5's global happiness stat just makes no sense and becomes just a gamey meter. They might as well have called it "Shafer Rating" or something since it has nothing to do with "happiness" in any sensible way.

We've had this discussion in another thread, but you can call it what you want but it really isn't.

Why does each luxury have the same effect anyways? That's a gamey abstraction that all Civ games since Civ3 has had.

Calling something gamey because you disagree with it, doesn't make it so.

Theatres and luxuries making people "happy" makes some sense.

Theatres in some far flung outpost that adds to total empire-wide happiness makes no sense. Happiness as a meter to force you to be small and to force you to raze conquered cities makes no sense.

As I said, they could have used some global mechanic of "stability" with sensible factors to slow down growth.

I have not seen too many people yet defend global happiness as making sense until you. If there are others, I encourage them to add to this thread.

polypheus said:

Theatres and luxuries making people "happy" makes some sense.

Theatres in some far flung outpost that adds to total empire-wide happiness makes no sense.

Click to expand...

Sure it does. But you're leaving out pertinent elements to make that point.

A City automatically generated unhappiness points per population point. A city with size 4 population can be served by your 1st happiness building, the coliseum. It's not like the city is generating net happiness.

It just seems that way because your social policies and wonders have the effect of reducing city or empire wide happiness which then allow those buildings to generate net happiness.

This isn't any gamier than assuming the same rinky dink Alaska town you mentioned in another thread liking furs as much as the cosmopolitan elites in the capital. Or that rice is good for their health.

dexters said:

A City automatically generated unhappiness points per population point. A city with size 4 population can be served by your 1st happiness building, the coliseum. It's not like the city is generating net happiness.

Click to expand...

Okay, so how about a pop 1 city with a circus and colosseum?

Bad Brett said:

Okay, so how about a pop 1 city with a circus and colosseum?

Click to expand...

Las Vegas?

edit nice try though.

I wouldn't call global happiness "streamlining", yikes do people use that term way to often?

Global happiness was the best thing that could happen, now I can build a large flat empire (France) or a small vertical empire (India) and the game system wont punish me. I could never do that in civ 4. No need to micromanage my cities to avoid riots and production loss.

Also you can go for an golden age strategy (Persia) when you keep your happiness high but avoid to expand to much and pick policies that benefits from extra happiness. Again cant do that in civ4.

If you are building one population cities just to rush build happiness buildings then you are hurting yourself economically, that gold is better spend elsewhere. You do get a nasty upkeep if you have 6-7 small cities supporting your happiness. Aim for luxuries and/or bigger cities instead.

^ I think Brad is just trying to find holes in my argument by illustrating an absurd scenario/gambit that could be employed, but as noted, gold cost just to rush is ridiculous (the equivalent of 3-5 research agreements -- so 3-5 techs lost) and the maintenance would kill you on an empire wide scale.

Let me run this gambit through my computer to make sure its not too gamey for the Civ4 players.