In Civ5, I play on Immortal, even though I aim Deity. In order to do so, I'm fixing myself an objective of 300 science beakers per turn in turn 200. So I play, and often end up seeing I won't reach this threshold... then I quit. Not only I won't reach it, but also, I usually have happiness problems at those times... so I hardly see how I could improve my game. (and i'm playing with egypt, with very happiness buildings built O.M.G.)
So, I'm playing half-games most of the time, quitting after turn 200 or so. As I don't achieve to do what I want, again, again and again, this is becoming sort of BORING, ANNOYING and ANGRYING.
However, I have watched tons of let's plays, especially Marbozir's, and still wonder how they can treat happiness. Often when I watch them, I'm like : "what ? From where comes this happiness ? This is impossible ! As if it were the same with me !? I can't believe it ! Hah, I don't get it" It's like there were an anti-me leprechaun program in this game, that loves to make me becoming mad.
Be more selective in where you settle, prioritize luxury techs and improving them, and build circuses, stone works and colosseums, and at least get friendly with mercantile City States. Planting a city eats 4 global happiness, so you should try to settle your new cities in places where you have at least 1 new luxury, and preferably a second new, or at least a duplicate of the luxury unique to your region. If you can found a religion or an AI converts you to their religion, that can really help your happiness situation a lot too.
Since you brought up Marbozir, I can break down the happiness he has at one point in his Pridelands LP - he has two cities, one at 6 pop and one at 3 pop, so there's 15 unhappiness. However, he has improved Ivory, Salt, and Silver, which which in addition to the starting 9 Happiness you get from Prince and above, makes for 21 Happiness. He adopts Ascetism as one of his beliefs for his religion, which gives him one more happiness, for a total of 22. 22 - 15 = 7. Finally, since he discovered Uluru, his global happiness is also improved by one, which gives hiim 8.
Happiness is horribly implemented though, since the penalties for unhappiness are so severe. I can understand that city growth is impeded, and likewise cultural borders expand slower, but it's ridiculous that your army suddenly becomes much less effective because one of your cities grew. It also becomes pretty insane as soon as ideologies come into effect, making it either almost entirely meaningless or crushing you and forcing you to adopt another ideology if there's a cultural runaway, which makes you effectively lose two turns of progress while your empire is in revolt.
One of the other things that really ticks me off is the <snip> world congress. It's been a while since I played IV, but couldn't you defy the WC/UN in that game? Why the heck would an empire willingly submit to the whims of other countries for luxury bans? "Sorry Johnny, we must continue to go without salt today because our great leader didn't bribe enough city states to defeat Alexander the Terrible's proposal. Maybe next century your grandchildren won't suffer from sodium and iodine deficiency as we have."
It's not even that the UN is a bad idea, it's just terribly implemented. That luxury ban could have instead been a ban on just
trading the luxury, which would still lead to less happiness for the target/victim.
While I'm on a roll, it's seems the devs decided to ignore the metagame when it comes to how food, gold and hammers are weighted. I've seen the governor decided to work 1F1H2G unimproved plains incense over 3F1H deer (granary, no camp). And you really better watch out if you have Cerro de Petosi in your city's working radius. Of course, this is easily fixed by micromanaging your cities, but this doesn't fix the problem for the AI. The AI wouldn't need half the insane production benefits it gets on Immortal and Deity if only city management was fixed, seeing as food is more valuable than hammers, and both are immensely more valuable than gold. I swear, the AI fetishizes gold and gpt to the point where it'd think 10 gpt, no growth and no hammers is more valuable than 0 gpt, 5 excess food and 5 hammers.
Moderator Action: obvious swear word removed.
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