They should have ditched global happiness and replaced it with per city happiness. It's going to be a pain to track down now since you won't have the happy/unhappy citizen faces you used to have in civ I-IV. Now where do you have a city that lacks a colosseum? Mmmm... It's a step in the right direction, but the whole happiness system must be replaced to a per-city system with each city showing its current happiness score.Buildings can now no longer provide more Happiness than there is population in a city
Buildings can now no longer provide more Happiness than there is population in a city (wonders are excluded from this). (Added 12/3)
on top of the happiness capping sounds like they want to forceReduced effects of Forbidden Palace and Meritocracy (Happiness per city). (Added 12/3)
to happen is every game, as quickly as possible.Unhappiness beyond a certain point breeds rebels within your empire, based on the number of cities a player has. (Added 12/3)
This changes makes this policy no longer fit the theme of the Liberty tree, but instead should now be in the Tradition tree, which is primarily about boosting the capital. Since the Capital is usually the only city with enough production to build an early wonder in the higher difficulties, this forcing us to build our settlers in the capital for the production bonus, only makes it that much harder for both the initial expansion and building those wonders.Liberty branch balance (Settler training bonus now only applies to capital). (Added 12/3)
Oh well, you can already get such info simply by clicking on the Economy slot in DiploCorner that popups the cities list with a happiness tab where numbers are crunched for your pleasure & deductive acrobatics.Now where do you have a city that lacks a colosseum? Mmmm...
I think this one is a bit extreme, because it doesn't just stop ICS, it also screws earning GA's through happiness and makes it even harder to grow cities, because we'll now be stuck around 0 happiness, if not constantly dropping into unhappiness, no matter what strategy is employed.
This changes makes this policy no longer fit the theme of the Liberty tree, but instead should now be in the Tradition tree, which is primarily about boosting the capital. Since the Capital is usually the only city with enough production to build an early wonder in the higher difficulties, this forcing us to build our settlers in the capital for the production bonus, only makes it that much harder for both the initial expansion and building those wonders.
In fact, with this double nerf to the Liberty tree, initial policy and Meritocracy, we're nor limited to only 2 viable trees in the ancient era. Even with the buffs to Tradition, it'll still likely only be good for OCC games. Thus Honor will really be the only one worth taking.
Agreed and I meant to mention this in my previous post, but forgot to.The other thing to notice is that Freedom is now the single most important SP in the game.
My point is that the Liberty tree is meant to effect multiple cities, while the Tradition tree is meant to boost just the capital. As you pointed out, the other cities have a harder time producing settlers than the capital as it is, thus they have a greater need of this boost than the capital does, if only to bring them up the par with the capital's non-boosted rate.Which means that the designers have introduced a meaningful tradeoff. You can build Wonders or expand horizontally, but not both. This is a smaller nerf to the Liberty tree than you might think. The Capital usually produces Settlers much faster than satellite cities due to Maritime anyway, so most of your early cities are produced by the capital. You're looking at it taking a few more turns for a third of your first wave cities to go up. That's not a big change.
Where it hurts is in subsequent expansion waves, and that's not such a bad thing.
Considering this only added 1 happiness per city, which effectively reduced the per city unhappiness from 2 to 1 and did not count the capital. It was already not as good as later policies at reducing the unhappiness, such as the previously mentioned Freedom. Especially when you consider that this policy has a financial cost associated with it that other happiness boosting and unhappiness reducing policies do not have.I'd like to see the Meritocracy nerf before I declare traditional ICS dead. Note that impure ICS strategies that make use of some ICS principles are very much alive.
My point is that the Liberty tree is meant to effect multiple cities, while the Tradition tree is meant to boost just the capital. As you pointed out, the other cities have a harder time producing settlers than the capital as it is, thus they have a greater need of this boost than the capital does, if only to bring them up the par with the capital's non-boosted rate.
Also consider the fact that they are reducing the bonus from the Forbidden Palace WW, but not the identical bonus from the Planned Economy policy. Wouldn't it have been better to reduce this policy's bonus instead of Meritocracy's bonus? It'd give the same net effect of reducing ICS, without hindering the early GA's or the growth potential of the cities. After all that +1 happiness meant +1 citizen per city. While FP and PF both just meant twice the cities.
Planned has its own highly abusable problems that this patch is not addressing, but it had no effect on ICS gameplay because an ICS will never acquire the extra three policies needed to unlock it.
With the new patch and no saving up SPs it's probably not very feasible, anyways.
That change is now optional.
I know, but standard settings have it, and that is what we usually talk about. Otherwise we could also talk about how OCC culture victory is quite hard to get before the game end time if you play without cultural CS or how easy it is to get luxuries with abundant resources
Did India just become the best ICSer since they are the only Civ that can have a 0 unhappiness city? (The rest can cover just the population unhappiness but not the -2 from the city?)
Good thinking, you smell bug potential. Theocracy might have a similar effect. Definitely something to look out for as the patchlog specifically talked about "can't provide more happiness than they have population" rather than "can't provide more happiness than they produce unhappiness from population"
I think other civs can still have 0 unhappiness cities because of SPs like Freedom, though.