All About Cities, Happiness, and Gold in Civ5

In the past week, the official Civ5 website has posted new informational articles authored by community manager 2K Greg. The pages address the workings of cities, happiness, and gold in the game.

If, like me, you haven't had a chance to follow recent development too closely, these articles should help get you up to speed. Below are some excerpts:

All About Cities

With the single exception of the monument, which has no prerequisites and is available to build at the start of the game, you need knowledge of a specific technology to construct a building. For example, you must learn bronze working before you can build a barracks.

Some buildings have resource prerequisites as well -- for instance a city must have an improved source of horses or ivory nearby to construct a circus. Also, some buildings have building prerequisites. You can't build a temple in a city unless you've already constructed a monument there.

There's one downside to buildings: most of them cost gold to maintain. The price depends upon the building in question, and can range from 1 to 5 per turn. The gold is deducted from your treasury each turn.

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Happiness

When your happiness is negative and your happiness icon is looking sad, your population is "unhappy." An unhappy population's growth rate is significantly slowed, but there are no other ill effects.

When your happiness is negative and your happiness icon is looking angry, your population is "very unhappy." If your population is very unhappy, your cities stop growing altogether, you cannot build any Settlers, and your military units get a nasty combat penalty.

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Gold

You can extend your civilization's territory by purchasing individual tiles. The cost of each tile will vary based on a variety of factors, such as how rough the terrain is and whether it's across a river.

Units and buildings both have "maintenance costs" that must be paid every turn. These maintenance costs are dependent upon the difficulty level at which you're playing.

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Building maintenance? 3 level of happiness? I hate building maintenance!
Man, this is becoming more and more like a civ5 base on civ3 instead of civ4......

I'm surprised that cities can't rebel and spawn rebel units.

I hope this is balanced carefully, and we do not go back to ICS tactics or other odd exploits. We will have to wait and see -- hopefully everything will be fine.

This is definitely a big change from Civ IV though. As Leo Tang said, this feels more like Civ 3. Or does the city still cost maintenance itself, even without buildings? It sure seems like everything is being set up to limit the player -- gold for buildings, gold for units, gold for expanding city radius/influence, 1 UPT, resources only supporting a limited number of units/buildings, buildings requiring resources, etc. Limits, limits, limits everywhere you look. I know we are only getting snippets of data until the game is actually in peoples' hands, but this worries me a bit.

I'm excited about the new game -- can't wait to start playing and getting a feel for how things fit together.

Are rebellions and cival wars defintely impossible? Rebellions were such an important part of world history. I really wish they were included.

haphazard1 said:

Limits, limits, limits everywhere you look

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Or mechanisms to encourage or force strategic decision making, which IMO is a good thing.

Undecided what to think about this...
I like the gold part.
Pretty much neutral on the happiness part.
Dislike the city part, seems somewhat of simplification compared to previous Civ IV (and too much like Civ3, which imo was the worst game of the series).

love the upkeep part i hope it works more like civ 1-3
civ4 is to limiting in expansion.
Dont much care if ics exploit works its booring and i dont use it i like to give my cities full tile numbers if i can.
Nice to be able to take control of an entire small continent without going broke ,sure in civ 3 i could not afford to make those cities useful but they still gave me area of control.

Lessee... back to building-based maint - Not sure if I like this idea, but it meshes well with road-maint, so I can't complain too much. If one of the buildings is a superhighway system that allows units to move within that city's radius more quickly without need for actual roads to be built on the map, that'd be cool.

Monuments available at the start - yay! Being able to build a culture building is a GOOD thing. Removes the overwhelming power of Creative. (There's sure to be someone with Creative-like powers.) Monuments are required to build Temples, so they're not going to expire (at least, not before Temples, which probably won't expire).

Barracks must be researched - Makes sense.

Tile acquisition via culture (free) or gold (not free) - and they're independent of each other.

City unhappiness affects army quality - interesting idea, if implemented properly. I'd expect military losses to make people unhappy, which makes it a death-spiral to get into a war without a serious advantage. How will they keep that from happening?

.... Ok, it's not as serious as they made it sound. The "methods outlined above" didn't do a great job of explaining how you can "always raise happiness", but one would hope that it means your production isn't hampered by "very unhappy" people and you can build something to raise happiness. I didn't see an indicator of a culture slider or anything like that which would divert gold to entertainment, but I'm sure something like that is in there.

Rivers affect the price of tiles - Hmmmmm....

Difficulty affects building-maint costs. Difficulty also affects starting Happiness level. Looks good so far.

There seems to be a larger focus on Gold-as-currency this time, making it a little more meaningful. Good.

Edit:

Resources REQUIRED for some buildings - I don't like that. I prefer the way Civ4 does it, giving you a production bonus if you have the resource but not preventing you from building if you don't have it. I'd like a similar thing for units; would've taken care of the Saltpeter problem with Muskets in civ3, frex, as well as the continuing problem of being unable to build a modern force to go take an Oil, Uranium, or Aluminum source from another modern force. Wouldn't've needed to waste 2 Corps if they'd done it that way.

So is War Weariness gone? Because it isn't mentioned at all in the full post discussing happiness/unhappiness in on www.civilization5.com.

Zeek said:

So is War Weariness gone? Because it isn't mentioned at all in the full post discussing happiness/unhappiness in on www.civilization5.com.

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The Cities thing indicates it'll appear in some form.

TheDS said:

The Cities thing indicates it'll appear in some form.

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Could you show me the relevant quote? The only mention I can find of 'war' on either the discussion of Happiness or Cities is the following:

www.civilization5.com/#/community said:

In wartime, for example, it might be a good idea to focus on production to get military units trained quickly, or you might want to focus on gold to upgrade your obsolete units.

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I think the part about the resources required for constructing some of the buildings just underlines the new importance of the strategic resources in Civ5. As mentioned in other articles, you just not only need resources like iron to build better military units but even several of them to expand your army (I read something about one iron equals five units).

In conclusion, this means that resources are extremely important for building up your empire infrastructure as well as your army. I really like this idea, because it will play a big role in the strategy for conquering other empires. You will obviously focus on the cities near those resources to weaken your enemy on the one hand and expanding your own army on the other.

The resource limitations for your maximum unit production would also lead to a smaller army in the long run, which supports the idea of the one field one unit concept. Furthermore, it makes each unit far more valuable and therefore lets you think more about where to fight and defend.

btw. you should read the posts on http://www.civilization5.com/#/community/

They are a little bit more detailed, e. g. roads are costing maintenance too.

Building maintenance is kind of tedious.

It was announced before that happiness would be an empire wide statistic somewhere before, and I think it explained why they went that way but I don't remember where it was. Does anyone have that link?

Rudimentos said:

btw. you should read the posts on http://www.civilization5.com/#/community/

They are a little bit more detailed, e. g. roads are costing maintenance too.

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The article on gold mentions trade routes to your capital, but not foreign trade routes. Is it safe to assume foreign trade routes are out?

I just read about empire-wide happines and I felt like: this is nonsense. Of course, you can have some factors that affect happines at empire level (war weariness, civics...) but ¿buildings and other specifics? Come on! If I live in, let's say Napoli in Italy, I won't be happier because of theatres being built in Milano and Turin, and Venice, which are in the North, far away from me... Indeed, I would be angry at that there is no theathre being built in the South of the country, that I can access easily...

robcheng said:

Is it safe to assume foreign trade routes are out?

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Right, is confirmed.

Josephias said:

I just read about empire-wide happines and I felt like: this is nonsense. Of course, you can have some factors that affect happines at empire level (war weariness, civics...) but ¿buildings and other specifics? Come on! If I live in, let's say Napoli in Italy, I won't be happier because of theatres being built in Milano and Turin, and Venice, which are in the North, far away from me... Indeed, I would be angry at that there is no theathre being built in the South of the country, that I can access easily...

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But if you had to manage this empire wide, then you could assume, that swapable goods are now distributed in another way.

Merkill said:

Nice to be able to take control of an entire small continent without going broke ,sure in civ 3 i could not afford to make those cities useful but they still gave me area of control.

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I agree, I once spent 700 years of a Civ4 game completely broke due to too fast of expansion. Couldn't even afford a worker, one scientist working towards Courthouses or something like that was my only hope. And of course the barbarians refused to capture any of my cities, and no one would take them for free. That wasn't a game I finished.

And then my most successful war, where I took over the entire continent and found myself losing hundreds of gold at 0% science, with just enough in the treasury (stockpiled from plundering cities) to pull out of the losses before running out of money. Of course I did realize the situation before I had conquered the entire continent, but when I realized it I was out of money and had to conquer more to avoid going broke earlier. Can't say that war was cheap, at least.