All About Cities, Happiness, and Gold in Civ5

[_hero_]

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.

Based on each new city creating unhappiness at a greater rate than extra population in a single city would, I suspect that ICS is going to be hard to pull off, though not impossible because, as stated, each happiness building boosts your entire empires happiness rather than just the home city. This in turn means that ICS is going to require that you also build up your cities.

 

[Marshall Thomas]

Does anyone know why they removed foriegn trade routes? Foriegn trade was so important historically, that I can't imagine they'd remove it. Is it perhaps represented in another way? Thanks in advance

also: does anyone know why the designers decided to go with empire-wide happiness instead of individual city happiness?

 

[nzcamel]

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.

Sounds like you needed to invest in some infrastructure: courthouses and markets spring to mind. This would be because 99% of the time in the real world you would have to do something similar to stop your civilization from falling apart. Or maybe choose a civ who are aggresive & financial....Is it that hard...??

 

[BCAgamer]

One down side to Civ 3 was that it forced the player to take a low infrastructure-high city founding strategy early on because you couldn't afford to build many buildings. Hopefully Civ 5 won't have that problem, regardless of the building maintenance. Maybe some buildings don't cost any maintenance?

 

[Minor Annoyance]

Yeah, I was wondering about that. They removed building maintenance costs in civ4 so people would build up cities rather than spam many cities like often happened in civ3. Perhaps city spam is no longer an issue the way civ5 works regardless of building maintenance.

 

[Nials]

I am sort of pleased to hear that building maintenance is back, which should help cure my buildaholicism.

On the other hand, I hope it won't lead to ICS-like conditions as in Civ3, which has already been mentioned several times. It will be interesting to see which constraints the developers have thought of to prevent this.