Civ5's Biggest Weakness

I personally think the biggest design flaw in Civ5 is the Empire Wide approach to happiness. Instead of getting localized effects where specific cities are unhappy (forcibly occupied, or bad defense, or ...) we have a situation where when rome captures athens, the romans are suddenly unhappy. In reality they'd be exultant.

Localized happiness is one of those things that felt real, and it really hurts the experience when instead of celebrating conquering an enemy civilization you're scrambling to deal with a major unhappiness crisis (not just in the forcibly occupied cities but everywhere)!

 

agreed.
I found the new method of happiness to be unworkable. It made me unhappy.

 

It's the AI for me, I'm not too bothered about worldwide happiness, though that system isn't perfect either (see: ICS).

I did prefer city specific happiness, but there are bigger problems to tackle first for me.

Hopefully the upcoming patches make us both happier!

 

It should be simple:
-Unhappiness is local
-Happiness from buildings is local
-Happiness from luxuries is global, maybe needed to be connected by trade routes
-Effects from unhappiness is both global and local. As in, one city is unhappy, -25% production/growth/etc. Over 60% of cities unhappy, -25% culture, -25% production/growth etc in all cities, even those uneffected.

IE: New York is size 10. Lets say thats 10 unhappiness. They would recieve 5 happiness from buildings THEY have built, ie collusseum. They would also get, say 10 happiness from luxuries coming from, say Washington and San Francisco.

 

Happiness from Luxuries worked well in the local system.. each city connected to the luxury by roads gets a +1 happiness bonus.

ICS has been a problem in most versions of Civ (other than the Civ 3 unfun corruption based on size stuff). It has been discussed in depth in many threads but the key factor is a size 1 city gets to work two tiles so expanding a lot gives you access to more tiles per point of population.

I think global happiness actually helps neutralize ICS somewhat because it makes it hard to expand before you have the techs to get your happiness buildings, and it makes it difficult to expand without either a lot of supporting gold, or a site that actually has good production for building things like colliseums.

 

I think that is an excellent approach.

 

I must say that one of my favorite parts of Civ 1 were those cheesy "We Love the King Day" parades and Civil Disorder riots lol. It really gave me the feeling of a living, breathing empire.

 

I'd like:

-Unhappiness is local
-Happiness from buildings is local
-Happiness from luxuries is local
-Effects from unhappiness are mostly local, but if a certain nearby cities are all simulaneously unhappy then they can split from the empire through civil war.

 

That's even more excellent.

 

I think the system works, not as a representation of happiness, but as a gameplay mechanism and a mechanism to ensure all your cities do not reach a certain size (almost invariably similar) and then plateau. I prefer having a big New York and a small Buffalo with shared happiness than a New York and Buffalo of almost the same size with individual happiness levels. (Of coures how individual is it when they all have the same resources and happiness buildings?)

 

I think it works fine how it is, but I would like health to be reintroduced as a local system with

-Unhealthiness is local
-Healthiness from buildings is local
-Healthiness from luxuries is local
-Effects from unhealthiness are mostly local, but if a certain nearby cities are all simulaneously unhealthy then they can split from the empire through civil war.
(thanks LordTC)

 

For me the biggest weakness is the lack of vassals, I always think it's such a bother to hunt down every single city of a particular Civ to get rid of them.

I like the new happiness system though.

 

Returning it to the Civ 4 system would be awesome !


On the other hand a system where you can find a common happiness counter together with a happiness counter for each city would be nice.

 

I think this system was designed so that you could assign certain cities to do certain things. Building a units in one city and then building happiness buildings in another. This way you can focus on other production while at the same time keeping all your cities happy. Otherwise due to longer build times in civ5 you would never be able to expand, build military units, and build tech buildings until the late game because you would be too busy building happiness buildings. I do believe that if local happiness was put into civ5 the whole game would have to be reworked.

 

You have to build happiness everywhere if you're going to stay in the positive. As for building units, who does that? I can't see any point in devoting one city to unit production. By the end of the game it would have built what 6 units? I just build wealth and buy them. If you go for Stone Hedge right away you'll unlock enough social policies to get your happiness back on track and ICS sprawl the cities needed for a lot of cash. I don't even build research buildings. I've found those to be a waste of my time also. A library, why?

 

A library is one of the most powerful buildings in the game IMO. Assuming that there are no CSs or other science buildings, they increase each cities' science output by 50%

 

Yep, I agree with the OP. The global happiness isn't fun and makes no sense. Why would a coliseum built in one cityh make the entire civilization happy? Why would annexing a city make the entire civilization unhappy? It's illogical and it's my biggest problem with the game.

The problem is they tried to make happiness instead of the economy the limit to unending expansion and it's stupid.

 

That was already the case witt IV and III. It makes also perfect sence local people are "less unhappy" while there is a strong garison keeping order. All that is gone.

 

Unless I'm trying to launch a space shuttle I don't even see the point. I can pay for a diplomacy victory, and do research agreements to get there. If I'm going for domination I just pay the military city states for updated units. Social policies, same thing no need for science.