Read the report I posted. IIRC that was at immortal, and the strategy was easy, spam settlers, build happy buildings, and science ones, trade post spam, build enough units for war, win however you want.
T-Hawk's concluding remarks just show how badly balanced the game is still, almost two years after release. You don't get a game this imba this late into it's life-cycle unless the original design was fatally flawed and the development workers didn't understand those flaws.
Ok, I've just read this report. First, he speaks about "happiness bubble", means it's more like an economic phenomenon than a simple carthesian mean. And he is fairly right about it. Because things like wonders or policies are based on percentages, that are hardly monitorable. Second, he uses shamelessly all the happiness bonuses, be them from policies, wonders or unique buildings. Actually I'm doing the same, but I don't play on Deity, so I know I can't count on them in higher difficuly levels. Third, he plays on Emperor, not Deity, and that pretty sums it all up.
Without Egypt UB (so with all other civs), wonders and SPs, one can easily see that happiness in unmanageable with solely luxury resources. T-Hawk himself was dependent of its global happiness level, and we can feel that he can't really do much about it, except streamlining the game to it more or less. Rather more than less here.
Then, you just have to accept that other people may be dependent of it in the same way. Those people, including myself, don't necessarily understand the importance of the different and rather seemingly
unsignificant bonuses build-up. By the way, T-Hawk probably didn't understood them first. He says he played a lot at the game. To add to the confusion, there is plenty other ways to play, like choosing other SPs. Or building settlers. (for that part, note that he plays on a large map, that let him to choose various new luxury resources, when on standard (small) ones, you most of the time end up with the two ones of your capital, 1 or 2 more if you are lucky, the other ones have to be taken from enemies, yet it happened to me that those enemy capitals had the same resources I already had, and then you ask : "Whyyyy?")
