Empire-wide happiness = more natural mix of city sizes

[Pazyryk]

My favorite thing about empire-wide happiness is that your empire can have a variety of city sizes. In civ4, playing as a builder, all my cities would always be exactly size n (or n + 1 for capital) where n was determined by my tech level (available buildings) and luxury resources. Any new cities would always come up to n very quickly. This always seemed very unnatural to me. In the rare cases that I did build an outpost city with terrible food tiles (to claim a strategic resource or for military position), it always felt like I was loosing out. You have to pay distance and number-of-cities maintenance for a city that can never reach the the happy cap -- yuck.

In civ5, there is no reason for all of your cities to be the same exact size. Your empire will develop more naturally with large core cities and smaller frontier cities (the frontier becoming core as you develop empire-wide infrastructure). It's little cost now to have an outpost city that can never grow big. Yes, you have to pay the the per-city happy cost. But every population point will cost the same whether you put it in the new city or in a core city, and the core city will often be a better choice because you have more buildings to multiply that citizen's productivity. All in all, I think it will produce a much more realistic (and interesting) mix of big and small cities.

 

[wapamingo]

Interesting. I did not think on this.

 

[Helmling]

I didn't either, because I didn't have this happen to me often.

Food and growth rate limited my city sizes, not happiness. How big were your cities? By the late game, the happy cap really isn't affecting any but my largest cities.

 

[Helmling]

Thinking further about this empire-wide happiness, I don't think I like it. Some events should affect one city and not others, while some should be empire-wide. Oh well, small complaint.

 

[Avatan]

What worries me is that it now the size of your empire which is dictated by your technology.

In cIV if your technology could sustain size 10 city, you could still choose how many you wanted (at the risk of tanking your econmy, i agree). But now it will determine the number of citizen you have empire-wide. Early Expansion and Medieval domination victory will be rendered impossible. Maybe that is precisely the point after all...

 

[Matjillam]

I never thought of this, nice thinking

And I totally agree, now it will make sense to have more dynamic size cities. I allways hated the beginning of cIV where all new cities had a happy cap at 4-6 pop. A pop which they hit rather quickly.

Now, I have to decide whether or not my capitol should become even greater than it is or if I should start developing my other not so developed cities that need some loving before being usefull. Big decisions... I like it!

 

[Tomice]

They changed enough that we'll have to rethink 90% of our strategies, and that's great. I'm so looking forward to try things out