Global Social Policy Happiness?

MarqFJA87

Chieftain
Joined
Dec 8, 2020
Messages
41
Currently doing a post-Space Victory plan to expand my empire through both founding new cities and conquering from other civs until I secure my position as the hyperpower of this match's world, as payback for the other civs getting permanently pissed at me since the Medieval Era just because I decided to wipe Byzantium from the face of the map to both seize very valuable territory (I was basically being boxed into a tundra-heavy corner with little room for expansion) and eliminate the potential for being backstabbed in revenge. Soon enough, I've started to struggle with maintaining my happiness level in the positive, going from being regularly between 30-50 on average to now hovering around just 10, despite having taken a lot of happiness-boosting social policies (currently aiming for the Exploration one, then the Tradition ones) and also built several (but not all) of the happiness-boosting wonders (damn Elizabeth nicked the Forbidden Palace before I could).

In the process of trying to figuring out how to fix my woes, I've noticed that in the list of happiness sources tooltip, I'm getting exactly zero "global social policy happiness". What the hell is up with that? Pretty sure at least some of the policies that I've taken give global happiness rather than local; is this a glitch, or is this a holdover from the vanilla/G&K versions of the game that is no longer functioning?
 
Huge map, and 52 cities (36 of which I had founded). My Ideology is Order, for the record, and I've gotten all of the happiness-related tenets.

You know, in hindsight I should've thoroughly analyzed all the local and global happiness bonuses that I could theoretically have, then calculated the average city population size that would keep my net happiness significantly into the positive double digits, and set my cities to avoid growth when they reach that size.
 
Huge map, and 52 cities (36 of which I had founded). My Ideology is Order, for the record, and I've gotten all of the happiness-related tenets.

You know, in hindsight I should've thoroughly analyzed all the local and global happiness bonuses that I could theoretically have, then calculated the average city population size that would keep my net happiness significantly into the positive double digits, and set my cities to avoid growth when they reach that size.

on huge map every city only cost 1.8 happiness which can not be covered by local happiness.
so if you already have Meritocracy, which provide at least 1 global happiness for each city,
the difference between global and local happiness should not be an issue for 50 cities.
 
Even if several cities have grown to around or above 30?
the difference from global happiness and local happiness is that global happiness can always provide you happiness, while local happiness is limited by population of a city.
So all unhappiness from population can be covered by local happiness in that city. Only unhappiness from city itself can't be covered by local happiness.
30 population seems too much to be covered by local happiness.
if you want more global happiness, there are 3 ways to provide global happiness (or works similarly) that scales with numbers of cities: Meritocracy, Aristocracy, and Forbidden Palace
 
Yeah, I'm aiming for Aristocracy after I get Naval Tradition (as I already unlocked Exploration), since I have a lot of coastal cities with both the three relevant structures and big enough populations for the policy to give me several dozen happiness points immediately. If only the Great Writers (and other culture-oriented GPs, for that matter) weren't bottlenecked to a single city, unlike other GPs; the next one is slated to come in over 100 turns!

I still wonder what the deal is with the "Global Social Policy Happiness" being valued at zero, though. Maybe if I licked Aristocracy and Monarchy, that would change?

Oh, incidentally, a word of advice to newer players: Take care of the fact that the Patronage policy that boosts the happiness of gifted luxury resources diminishes in usefulness if you are engaging in a world conquest like I am doing, as you will almost inevitably acquire more and more luxury resources that were once only accessible through either trade deals or city-state alliances. Thankfully the policy isn't rendered useless since it also boosts strategic resource quantity.
 
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So... I finally took Aristocracy the other day, and confirmed my suspicion: That is what the tooltip was referring to by Global Social Policy Happiness, at least as of BNW. I don't know if pre-BNW versions similarly had that as the only source of happiness that qualified for that category.

Also, the absolute enormity of its effect - gave me practically 300+ happiness in one fell swoop, thanks to my large number of 20+ pop cities! - made reevaluate its importance; I'm actually thinking of revising my approach to social policies to take it into account at various stages of a given game.
 
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