Golden Ages ... all three of them

[Druin]

In the last 3 out of 4 games I have played, as Siam, Egypt, Persia, I have only had three real golden ages.

Here is what happens: I play the game, build stuff, warmonger like a champ, ect. Sometime in the BC's my excess happiness sends me into my first GA. During this time I am happy about the GA mechanic and I build stuff and make money ... yay!

That GA ends and I go back to business as usual. I build things, keep my empire happy, pay for my egregious puppet state building choices, get ahead in key military techs ... all that jazz.

Usually somewhere between that first GA and 1500AD I start a second GA in order to build a key wonder or two (usually CI for longer GA's)

Then sometime around 1500AD I enter into my second GA from happiness. Obviously, because I have lived to 1500AD I have already won the game, but this is what really solidifies it. During this happiness GA, boosted by CI, I build the Taj. Now my GA will last for ~50 turns! Cool! So I burn all my extra GG's and que up building the Louvre, for another 2 golden age starting Great Artists I also hit up the GA SP's during this time. (if applicable)

This GA lasts around 100 turns and I will end the majority of my games while it is going on. Also, because you don't accrue happiness while in a GA, I will absolutely never get another GA. EVER. Even if the game took me another 100 turns after my silly long GA, it wouldn't be enough to start from 0 happiness and get to the HUGE amount needed for GA #3

So my thoughts are:

GA's are really powerful in Civ V which I really like. I felt they were too "precious" in Civ IV and I just used them to slingshot from a "maybe" victory on immortal to an "absolutely" or, if that wasn't possible, as a free spiritual trait.

GA's from happiness are a super cool mechanic!

GA's from happiness are less of a "get tons of happiness and turn that into GA's" as they are "get your assured two and no more"

The Piety tree is woefully underpowered by this concept. I had that tree in my Persia game, and despite running at +40 happiness the entire game and having the full Piety tree, I still only saw two GA's from happiness.

What are other people's thoughts on the GA mechanic?

Note: I like how the actual GA's feel while I am in them, but I don't like the mechanics that allow massive stacking on GA's so they happen independent of how happy my empire is.

 

[aimlessgun]

Yeah it's true that you will only ever get like 2 GA from happiness, no matter how much happiness you have lying around (at least for realistic levels of happiness). Maybe they should make them more frequent but shorter? Hmm..

The crazy length of GA's, not sure what to think about it, what the difficulty and costs are of setting it up. But it does seem not too difficult to engineer a super-duper golden age.

 

[SDEngineer]

If you're playing expansionist, then yeah, you won't get many GA's, since you'll be expanding whenever your happiness surplus gets to a certain point.

But it's pretty easy to pop a lot of GA's if you're playing a small civilization.

On my Gandhi cultural win (3 city Bollywood achievement), I was rolling in GA's - at a guess, I'd say I had 6 or 7 triggered by happiness. My Happiness surplus averaged about 40 happiness per turn for most of the game (and it was 50+ for a lot of it - used my GPT surplus to ally a lot of city states, which gave me access to most of the happiness resources in the game)

 

[duxup]

In one of my early games without realizing it I had a couple cities just pumping out great artists and later a few other cities pumping out various other great people. I'm guessing the lower difficulty level was part of the cause and I just kept stacking golden age on top of golden age (really it just makes them longer), it was crazy.

 

[swordspider]

As a warmonger you should have had plenty of GG's to sack into a GA.

 

[aimlessgun]

Haha I don't think people are reading the whole post. He's popping off tons of GAs, but there are effectively only 3 because of chains.

 

[Ahriman]

I'm not sure I see what is wrong with only three golden ages.

How many civs have had more than that in earth's history?

 

[Druin]

sorry, perhaps I wasn't very clear in what I was asking.

Because of stacking GA's combine with the insane length of those GA's and how many ways there are to get them, the happiness -> GA mechanic is basically a "get two GA's every game" weather you are +50 happy or -50 happy for the last ~100 turns.

I like the happiness = more GA's idea ... but currently it makes zero difference, I just get my standard two and that is all.

This problem occurs because you can't accrue GA points from happiness while in a GA and it is easy to make your second happiness GA last forever.

I was really wondering how other people felt about it.

P.S. I have found t he size of my empire has little effect on this problem except the second GA comes later with a large empire ... I still always get it though.

 

[civhawaii]

Well its not really "get two every game" If you're getting a 100 turn GA thats getting five 20 turn GA's. I think you should look less at how many GA's you're getting and more at how many turns of GA you get over the course of the game.

Sure you can chain and get super long GA's, but you can also spread them out if you like. Ive gotten 7 or 8 GA's from happiness on a cultural game, but they were only 10-20 turns.

 

[Celevin]

I honestly don't like how the golden age costs go up for each one. What's wrong with it costing 1000 for the first, 1000 for the second, and so on? If a player's actually killing their production for golden ages, they shouldn't suffer.

 

[aimlessgun]

Well its not really "get two every game" If you're getting a 100 turn GA thats getting five 20 turn GA's. I think you should look less at how many GA's you're getting and more at how many turns of GA you get over the course of the game.

Sure you can chain and get super long GA's, but you can also spread them out if you like. Ive gotten 7 or 8 GA's from happiness on a cultural game, but they were only 10-20 turns.

But it doesn't change the problem, which is happiness not accruing to the next GA during all those non-happiness GAs: you have so much time spent in golden ages that your happiness surplus becomes useless.

 

[Druin]

Well its not really "get two every game" If you're getting a 100 turn GA thats getting five 20 turn GA's. I think you should look less at how many GA's you're getting and more at how many turns of GA you get over the course of the game.

Sure you can chain and get super long GA's, but you can also spread them out if you like. Ive gotten 7 or 8 GA's from happiness on a cultural game, but they were only 10-20 turns.

Again, I must have not been clear enough. I am not talking about GA's from anything but happiness. My 100turn GA makes the happiness -> GA function in Civ V pointless because during all 100 turns of that GA I am gaining exactly 0 GA points from my massively happy empire.

In fact, once I reach my second SUPER GA, I usually just sell all my lux resources because having +20 happiness does exactly nothing

So my concern is, no matter what happens, I end up with exactly two GA's from happiness weather or not I try for a happy civ or not. I would actually prefer making GA's shorter in general but easier to get. Not sure how to balance that with Taj/GP's but I would like to see a difference between working hard to get a +30 happiness surplus AND the Piety tree vs. not working to sit at around +10 happiness surplus.

 

[tibbles]

Well, if you didn't play Persia, maybe you'd get a 3rd I was going to check if happiness kept accruing during GAs or not, this answers that question.

Seems outside the rare case of trying to run super high happiness for culture, in general you want to run at 0 or massive negative. Which seems fundamentally flawed, you're rewarding for less happy empires.

 

[Jet082]

In actual history, most golden ages for an empire are infrequent but can be long. The mechanic in the game seems to match that - once you get a golden age it's easy enough to extend it.

I'd rather have an extra long golden age than many small ones. I feel like I get more accomplished during the golden age. I also feel it makes more sense for happiness to NOT effect the count towards a future golden age, otherwise it would probably be quite broken.

 

[Semmel]

In my last game I had so many great persons and so much happyness left over that my economy was not able to survive without golden ages. It was very funny.. but I had like +300 Gold with GA and -200 without. So in my late game, I had almost non-stop golden ages through taking the right wonders, using great people, having a lot of happiness and using social policies. Of course, I could have focused more on money in my cities, but they were such production powerhouses (4-5 cities with more than 100 production per turn) that I didnt want to. That way, the science victory was a joke.. and i build (!) 5 GDR and a lot of other units to conquer the world.. just the science victory was faster than my GDR.. I was playing as Japan btw..