Happiness Buildings - City vs. Empire Wide

[brades]

After my first game I still have a few questions and hope someone here has the answer.

1. Happiness is empire wide. When you capture a city, it increases the unhappiness for all of your cities?

2. Burial Tombs and Coliseums. Burial tombs say they give +2 happiness, Coliseum says it gives +4 happiness empire wide. For every burial tomb I build i will get 2 happiness for my empire? So, if I have 10 cities and build a burial tomb in each I end up with 20 happiness for my empire?

OTOH, a coliseum only gives 4 happiness for the entire empire, so build one and be done? Why is the stupid advisor suggesting I build more coliseums even though I already have one?

Overall, so far I am very happy the new one unit per tile and ranged attacks has led to a lot more strategy for attacking/defending. I was able to fend off a fairly nasty invasion by playing smart with my archers and longswordsman. In civ 4 my puny army would've been rolled by an SoD. King difficulty seems about right for civ 4 veterans.

 

[Olleus]

1) Thats a meaningless question. Happiness and unhappiness is ONLY empire wide. It is not attached to individual cities.

2) Every single happiness building you have gives extra happiness. Building 2 colosseums gives a total of 8 happiness and building 3 burial tombs a total of 6. Everything stacks.


Each pop you have gives you 1 unhappiness and each city 2. Extra unhappiness comes from conquering cities. Do not try to think of the happiness each city has - that concept no longer exists.

 

[brades]

Interesting, I was under the impression that only one coliseum should be built because the bonuses do not stack, but if they do that will make dealing with my unhappiness issue much easier.

 

[Ahriman]

Olleus is correct. I'm really liking how this works.

The city-based constraint was lame, because either it was satisfied (in which case extra happiness was useless) or it wasn't. Very binary.
Now, more happiness is always useful.

 

[alpaca]

But more population is always useful, too, so do you really tend to have a lot of excess happiness for the golden ages?

That said, this is one of the changes I like a lot. What I don't like about it is that happiness is kind of the "city maintenance" replacement keeping you from founding too many cities - and that it's the only one.

 

[Onionsoilder]

But more population is always useful, too, so do you really tend to have a lot of excess happiness for the golden ages?

That said, this is one of the changes I like a lot. What I don't like about it is that happiness is kind of the "city maintenance" replacement keeping you from founding too many cities - and that it's the only one.

Yeah, it seems far too easy to reach an "empire limit" were you can't expand any more through anything; not REX, not conquest, nothing. You just lack the happiness to grow your empire to any reasonable size. I have yet to get a single AI to trade luxuries with me, though I have found I can sell them my extra luxuries for gold.

I think next game I will have to invest heavily in the Piety branch. I don't like giving up the science from Rationalism, but the extra population from having Piety probably makes up the lost science, and then provides extra production ontop of that.

 

[Ahriman]

Yeah, it seems far too easy to reach an "empire limit" were you can't expand any more through anything; not REX, not conquest, nothing.

How about, through building more happiness stuff, or getting happiness social policies?
I think its *good* that there is a check on overexpansion.

I have yet to get a single AI to trade luxuries with me

Weird, I have had no trouble getting them to trade on a 1:1 basis when they had a spare, or on a ~3:1 basis when they didn't.

 

[alpaca]

I'm not complaining about happiness limiting expansion, I'm complaining it's the only thing that does

I'd love a hybrid system where you have city maintenance similar to Civ4 that makes early game expanding difficult, especially for lots of small cities, and the happiness variable that limits you even in cases where you are filthy rich. Seeing we even have road maintenance (which isn't a bad idea, either) I think it's a shame we don't have city maintenance.

 

[Ahriman]

I'm complaining it's the only thing that does

Not quite, expanding also reduces your ability to get social policies.

I think a single happiness variable though is much cleaner than city maintenance, which was always very opaque. It was something that happened to you after you built a city. You wouldn't easily know how much a city was going to cost you before you built it.

Its much easier to understand what is going on with the new system.