Happiness cap etc

[ironic_lettuce]

Hi everyone

I've posted a few threads recently on how to improve my game and I'm very grateful for what everyone has told me so far. Now I just have a few other questions that if you could answer I'd be very very grateful!

Firstly, I've seen people mention a happiness cap when it comes to cities, which I assume is the population at which a city will remain happy and you won't get any dissent. One of my problems is that I tend to think that the bigger a coty, the better, but I'm now thinking that when I get to the happiness cap, I should prevent my city growing until I can get another happiness thing in there liek a temple or a resource - is that what most people do?

I know what my biggest problems in this game are but I'm a bit stuck on how to rectify them!

1. I don't expand enough, and I dont expand quickly enough! I get my first 3 or 4 cities out pretty quick, but then my money starts to drop and no matter how many cottages I build i dont seem to be able to even out or go into profit! This leads to me not building any more cities then I get left way behind.

2. I'm not aggressive enough! I very rarely start wars or even think about starting wars, and I've lost count of the number of times someone has declared war on me because im so weak! I'm trying to combat this by specialising one city to be my military production city so hopefully that'll be solved soon, but I still have to change my mindset!

Any more help would be great! I'm determined to get better at this game! I play on Noble, which I know isn't very advanced, but we all have to start somewhere

 

[Pellanor]

Once you get more than one city, you'll have to start lowering your science rate. This is due to the upkeep that you'll have to pay on your cities.

There's a number of things that affect your upkeep costs, but the simple version is that the more cities you have, the higher your upkeep will be. Base upkeep for a city can never go above 6 (per city), though your civic upkeep is also based on the number of cities you have, which can cause the effective upkeep of a city to rise above 6.

Also the money you make from cottages is based on the science slider. If you're making 10 commerce in a city, and you have your science slidder at 100%, then you'll be generating 10 beakers, and 0 gold, base. If you instead had the science slider at 70% you would generate 7 beakers and 3 gold, base. So unless you have a sorce of Gold, which bypasses the slider (and by gold, I don't mean a gold mine), once you get upkeep costs, you'll never turn a profit at 100% sciences.

An example of a source of gold is that which is generated by building the holy building for a religion. The extra 1 gold per city with that religion in it bypasses the commerce slider. So if there's 30 cities with your religion in them, and your upkeep is 25 gold, then you'll be able to make a 5 gold per turn profit at 100% sciences.

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I have the same problem with not being aggresive enough. What I'm doing to work on it is as follows:
1. Start a game one difficulty lower than you usually play on.
2. Set Always War and Raging Barbarians on.
3. Warmonger.

I found that it helped to get me thinking about always having a solid military.

Just one tip: Never let an enemy warrior get between the warrior that you scout with and your capital. Nothing like losing your first city 10 turns into the game because it's not defended.

 

[svv]

Firstly, I've seen people mention a happiness cap when it comes to cities, which I assume is the population at which a city will remain happy and you won't get any dissent. One of my problems is that I tend to think that the bigger a coty, the better, but I'm now thinking that when I get to the happiness cap, I should prevent my city growing until I can get another happiness thing in there liek a temple or a resource - is that what most people do?

It's not so much a happiness cap as it is a penalty on population. Unlike a cap, you can overcome it by various means. The most likely is luxury goods. Make sure you've made the terrain improvements to get all the ones you have in your territory, and see if you can trade for a few more (but don't trade other luxury goods if you only have 1, you'll just lose use of it yourself - trade foods or, if you must, metals).

Another way is buildings, especially temples, and then collusiums, etc.

Another way is upping the culture on the science/culture/gold slider, but I usually don't do that.

Once you get to your max happiness, and can't find any way to improve it, either turn on the "no pop growth" thingy, or (if you're still in slavery) kill some people off making an improvement. The latter works well if your growth is outstripping your health maximum, but not your happiness maximum, since the temporary oppression frowny won't bother you.

 

[ironic_lettuce]

Hi guys, thanks for the replies

I always try and get a holy shrine built in one of my cities and then spread it around to get some money But if I don't get it, then I'm never very good at making money!

That's a good idea with the warmongering, I might give that a try

 

[Welnic]

One way to help learn warmongering is to play a duel pangea map with just one other civ. It really simplifies what you need to do. You don't have to worry about getting behind on tech to the other civs, you don't have to worry about diplomacy. Just crank out some units and go.

 

[cabert]

a few things:
- running 60% research, 40% gold is fine = you make more beakers with 60% of 50, than 100% of 25. Expand!
- building a cottage is not enough, you must work it!
- a gold/silver/gem mine is in early stages much better than a cottage + they give happiness, more so with forges in your cities

About happiness cap, you can let population grow past the limit if you can feed your rebel(s). It's just not doing much good.
Avoiding growth isn't a good solution.
Good solutions are :
- working tiles and specialists so that you don't grow too soon
- whip away 2 or more people for something useful, like a happiness building (theatre, temple, forge, market, ...)
- move up the culture slider until you gain more happiness (like a ressource, a wonder, a vassal [warlords only], peace treaty, ...)

 

[Pantastic]

I advise never using the avoid growth button, it's pretty much always the worst choice. If you're running slavery, then whipping excess population is the way to go. If you're running caste system, just run more specialists to avoid growth. If you're up to emancipation, your cities should be large enough that pop growth is really slow most of the time and you don't want to waste it, if you're having happiness problems at this point you probably want to look at using the cultural slider for happiness.