Happiness limit even more broken post-patch?

Okay, I am hoping some more experienced Civ V players might enlighten me here.

It seems to me that the new implementation of the happiness limit (done apparently in an attempt to neutralize the ICS exploit) doesn't just limit your expansion. It would seem to me that it puts an absolute cap on it.

Here is what I mean. Crap tactical AI aside, I was having a great and enjoyable game on a Terra jostling elbows for the lead score with about 4 other strong AI civs.

When Nappy became prima inter pares, so to speak, the other 3 gang-rushed him in the modern era. I bided my time and then backstabbed Bill Clinton and unleashed my Russian blitzkrieg against the American cities.

I ended up taking them all. Had to basically puppet all of them but still. Now I was top dog and with a great army and a pretty decent strategic position to take on the other big AIs.

But then I looked at my happiness of 5. With no wonders left to get and no real social policies available for reducing it. Had every resource. Had Colosseum/Theatre/Stadium/Circus built wherever applicable.

So basically, pre-patch I could have dropped a bunch of new cities in the new world and deployed my massive gold reserves to just buy enough happiness buildings to sustain me on my march to world conquest.

But now, I see NO way to EVER increase my happiness. Which will go down each and every turn that one of my 15 puppet cities adds a citizen. And god forbid I should actually want to, oh, conquer the rest of the world. Or even ONE AI city for that matter. My happiness can basically only go down. If I annex the puppet cities or build new ones I can get no benefit from constructing happiness buildings. Because if you can only add happiness up to the level of city pop then each new city can only be a net negative - you get punished for adding to number of cities and can only benefit from buildings up to the pop limit.

FRUSTRATING. And meaning no offense to all you non-bloodthirsty types, but I go back to Civ I and aside from one instance of shooting off the stupid spaceship in 1994 I think every single one of my games has gone the route of brutal conquest/domination. This is what I like. And the patch has basically taken that option away as far as I can see.

Am I wrong about this? Please, someone, tell me what the trick is that I have not yet figured out to keep happiness from going on its inexorable one way trip into the red.

BTW I never understood why you had to jack up the game mechanics JUST to counteract a particular exploit. Every game has exploits! Don't use them if they bother you so much.

 

Yes, you are wrong. You're complaining that due to a change in the last patch, you can't play the game in exactly the same way as before.

If you want to have a HUGE number of cities, then you need to plan for that. You can do this by following some of these rules:

1. Never let a city grow beyond the happiness boost it is providing itself. For example, if you can only build a circus and coloseum (no theatre yet), then don't let it grow past size 6.
2. Target the Forbidden Palace, or the similar social policy
3. Annex cities instead of puppeting them so that you can prioritize happiness buildings. Or, even better, replace them with a settler.

Once you have a core empire with tons of cities, you really shouldn't feel you NEED to continue puppeting every city that you take over... just start razing the new ones.

 

What policy trees do you have currently unlocked? Unless you've got liberty, freedom, honor, piety, and order already, there should still be a tree with something to offer you regarding happiness boosts.

Also, some things to keep in mind with puppets:

1) When your happiness is low, like it is now, they will focus on building happiness buildings, which are all razed automatically when a city is captured/traded. As long as they've got the hammers to build faster than they grow, you'll stay in the yellow.

2) You can focus a puppet's growth by building/not building trading posts. Puppets always work tiles in descending order of gold, killing population growth if necessary. Build trading posts on hills and plains, raze the ones on grasslands, and you'll stop population growth while getting extra hammers to help the puppets build happiness buildings faster.

 

Forcing a player to decide what to do early in the game, with no way to change or fix it later, really, really, stinks.

 

SO the only way to go is to burn every conquered city to the ground (creating loads of unhappiness for a while) and to pre-emptively limit all cities to population of 6? Well how would limiting the population to 6 help? So that I could build a colosseum and Circus and reduce my unhappiness by a total of 6. Getting whacked for 6 unhappiness on city size and whatever they hammer you on for number of cities.

Obvious first point that this is not particularly immersive or fun.

And again, if you have all policies and the FP and the resources you basically cannot add a single point of population without lowering happiness. Can't build cities, can't grow cities, can't take cities.

And it is not really a matter of keeping me from playing the way I like to. Well, actually, it is. I SHOULD be able to play the way I want to. It should be possible to conquer the world if you WANT to. Isn't that what this franchise is supposed to be about? Giving you choices. Not forcing you to employ gamey tactics completely absent from any portion of human history.

Ah yes, the hordes of Temujin swept across Asia.... Taking every city.... Executing 100% of the population and burning every building to the ground...... And then plopping down some settlers on the site to rebuild the city from scratch. But only up to population of X, because the global unhappiness of the Khanate was at its max-out point.

Uh, I think that's it for me with CiV till the next re-working. My two cents is that you need a mechanism to limit empire size that does not involve a simplistic absolute cap on it. Almost makes me nostalgic for the CivIII 1 shield 1 loaf "corruption cities."

 

Each city gives unhap per city (reduce by forbiden city and SP), or nonbuidling per city bonuses (liberty tree +0.5) With all of those per city you gain net +0.5 happiness.

Each pop in city gives unhappiness, but for ghandi it gives half and theocracy reduces it by 0.25.
So if you take this or play ghandi (or both), you get 3,2 or even 1 unhappiness per pop.
And city gives at most its pop in happiness. So with SP only, build coloesseum and grow to size 4 and your pop gives 3 unhap and you have 4 hap per city. (And later you can add two more hap. buildings, so you can have 14Hap per city and (with size 14) 10 unhap per city. (without being ghandi)

Do both and lategame city gives you 4.5 net hapinness.
Add luxury, wonders and other bonuses and you can have HUGE hapiness reserve.

But if most cities are pupets, it can take AGES before they build those happiness buildings, and sometimes its hard to make them grow (because they prefer gold over food), but you cun put food in their mouth with maritimes.

 

Oh, wait, I see! I don't have the honor SP that reduces unhappiness by one for every garrison.

Cool! I'll just have to wait 40 more turns to be able to unlock that. And by that time I will have been able to build enough infantry units to garrison about half of my puppet cities. Seeing as I can only build units in about 3 cities and not have said units literally take 40 turns to build.

All the while having built nothing else. And at the cost of, what, -350 a turn in gold on new unit maintenance.

Okay, HOI 2 Arsenal of Democracy here I come. Where I can smash the fascist serpents without having to do all manner of utterly silly things just to keep the Rodina functioning. And after defending CiV for months I think I have officially slid into the "hater" camp now.

 

i have no trouble maintaining happiness with 69 cities...
if you have piety's theocracy for the -25% from population, cities with 12 people and the three regular happiness buildings net you positive global happiness. throw in forbidden palace and order's planned economy and things get even easier.

 

Welcome to the dark side, young Skywalker. Enjoy the cookies.

 

You don't have to do all those things. (and the +hap per garrison is one of THE WORST options, because maintanance cost grows)

How it work is not elegant, but it is possible to make large empire using multiple approaches. But player MUST take one before he spends his SPs and makes taking now one too hard.

So player must think now, great deal. (But he must think using information that is not presented well in game)

 

Why do you need to have a garrisoned unit in every city? Really, why do you need to do anything right now? As long as you're not in unhappiness, the only thing extra happy gets you is golden ages, and those are easier to come by through chaining great people expenditure than happiness anyway. Even if you do get below 0, as long as you're above -10 the only penalty is reduced city growth, which was leading you into unhappiness anyway, so you'll just get more time for puppets to build happiness buildings for you. Mild unhappiness isn't nearly as crushing as it was in Civ 4, you really just need to stay above -10 to avoid problems.

Make sure all your cities are in the trade network to get the Liberty tree's happiness bonus, switch citizens over to specialists where you can for Freedom's unhappiness reduction, and plant trade posts to help your puppets get more hammers and less food. If you think you might need it to avoid -10, you can focus on getting the garisson happiness bonus from the Honor tree and garrison a couple units to stay above that until the puppet's finish their happiness buildings.

 

happiness buildings are not auto-razed, the ai just doesn't always build them in smaller cities at very high levels due to its happiness buff. post patch I have captured many cities in industrial/modern age with a colosseum or theater.

 

mmmmmmmmkay. so you're upset that you didn't plan properly for the huge population unhappiness penalty that you would get from conquering the world? a better solution is to sell some of the captured cities to your next ai victim for lots of $$$, use that money to annex/courthouse/happy-fy your other cities, then retake the sold cities. alternative, at 5 happiness you're still doing fine and you can just continue the steamrolling. I just took over a modern era civ with a slight tech lead over me (but no defense for my 15 mech inf and 6 rocket artillery with logistics), my bpt literally skyrocketed from 600 to 1000 in 15 turns. who cares about further growth when your science is that much higher? also, you can starve poor/weaker cities to further reduce your unhappiness.

 

This game you've not planned for it and it's hard to recover. Next game you can get it done without trouble. It's not a bad thing if you need to develop new concepts and gain personal experience in each game.

 

Technically, the existence of 'exploits' like building lots of cities does have implications for multiplayer. But mostly this was done out of condescension (or if I'm really charitable, blinkered idealism). Some players thought this strategy was degenerate, and they knew the game would be more fun for you if you were prevented from using it, because you obviously aren't capable of choosing the right way to play the game on your own. And the devs agreed with them. Indeed, Firaxis have always thought along these lines. Play the game the way they imagined it, or don't play at all.

 

You are taking your preconceived notions of how the game should be played and letting it get in the way of how it actually needs to be played. Post-patch, you need to carefully manage your happiness levels as you get big. When you conquer, you need to carefully select which cities you want to puppet and which you want to raze. I routinely raze about half of what I conquer. The more you puppet, the more you limit your ability to do future conquests. You also need to plan ahead for conquest, by choosing at least some of the happiness improving SP. There's a lot of them - make sure you get some. This is crucial to reducing unhappiness and letting you continue to conquer. There's no reason you can't conquer the entire world on a standard size map and finish with positive happiness.

But you can't do it mindlessly - you do need to plan ahead.

 

Every game does that. The whole point of a game is to specify a ruleset, a challenge, and a limited set of tools to meet that challenge within the ruleset. These combined create a particular intended game experience. That is the very definition of a game, computer or otherwise. If a way is found to circumvent or exploit the ruleset such that it eliminates the challenge and/or breaks the intended experience, it's going to be fixed to better capture in the intended experience. In the case of happiness, not having the pop limit was allowing for spamming small no-growth cities with Colosseum/Theater/Stadium and was eliminating the challenge of absorbing acquired cities or supporting large populations. The game was altered to restore this challenge. There's nothing condescending about it, it's merely the reason any other change is ever made in a patch: to better present the intended game experience.

 

Honestly, more than half the cities the AI builds are utter crap. I've found that I raze approximately 2/3rds of all the cities I ever take from the AI.

 

Build Courthouses in all decent enemy cities, then burn them to the size dictated by their happiness buildings (alternatively, build more happiness buildings if you want to keep the city strong). Burn all marginal cities. This should free up a large amount of happiness.

Use Freedom as your SP. It's essentially +1 happiness per city after you get a University up, and even better late game when you'll want to run more Engineers if you grab Civil Society or Statue of Liberty.

 

And removing this was good thing IMO.