Happiness System in Civ 5 Vox Populi Explained by Milae

Well I for one definitely did not understand happiness at all, and I almost never get far enough into the late game to see the problems described here. I have a lot more sympathy for efforts to revamp happiness now.
 
There are a few things that I wasn't aware of and that change the way I play:
- Urbanization local unhappiness is not capped with city size -> Therefore if max happiness and no unhappiness through urbanization a city can't get unhappy.
- The baseline for the unhappiness system, median of all cities on the map, is only(!) updated when a city grows. -> Therefore unhappiness can be reduced if a city is not growing in size but in yields.

So I now make sure that there is always enough global happiness by using a lot more Great Admirals (and the reason I play a Portugal game now :)) and I make sure that there is no urbanization unhappiness.
 
Yeah, in general it's not very complicated, but the tooltip is filled with so many numbers with decimals, percentages and () that it becomes a bit confusing to grasp.
 
My main question is, how is he already on robotics in 1836?? In my most recent came it's 1920 something and I'm the most advanced civ and I'm still using cavalry and fusiliers.
 
DingoBongo said:
My main question is, how is he already on robotics in 1836?? In my most recent came it's 1920 something and I'm the most advanced civ and I'm still using cavalry and fusiliers.
Click to expand...

Can I ask what level you are playing on, as I have noticed similar things in my games. I am not very good & usually play warlord/prince, but notice how people who play on the highest levels always seem to get to the modern ages quickest. This seems to be the reverse of what should be happenning. I would add I don't play with the Tech brokering/trading which help this or ancient ruins which give you a big lift early on.
 
Higher difficulties don't necessarily make the game harder to play, it just makes the AIs much faster so you also have to be much faster as well in order to win. Also in some ways high difficulties actually help with techs since their cost is reduced slightly when other civs have them and you can also get tech steals and stuff. The full series is on my channel if you want to see how I ended up there.
 
Milae said:
Higher difficulties don't necessarily make the game harder to play, it just makes the AIs much faster so you also have to be much faster as well in order to win. Also in some ways high difficulties actually help with techs since their cost is reduced slightly when other civs have them and you can also get tech steals and stuff. The full series is on my channel if you want to see how I ended up there.
Click to expand...

Trade Routes are also a big factor. Because the Deity AIs have so much science, when you leach off of that with a Trade Route, you get much more science than you would playing on King for example. That combined with simply more optimum play at those levels (aka in order to play at deity you really need to know how to optimize your yields)...leads to a faster game.
 
I feel like the biggest tech boost from higher levels is stealing techs. You can often catch right up to the AI by stealing four techs in a row pretty quickly. Which requires them to have all those techs for you to steal in the first place.

There was also a tech rebalance in this mod at some point, fairly recently I think?
 
First off, super helpful video. A couple questions that come up:
  • I'm having trouble managing distress. Granted, I learned about avoiding growth pretty late on in my game, but at this point every city is locked. Almost all of my cities have every improvement, and still are unhappy almost entirely due to distress. Is the only way around this to stay on avoid growth and just spam public works?
  • After locking all my cities, when - if ever - is it a good idea to unlock avoid growth?
  • Is there any way to easily see what my max happiness is (total pop minus vassals) so I know if I'm at my cap already?
 
DingoBongo said:
First off, super helpful video. A couple questions that come up:
  • I'm having trouble managing distress. Granted, I learned about avoiding growth pretty late on in my game, but at this point every city is locked. Almost all of my cities have every improvement, and still are unhappy almost entirely due to distress. Is the only way around this to stay on avoid growth and just spam public works?
  • After locking all my cities, when - if ever - is it a good idea to unlock avoid growth?
  • Is there any way to easily see what my max happiness is (total pop minus vassals) so I know if I'm at my cap already?
Click to expand...

1. Pretty much yeah, depending on tech and empire size sometimes there's no way to fix your unhappiness without spamming some public works to get the needs to a reasonable point.
2. If you can fix their needs (usually requires some public works) you can let them grow again. If you hover over the needs it should tell you what the needs will be if you grow (it takes the updating to new median into account if you've had the city growth locked for ages).
3. No clue
 
If you have more happiness than population, definitely keep growing. Avoid growth is a death trap in this case.
 
Thanks for sharing, OP. I've played VP for a while now, but I did not know yield unhappiness was capped at city pop! Never really noticed because most cities automatically assigned specialists that pushed unhappiness over the cap - I really need to start micromanaging cities more :lol:
 
Roche14 again, thank you very much for this link. For not-so-hardcore players with limited intelligence who need more than ... hmm ... 23 minutes and 30 seconds to understand the mechanics of happiness, it's a great video. I have seen it over and over again to evolve and improve my game skills.
 
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