Hippodrome, Pavillion or Theater?

[reddishrecue]

Which of these theaters would you prefer? The hippodrome, the pavillion or the theater? other?

 

[SamSniped]

I love the hippodrome. Extra happiness is always needed.

 

[Zx Zero Zx]

Well considering that the Theater is a happiness building in my eyes I would have to say more happiness is always better than culture.

 

[Giant Wolfman]

Hippodrome. Double happiness over theater when running the slider, and the base happiness comes from a much more accessible resource? Very nice. Pavilion adds a little when you're going culture or in border culture wars, but not really a big difference.

 

[GreatProfit]

As usual it always depends on the situation and context. Qin's IND synergizes well with the Pavilion for cultural victories, while the Hippodrome has no particular synergy with IMP/SPI and kataphraktoi. Also, personally by the time I get Drama I'd either have gotten Monarchy, Mids, lots of luxury resources, or otherwise dealt with happiness bottlenecks. Hippo's extra happiness can play a role in very late game cultural victories when running Caste System over Emancipation, but Pavilion helps you obtain the victory faster. Hippo also does not let you run 2 artists like theatres can, so if for some reason you are on Eman and you need to run artists, Hippo cannot help you with that.

 

[lymond]

I voted for Hippodrome simply as it has more flexibility in most games. Pavilion is very nice for Culture games, but otherwise worthless in other games. Although I do think it odd that they eliminated specialists slots for the Hippo.

Thing with Hippo though is that if you use the slider in the later game to increase happiness you don't have to raise the culture slider as much. That's pretty huge when you think about it as you go for score.