Is Civ VI better with regards to happiness and expansion than V?

[raider980]

Civ 6 is $40 on the 2K site for owners of Civ 5. I'm considering it but would like to know a couple things about Civ 6. Two of the things I hate the most about 5 is unhappiness and how hard it is to found many cities. I know they're related but is Civ 6 better than 5 with regards to these two aspects?

In Civ 5 unhappiness is sooo punishing. I came from Civ 2 and in that game you can give your people Elvis to make them happy. Its a trade off from food and production but you can do it anytime you want. How is happiness in Civ 6?

Expansion. The most fun part of the game for me is exploring and founding new cities. Civ 5 is also very punishing for wide play. From what I've read, it seems like its easier in Civ 6 to found more cities, is that right?

Thanks for any answers.

 

[leandrombraz]

Civ VI replaces happiness with amenities, which is way, way more forgiving. Amenities are local instead of global. Cities need 1 amenity every 2 population and the first 2 pop don't require amenities, so you'll only need 1 amenity when you reach 3 pop, then another when you reach 5, then 7 and so on. There are plenty of sources of amenities and having some negative amenities doesn't hurt you as badly as in Civ V, so even when you manage to go negative, it isn't a big deal.

As for expansion, Civ VI favors wide. There are no penalties for settling more cities, aside from a cost increase for settlers and builders each time you produce one, and it's always better to have more cities. You can also cluster your cities, there's no need to settle them with a perfect 6 tiles distance from each other. It's even beneficial to cluster them. If you like to expand and settle cities at your hearts content, you'll enjoy Civ VI.

 

[Jewelrunna]

Emphatically yes, and some would argue overcentralizingly so. The amenities system is way more manageable and easier to play around than happiness in Civ V. Civ V has an artificial cap that's impossible to play around to an extent. Civ VI amenities are by contrast a problem that has a lot of solutions.

In fact, Civ VI has a problem where you have no real incentives to build tall. Your yields are tied to districts, and the amount of districts you can construct is based on the number of cities. Therefore, the meta naturally forces you to go wide. However, the benefits to going tall are pretty minimal compared to Civ V, in large part because specialists are very underwhelming. You basically get a bunch of cities to 10 pop, and that's it.

Your mileage will vary depending on how you feel about this difference. For me, not having to deal with unhappiness makes it very hard for me to go back. But in Civ V, going wide can be very valuable if you can pull it off; it's not that the rewards aren't there, the game just penalizes you for doing so. But it does feel kinda bad when you grow a city to 25 pop and you aren't really rewarded much for doing so.

 

[jguy100]

Exploring and peacefully expanding is my favorite part of civ. Coming from a civ 3 perspective (where infinite city sprawl was a powerful strategy), civ 6 provides somewhat of a middle ground. Civ 6 definitely seems to favor wide over tall. I feel like most of the punishment from an expansionist policy comes from the per turn financial costs. But other factors (like the larger minimal distance between cities) also quickly comes into play. You’re not going to have a billion cities. But you can still get a fairly large empire, especially since the AI doesn’t seem to value expanding as much.

 

[Haig]

Yeah Civ 6 is better for big empires, the global happiness of Civ 5 was awful.

 

[Mr Jon of Cheam]

Absolutely yes. If they are the two things you dislike about V then I think you'll enjoy VI.

 

[Bibor]

But it does feel kinda bad when you grow a city to 25 pop and you aren't really rewarded much for doing so.

You are rewarded if you make it productive. Working 25 farms or 25 hill mines is a very different thing.

 

[enKage]

Sincerely, everything including Pacman and DynaBlaster, is better than CivV (un)happiness and "don't expand" mode of expansion

 

[Abaxial]

Global un/happiness was my most unfavourite feature of Civ V and a main reason for preferring VI.

 

[Mahi]

The punishment of having negative amnities in Civ 6 is too low in my opinion. I feel like people who say happiness stops them from expanding in Civ V hasn't really learned to play the game. There are tons of ways to unlock happiness in Civ V (resources, social policies, ideology, buildings, religion - heck even natural wonders can help)

Currently I'm playing a civ 5 game with three of my friends (we don't like civ 6 multiplayer since rounds takes forever). We don't war each other until the very late game.

I started on a horrible Island with few luxury resources and no contact with other civs until Astronomy so I knew immediately I needed to focus on happiness if I wanted to expand. So I focused on religion to get some good hapiness beliefs and focused to get circus and colosseum, while gunning for Industrialization to be able to found the first ideology to gain even more happiness..

You see, in civ 5 the lack of amneties/happiness actually forces you to focus on short term and mid term goals to be able to keep the empire expanding. It opens up the game much more than it does in Civ 6. I think people tend to forget that the more restrictions you have, the more you will look for alternative solutions.

It's like Nietzche said
"To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.”

People think they want it nice and easy in their games but they really want all sorts of challenges they can improve on. Overcome frustrations, etc.

 

[Pietato]

Civ 6 is the opposite. They went from one extreme to the other.

 

[Republic of San Montuoso]

Civ 6 is the opposite. They went from one extreme to the other.

Civ 6 is so much the opposite of Civ 5 comparing to happiness and expansion that it became its own problem: going tall, while not punishing, is often peanuts against going wide.

 

[salty mud]

Base Civ V yes, Civ V with Vox Populi no. Vox Populi has a much greater "Civ IV" feel to it, where learge, productive cities are more often than not worthwhile building. You generally want to gobble up the good land, but you have to be careful to suitably build up your cities since they also have local happiness, and not to crash your economy with maintenance costs and low happiness.

I find Civ VI expansion a joke. No real penalties exist except "amenities" which can be safely ignored.

 

[Tiger Genocide]

Base Civ V yes, Civ V with Vox Populi no. Vox Populi has a much greater "Civ IV" feel to it, where learge, productive cities are more often than not worthwhile building. You generally want to gobble up the good land, but you have to be careful to suitably build up your cities since they also have local happiness, and not to crash your economy with maintenance costs and low happiness.

I find Civ VI expansion a joke. No real penalties exist except "amenities" which can be safely ignored.

Civ5 with Vox Populi got the happiness balance right. Some of the older versions of VP it was even harder than the basegame until they fixed it. It's been great for a long time now. One thing I like about VP is if you try to go wide very fast in the early game sometimes the neighbor AIs will get angry and take your cities. They will punish you if you try to play like it is Civ6, like putting down 7 cities in 50 turns. You have to play smart and expand while building the troops to support that to a certain point. You usually can get a quick 3 or 4 down without many units, but you better fix that before tossing down 2-3 more or they will make you pay for it.

I also like how in VP you have different buildings to control different types of happiness. Temples for Religious Unrest, Markets for Poverty, etc. etc. It all affects your global score, but if you have one city that is missing out on something key, you just build the building for that. You don't have to furiously try to make trades for luxuries or warmonger for more luxuries you don't have.

I do not think I have actually seen rebels from lack of amenities in Civ6 before. If I did, I forgot what that looks like.

 

[salty mud]

Civ5 with Vox Populi got the happiness balance right. Some of the older versions of VP it was even harder than the basegame until they fixed it. It's been great for a long time now. One thing I like about VP is if you try to go wide very fast in the early game sometimes the neighbor AIs will get angry and take your cities. They will punish you if you try to play like it is Civ6, like putting down 7 cities in 50 turns. You have to play smart and expand while building the troops to support that to a certain point. You usually can get a quick 3 or 4 down without many units, but you better fix that before tossing down 2-3 more or they will make you pay for it.

I also like how in VP you have different buildings to control different types of happiness. Temples for Religious Unrest, Markets for Poverty, etc. etc. It all affects your global score, but if you have one city that is missing out on something key, you just build the building for that. You don't have to furiously try to make trades for luxuries or warmonger for more luxuries you don't have.

I do not think I have actually seen rebels from lack of amenities in Civ6 before. If I did, I forgot what that looks like.

Yes, VP addresses most of my problems from the base Civ V. I've even somewhat grown to like 1upt, which I thought would never happen! Managing happiness is tricky, but the tools are available to mitigate it. You can trade for luxuries, conquer more, decrease poverty and literacy in your empire and so on. The "distress" score for happiness seems clunky at first, but it actually forces you to push through technologies and improve the food and production output of your cities by improving the surrounding land. It has a real feel of progression and modernisation to it.

Anyway, not to derail OP's thread too much. If you haven't checked out VP yet OP, I strongly recommend you do! I think it's the empire building and expanding game you're looking for.

 

[raider980]

Thanks for all the replies! It sounds like Civ 6 will be to my liking. I thought about Vox Populi, it seems to change a lot. I've also thought about getting Civ 4, I never played that one. But I think moving forward to 6 is probably what I will do. I mainly like playing shared games like GotM or a challenge series.

 

[Tiger Genocide]

Thanks for all the replies! It sounds like Civ 6 will be to my liking. I thought about Vox Populi, it seems to change a lot. I've also thought about getting Civ 4, I never played that one. But I think moving forward to 6 is probably what I will do. I mainly like playing shared games like GotM or a challenge series.

It used to in past years. It hasn't really changed in a really long time now.

 

[thecrazyscot]

For those interested, I've created a little mod which adds a fairly simple Corruption mechanic into the game, which manifests as a negative gold modifier based on distance to the capital, whether a governor or government plaza is present, if you are in a dark age, and based on what government you are in. It needs some testing and balancing, but it starts to bring back what I always thought was a great mechanic from previous iterations of civ.

 

[Amrunril]

Civ V's global happiness and Civ VI's amenities aren't actually all that different in a qualitative sense. While VI's version is tracked locally, a large portion of the amenities come from luxuries. These distributed around the empire as needed, which means that in practice you have a mostly unified pool of amenity supply and requirements. The one difference would be what happens when a city generates more amenities than it needs through local sources. In V, the excess was lost, whereas in VI, that city gains some happiness bonuses. The larger differences, though, come from the specific numerical parameters the games use- in Civ V, a new city costs 4 pop worth of happiness immediately, while in VI, it essentially gains you a free pop worth of amenities.I actually prefer V's balancing in this regard, though I'd stick with VI's presentation, as it doesn't seem to contradict people's intuitions about happiness in the way that V's did.

As to the broader question about the viability of wide expansion, yes this strategy is far stronger in Civ VI than in the final version of V*. Amenity rules explain part of the difference, but the loss of Tradition bonuses and the National College, the de-emphasis of specialists, and the shift from population-based to flat city yields also play important roles.


*People often talk about the dominance of 4 city tradition in Civ V, but it's worth remembering that this strategy only became dominant after the final expansion. For much of the game's history, wide play was the dominant strategy, and if the last few balance patches had tuned the policy trees slightly differently, we might have very different memories of the game's balance.

 

[Tiger Genocide]

For those interested, I've created a little mod which adds a fairly simple Corruption mechanic into the game, which manifests as a negative gold modifier based on distance to the capital, whether a governor or government plaza is present, if you are in a dark age, and based on what government you are in. It needs some testing and balancing, but it starts to bring back what I always thought was a great mechanic from previous iterations of civ.

Sounds interesting, I'm downloading it right now. Thanks