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

[Trav'ling Canuck]

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.

That's a well-written, succinct summary of the differences.

The final balance patches of Civ 5 broke "wide" play in the early eras by making national wonders (notably National Colleege) unavailable until all cities had the base building (and to pile on, also making the national wonders more expensive the more cities you had). So you had to stop expanding for long stretches in order to build these uber-powerful buildings. After they were built, you could start expanding again, but your core cities were generally so well developed by that time there wasn't a lot of pressure to do so. You could win the game on most levels without worrying about the national wonders, but on Deity you pretty much needed them, and the artificial check on early expansion the national wonders created was a weird mechanic.

What a lot of people who disliked Civ 5 remember, though, is the happiness system. Which really wasn't a limit on "wide" play, because every city could build the buildings it needed manage it's own happiness. What it did was slow down expansion, because you needed to build up a happiness surplus before adding a new city. You could easily manage as many cities as you wanted under Civ 5's happiness system, even after the final patches, but you had to invest in happiness before settling each new city, which was more challenging and, for a lot of players, less fun than managing it after you settle the city.

Civ 6's amenities system is generous enough that it delays you needing to manage happiness until the city grows quite large. Then as an added bonus, Civ 6 makes having large cities totally optional. So you never really need to deal with amenities (or housing, or food) unless you want to.

 

[Pfeffersack]

I already uttered this a couple of times, but for all those who feel that Civ6 happiness system is too forgiving - a simple take away of the "free" amenity each city gets already changes the game quite a bit. It still does not create an environment where you are in danger to see rebels from unhappiness, but you have to fight at least a bit to to stay in positive happiness and those struggle finally makes e.g. Entertainment/Waterpark complexes more worth to build, sometimes even locally for the base amenity and the local Arena/Ferrywheel building alone.

 

[OmniPotent42]

I recently got back into Civ 6 after playing a bit at launch and 1000+ hours in Civ 5, and I must say it's refreshing to not be limited to 4-8 cities.

I often find more often than amenities, the limiting factor to my expansion is loyalty more than anything else. I think its an ok mechanic, although it does make colonizing other continents a bit harder.

That being said, I'd like to see some incentives to play tall, they don't have to be insane but it would be cool if there were certain districts or buildings that were only available in cities with more than x pop, or a policy you could enable that would give your first x cities extra % yield modifiers, with maybe a downside of decreased loyalty for cities after a certain amount.

 

[Starwars]

I love the fact that Civ VI really encourages expansion so I'm happy about that. At this stage in the game though, I do feel like there could be more "penalties" to lots of cities. Maintenance costs perhaps as gold in Civ VI is so incredibly easy to come by, especially a bit later in the game. Or making amenities matter more so there is more incentives to buy Entertainment complexes and Water parks.

Of course, changes like this would likely just harm the AI more than anything.

Overall though, I'm very happy that VI wants you to expand your empire.

 

[kaspergm]

I like the fact that Civ6 rewards you for having more cities, but I dislike the fact that there's no limitation or penalty to how fast you can spread those cities. In Civ 6 you can basically just pump out infinite settlers if you can find the resources to do it. This may sound theoretical, but in practice it's actually achievable with several civs. For instance in my current Mali play, I have a good desert start, pick Desert Folklore for massive faith income, get Monumentality Golden Age in both classical and medieval age and can basically buy a new settler every 3-4 turns with the faith I rack in. Building also the Ancestral Hall gives me a free builder with every city I settle, and I can easily improve luxuries to keep my amenities up. And this is on deity difficulty, and while it did require a good start, I don't think it's a complete niche case. Obviously civs like Russia and probably Brazil and Australia can pull off similar tricks.

So the problem in Civ6 imo. is not that it encourages wide spread, but that there are no or at least only few limitations to the speed with which you can do it. There's no break-even point for new cities, neither wrt. happiness nor gold or other resources. I never liked the Civ3 corruption mechanic, but Civ4 had a pretty excellent city-upkeep system, which settling too many new cities too fast would totally cripple your economy. That made expansion something you should actively work for, which I think was great. Civ5 obviously as others have pointed out hit a poor balance where settling new cities was just not worth it. That was a bit of a shame, because with some not-too-big tweaking and scaling to policies and national wonders, you could actually hit a fairly good spot where expansion was worth it, but tall play was still doable if you did it well, albeit suboptimal (at least that was how I felt it played out with the mods I used).

 

[blackcatatonic]

I'm not saying this to put the OP (or anyone else!) off Civ VI - which, as a player who loves going wide, I much prefer to V - but I have noticed a weird disconnect between the way the game encourages building lots more cities, but at the same time promotes micromanagement of cities by removing or changing some of the things you would use in late-game Civ V to alleviate the tedium of managing a huge empire.

For example:
- In V, city projects are infinite. If it's late game and there's not much you want to build, you can, quite literally, set a project running and forget about it. In Civ VI, they only last a few turns, so you have to keep renewing them. You also need to have the required districts and/or buildings set up first to enable specific projects, which is more complicated than in V which didn't need you to build districts.
- In V, if you captured cities you could choose to puppet them rather than annexing them. This meant that the city would still be yours and produce for your empire, but you couldn't dictate production. Puppeting isn't a thing in Civ VI - you can only raze, annex or (if applicable) liberate - which means that, if you capture a city and wish to keep it, you have to tell it what to do.
- Civ V (IIRC) always had a production queue. Civ VI does now have a production queue, but it is interesting that it took them over two years before they finally implemented it.
- In V, it was much easier to view at-a-glance information about your particular cities using the report screens and sort the list of how they were displayed. Again, in VI this has improved since launch, but it's very unwieldy still and you cannot, for example, sort your cities by production or science output in the list.

So you have this bizarre dichotomy where you are encouraged to build more cities than in V, but are at the same time given fewer tools to make managing them easier. Was this their attempt, I wonder, to implement some kind of penalty for going too big? As much as I enjoy going wide, I think the micromanagement that is an inevitable part of large empires in VI is one reason why I finish fewer games than I did when playing V.

 

[Pfeffersack]

So you have this bizarre dichotomy where you are encouraged to build more cities than in V, but are at the same time given fewer tools to make managing them easier. Was this their attempt, I wonder, to implement some kind of penalty for going too big? As much as I enjoy going wide, I think the micromanagement that is an inevitable part of large empires in VI is one reason why I finish fewer games than I did when playing V.

While I agree with your analysis in regard to the UI and the provided tools in comparison, I doubt it is an intended penalty. IMO, penalizing certain (too effective) playstyles by interface is one of the worst mistakes in game design and I doubt Firaxis would go that route on purpose.

 

[blackcatatonic]

While I agree with your analysis in regard to the UI and the provided tools in comparison, I doubt it is an intended penalty. IMO, penalizing certain (too effective) playstyles by interface is one of the worst mistakes in game design and I doubt Firaxis would go that route on purpose.

To be honest, I doubt this is the case as well - I actually edited my original comment and added that in as an afterthought - but either way we have a weird design decision going on.