So I'm playing Spain on a standard continents map. I've just gotten to Turn 103 and have 8 cities (naturally, no conquest). My plan this game is expand as much as possible, to test the limits of the system. I have hit my maximum passive space at the moment, so I'm about to go to war to get more.
My stats:
1) 80% global happiness.
2) Most of my cities are actually unhappy locally. One city I built on a flood plains for maximum growth is currently 4 happy, 10 unhappy...so its basically stopped growing around Pop 10.
3) I have very few specialists at the moment.
My notes:
1) I like the UI so far. The Global Happiness bar makes good sense (for some reason I've never really understood the two numbers up top before). The needs numbers keep the math but places it towards the back. I can see clearly my unhappy numbers, and the max possible they can have. It all makes good sense to me. The exception is the luxury number, I don't understand why its 1 or 2 or whatever it is.
2) On the other hand, the Global Happiness has lured me into a false sense of security. I honestly thought my happiness was better until I checked all of my cities for this posting, and I was surprised how "bad" things are in my cities. This is an important note, micromanagement is now greater in this system. In the old system as long as the big happy number at the top was good, I was good. Now...I have to watch all of my cities to ensure they are getting benefits.
3) Luxuries don't matter. I currently have 5 luxuries, and only 1 of them is actually giving me a benefit (even in my capital of 12 pop I just checked). This maybe an area where luxuries have to go back to Global. At 1 per luxury in every city it would be way too good, but if luxs don't even give me 1 happy than they aren't worth anything.
4) Specialists are really expensive right now. Effectively I lose 2 (or more) food, +1 GAP, and 5% growth at minimum to have a specialist...that's a lot. My governors are avoiding them like the plague, but could be my current happiness scenario, we will see.
5) Expansion makes Global Happiness easier not harder. With my luxury and base happiness from difficulty (1+3 = 4), I get a 5 pop cushion in every city. That city can be a total dirtball, but I can let it grow to 5 and then cut growth. This adds 1 unhappy and 5 pop to my Global Total (aka 80% happy). Now we will see how it transitions later game as my expansion slows and my cities want to develop. But for right now, not only is expansion not penalized...its actually incentivized.
So my current plan. Start shifting into war to push further, and then see if I can infrastructure up my cities out of their current unhappiness...and see how I look.
happiness and 50%
boredom reduction, which was massive.
generation is lower and the boredom mitigation is the same.
