I'm building a big empire as Rome on a large horizontal Pangea world map. My empire is on the western end, but a lot of the other civs are on the other end. I'm thinking of settling a few cities on the east end, colonies if you will, to be able to build an army and attack them (I'm playing Domination only).
Anyway, that got me thinking. Civ 5 has a global happiness system, but it's not logical when you have cities on different sides of the world. I know Civ 4 had a happiness per city system, but I like the concept of more general happiness. Instead I'd support a regional happiness system. This would mean that my empire on the west side of the continent and my 'colony' region would have different levels of happiness. This would also make developing colonies like these easier (and more realistic), because it doesn't harm the rest of the empire (aside from having to invest time, money and resources). Global happiness should still play a small role, as the sum of regional happiness, but by counting happiness per region it would be easier to develop regions independently of eachother.
Now that's my main idea. Then I came up with some more experimental ideas
:
1. First off, the definition of a region. This could be set by the developer, or as an option when setting up the game before playing. Two cities would be part of the same region if they're situated within a certain amount of hexes from eachother (say seven).
Alternatively, you could have players decide in-game how big a region is! This way you can choose your own syle of politics. You could choose to go with big regions or several small ones. The would both have their (dis)advantages, for example a small region of two cities would mean both cities need to build happiness buildings, but in a five-city region you could have some cities focus on happiness and others on other stuff. This would make governing your empire different every time.
2. Secondly: policies. Every region could take up certain policies (not as complex as the global policy trees) with both advantages and disadvantages. For example, you could give a coastal region a policy that adds +10%
to building naval units but -10% to building land units. This way you could have regions/provinces focus on specific activities.
3. Additionally, you could have cities within the same region trade more extensively. For example, you could have one city focus on and another on 
. The surplus can then be exported to the production-focused city in the same region so that it doesn't have to worry about food.
I realise that some of these ideas may not be realistic and that they might mostly apply to big empires, but what do you think? Good/bad idea?
Anyway, that got me thinking. Civ 5 has a global happiness system, but it's not logical when you have cities on different sides of the world. I know Civ 4 had a happiness per city system, but I like the concept of more general happiness. Instead I'd support a regional happiness system. This would mean that my empire on the west side of the continent and my 'colony' region would have different levels of happiness. This would also make developing colonies like these easier (and more realistic), because it doesn't harm the rest of the empire (aside from having to invest time, money and resources). Global happiness should still play a small role, as the sum of regional happiness, but by counting happiness per region it would be easier to develop regions independently of eachother.
Now that's my main idea. Then I came up with some more experimental ideas
:1. First off, the definition of a region. This could be set by the developer, or as an option when setting up the game before playing. Two cities would be part of the same region if they're situated within a certain amount of hexes from eachother (say seven).
Alternatively, you could have players decide in-game how big a region is! This way you can choose your own syle of politics. You could choose to go with big regions or several small ones. The would both have their (dis)advantages, for example a small region of two cities would mean both cities need to build happiness buildings, but in a five-city region you could have some cities focus on happiness and others on other stuff. This would make governing your empire different every time.
2. Secondly: policies. Every region could take up certain policies (not as complex as the global policy trees) with both advantages and disadvantages. For example, you could give a coastal region a policy that adds +10%
to building naval units but -10% to building land units. This way you could have regions/provinces focus on specific activities.3. Additionally, you could have cities within the same region trade more extensively. For example, you could have one city focus on
and another on . The surplus can then be exported to the production-focused city in the same region so that it doesn't have to worry about food.I realise that some of these ideas may not be realistic and that they might mostly apply to big empires, but what do you think? Good/bad idea?
