Thanks for the tangent. I've almost always tried to make a few large cities when I played Gandhi, but your strategy makes sense and I'm going to try it when I get Gandhi next. (Although it seems like crazy expansion is the generally a good idea in this game?) And put in the ever expanding/growing context the Indian special ability seems pretty powerful. Where would you rank it overall?
Well, the UA definitely hurts you in the early game. With other civs you can drop 2-3 cities early on before you hook up a single luxury, if you want. India can't do that. But it's not really that hard to compensate for the extra per city unhappiness. Remember you break even at 4 pop. It doesn't take that long to get there, even without building lots of farms. Maritimes are great, as always. I like Tradition a lot too because there's no reason not to grow your capital as large as possible.
It's tough to compare this UA to others because it doesn't offer any benefit until later in the game. I think the ability to have absolutely gigantic happiness levels is quite strong. It's basically an open-ended trait that can be as powerful as you let it. So I guess I'd say it's maybe difficult to leverage, but probably ultimately one of the best UAs in the game.
In my game as Gandhi (Immortal Pangaea), I beelined iron and killed my neighbor, Caesar. He had a ton of cities very early and would have been a real pain if I hadn't done that. I had more wars later in the game but didn't just run around knocking heads together. After I had hooked up all of Caesar's luxuries, I had positive happiness and soon was #1 in happiness and stayed there for the remainder of the game. Yes, I out-happy'd the AI on Immortal difficulty for the entire game. Having 100 happiness per turn means you go in and out of 10 turn golden ages all the time. Sadly I didn't get the Chichen Itza. Get it if you can!
Catherine declared on me in the middle of the game (just before rifles, I guess), despite being last in tech and it having been her idea to beat up Caesar (she is such a....) so I beat her up and took a few cities. Then she gave me a ton of cities in a peace settlement. I puppetted them all and was still at positive happiness. In fact, soon my happiness was higher than before the war started!
I did fill the Piety tree, built the Forbidden Palace (though it's not that big a deal with just .5 happiness savings per city) and later filled the Order tree. So at that point my unhappiness per city was down to 2.5 instead of 4. Theocracy had less of an effect that it has in games with other leaders. I'm assuming I was paying .375 unhappiness per citizen instead of .5, which is only a .125 reduction as opposed to other civs that go from 1 unhappiness per citizen to .75, a .25 reduction.
It's interesting that with the per city unhappiness the modifiers are just numbers that are subtracted. I.e. Forbidden palace subtracts .5 from the per city unhappiness (despite what the description says) and Planned Economy subtracts 1 from the per city unhappiness (the description lies again). However Theocracy actually does subtract 25% from the per citizen unhappiness.
So for that game I just kind of let it roll. I'm not sure where the sweet spot between growing, building new cities and all that is. The tough part might just be running out of room because you can't expand as quickly as your neighbors can. That's why I'm a big believer in swords. If you aren't, then I suggest you try to get some blocking cities out early so you'll have space to expand. Grow these guys and build Coliseums. When you have happiness to spare, drop some more cities. Really kind of like any other civ, but you expand more slowly and grow more with the ultimate goal of having more, larger cities by the end of the game.
