Checking in.
So, I've been thinking a little about our gameplan, and the preferred victory goal of Domination. One thing I'd like to accomplish, if we can, is to keep most of the cities we conquer, pushing the happy cap as far as it can go.
First of all, we get 9 base happy from the difficulty level. On a Standard map, there will be six Natural Wonders. There are fifteen luxury resources. So, right there, before policies and building stuff, we have ninety happy to work with.
There are three buildings that increase happy: the Colosseum (Construction/150h/3gpt/+4 happy), the Theatre (Printing Press/300/5/4), and the Stadium (Mass Media/450/6/4), each sucessive one requiring the one before it to be constructed. Clearly the Stadium comes too late to help matters much.
The Wonders that affect Happiness are as follows: Eiffel Tower (Radio, +8 happy), Notre Dame (Education, +5), The Forbidden Palace (Banking, Unhappiness generated by # of cities is cut in half), and The Hanging Gardens (Mathematics, +3, increases population in all cities by 1).
Each social policy branch has at least one feature that affects happiness. Tradition has a first-tier policy, Legalism, that reduces unhappiness due to population in the capital by 33%. Liberty has Meritocracy, a second-tier policy that gives +1 happy for each city connected to the capital, for a max of (num_cities-1) happy. Honor has Military Caste, a second-tier policy which gives +1 happy for each city with a garrison, for a max of num_cities happy. Piety's tier-zero adoption bonus is +2 happy, and Theocracy (tier 2) reduces unhappiness from citizens in non-occupied cities (our own, or conquered ones with a Courthouse) by 20%. Patronage's third-tier policy Cultured Diplomacy increases by 50% the happiness gained from luxury resources given to us by city-state allies. Order's second-tier policy Planned Economy reduces unhappiness from number of cities by 50%. Autocracy's second-tier policy Police state reduces unhappiness in occupied cities by 50%. Freedom's adoption bonus is to reduce the unhappiness generated by Specialists by 50%. Rationalism's tier one Humanism gives +1 happy for each university. Finally, Commerce's tier three policy Protectionism gives +1 happy for each luxury. Clearly the most powerful ones are Meritocracy, Military Caste, Planned Economy, Freedom, and Protectionism.
As for the causes of Unhappiness, they are threefold. Firstly, population. Your civilization generates one unhappiness for each population point in a non-occupied city. Secondly, number of cities. Your civilization generates two unhappiness for each non-occupied city you control. Thirdly, occupied cities. You generate five unhappy per occupied city you control, and occupied cities generate extra unhappy per population point (I had 10 pop in occupied cities in my China game, and was generating 13 unhappy from them, so I'm guessing an extra 33%, rounded down). Puppet states do not generate any unhappiness above and beyond the normal for population and number of cities.
So, based on this, here are my thoughts. The most important wonder for supporting our gameplan is clearly The Forbidden Palace. Right there that gives num_cities happy. We were clearly going to go for a number of Honor policies anyway, to get the bonuses for fighting, and Military Caste is pretty good. I really like Order as a secondary policy branch - its bonuses are quite strong, and I want to find out if Planned Economy stacks with Forbidden Palace the way I hope it does
. Planned Economy also lies on the very powerful Communism line of policies. We're going to have difficulty generating enough culture to buy policies the bigger we get, but between monuments, Cultured city-states, and the odd wonder here and there, I think we'll get by. We're also going to have to be careful about population - let's not grow our cities beyond the number of useful tiles they can work! With regard to conquered cities, I think a good starting point is this: Raze the crappy ones. Puppet the rest, but only annex the ones that have good production potential. The only point in annexing a city is to be able to control its production. The Courthouse costs two hundred hammers. These two facts point together to the conclusion that you should annex cities only if they can get their courthouse done and produce sufficient units/useful buildings in the time you have left to make up for the happiness crunch while they build their courthouses. If in doubt, and there's enough happiness to spare, puppet it. You can always raze it later.
As for our starting position, I am underwhelmed. Grassland is fine and dandy, but where are the hammers? All we have is two hills, four forest, a plains marble, and a grass cow (which gives a hammer when improved). Ugh, this is depressing. The cow is in the third ring of the origin, too. Here's what I'm thinking: Grass river cows are 3/0/1 tiles natively, as good as a farmed river grassland. We don't want that in our third ring. I think we should found on either the hill to our direct west (4 on the numpad) or the grassland 1 of the hill. Both are one turn away from the origin and have the cattle in the second ring. The advantage of settling on the hill is that the marble is second-ring. The advantage of settling on the grass is being able to farm that plains hill and the grass hill 111 of it as well - farmed hills are very good tiles to work in the early game! Of the two options, I lean toward settling on the grass 41 of the initial position, simply because it gives us better tiles to work for early production. Forests are such awful tiles. Regardless of where we settle, I think we shouldn't pop the ancient ruins until we've settled our first city, to give us a shot at the +1 pop bonus. My recommendation for first warrior move is onto the grass hill 41 of his current position and pop the hut on the next turn. With grass cows in our BFH, I think Animal Husbandry has to be our first tech, and Scout first has been a good opening move on Continent and Pangaea for me. Obviously, we should direct our scouting to the west and south, due to tundra and mountains being to our north and east. Welcome to Siberia!
Okay, I'll shut up now.
EDIT: I see I got ninja'd by Kylearan. So ignore my comments about the warrior moves for t0 - grab that ancient ruins, stat! I'm glad we are thinking alike regarding the settler move. As I said, I prefer the grassland 1 of the hill, because I really don't want to waste a good hill tile when we're so deprived of them!
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time.
