Info regarding Cities and Happiness

[Guynemer]

http://www.civilization5.com/#/community/

Veterans of past games in the Civilization series will notice that happiness has received a bit of an overhaul in Civilization V. Most notably, happiness is now an empire-wide value, rather than specific to each city. In today’s community feature, I detail how happiness works.

Overview

Happiness is a measure of your citizens’ contentment. As a rule, the larger your total population, the unhappier everybody gets. An unhappy population doesn’t grow very rapidly, and a very unhappy population will affect the fighting quality of your armies as well.

Causes

The amount of happiness that your civilization begins with is determined by the game’s difficulty setting. The moment your construct your first city, that number will begin to decline.

There are many things that cause happiness and unhappiness:

* Natural Wonders: Each Natural Wonder you discover permanently increases your civilization’s happiness.
* Luxury Resources: Improve resources within your territory or trade for them with other civs. Each kind of resource improves your population’s happiness (but you don’t get happiness for having multiple copies of a single luxury.)
* Buildings: Certain buildings increase your population’s happiness. These include the Colosseum, the Circus, the Theatre, and others. Each building constructed anywhere in your civ increases your overall happiness (so two Colosseums produce twice as much happiness as one, unlike Luxuries.)
* Wonders: Certain wonders like Notre Dame and the Hanging Gardens can give you a big boost in happiness.
* Social Policies: Policies from the Piety branch provide a lot of happiness, as do a few policies in other branches.
* Technologies: Technologies in themselves don’t provide happiness, but they do unlock the buildings, wonders, resources, and social policies that do.
* Raw Population: As your civ grows, the people get increasingly unhappy and demand more stuff to keep them amused.
* Number of Cities: As the number of cities in your civ grows, so does your unhappiness. In other words, a civ with 2 cities each of population 1 is unhappier than a civ with 1 city of population 2, even though they both contain the same total population.
* Annexed Cities: If you capture and annex foreign cities, your population doesn’t much like it.

Unhappiness

There are two levels of unhappiness. Neither is very pleasant.

When your happiness is negative and your happiness icon is looking sad, your population is “unhappy.” An unhappy population’s growth rate is significantly slowed, but there are no other ill effects.

When your happiness is negative and your happiness icon is looking angry, your population is “very unhappy.” If your population is very unhappy, your cities stop growing altogether, you cannot build any Settlers, and your military units get a nasty combat penalty.

Remember that unhappiness is not permanent. You can always increase your citizens’ happiness – no matter how pissed off they are at you – through the methods outlined above.

That about sums up Happiness in Civilization V. I am personally a big fan of the new take on happiness, and when you get your hands on the game I hope you will agree!

All About Cities

Cities are vital to your civilization’s success. They allow you to build units, buildings, and wonders. They allow you to research new technologies and gather wealth. You cannot win without powerful, well-situated cities.

Cities should be founded in locations with plenty of food and production and with access to resources such as wheat, fish, and cattle. It’s often a good idea to build a city on a river or coastal hex. Cities founded on hills gain a defensive bonus, making it harder for enemies to capture them.

Working the Land

Cities thrive based upon the land around them. Their citizens “work” the land, harvesting food, gold, production and science from the tiles. Citizens can work tiles that are within three tiles’ distance from the city and that are within your civilization’s borders. Only one city can work a single tile even if it’s within three tiles’ distance from more than one. Because of this, it’s important to carefully consider how closely together to build your cities!

As your city grows, it automatically assigns its citizens to work the lands around it. It seeks to provide a balanced amount of food, production, and gold. You may order a city’s citizens to work other tiles; for example: if you want a certain city to concentrate on generating gold, or production. In wartime, for example, it might be a good idea to focus on production to get military units trained quickly, or you might want to focus on gold to upgrade your obsolete units.

Fans of previous games in the Civilization series will be familiar with the concept of “improving” tiles to provide even more food, gold and so forth. Workers return in Civilization V and can be ordered to construct improvements such as farms, mines, trading posts, and so forth. A detailed overview of all of the improvement types will be coming in a later feature!

Specialists

Specialists are citizens who have been assigned to work in a building constructed in their city. There are four kinds of specialists: Scientists, Merchants, Artists, and Engineers. A Library, for example, allows one or two citizens to be assigned to work in the building as Scientist specialists. Not all buildings allow specialists to be assigned to them.

When a citizen is assigned to be a specialist, that citizen is no longer available to work in the tiles around the city; therefore the city loses the food, production, or science that citizen would otherwise bring in. (However, if the city has more citizens than it has tiles to work, the specialist may have no negative effect upon production at all!)

Specialists provide the following benefits:

* Artists increase a city’s cultural output and speed the creation of Great Artists.
* Merchants increase a city’s gold output and speed the creation of Great Merchants.
* Scientists increase a city’s science output and speed the creation of Great Scientists.
* Engineers increase a city’s production output and speed the creation of Great Engineers.

Buildings

A city is more than a bunch of homes. It contains schools and libraries, markets and granaries, banks and barracks. Buildings represent the improvements and upgrades that you make in a city. Buildings can increase the city’s rate of growth, can speed production, can increase the science of a city, can improve its defenses, and can do lots of other good things as well.

A city that has no buildings is pretty weak and primitive and will probably remain fairly small, while a city with a lot of buildings can indeed grow to dominate the world.

With the single exception of the monument, which has no prerequisites and is available to build at the start of the game, you need knowledge of a specific technology to construct a building. For example, you must learn bronze working before you can build a barracks.

Some buildings have resource prerequisites as well – for instance a city must have an improved source of horses or ivory nearby to construct a circus. Also, some buildings have building prerequisites. You can’t build a temple in a city unless you’ve already constructed a monument there.

There’s one downside to buildings: most of them cost gold to maintain. The price depends upon the building in question, and can range from 1 to 5 per turn. The gold is deducted from your treasury each turn. A later feature will explain more about gold, including how you earn it and what else it can be spent on.

Expanding Territory

As a city gains culture, it will acquire additional tiles in the surrounding unclaimed territory. The faster it gains culture, the faster its territory will grow. Each city acquires territory depending upon its own cultural output. When it reaches a certain level, it will “claim” a new tile (if any are available.)

You can also expend gold to “purchase” tiles; this is entirely independent of the city’s own acquisition based upon its culture.

No more Priest specialists, which makes sense as Religion is out, but I would think that Priests could be used to increase nationwide happiness.

Still, nice to have some new info. Not sure how I feel about the nationwide happiness, but I think it'll probably work out okay; nationwide maintenance/support costs seemed odd to me at first, too.

[Elok]

...I'm trying to look on the positive here, really, but WTF? "Natural wonders?" As in, the Germans discover Niagara Falls and riot less than they used to? And a circus (I can only pray that CivV will not be the first Civ to prominently feature clowns) in Rome makes people happier everywhere, including Tokyo and Rio?

It's sounding more and more like they're just pulling random innovations out of their asses for the sake of gratuitous novelty.

[Hauptman]

Well Disneyland definatly adds happiness to the nation rather than just Anehiem....

[Boris Godunov]

Workers return in Civilization V

Boo.

[Robert Plomp]

The circus is most probably more the Roman circus... (I hope)

National happiness: Good! That makes you feel more like you run a nation then a bunch of cities!

Workers: Good! (hope they have a good automation AI though)

I'm glad that specialists work the same. building maintenance costs return from Civ3 (or civ2?). Not sure yet if I like that. Must know the entire city maintenance structure first.

Natural wonders sound very cool. Another reason for a war as well!
I hope that wonders won't lose cultural output when captured. (as in Civ4). That aways made no sense at all, and worked terrible b/c you suddenly had to fight a lot of culture of the old civ with no culture at all. As if the Pyramids suddenly lose their cultural output after a new civ took over Cairo.

[Sir Og]

I am most curious what happened to health and health buildings and resources.

[self biased]

most interesting.

a good question, sir ogg. if i were on my own computer, i'd post at a greater length, but i've got to go to work.

[Dinner]

I predict this lame unhappiness always going down "feature" will be badly unbalanced and the first thing which they'll have to fix come expansion time. The second thing they'll fix is the absolute over sight of not having religion. How can a game calling itself civilization not include religion?

[Sir Og]

They have the piety(sp?) branch of social policies which is supposed to represent religion in this version.

[Elok]

Natural wonders sound very cool. Another reason for a war as well!
I hope that wonders won't lose cultural output when captured. (as in Civ4). That aways made no sense at all, and worked terrible b/c you suddenly had to fight a lot of culture of the old civ with no culture at all. As if the Pyramids suddenly lose their cultural output after a new civ took over Cairo.

You say that as though "cultural output" made sense in the first place...please name a point in history where one power gained any advantage whatsoever over another purely from having better art, music and philosophy. Not from trading that sort of thing, just from having it. Name one time.

[wodan11]

Hard to define that sort of thing. Some examples that could be put forth, I daresay you'd respond by saying "that's trading it". A more micro example might be, say, a large city on the border of the nation. Over the border the suburbs are basically that: suburbs of the large city. They aren't anything in their own right. There's a political boundary but for all intents and purposes, those people are citizens of the larger city, sharing in its culture and spending their money in the city's stores.

[Robert Plomp]

I think every civ is proud for it's big accomplishments. It inspires artists, attracts people, etc. Big cities with proud people have influence on the surrounding villages. That's even today.

[Sir Og]

You say that as though "cultural output" made sense in the first place...please name a point in history where one power gained any advantage whatsoever over another purely from having better art, music and philosophy. Not from trading that sort of thing, just from having it. Name one time.

Recent example is Western music, movies (culture) influencing communist countries. The result was Eastern Europeans became allied with the West, allowed access for bases etc. (gain advantage).

Older example would be everybody who invaded China and ended up becoming Chinese instead of turning China into something else. Chinese culture is so dominant that invaders want to become Chines which means that the Chines have an advantage (they can't loose). This can be given as an example of a culture flip in civ.

[Hauldren Collider]

Natural wonders make a lot of sense to me. They encourage you to found cities in areas which would otherwise be completely worthless.

In fact, they make it PRACTICAL to found cities in some areas that are, for instance, militarily strategic but have no way to grow because they're in tundra or something.

[Elok]

Recent example is Western music, movies (culture) influencing communist countries. The result was Eastern Europeans became allied with the West, allowed access for bases etc. (gain advantage).

I admit my history, especially modern, isn't the best, but didn't that happen after the Warsaw Pact collapsed? Before then their "allegiance" was maintained by Russian tanks, and after that it was just a stark choice between East and West. After all their experience with what the East had given them, is it any surprise they went West?

Older example would be everybody who invaded China and ended up becoming Chinese instead of turning China into something else. Chinese culture is so dominant that invaders want to become Chines which means that the Chines have an advantage (they can't loose). This can be given as an example of a culture flip in civ.

No, because the Hsiung-nu, Mongols etc still maintained material control of whatever region they conquered--and used them to further their own, foreign aims--they just abandoned their old customs and took on Chinese ones. The Mongols were the Sung dynasty (I believe), but the Han Chinese still always thought of them as foreign overlords. The Tang are somewhat different...IIRC, the first Tang emperor was half-Turk, with a Han mother. He was legitimately "Chinese," but he didn't have any non-Chinese domains, ie he wasn't comparable to a foreign leader in Civ. The best culture could realistically do is assimilate/pacify barbarians.

[gdijedi7]

I'd say that it doesn't particularly help you if invaders adopt your culture.

Greece had more culture (in Civ terms) than Rome, but even with Rome adopting Greek culture wholescale (in many areas), Greece was still just another conquered nation.

[Provost Harrison]

And a circus (I can only pray that CivV will not be the first Civ to prominently feature clowns) in Rome makes people happier everywhere, including Tokyo and Rio?

I was in the Circus in Rome only a few weeks ago, and trust me, there were no clowns there

[Boracks]

I was in the Circus in Rome (...) there were no clowns there

Aren't you contradicting yourself?

It looks like they are keeping to the Civ idea, forcing the player to make many decisions while keeping it flexible enough that there's no one 'correct' way to go.

Be interesting to see how cities work out on a hex system with a 3 hex radius, and how that affects city placement. Going to be a lot of rethinking there.

[Theben]

Aren't you contradicting yourself?

I think he looked around and didn't see any.

[Dinner]

I'll wait to see how happiness actually works in Civ5 before passing final judgment but I don't like this collective happiness system.

[Dinner]

Aren't you contradicting yourself?

PH got "clowned".

[Felch]

Collective happiness sounds like a great idea. It reduces micromanagement, and it looks like an anti-ICS factor.

[Sabre2th]

Collective happiness sounds like a great idea. It reduces micromanagement, and it looks like an anti-ICS factor.

That's exactly my thinking on it. I get that a lot of people don't like change and that some actually enjoy insane micromanagement, but I'm having trouble seeing a downside to this. That's especially true for those times when your terrain is sub-par. Your smaller cities won't waste nearly all their time just trying not to suck.

Obviously, it all depends on their implementation, but I like the concept.

[Brael]

I like empire wide happy, but I'm not a fan of cities costing unhappy just by existing (in addition to their population) and building maintenance coming back. My concern is that it's going to put the focus on having a small number of max tile cities, unlike civ 4 where the focus is on being able to efficiently work your good land, the fact that cities jump from 18 to to 36 workable tiles reinforces this idea to me.

[Dinner]

Collective happiness sounds like a great idea. It reduces micromanagement, and it looks like an anti-ICS factor.

Couldn't they have just used maintenance costs like in Civ4 if they wanted to combat ICS?

[Brael]

Collective happiness sounds like a great idea. It reduces micromanagement, and it looks like an anti-ICS factor.

I have to disagree, with empire wide happiness, depending on how much happy buildings contribute I can see a handful of strong cities being able to support a lot of weaker ones. If anything I would say it contributes to ICS.

[Dinner]

If one looks at ancient Rome do you really think what was happening in Britain routinely effected the happiness of the people in Syria?

[OzzyKP]

The circus is most probably more the Roman circus... (I hope)

National happiness: Good! That makes you feel more like you run a nation then a bunch of cities!

Workers: Good! (hope they have a good automation AI though)

I'm glad that specialists work the same. building maintenance costs return from Civ3 (or civ2?). Not sure yet if I like that. Must know the entire city maintenance structure first.

Natural wonders sound very cool. Another reason for a war as well!
I hope that wonders won't lose cultural output when captured. (as in Civ4). That aways made no sense at all, and worked terrible b/c you suddenly had to fight a lot of culture of the old civ with no culture at all. As if the Pyramids suddenly lose their cultural output after a new civ took over Cairo.

Yea, I agree with all of this. Everything sounds awesome except the building maintenance.

[Elok]

If one looks at ancient Rome do you really think what was happening in Britain routinely effected the happiness of the people in Syria?

Okay, so you actually give a damn about verisimilitude. By my count, that makes two of us on this board...the idea of either all your cities being in revolt (or close to it) or else more or less content, simultaneously, strikes me as a bit silly. But no sillier than nations going to war to secure possession of the Grand Canyon. A bit less silly, actually.

[Dinner]

I actually had to look up the definition of verisimilitude.