Health or Happiness

[gdgrimm]

On levels of Prince and higher, which do you tend to run into a cap with quicker, health or happiness?

And which do you feel you can more adequately deal with?

In most of my Prince games so far, I've tended to hit the happiness cap quicker, but that may be mostly due to the game situations (they've tended to be played with little/no early religion, early wars, quick expansion, sometimes even with an Expansive Trait leader).

And I think happiness is by far easier to deal with. You can fairly early on use Hereditary Rule and military to fix it, you can push religions/temples to fix it, you can build theatres and use the culture slider to fix it, and of course some other buildings (like Markets) can help. You have quite a few options to choose from.

Fixing health, on the other hand is far more difficult. No early game civics help you. Religion does nothing for you. There are some buildings (i.e. Grocer/Aqueduct) that can help, but they're quickly balanced by some that hurt (i.e. Forge). Selective city placement (access to fresh water and forests, little/no flood plains) is about the only early game decision you can make with regards to health, and that's just a preventative thing -- once you hit the health cap it's too late to change where the city is or to grow forests.

[UnOrthOdOx]

I play on Monarch these days.

Definately hit happiness first unless I start on floodplains or jungle.

I find health much easier to deal with as well: the penalty is less severe, and there is always food I can hook up quick to fix it, not always able to hook up the lux I start near until Calandar. Also, Granaries are early enough to solve most health issues up to your happiness limit.

Unhappiness, I find I don't always get an early religion at this level unless I start with Myst. Run a few games without religion, and you'll soon see happiness can be a much bigger pain than health.

[gdgrimm]

Originally posted by UnOrthOdOx
I find health much easier to deal with as well: the penalty is less severe,

Nice. That was something I forgot to consider. So while fewer techniques are available to fix health issues, the downside to not fixing them is pretty small.

For happiness, the downside to having it is quite a bit larger, but there's plenty of techniques you an employ to fix it.

Sounds pretty balanced.

[Blake]

I find it depends a lot on the resource availability. Last game on Highlands I didn't have a single happy resource nearby, I did have Rice, Corn, Pigs, Cows. Later I found Wheat, Sugar, Gems, Spices and Dye. So with a Granary alone I had +8 health - before any trades. Most my cities were sitting on +14 health or so. And then I had a grand total of 3 happy resources, all boosted by a different building. Suffice to say I made Drama a priority, I got it before finding any of the happys, with 10% allocation and theatres that gave me +2 happy, allowing my cities to grow about +40% larger (yay Emperor). I also grabbed Monarchy with some priority, and Asoka generously spread buddhism for me with his missionaries.

While in theory Monarchy means that health should always be the limiting factor, I'm loathe to rely too much on the military happiness, especially when it's unlikely I'll be coming into too much more happiness. Monarchy becomes addictive when you rely on it too much.

It seems that in practise about 70% of my games are limited more by happiness - either from abundance of grain resources + granaries or abundance of seafood + harbors, altough when health is limited, it's more annoying.