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After playing a few games I'm seeing what might be an annoying trend that will require users to do some serious micro management in order to maintain a productive empire. Read on and I'll explain.
Happiness is global.
Unhappiness effects both growth rate and production.*
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Edit: Sorry, I was mistaken. Production is not effected until you reach 10 unhappiness, so the system has an inbuilt slowdown to prevent cascading unhappiness and inefficiency in the empire. The decrease in production I saw must of been due to 10 unhappiness (I was at war at the time and had captured two cities).
If being between 1 and 10 unhapiness has any other ill effects then It still requires the magical "stop growth if below x hapiness button" so that you can maintain an efficient empire, otherwise the system already has this magical button by automatically slowing down growth when you become unhappy.
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You get unhappiness from both number of cities and population size.
Large empires struggle to maintain happiness.
Unhappiness is a built in game mechanic used to decrease the effectiveness of expansion.
That's all fine except it leads to the following;
In my recent games I have expanded like crazy, and wavered in and out of happiness throughout the course of the game. As soon as you become happy cities grow fast (especially with 5+ maritime city state allies), and it doesn't take long before you dip back into unhappiness.
Being unhappy seriously destroys the effectiveness of your empire. It is much more efficient to remain small and happy than it is to venture into unhappiness.
What I have begun to do is prevent city growth when I fall below a certain level of happiness ~ 5. This prevents my cities from becoming unhappy and keeps the empire running optimally. In the long run my growth is faster because I can use the extra production to build more happiness buildings quicker at which point I can turn back on growth and repeat the cycle.
This works very well but it's a really annoying micromanagement effort. I have to go into each of my cities and turn on and off growth every few turns.
There needs to be a "prevent city growth if happiness is < X" option for the city governors. Without such an option it's a pain in the !$#% to have to turn off and on growth for every city manually to prevent this oscillation in and out of unhappiness.
Happiness is global.
Unhappiness effects both growth rate and production.*
--------------------
Edit: Sorry, I was mistaken. Production is not effected until you reach 10 unhappiness, so the system has an inbuilt slowdown to prevent cascading unhappiness and inefficiency in the empire. The decrease in production I saw must of been due to 10 unhappiness (I was at war at the time and had captured two cities).
If being between 1 and 10 unhapiness has any other ill effects then It still requires the magical "stop growth if below x hapiness button" so that you can maintain an efficient empire, otherwise the system already has this magical button by automatically slowing down growth when you become unhappy.
--------------------
You get unhappiness from both number of cities and population size.
Large empires struggle to maintain happiness.
Unhappiness is a built in game mechanic used to decrease the effectiveness of expansion.
That's all fine except it leads to the following;
In my recent games I have expanded like crazy, and wavered in and out of happiness throughout the course of the game. As soon as you become happy cities grow fast (especially with 5+ maritime city state allies), and it doesn't take long before you dip back into unhappiness.
Being unhappy seriously destroys the effectiveness of your empire. It is much more efficient to remain small and happy than it is to venture into unhappiness.
What I have begun to do is prevent city growth when I fall below a certain level of happiness ~ 5. This prevents my cities from becoming unhappy and keeps the empire running optimally. In the long run my growth is faster because I can use the extra production to build more happiness buildings quicker at which point I can turn back on growth and repeat the cycle.
This works very well but it's a really annoying micromanagement effort. I have to go into each of my cities and turn on and off growth every few turns.
There needs to be a "prevent city growth if happiness is < X" option for the city governors. Without such an option it's a pain in the !$#% to have to turn off and on growth for every city manually to prevent this oscillation in and out of unhappiness.
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