Domestic Advisor Details

[Bleyn]

Originally posted by albiedamned
My question is still this: why distinguish between the two types of luxuries on the domestic advisor screen, unless there is some difference between their effects? If luxuries from special resources and luxuries from city improvements both have the same exact effect (they make people content), then why bother breaking the number down into the two components, and why bother using two icons?

Actually, calling that column the Luxuries column is probably somewhat inaccurate. It is more acurately an indicator of how much Happiness is being generated in the city. What it is showing is one smily icon representing the Happiness being generated by Luxuries, and another being directly generated by City Improvements such as temples.

Its really little different in content from the Happiness Analysis subscreen in Civ2. I just looked at that screen on one of my old savegames, and it broke things down into the unaltered happiness, followed in sequence by the happiness as modified by luxuries, city improvements, troops outside the city (unhappiness), and wonders. Now they are just showing it in a different fashion.

In fact, looking over that again makes me wonder. If military units are now supported by the civilization as a whole, and not a particular city, is there any link between a military unit and any particular city that will have any effect at all? How will having units in the cities have an effect on happiness? Will your civ. explode in discontent if you decide to shift all of your forces to the outer perimeter of your area of influence and leave the center unguarded? Will there be any specific generators of unhappiness in cities other than increasing population, and the difficulty level of the game? If you have a weak culture, and there is a strong culture encroaching on your borders, will you get any indicators in form of increasing unhappiness in boarder cities?

That last one would actually be a nice touch. At least in civ/civ2, there were three ways to deal with unhappiness, increase the luxury rate, convert citizens to Elvises, or build city improvements. If, in civ3, losing the culture war in a city meant increasing unhappiness before the revolt, you would actually be getting a warning with one appropriate and two inappropriate counter-actions. Fiddling with luxury rates and entertainers would treat the symptoms but not cure the disease. Building temples and the like would not only help fix the symptoms, it would go to fixing the cultural disease in a way that I doubt the others will.