Civilization V Notes - Happiness Is A Warm Gun

Happiness in Civ 5 has had a major rework. It's no longer city specific and is an empire wide value. This doesn't mean your individual cities no longer take a penalty for over population, they do. But no one city will be crippled because of unhappiness.

But instead you could cripple you entire empire by unhappiness, making happiness a crucial concept to master. This happiness business is serious stuff. An unhappy population will work at quarter efficiency(essentially at 1/4 of its full potential). It cuts down on food production, science production, and even how fast you build stuff in cities. And yes let me stress this happens across you entire empire and not just in one city.

To add to the dire situation of unhappiness, the golden age is tied closely to happiness. Your civilization will accumulate excess happiness to add to this golden age meter(well it's not a meter, but I have no idea how to explain this). If your empire is unhappy, this meter losses points making the golden age further away. You can however always consume great people to start a golden age. You will fall behind other civilizations as everything just takes longer and slower.

Expanding your empire also negates happiness as Civ 5 imposes some hefty penalty on large empires. You could easily run into unhappiness if you play it like Civ 4 and expand haphazardly. You'll have to time your expansion with excess happiness to buffer the unhappiness hit you get from founding a new city(or conquering an enemy city). I'm still getting to grasp with this new system as my German empire now grinds to a halt with growing unhappiness and bankruptcy(gold will be another topic I'll get into next time). Building structures that give your citizens happiness cost a lot more gold for maintenance making it a tricky proposition.

There is this new social policy system(a replacement of the civics system) which you can use to give bonus to your civilization and reduce the effects of a large empire. Social policies are another concept I'll go into detail on another day. Well thats it for now. Back to one more turn....