Best Civilization For Age Of Empires 2
Arnau Cyr
It's so bad for me that I looked at social policies solely based on their happiness, but the few that do add happiness are tacked on things like resources and universities and trade lanes, which are slow to come by early in game (and even later, the population grows way faster than they do).
In war the AI sometimes gives up and hands over like 12 cities at once for peace (which I'd be stupid not to take), and even kept as puppets my unhappiness plummeted to -81 at one point (big map....) and I had to spend a lot of gold to quickly build the few happiness structures in the few towns that I didn't have them in.
I think your conclusion here may be false. If those cities are going to drive your happiness into the ground, it may not be in your best interests to take all of them at once. There is no magical wellspring of happiness that will allow you to absorb an unlimited number of enemy cities into your empire without repercussions.
In addition, use puppet cities to your advantage, and don't overextend yourself. If taking all those cities is going to cripple you, it may not be worth it. Is a vast, dysfunctional empire better off than a slightly smaller, functional one?
Unfortunately, you will have take the cities with your military rather than taking them in a trade for peace. However, if a Civ is giving you a dozen cities for peace, chances are you have them beat and taking the cities will not be a problem. And for your trouble you get:
Step 2) Luxuries are a major source of Happiness, especially during the early to mid-game. Be sure to mine, quarry, or build a plantation on every luxury within your empire's borders, and choose new city locations based on their proximity to new luxuries.
Step 3) Explore and meet your neighbors. Each individual type of luxury only gives your civilization the same +4 happiness, i.e. having 2 sources of silk does not give anymore Happiness than just having 1 source. However, if your neighbors have excess luxuries of their own, you can swap different luxuries giving each nation an extra +4 happiness. Word of warning, if the luxury listed has a one in the parentheses like this "(1)", then it is the nation's last bit of that particular luxury. AI civs will be very loathe to part with it and their price will go up.
Also, I have never seen the AI iniate an offer to exchange luxuries. The player needs to routinely check the diplomacy menu to see if any nation's have excess luxuries you might trade. Sometimes, you can pay several hundred gold in lieu of offerring a luxury of your own.
Step 4) Save your pennies to bribe City-States. Bribing city states have a lot of benefits, including extra food and culture. Now, if that city state is an ally, then also share their strategic resources and luxuries with you. So, browse the Diplomacy menu to see which City-States have luxuries you do not. This is a great way to pick up extra happiness.
Step 5) Build Coliseums, Circuses, and Theaters. These buildings take a long time to build, but are ultimately one of the few ways to garnish happiness on a widespread level. I mention these buildings for their economy, they give the best amount of happiness for the gpt maintenance.
Step 6) Control expansion. If your Happiness is already at 2 or 3, there is no room for another city until Happiness goes up (an exception might be made for a city that adds a new luxury to your empire). This also means do not acquire enemy cities when your happiness is already low. Since there is a Happiness ceiling on expansion, a player should only acquire enemy cities that are worth keeping in the long run. Otherwise, they should just be razed without ceremony. If necessary, a settler can always be dispatched to reclaim the location under more advantageous circumstances.
Step 7) Annex cities 1 at a time, and immediately build a court house. Puppet cities can be annoying with their tendency to build Barracks and Arsenals when they cannot build military units. Yet, an Annexed city will provide more than double than unhappiness as a normal city (at least 6 unhappiness plus population*1.2). Keep in mind that is on top of unhappiness it creates as a normal city. There are a lot of benefits to annexation, the process just needs to be planned out so as to not stifle the nation.
My continent was huge, the biggest of all three and I'd attacked and conquered all 5 civilizations that were on my continent. I had 5-6 cities on my own, with 21 puppets.You can't know how large this is without seeing it. As I'd captured lots of workers, I built lots of roads: when you have 20 workers and your Roman legion building roads, this is fast and your cities become much easier to defend. Since I knew I was now alone now on this devastated continent, I didn't need much defense. I could just work on my town.
It's worth mentioning that the game's happiness balance is a bit wonky, which is probably the cause of your "insane lack of happiness". Puppet cities don't produce much unhappiness: it's the people in your other cities that are the cause. For example, in my case, I had lots of gold tiles and all the possible luxury resources besides three(whale, pearls and ivory).I had 5 cotton tiles and 3 silver tiles, but they don't contribute any happiness after the first tile. It would be nice if they at least provided something.
Actually, I'm now at 1720 AD in the timeline and the only thing I did so far is work on happiness. I'm at 40+ town's (I made a new one to cover all land space) but the basic problem is that as soon as I got few happiness points, the town grew up another tier and I went back to negative. All my research and social branches are concentrating on happiness.
When I got the +20% happiness bonus, I had a huge jump from -3 to +12.Then when I made the Forbidden Palace, I went to +30 or so. This is when I started to annex all my puppets. Now that these cities are no longer puppets, they are mine and I'm producing buildings all across the continent. This is hard to keep up: one turn my income is +60 gold, the next it's -20 (this is an exaggeration, but you get the idea), but overall this is worth it. This is especially true during a Golden Age, where I go to +350 gold per turn.
Also, as a result of having all the maritime neutral allies, my food bonus is awesome, meaning my town grew up pretty fast. I see the other empire's best town has nine people; for me, nine is the average of all my towns, including my latest.
My army is still composed of legions and cavalry. I haven't ever needed to create a new one since the last two empires are far away and I only need to kill barbarians moving around. As for tech, I'm about to discover Tanks! In the year 1750, I'll be producing tanks, and I don't think their little gunmen will be of any match.
So overall, it depends on your surroundings. Can you balance lots of towns over short periods of time? If so, you're going to be pretty powerful. I'm about to reach 1500 points. I don't know how good that is, but if I look at the best computer with his 25 towns, he doesn't even have half of this.
I often raze cities that are not in ideal locations and that are not producing enough gold. I keep as a puppet a city in a good location with lots of gold and other luxury tiles around. Once I even offered a city to a neighbor to keep him peaceful towards me; this payed off pretty well and reduced my unhappiness greatly.
Once I get into war and get many cities (from a peace treaty or by conquest), I make sure that they don't grow fast by removing food tiles and replacing them with trading posts. By doing this, I make more money faster for buying a coliseum or other happiness-related buildings in the cities I own -- 60 for accepting 10 cities for a peace treaty is the usual, should be close to 0 after 10 turns.
I always keep a captured city as a puppet; there's no need to annex them, even if you think it would be better to choose what to build there. It's better to raze it and send a new settler there (saving 5 gold/turn for not having the courthouse/city is a must for me).
I also change the lumber mill to a trade post, reducing the speed at which they get built.Having the extra gold also let you build the high-maintenance cost theater in your own city once you get to that technology.
Another reason to keep them as a puppet is to keep the quality of culture low enough to get the next policies, and they will usually build the monument and temple fast enough to give the extra push to get nice policies that give happiness.
I played over 15 games in the last five weeks, mostly on a huge map, and did a few conquest victories with minimal city annexation. The only good reason to annex a city is when you get on another continent and you want to pop out some new war unit or settler from it!
I also won the game once by building the space shuttle by around 1950-2000 A.D. on a huge map with 10 cities of my own on difficulty level 4. There was no wars at all and I rarely had unhappiness, no less than -5 for a few turns. I kept a small but strong army just in case; it was easy to have advanced units as I focused on science.
I've been having a think about this recently as I'm a bit fed up of the unhappiness problems in my games. It seems the trouble is I like building non-overlapping cities with big populations, but this is very hard to scale up to Huge maps.
Let's say you get about 1 unhappy per population (I think the actual ratio depends on difficulty level and whether you're Gandhi) and ignore unhappiness from number of cities for now. That means that in the end game you can only have cities of size 9 or less without eating into your 'auxiliary' happiness. That seems very constraining to me as I aim for cities of 20 or more.
Together with the buildings above, this adds up to a maximum of about 18-22 happy per city, but a large part of that is capped by the amount of unhappiness the city causes - so it's not all that beneficial to build new cities to build more of these buildings just to increase happiness!
Note that this theoretical maximum is hard to achieve even towards the end of the game and even then is only roughly half as much population as a city can have worked tiles. I'd therefore recommend that when planning your cities' locations, don't worry about overlap or food shortages too much. Keep an eye on your 'maximal happy city size' as you develop the buildings' requisite techs and gain social policies. At some stages in the game you'll see cities are approaching this target value and it could be worth halting their growth by turning farms into trading posts, selling granaries and diverting the surplus food into building settlers.
d3342ee215