The Happiness system in Civ 5 is one of the key mechanics of the game, moderating population growth and expansion to new cities. As well, it triggers the ‘natural’ Golden Ages in the game, which leads directly to more gold and production. The AI cheats heavily on the happiness mechanic to effectively keep it in golden ages most of the game.
With the latest patches, the Happiness system went from ‘close to final’, where it almost balanced ‘tall’ strategies with ‘wide’ strategies, to an almost exclusively ‘wide/semi-tall’ strategy being the best. Given that there are civs in the game that benefit from being ‘tall’ more than ‘wide’, and others that benefit from being ‘wide’ more than ‘tall’, this skews the ‘power’ rating a bit to the civs that work naturally ‘wide’. There does need to be a balance, and the ability to choose wide or tall as effective strategies. Builder types like to go tall and wonder spam, which works well for a cultural or scientific game. Expansionists benefit from more gold and more locations to build units, which works for Diplomatic and Domination games.
How it works right now:
There is a split between ‘local’ and ‘global’ happiness, though the latest patches skewed almost everything to ‘global’. The Coliseum/Theatre/Stadium line of happiness buildings, along with the circus, are all considered ‘local’. The benefit they provide is directly related to the population of the city it is in. So a 5 pop city with a coliseum and a theatre will get 5 happiness to combat the 5 unhappiness from population. Now, if the city had only 4 population with the same theatre and coliseum, it would only gain 4 happiness. So ‘local’ happiness is locked to the population.
Every other possible happiness source, be it from luxuries, wonders, social Policies or other, is considered ‘global’. That is, it can be used in any city to manage population, as well as to counter the ‘per city unhappiness’, which is currently 3 unhappiness/city. This is the core of the ‘ICS’ issue, which realistically drives the ‘wide and tall’ strategy. You only need a few policies to overcome the 3 unhappiness/city in each and every city. You can do it cheaply with Piety/Organized Religion (needing both a monument and temple, which you build anyways) and Liberty/Meritocracy (requiring a trade route), which you get anyways since Liberty is the most powerful Social Policy tree in the early game. You can do it slightly more expensive with walls/castles/etc from Honour, or wait a long time to get Rationalism for Universities/Observatories/Public Schools. In any case, you just need three ‘global’ happiness per city, from repeatable sources/city.
This effectively makes the happiness system just a ‘minor annoyance’ to Expansionists, though Builders are locked into few chances to replicate the same thing with population in only a few cities. This means that ‘wide’ empires are guaranteed to have more population, and therefore more science/gold/production/etc, than tall empires. When ‘local’ happiness is a very small portion of the overall happiness system, and ‘global’ happiness is repeatable/city, it’s by far more effective to expand than add 10 more population to a single city as you can gain the ‘local’ happiness for each city as well as each of those repeatable ‘global’ happiness sources.
This is exasperated when taking to an ‘extreme’. Wide empires can add ten more 10 pop cities, using ‘global’ happiness additions, far faster than a ‘tall’ empire can add 100 population to a single city, let alone 50 to two cities or 25 pop to four cities. Even at one population point/turn gained, it’ll take 100 turns to add 100 pop to a single city, but that’s not an issue for expansion, since you do that in parallel. In context, that means going ‘tall’ is a bad idea when the AI can just spam cities everywhere. Wide (or constant raze/pillage cycles) is the only defense against an AI city spammer, or one that gained an extra empire in a one sided trade deal. This shouldn’t be the case, though it’s ok to have trade offs between going tall and wide.
As a side problem, which is by far more symptomatic of the games mechanics being unbalanced, you can ‘go wide’ without luxuries being used for their happiness function. You can generally sell every last luxury for 240g, which along with an Open borders agreement, (290g total at standard speed) covers you for Research Agreements until Modern. One luxury sale/civ on the map = one or more techs/sale by Renaissance. You can do this for 3 cycles and clear 1/2 or more of the tech tree in 90 turns or so. Add in the requisite 6-8 Great Scientists, Oxford University and Scientific Revolution and you’ve effectively cleared the tech tree, no skill required. Given that ‘wide’ empires are going to gain more luxury and strategic resources than a ‘tall’ empire, this is a major problem that needs to be fixed.
Of course, the warmongers will rightly point out that a mass puppet empire is hard to gain, let alone the fact that for every city you raze, two more can pop up. Unhappiness forces you to stop fighting while waiting on cities to raze, which obviously puts a damper on your domination attempts. Obviously we need a way to allow the warmongers to keep fighting, while ensuring that mass expansion (including puppets) is fairly balanced with a ‘small but tall’ empire. The most obvious start is the happiness system, though other balance changes will be required to ensure there is a reason to be ‘tall’.
The biggest issue with making changes to balance ‘tall’ and ‘wide’ is that any time you add something ‘local’ for a ‘tall’ empire, a wide empire can build it just the same. You can try to force a limitation on expansion, but that cause major issues in Large and Huge map sizes, where ‘small’ tend to be wider than ‘wide’ on smaller maps. So any change has to keep that in mind. As well, you are limited on the amount of happiness you can get in one city. Sure you can trade for luxury resources, but you’d need a vast gold income (wide is better) or get a very lucky start with a large number of unique luxuries within your area. (rare) This makes any balance changes very hard, but we’ll give it a shot.
Invariably, the happiness system is finite in it’s ability to stack happiness in a single city. There are too few ‘tall’ happiness based increases, which properly scale so that wide empires can’t use them effectively. Of course, you don’t want a ‘tall’ civ to grow infinitely, just as you don’t want a ‘wide’ empire to expand infinitely. Though, realistically in the games current mechanics, it takes infinite turns to grow infinitely tall, but a lot less than that to go wide. (aside from the obvious infinite is infinite argument…)
read Part 2 for more.
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