Settlement Cap Advice

[Sheldon666]

HI!
I have a settlement Cap of 6 in the first Age.
I already have 6 settlements as I conquered a city of Macchiavelli.
Now I am just before conquering Macchiavellis Capital. But then I will have 7/6 settlements.
What should I do? The next Tech that raises my cap is 16 Turns away. I can´t afford getting the maluses for 16 turns.
Should I consider razing the City instead / or razing the smaller of Macchiavellis cities? I am Afraid of the Malus I get from that ...
Or is there some other way / some kind of tricks?
Thanks in Advance!!

[Evrach]

You perfectly can take it. It’s not a hard cap. You will just have a -5 happyness malus in all your cities, ko big deal.

[DadouXIII]

Either don't conquer the capital, raze it, or take it and deal with the consequences.
You don't have any other option.

[Rhapsody]

You can go as much as 50% above the settlement limit if you're managing happiness well, especially when playing certain civs and leaders. Razing a city is very rarely a good idea.

Early on the pantheon bonus and altars in towns will help you the most. Then in the exploration age it's temples, resources and social policies.

You can also change town focus to trade network settlement, that'll give a happiness bonus to each resource, or focus on growing the town over terrain that grants happiness as yield.

[Aluminum Elite Master]

There are one or two attribute points that lift the cap (expansion and militaristic, I think?).

There are a couple of civ choices that have innate lifts to the cap (Persia IIRC).

And like others said, it's not a hard cap... if you plan ahead and build happiness buildings and take happiness social policies, it's possible to go multiple settlements over the cap and not really suffer any penalty at all.

[plaguepenguin]

Happiness is the factor you should plan around, rather than the cap in isolation.

Exceeding the cap gets you -5 happiness, for every settlement in excess, and -5 in each of your settlements. With happiness just from resources and settling on fresh water, without even needing to get happiness buildings, you almost certainly won't face dire consequences for being just one over the cap, just -5 in every settlement.

Happiness is of two types, empire-wide, and specific to each settlement. Short term consequences arise from having negative happiness in settlements, but even just low empire-wide happiness has bad long term consequences.

Negative happiness in a settlement instantly reduces its yields by 2% for every point of unhappiness. At some point (and I'm not clear how negative it has to be because I almost always avoid leaving any settlement in negative happiness for long at all) of negative happiness, civil disturbances break out in that settlement, which has the effect of increasing the odds of some of its tiles being pillaged. Leave a settlement at negative enough happiness for long enough, and it revolts, flips to one of your competitor civs. Yikes.

You counter these bad effects of city unhappiness by moving in happiness resources, and getting happiness buildings in that settlement. Depending on how bad the problem is, you may need to purchase the happiness buildings rather than produce them. Purchase is your only option in towns anyway. Recently captured settlements are a special case, in that their unhappiness can be countered by stationing a commander in them, at a 10% reduction for every command level.

So, short term in this situation, being about to capture an enemy capital that will put you over the cap, the first thing is to plan ahead. Survey your settlements to see if any will go negative on happiness if they get the -5, then take corrective action. If you have a comfortable margin of positive happiness, no need even for correctives. Plan on stationing your best commander in the captured settlement until its period of unrest is over. It's often a good idea to make peace in this situation, but, if you have positive happiness to spare in all your settlements, maybe you can afford to press your advantage and take more settlements.

Empire-wide happiness, if low, means it will take longer for you to get celebrations. The 10-turn bonuses for these are nice, but the real benefit of celebrations is that each one gives you another policy slot. Since policies are nice and more of them are really nice, there is a definite trade-off calculation to be made between adding a well-developed settlement like a capital to your empire, and delaying the acquisition of policy slots as the price you pay for the nice settlement, if it puts you over the cap.

The other long-term consideration here is the other negative happiness factor, specialists. Each one eats happiness, at -2 each, as they add other yields. This sets up a trade-off between them and exceeding the cap, because you can't go too far in both of those directions at the same time without really intense countermeasures to pump up your happiness. At some point you max out on the positive happiness factors at your disposal, and you will have dire consequences for being 4 over the cap, with your cities larded down with tons of specialists. Then, draw the unhappiness crisis, and you're really in trouble.

As for razing a city as a means to escape the downside of exceeding the cap, there is a strong disincentive to that. You lose 1 point of war support, forever, for every settlement you have ever razed. That's awful enough that I've never done it.

[Ðe§er†FoX]

Originally posted by plaguepenguin:

Happiness is the factor you should plan around, rather than the cap in isolation.

Exceeding the cap gets you -5 happiness, for every settlement in excess, and -5 in each of your settlements. With happiness just from resources and settling on fresh water, without even needing to get happiness buildings, you almost certainly won't face dire consequences for being just one over the cap, just -5 in every settlement.

Happiness is of two types, empire-wide, and specific to each settlement. Short term consequences arise from having negative happiness in settlements, but even just low empire-wide happiness has bad long term consequences.

Negative happiness in a settlement instantly reduces its yields by 2% for every point of unhappiness. At some point (and I'm not clear how negative it has to be because I almost always avoid leaving any settlement in negative happiness for long at all) of negative happiness, civil disturbances break out in that settlement, which has the effect of increasing the odds of some of its tiles being pillaged. Leave a settlement at negative enough happiness for long enough, and it revolts, flips to one of your competitor civs. Yikes.

You counter these bad effects of city unhappiness by moving in happiness resources, and getting happiness buildings in that settlement. Depending on how bad the problem is, you may need to purchase the happiness buildings rather than produce them. Purchase is your only option in towns anyway. Recently captured settlements are a special case, in that their unhappiness can be countered by stationing a commander in them, at a 10% reduction for every command level.

So, short term in this situation, being about to capture an enemy capital that will put you over the cap, the first thing is to plan ahead. Survey your settlements to see if any will go negative on happiness if they get the -5, then take corrective action. If you have a comfortable margin of positive happiness, no need even for correctives. Plan on stationing your best commander in the captured settlement until its period of unrest is over. It's often a good idea to make peace in this situation, but, if you have positive happiness to spare in all your settlements, maybe you can afford to press your advantage and take more settlements.

Empire-wide happiness, if low, means it will take longer for you to get celebrations. The 10-turn bonuses for these are nice, but the real benefit of celebrations is that each one gives you another policy slot. Since policies are nice and more of them are really nice, there is a definite trade-off calculation to be made between adding a well-developed settlement like a capital to your empire, and delaying the acquisition of policy slots as the price you pay for the nice settlement, if it puts you over the cap.

The other long-term consideration here is the other negative happiness factor, specialists. Each one eats happiness, at -2 each, as they add other yields. This sets up a trade-off between them and exceeding the cap, because you can't go too far in both of those directions at the same time without really intense countermeasures to pump up your happiness. At some point you max out on the positive happiness factors at your disposal, and you will have dire consequences for being 4 over the cap, with your cities larded down with tons of specialists. Then, draw the unhappiness crisis, and you're really in trouble.

As for razing a city as a means to escape the downside of exceeding the cap, there is a strong disincentive to that. You lose 1 point of war support, forever, for every settlement you have ever razed. That's awful enough that I've never done it.

Are you sure about the razing cities and war support? I have razed tons of cities as the ai tends to settle too close and take away valuable tiles and dont recall losing much war support. Also with the cap i like optimized towns.