Vampiresbane's Guide to Food, Growth, and Happiness for Rome 2

[Vampiresbane]

For many of us, first playing Rome 2 is a struggle to learn some of the new game mechanics. For myself, one of the hardest to understand was how food, growth, and happiness worked. The encyclopedia has little to no information and what little information there is to be found are hidden in tooltips that take time to find. This guide will walk you through how to increase your food, growth, and happiness. So let's begin!HappinessBelieve it or not, the most crucial mechanic to growth and region stability is happiness. With neutral or negative happiness, you actually can see a decrease to growth. In addition if you allow happiness to fall far enough, the region will rebel. On the flip side, if you manage to get your happiness into the positive, you'll start seeing bonuses to wealth and/or tax rate as well as population growth. One thing you might start noticing is that the AI tends to take a city and immediately leave it. A player's first instinct is to remain at the town since the happiness will decrease or is in the negative. You don't have to stay. Cities can actually take up to 10 turns starting at -33 happiness (lowest amount when you occupy) before they rebel. Once you start to get the hang of military actions, you can feel safer occupying a city, moving on to fight other armies or take other cities, and then returning before you have a rebellion. So what affects happiness? (Note when I state agent I'm including all typical agents as well as your generals)What Increase HappinessFood SurplusMilitary Garrison (The larger the army, the larger the increase to happiness each turn.)Agent ActionsAgent Retainers (I've seen spies, diplomats, and generals all with different bonuses to happiness per turn)What Decrease HappinessTaxes (Even at the lowest setting, taxes will still give a -1 modifier to happiness)Lack of FoodCultural Differences (For instance if you're Rome and you take an Alveni settlement, you'll have a negative modifier due to cultural differences until the city converts to your culture.)Occupation (-33)Looting (-55?)Extermination (-55)Enemy Agent Actions (Slave revolt from the Champion, Insurgency from the Spy, Cultural Differences from the Diplomat, etc)Enemy Agent Retainers-In Progress- I'll be adding pictures to help illustrate how these mechanics work as well as updating with more information as I go along.NOTE!: Yikes that formating was terrible and this is taking forever to load. I'll return to this site once my internet starts behaving. In the meantime. I'll be reposting this guide here:http://forums.totalwar.com/showthrea...726#post672726