The Opera House is a type of cultural building in Napoleon: Total War.
Description[]
Entertainment improves the happiness of all classes and helps to improve town wealth.
An opera house is a sumptuous theatre for the performance of highly stylized musical plays. The self-important and the genuinely important often attend to be seen rather than for amusement, but the "lower orders" are often genuinely entertained and distracted from the difficulties of life. No expense is spared on making an opera house a grand venue. They rival many great palaces with the luxury of their fixtures and fittings, as the public areas for the audience are at least as important as what is happening on stage. Having a prestigious opera house will improve town wealth as it draws crowds from far and wide.
In the 18th Century opera was done in the Italian "serious" style, a musical form that influenced many non-Italian composers including Mozart. The plots were intentionally simple, based on Classical themes, usually tragic and often had a highly conservative bent -- as befitted the tastes of the patrons paying for the music. Many are still performed today. One fashion that mercifully ended before the Napoleonic period was the use of castrati: young men gelded so that their voices did not break and remained in the soprano range.
General Information[]
As second-tier cultural buildings, opera houses may be built only in region capitals, either as an upgrade over first-tier theatres or by converting another second-tier building already placed there (such as a Magistrate or Barracks).
As with all cultural buildings, opera houses offer a bonus to happiness and to town wealth. The cultural building line compares most similarly to the administrative line of buildings: both provide near-identical bonuses to public order (happiness and repression are identical except in the cases of elections). However, administrative buildings provide a larger economic benefit in the short term by raising tax rates, while cultural buildings grant a larger economic benefit in the long term by increasing town wealth growth.
Opera houses, and all other cultural buildings, are perhaps best placed in regions with low wealth: administrative buildings increase tax income by a percentage, so they do not increase the income of poor regions as much. Opera houses, on the other hand, produce a fixed amount of town wealth growth, and so benefit all regions equally. They can make poor regions wealthy enough to be meaningfully taxable in the long term.
Opera houses may be upgraded to grand opera houses, which further increase regions' happiness and town wealth growth.
The Peninsular Campaign[]
In The Peninsular Campaign, opera houses require 750 gold and 5 turns to build. This is one more turn than the other buildings of its tier; building a Magistrate instead of an opera house therefore increases public order more quickly.