Increasing happiness?

[Larry]

So, I'm a bit confused as to how to increase happiness in this game. What's the deal with it? I've got one city that's rebelling and the rest are near to 0% happiness. I can't find any buildings to increase happiness or any tiles that affect it. Am I missing something? In-game the text for burrows says that burrows decrease happiness by 1 but increase it by 10 outside of a city tile...?

[selanderk]

Are you building tiles into districts or just bouroughs? Each tile you build on will decrease happiness untill it is made into a district. Also you take a happiness hit for the number of cities you have, You can also use most of the resource boosts to help as well. Most of then give at least 5% happiness.

[Larry]

Eh... what do you mean? I've built one burough on a city extending it to the sea for gold income. The second one I built was to extend the first burough for more gold. The city itself is inland. By district do you mean not having any loose ends but circling around and forming an enclosure?

[protëin]

Each borough gives you -10 approval. Every borough (including the city center) levels up to lvl 2 if they have at least 4 adjacent boroughs, when they give you +15 approval. Unless you play cultists, they can level them up to 3 with 4 adjacent lvl2 boroughs (including city center).
Fasf expanding gives you a lot of minus approval.
Other than that, use luxuries, and research/build stuff that gives approval or decreases expansion penalty.

[darkeisbein]

There are city improvements that increase happiness (mainly sewer system and central market), all luxury recources also boost happiness (wine even boost happiness for 30). You lose 10 happiness for every city besides your capital (expansion dissaproval) and you lose 10 happiness for building a city district. Once a City district is surrounded by 4 districts it levels up to level two and now gives 15 happiness (it still gives the -10 happiness so it gives +5 happiness in total).

Cities also loose a lot of happiness when they are captured during war (-X happiness from ownership) but this happiness loss vanishes over time.

There are also other factors that can increase happiness like gouvernors, certain anomalies, assimilating the minor faction "Eyeless Ones" etc. Later on winters also decrease happiness.

[Gregorovitch]

The three primary ways to deal with happiness are:

1. Techs. Some passive empire wide happiness boosters such as Bread & Circuses, others that unlock buildings that increase happiness in the cities they are built in such as sewer systems and markets.

2. Luxuries you can mine, wine and pixie dust etc. Wnen you have enough of them you can initiate a "booster" via the empire screen that often give a bonus to happiness. If you are mining enough of them (usually two sources are enough) you can keep these boosters going indefinitely.

3. By efficiently upgrading districts to level 2 as talked about above. This means you often have a decision to make between building borough streets on tiles that give the best FIDS output versus building therm on tiles that most efficiently level up you existing level 1 boroughs.

[TheDeadDude]

For proper city layouts i reccomend this link
http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/showthread.php?28694-Building-Big-Efficient-Cities-Borough-Streets-amp-Leveling-Districts

To increase hapiness you can get tech's that reduce penalties to expansion and buildings that increase approval rating.

Assimilated Minor faction
Eyelessones +5 hapiness per minor faction settlement.

Luxury boosters
Too many to list but most of the boosters give +5-10 hapiness excluding wines +20. The boosters have a number of amazing benefits and you should be extracting/buying them as you need them. Only buy boosters on slower game speeds or if its worth the investment in fast game speeds.

City improvements
Sewers, Central market, imperial network and arts council gives hapiness and the last two even gives you FIDSI.

Expansion dissaproval
Bread and circus and State approved theatre reduces expansion penalties by -25% each for both making new districts and expanding to new regions.

Empire plan
bottem tab called empire and expansion has the option for +25 approval/happiness on cities.

Settling new cities
You should not spam settlers everywhere like i see people doing in just about every game. You should actually stick with one city and expand to a new region every 15-20 turns till turn 60. Why? overrall more FIDSI, better empire plans, you can have 3 heroes as opposed to 1 and you can buy things off the market faster than you can extract them in slower game speeds. Your economy will actually burst with wealth this way so much quicker than if you were to spam a bunch of single district towns.

^^ This doesn't hold completely true anymore but in your case you are having trouble with empire approval and economy so i suggest building tall first. Build wide when you understand how to keep your approval ratings above 60%.