Tips on city happines

[Virgin Wizard]

I do festivals to boost happiness, but it barely makes a dent, people still discontent.
Any advice, please?
I even chose Freedom as law.

[Siontific]

Freedom law yes, stop building festivals theyre a waste of time.

Get a religion in your cities, make you religion happy. Send luxury resources directly TO a city to decrease discontent. Build some theaters or baths if you need.

Ultimately though, just tank it. Focus on family opinion instead. As long as you take the steps to keep your families happy then it doesn't matter so much if the discontent within the cities themselves stack up.

Over the course of the game it should slow down the rate of increase more or less on its own as you adopt different laws (tolerance) and build certain buildings.

Plus, once you start to hit discontent levels 5 or higher, it just takes so much longer for each level to increase that the game is basically going to be over before the next level up.

[Virgin Wizard]

Originally posted by Siontific:

Freedom law yes, stop building festivals theyre a waste of time.

Get a religion in your cities, make you religion happy. Send luxury resources directly TO a city to decrease discontent. Build some theaters or baths if you need.

Ultimately though, just tank it. Focus on family opinion instead. As long as you take the steps to keep your families happy then it doesn't matter so much if the discontent within the cities themselves stack up.

Over the course of the game it should slow down the rate of increase more or less on its own as you adopt different laws (tolerance) and build certain buildings.

Plus, once you start to hit discontent levels 5 or higher, it just takes so much longer for each level to increase that the game is basically going to be over before the next level up.

Thanks!
What are the negatives of poor happiness within the city?

[jotwebe]

Don't worry about happiness until you're up to discontent level 3 or 4... at five it starts getting spicy. Festivals have greater effects (and a higher cost) the higher the city's culture level is - at weak or developing they're not doing much. Generally festivals aren't worth running only for the happiness effect - they're more for if you don't want to wait for your next citizen, and then the happiness and culture is a bonus (IMHO).

Better sources of happiness are:
- luxuries, especially the ones the city's ruling families like (50% more effective)
- theater line buildings - the second and third upgrades
- ruling families that like you
- governors that like you, especially Orators and ones with Righteous and Pious traits
- happy religions
- walls and upgrades with a military unit belonging to the family in the city's territory
- chancellor position with coinage tech -> pacify city missions
- late game there are several laws, tier IV projects (forum/treasury/archive) and bath type buildings

It's generally better to go for those things as fast as possible then rely on festivals, though they do have their place and are occasionally useful. Going all in on festivals is a trap though.

[jotwebe]

Originally posted by Virgin Wizard:

Thanks!
What are the negatives of poor happiness within the city?

There's a tooltip. Off the top of my head, a percentage reduction in science production and increase in gold upkeep, and I think reduced growth. High unhappiness also enables bad events.

[Virgin Wizard]

Originally posted by jotwebe:

Don't worry about happiness until you're up to discontent level 3 or 4... at five it starts getting spicy. Festivals have greater effects (and a higher cost) the higher the city's culture level is - at weak or developing they're not doing much. Generally festivals aren't worth running only for the happiness effect - they're more for if you don't want to wait for your next citizen, and then the happiness and culture is a bonus (IMHO).

Better sources of happiness are:
- luxuries, especially the ones the city's ruling families like (50% more effective)
- theater line buildings - the second and third upgrades
- ruling families that like you
- governors that like you, especially Orators and ones with Righteous and Pious traits
- happy religions
- walls and upgrades with a military unit belonging to the family in the city's territory
- chancellor position with coinage tech -> pacify city missions
- late game there are several laws, tier IV projects (forum/treasury/archive) and bath type buildings

It's generally better to go for those things as fast as possible then rely on festivals, though they do have their place and are occasionally useful. Going all in on festivals is a trap though.

Thank you much :)

[Siontific]

You take a science penalty and a maintenence penalty for each level of discontent. So this means if you keep your economy running smooth and you focus high science output in some specialized cities, it shouldn't matter too much if other cities get too high.

The main interplay is with opinion. Each level of discontent decreases opinion with the noble family of the city by -20; so lots of cities with high discontent can amount to several hundred negative opinion with a family.

With each level a family dislikes you (upset, angry, furious) you can get hit with things like production penalties, rebels, and increased maintences costs.

So you definitely don't want to let this spiral out of control, but there are lot of tools in the game to address the opinion issue directly, while you sort of triage the discontent issue.

The goal is more or less to freeze or slow the rate of growth, rather than wipe out discontent entirely, and from a position of slow discontent growth, you can tackle the bigger issue of family opinion knowing that it's not going to continue to go down.

Getting everyone following the same religion, influencing the religious head, and assigning them to a council position while adopting that religion as a state religion is a solid way to gain over 100 positive opinion with a family, for example.

[jotwebe]

Yep, also Cleric families, Patrons and to some extent Traders and Artisans have an easier time with discontent management.

Clerics get straight happiness per turn and have easy access to a world religion. Patrons get two whole levels of happiness every time the seat levels up its culture and reliable access to Orator archetype characters. Also every Patron city starts with a luxury, which is another +1 happiness per turn if you send it to a city.

Artisans and Traders can get also get Orators, if less often than Patrons. Artisans can build Urban Improvements more rapidly in their Familiy Seat, so will have an easier time getting to the higher tier ones. They also get a flat culture bonus in all their cities, which lets them qualify for the higher tier ones earlier.

[Gregorovitch]

Early game you have to tank discontent. This is especially true as you play on higher difficulties because a) you get -1 discontent per difficulty level and b) you have to develop your military faster so have less resources available for anti-discontent measures.

As the game progresses discontent kinda sorts itself out and the main sources of improving discontent are theatres, baths, religion, laws etc. Relgion especially can be a great source of happiness (Tolerance law + multiple religions is a good fire 'n forget happiness generator) but this stuff doesn't really come online until mid-game.

So. yeah, just tank discontent until you're in a position to deal with it naturally. There are no problems that can't be ultimately solved with enough military units and if you watch elite players in MP games, they basically forget about stroppy citizens early game, they just crank military.

[DealingTheCards]

I'm still getting used to the game so I wondered if discontent makes negative events more likely but from what I've found it doesn't seem to influence events.

[Virgin Wizard]

Lot of info :O Thanks!

[Twelvefield]

Culture buildings will give you long-term Happiness as will the Specialists you can build from them. Ignoring that is possible. You probably won't feel it until the end-game, as there are many other ways to boost happiness: Luxuries, events that make Families happy, successful war, Religion, laws, etc.

I'll tell you what happened to me: I played a culture-less Roman Dynasty. The resources I didn't spend on Culture, I poured into my many, many legions. I swept most of the map and was less than twenty turns from total world domination when unhappiness created too many rebels for even the might of Rome to conquer. It was a civil war that consumed the entirety of my domain, no city was unaffected. I tried to put down the wave of insurrection, but the damage was done, and I lost everything, all for the want of a stage play and a nice warm bath.

[IceMatrix]

Originally posted by jotwebe:

Don't worry about happiness until you're up to discontent level 3 or 4... at five it starts getting spicy. Festivals have greater effects (and a higher cost) the higher the city's culture level is - at weak or developing they're not doing much. Generally festivals aren't worth running only for the happiness effect - they're more for if you don't want to wait for your next citizen, and then the happiness and culture is a bonus (IMHO).

Better sources of happiness are:
- luxuries, especially the ones the city's ruling families like (50% more effective)
- theater line buildings - the second and third upgrades
- ruling families that like you
- governors that like you, especially Orators and ones with Righteous and Pious traits
- happy religions
- walls and upgrades with a military unit belonging to the family in the city's territory
- chancellor position with coinage tech -> pacify city missions
- late game there are several laws, tier IV projects (forum/treasury/archive) and bath type buildings

It's generally better to go for those things as fast as possible then rely on festivals, though they do have their place and are occasionally useful. Going all in on festivals is a trap though.

I almost never use festivals much unless they only take 1-2 turns cause my civ production is so massive. But...in my current Aksum series...I feel terrible, I built like 4-6 of them probably should have made workers instead.

[IceMatrix]

My tip: get the laws that give you happiness. Game changing. One does for each Hamlet. One does for each Elder specialist. One does for each religion in a city I think besides your State Religion.

[Virgin Wizard]

Originally posted by Twelvefield:

Culture buildings will give you long-term Happiness as will the Specialists you can build from them. Ignoring that is possible. You probably won't feel it until the end-game, as there are many other ways to boost happiness: Luxuries, events that make Families happy, successful war, Religion, laws, etc.

I'll tell you what happened to me: I played a culture-less Roman Dynasty. The resources I didn't spend on Culture, I poured into my many, many legions. I swept most of the map and was less than twenty turns from total world domination when unhappiness created too many rebels for even the might of Rome to conquer. It was a civil war that consumed the entirety of my domain, no city was unaffected. I tried to put down the wave of insurrection, but the damage was done, and I lost everything, all for the want of a stage play and a nice warm bath.

Damn, thats quite the story :D You replicated the Fall of Rome in game :D

[Virgin Wizard]

Originally posted by IceMatrix:

My tip: get the laws that give you happiness. Game changing. One does for each Hamlet. One does for each Elder specialist. One does for each religion in a city I think besides your State Religion.

Yea, I went with Freedom law definitely. Hamlets give happiness? Didnt know, thanks.