My people are unhappy

[Dawn Celestine]

I was wondering if anyone had any pointers on how to handle unhappiness. I've recently upped the difficulty and have found that this has quickly become a perienial problem of mine and I find myself at a loss of how to best manage and prevent unhappiness.

[TheGaleRider]

Acquiring Luxuries
Building buildings that provide happiness
Wonders
Social Policies
Natural Wonders
Setting your cities to Avoid Growth
Don't found new cities and don't conquer
Avoid taking negative Popular Opinion from having a different Ideology

It's really not that hard to manage happiness.

[Skye]

Higher difficulties have lower base happiness in your empire to start you off and the amount of things that increase unhappiness goes up. For example, Prince is when you start to get the full penalties of +2 Unhappiness for every new city and +1 Unhappiness for every citizen as well as extra unhappiness from the existence of specialists. This is base and can't be removed except by social policies that affect it. In order to keep your sprawl under control, setting your cities to avoid growth or popping civilians onto specialist spots to use up more food AND curb its production in one swing.

As said above there's a lot of things that can increase happiness in the game, the most prominent being luxury resources. It's usually worth it to go just out of your way to make sure you can snag some and get them integrated into your empire. If you have spares, always look into trading them to friendly Civs for other luxuries (Just make sure said Civs like you enough to want to trade 1:1 and not pawn up spare horses or something.)

Building happiness increasing buildings and wonders is also a nice way to making sure that your public opinion stays under control. Wonders aren't always able to be obtained but if you know you can get one, it will be of a high benefit, and you're fairly certain other Civs won't hate you for swiping it, then they can be worth the extra effort. Natural Wonders also give a permanent +1 happiness for their discovery so start exploring and meeting new people if you can. Natural Wonders often spawn near other Civs and city-states so it tends to go hand in hand.

However your international relations can be one of the biggest things to hit your happiness even if you have all of this under control. Firstly, if you go to war, then conquering cities will create a lot of unhappiness in the cities until courthouses are built not to mention the delay time between the capture and when they can actually start doing something useful. On the peaceful front, always be wary of tourism-heavy Civs with strong ideologies. The stronger a Civ's tourism is on you, the more pressure their ideology will place on yours and the more of your people will want it instead of the one you picked. If left unchecked, you might wind up on the recieving end of a civil uprising. Sometimes the best course of action for this if you know your culture can't keep up is to just switch ideologies.

Hope this helps.

[Crim]

Each City Generates 3 Unhappiness
Each Citizen Generates 1 Unhappiness

[zxcvbob]

Do you have Brave New World?

Focus on culture as well as science throughout the game. And in the Renaissance start accumulating great works of art, music, and literature because that's where you get "tourism" You don't need to be the tourism leader unless you're going for a cultural victory, but you don't want to fall too far behind either.

Build colosseums and circuses. Later you can build zoos and stadiums, but they are a lot more expensive.

Religion can help with happiness.

There are wonders that give happiness. Notre Dame give +10 happy.

In the Industrial or Modern age, you get to pick an ideology. All of them have bonuses to happiness, as long as you aren't lagging too far in culture/tourism. Even if you are behind in culture, you can get away with it if you have the same ideology as the popular civs (this doesn't work so well if you pick your ideology first, then everybody else picks something else)

Finishing the Commerce policy tree is one of the best sources of happiness in the game even though it doesn't look like much.

Ally city states will give you their resources. That is a major source of luxuries. You can buy their alliance with gold, but killing barbarians for them is a lot cheaper.

[5n4k3d0cToR]

Originally posted by TheGaleRider:

Acquiring Luxuries
Building buildings that provide happiness
Wonders
Social Policies
Natural Wonders
Setting your cities to Avoid Growth
Don't found new cities and don't conquer
Avoid taking negative Popular Opinion from having a different Ideology

It's really not that hard to manage happiness.

Dont forget happyness through faith bonuses :)

[Nekoborg]

On higher difficulties you are often so challenged so hard that building world wonders will not be completed before someone else builds it.

UNLESS

Your city is geared for production.

Getting enough happiness from the "field" can also be difficult.

The idea about normal buildings like colosseum, circus, garden, theatre, and stadium is the easiest way to get happy workers. The reasons being that these building types are not in a race to finish or lose 3/4 investment converted: one gold per 4 hammers. This is a bad trade of and penalty for not being first.

It might be best to choose the city with highest population potential to get the national wonders like Circus Maximus. Looking at the landscape outside your cities, it is easy to spot the city which will become the most populated later in game.

On the 2 hardest settings then it isn’t only about strategy, knowing game mechanics helps a lot too. Knowing game mechanics allows better planning. You can be good at strategy but it won’t do any good if you know little of the game economic dynamics.

[zxcvbob]

Let someone else build Notre Dame, then go steal it from them. ;)

[zxcvbob]

I recently finished a Bollywood achievement game, and as is my custom I am now continuing to play to get a domination victory too. The first city I took (Venice) was before I got the achievement and right after I picked an ideology and didn't have many tenets yet. My happiness plummeted (but was still positive, barely) I thought "this is going to be a BIG problem when I start capturing cities for real." I have enough influence from the cultural victory that cities don't lose population when captured, so it might take 20 turns to raze them.

I started my rampage last night, after building Prora, a couple of zoos and stadiums, and finishing the Commerce tree. I've taken 3 big cities* so far, and my happiness is not going down, it's up to 93! Some of those cities had happy wonders (like Notre Dame), plus I've allied a few more city-states along the way. I'm sure all those big cities had coliseums, zoos, circuses, etc because the AI's were having happiness problems of their own -- I haven't checked yet to see if those were destroyed when I captured the cities (probably not; that would help explain what's happening)

*correction, 4 big cities, I forgot about Philadelphia.

[Skye]

Originally posted by zxcvbob:

Let someone else build Notre Dame, then go steal it from them. ;)

Domination for the sake of happiness tends to be somewhat overlooked due to the initial unhappiness penalties it carries, but if a weak neighbor has a lot of luxuries or wonders like this, it can definitely be worth it over time if you think you can eat the diplomatic costs and the warmonger penalty. Though this can be circumvented if you manage to stomp an opponent hard enough that you can demand cities in return for peace treaties. I once got El Dorado this way.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=237400507

Originally posted by zxcvbob:

I recently finished a Bollywood achievement game, and as is my custom I am now continuing to play to get a domination victory too. The first city I took (Venice) was before I got the achievement and right after I picked an ideology and didn't have many tenets yet. My happiness plummeted (but was still positive, barely) I thought "this is going to be a BIG problem when I start capturing cities for real." I have enough influence from the cultural victory that cities don't lose population when captured, so it might take 20 turns to raze them.

I started my rampage last night, after building Prora, a couple of zoos and stadiums, and finishing the Commerce tree. I've taken 3 big cities so far, and my happiness is not going down, it's up to 93! Some of those cities had happy wonders (like Notre Dame), plus I've allied a few more city-states along the way. I'm sure all those big cities had coliseums, zoos, circuses, etc because the AI's were having happiness problems of their own -- I haven't checked yet to see if those were destroyed when I captured the cities (probably not; that would help explain what's happening)

If you're still doing this as India, it'll probably definitely be worth your time to minor in tourism. India's bonuses to Tourism plus tourism-building Autocracy tenants will make it so your enemies will probably be in the midst of civil uprisings by the time you invade anyway. If you're really REALLY lucky, some of the enemy's cities will have either turned into city-states or even defected to you.

[Dawn Celestine]

Thanks for the advice guys I appreiciate it. In anycase I think I'm starting to see why I was having that problem ei I let my cities grow too fast.

@ zxcvbob
Yes I have Brave New Worlds

[Eifersucht18]

Originally posted by Lord Tristem:

I was wondering if anyone had any pointers on how to handle unhappiness. I've recently upped the difficulty and have found that this has quickly become a perienial problem of mine and I find myself at a loss of how to best manage and prevent unhappiness.

Lots of Good Pointers above - I would prioritize the following for a Happy Empire:

1. Luxury Resources: Your first 3 cities should be placed soley around where you can snag the most luxury resources. Use all gold you accumulate in early game to buy tiles containing luxury resources around you (before those greedy city states gooble them up) and work them quickly

2. Trade (W/Civs): Trade extra luxury resources (if you have more than 2 of each type) to other Civs for luxury resources that you do not have access to. Common examples are cotton, jewelry, truffles etc which I rarely find near my cities

3. Trade (w/City States): Once you get to mid-game and have the money / spies etc to dominate CS's, getting them to 'Ally' status automatically means they share their luxury goods with your trade network

4. Religion: When you pick a religion, select traits that add happiness

5. Happiness Buildings: Every City can have a Circus, Colloseum, Zoo, and you can choose to focus your efforts on those World Wonders that add Happiness

6. Policy Tree / Idealogy Tenets: Pick Policies / Tenets that add massive upgrades to Happiness if you have a good base. Depending on the Idealogy you pick for example, there are tenets for example that add +2 Happiness for every Castle, Barracks, Armory etc - so thats +6 Happiness per city x 5 cities = 30 Happiness upgrade in one go

There are lots of smaller ones like exploring to find Natural Wonders (hit or miss depending on map type) or the more complex Population Control Strategies but with those you are really just showing off to other Civs :)

etc etc

[zxcvbob]

Originally posted by Setrin-Skyheart:

If you're still doing this as India, it'll probably definitely be worth your time to minor in tourism. India's bonuses to Tourism plus tourism-building Autocracy tenants will make it so your enemies will probably be in the midst of civil uprisings by the time you invade anyway. If you're really REALLY lucky, some of the enemy's cities will have either turned into city-states or even defected to you.

I actually majored in tourism, with a minor in warmongering. (cultural victory using autocracy is fun! It's very manipulative) Everybody except China has embraced autocracy, and she only has one city left so it's not hard to keep it happy even against ideological pressure.

I only need 3 or 4 more social policies and then I don't care about policy costs anymore. At that point I can annex everything and buy courthouses and pagodas.

[Eifersucht18]

Originally posted by zxcvbob:

Everybody except China has embraced autocracy, and she only has one city left so it's not hard to keep it happy even against ideological pressure.

"Pooshing....taamalaa Poooshing" :)

[Broon Coo]

Originally posted by zxcvbob:

Let someone else build Notre Dame + Forbidden Palace + Chichen Itza, then go steal it from them. ;)

FTFY

[Lon 'Qu the Betta]

Well the main thing to prevent unhappiness is to max out social policies pertaining to that. Build all the wonders beforehand and when you're able to get an ideology choose Universal Healthcare as one of the tenets. Build all the buildings for happiness and don't try to do any fighting beforehand. Unhappiness generates also if the civ is at war and by the amount of units you own. Tbph, razing cities is a lot better than owning them. Capitals are what you want and if you're at war with someone and you're about to jack their capital, they try to give you a whole bunch of minor cities. If you take all these cities at once your unhappiness goes way way up. If you're at war with two civs at the same time it puts you at a huge disadvantage. Your main battle should be building wonders and getting certain social policies. Other than that, you shouldn't be going in the red.