Civ unhappy with both ideologies?

I'm on the Freedom ideology, then another Civ changed to Autocracy, so I immediately dropped to -20 happiness. So I switched ideologies to Autocracy, but the -20 happiness remains.

Normally when I switch to the preferred ideology, the -20 changes to 0. So is there a reason why it didn't change this time around?

THere are 3 ideologies. You probably were affected by 2 of them so switching accomplishes nothing. You can see in the hover-over text how many/which ideologies are making you unhappy. Your real problem though is a lack of ideological defense. You need some culture/tourism and you need to end open borders or minimize trade routes to the civs that are making you unhappy if possible.

Okay thanks. I am still new to Civ V and haven't been spending much time with culture and tourism lately (especially tourism, as it's a new mechanic). In the meantime, is there anything I can do to salvage my current game?

Having tourism of your own is the easiest way. If you're at ideologies, building some archaeologists and grabbing items from dig sites is the easiest way. If you built the writers/musicians/artist guilds putting both specialist slots on will grant you your first one in 100/7 or about 14 turns and they can produce great works to bump up your tourism.

If you have some tourism but not enough, try trading works with other civs and obtaining sets for museums. This can sometimes double or triple the tourism output.

As I mentioned, any trade routes, open borders, shared religion will each increase their tourism influence on you by 25%. You can't control their trade routes but you can not accept open borders next round if they've done that. It would be good to check what is actually influencing you too. Open up the tourism/culture victory splash screen by clicking on the baggage icon. In the culture victory tab It will tell you which ideologies affect you if you put your mouse over your unhappiness and you can tell by how much by the number of icons next to it. aka: 3 torches means 3 units of influence from freedom. Switch to the highest one. If that already was autocracy then both ideologies have equal influence and you need to build up your defense. If it was actually order, switch to that one instead. Sometimes things can take a turn or so to update too. Make sure the unhappiness was still caused by the same thing of course, and give a few turns, or just live with it and jack up your happiness by other means.

If you are still having a problem post a save/screenshot for the other users to look at.

So I combat other civ's tourism with my own tourism? Or do I need to boost up my culture instead? Which of the two is more important to prevent my empire from being influenced by the ideology of another civ?

Gary King said:

So I combat other civ's tourism with my own tourism? Or do I need to boost up my culture instead? Which of the two is more important to prevent my empire from being influenced by the ideology of another civ?

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High culture pre-emptively stops ideological unhappiness, but high tourism fights ideological unhappiness. So in your current situation, it woud be a good idea to increase your own tourism whilst decreasing your opponents.

In the future, it's best to dedicate some of your time to raising your culture before ideologies hit

Yeah, I was just playing like my usual, war mongering self, and I control 50% of the world's land, then BAM, I'm at -40 unhappiness and my empire is crippled by revolts.

So, I'm thinking of reverting to a saved game about 50 turns earlier, then I'll try and boost up tourism. What's the best way to do that? Great works and Artifacts, right? I'll just build a ton of Archeologists to dig up some stuff? Does Great Works only come from Great Artists, which are produced by adding specialists?

Gary King said:

So I combat other civ's tourism with my own tourism? Or do I need to boost up my culture instead? Which of the two is more important to prevent my empire from being influenced by the ideology of another civ?

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Both. The influence of one civ over another is measured as a percentage of the total tourism "exported" over the length of the game by one civ compared to the total culture generated by the other. Influence levels start at 0, 10, 30, 50, 100, 200%. Every one level difference between the influence going each way (i.e. Civ A-> Civ B and Civ B-> Civ A) will generate one Torch/Hammer/Sword which will affect your unhappiness. So generating your own culture will limit the influence the other civ has over you, while generating tourism will limit the difference in influence levels. Even if you don't go for a cultural victory you want to generate some Tourism to hit either 30 or 50% with most civs to limit the negative influence.

There are also other ideologies and other civilizations with other ideologies. You can also change the ideology to the other ideology to see if that works so that you could be content.

How do you see the level of unhappiness other civs have with you? I've never seen things like -20 happiness, etc.?

Specific levels of unhappiness are less relevant than relative levels of ideological influence/pressure. On the third tab of the Culture Overview, where it shows whether civs are content, or have dissidents, or experiencing a revolutionary wave, etc., you can mouse hover over that word (e.g., dissidents) to see what is giving rise to that situation and what preferred ideology their people prefer. For example, for your civ, it might have shown that one ideology had 4 "sticks" of influence over you (2 sticks each from 2 civs) and a second ideology also had 4 "sticks" of influence over you (2 sticks from 1 civ and 1 stick each from 2 other civs) and that your people's preferred ideology was the first one. Unfortunately, in this example, switching ideologies to the first one does nothing to improve your situation.

Since ideological pressure comes from relative tourism/culture imbalances, you have to go to the 4th tab of that screen to see where things are. For the civs that have 2 sticks of influence, that probably means your culture is unknown to them (level 1), while their culture is familiar (level 3) to you. For civs with 1 stick, there is just one level of difference. That screen also shows how much base tourism each civ is producing and what tourism modifiers (open borders, trade routes, etc.) are in effect for each pair of civs. If you play around with that screen, you will soon get the picture.

That picture may show that the easiest way out of your predicament is to get your culture to be exotic with 3 or 4 civs ASAP, and that you are within hailing distance of that. Get open borders with this civ, send a trade route to that civ and you may be out of the woods in 10+ turns. Of course you also want to slow down their progress vs. you, so pump culture as much as possible. Ally a cultural CS, etc.

Okay so in my current game, where I had huge cultural and tourism problems, I went back about 20 turns with a save, and went crazy building archaeologists and as many cultural buildings as I could build. That seems to have made a difference, because when 20 turns passed and I reached the same point where I had problems before (when Aztec adopted an ideology, which crippled my empire by giving me -20, and eventually -40 happiness in a few turns), this didn't happen anymore.

I checked the Cultural Victory tab and don't really see a difference though. All the other civs have huge cultural pressure on me (no surprise), but I guess what little difference I made work.

But now I have a huge financial problem. Perhaps too many cities through conquering so many civs?

Alright so the game where I had problems, I abandoned because it ended up being too difficult to salvage.

I'm in a new game, at around 1950 AD, and Greece is my neighbor. Starting from the very beginning, I did everything in my power to develop Culture, and when Archaeologists came around, I developed Tourism.

But Greece still destroyed me with Tourism, and my empire became unhappy due to ideologies. I eventually had to create a World Ideology because I controlled the World Congress, thankfully, but it still seems to quite difficult to defend against Tourism. I even did NOT have Open Borders with Greece, and traded mostly with nearby City States rather than Greece, yet he still out-Cultures me.

What more can I do to protect against this? Go crazy with Great Artists by manually using Specialists?

Culture is the best passive defence against ideological unhappiness. How you get affected by an ideology.i.e. weather and how much unhappiness you get is a consequence of how much tourism they have accumulated in the whole game over how much culture you have accumulated over the whole game...the whole game being the thing to remember so even a small amount of extra early culture can accumulate into a lot later game.

Tourism can help in the sense that if you heavily influence the AI they may change to your ideology and thus exert less pressure on your people and thus less unhappiness but considering the AI get huge happiness bonuses and doesn't really tend to care even if it is in crippling unhappiness it is extremely hard to get an AI to switch to your ideology.
So therefore your often better taking landmarks with your archeologists than taking artifacts if the sites are workable tiles as it easier to stop your empire getting unhappy than it is to get an AI to switch it's ideology, especially the big tourism players who are causing your unhappiness.

Generally i tend to take a passive approach to ideologies...i try to hold off on having to pick an ideology until at least the biggest tourism opponent has chosen their ideology then just choose the same as them.
If i am playing a science game i usually end up being one of the early ones if not the first to an ideology so i will either pick the one that will give me the best short term benefit until i have to change to the dominant ideology or try to guess what the dominant tourism AI's will choose and pick that one so i can keep the extra free policies.

If you really don't want to have their ideology and haven't built up a good cultural defence then you can always take their best cities and wipe out their cultural influence.

In short you either have to be serious and proactive about ideological defense...build lots of culture, wipe out the big tourism player etc or go with the flow.

You can hold off choosing an Ideology? I thought you had to choose one when the option came up, like almost all dialogue options in the game (World Congress, City production, Research, etc.).

That's really strange, what are their tourism levels? Even on games where I haven't emphasized tourism I've still had no ideological pressure at all. Even on my last Deity game. I do produce a LOT of culture though cuz I like filling the policy trees. If you enjoy warmongering you might want to consider keeping an eye on other culture's tourism and Great Wonders. Once it becomes clear who's going for a culture victory, Attack them before ideologies and take over some of their cities. You'll get the tourism stored there and any Wonders/culture buildings that don't get destroyed for free! Has worked for me and its a cheap way to get defense against that pressure before ideologies hit.

Yep thanks. Tourism is still a new concept (to me) but I think I'm learning quickly. I've already played two or three games since this thread, and in one of them even won a Cultural victory myself (albeit I DID eliminate a few of the opponents first!). It looks like a big part of gaining Tourism, at least for me, is to go for Archaeology and dig up as many Artifacts as possible around the world before the AI gets them.

Gary King said:

Yep thanks. Tourism is still a new concept (to me) but I think I'm learning quickly. I've already played two or three games since this thread, and in one of them even won a Cultural victory myself (albeit I DID eliminate a few of the opponents first!). It looks like a big part of gaining Tourism, at least for me, is to go for Archaeology and dig up as many Artifacts as possible around the world before the AI gets them.

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Conquest and cultural victory go well together. I've also won games by bribing some civs to attack a cultural power house on the other side of the globe. That civ was conquered, I won the game because I already had enough influence over everybody else. One of the great thing about the current state of Civ5 is that things you do for one win condition can help you as well with another win condition. For example, even if you don't go for a diplomatic victory, good diplomacy can get you the World Congress resolutions that help with a Culture Victory.