How Useful is Mike's in Deity Plus Three?

I'm playing a deity plus three game in which I built Mike's Chapel to the result that not one single black hat was changed, let alone made content. My conclusion is that this is because of the riot factor, but I'm wondering if it is normal for this level or if I have simply built too many cities to use Mike's as a happiness tool?

definitely the riot factor is in play here - Mike's is affecting a number of cities - although its not really showing in the happiness screen except in chicago and richmond. looking at the actual population heads in the upper left, a lot more are going from black to red (but they are showing as black in the happiness next to the cathedral). not that that does us any good, red and black are still malcontents...

What is the difference between reds and blacks anyway, aside from the graphical ones?

Red hats are unhappy, black especially unhappy. The count the same when calculating city disorder, but there are a few different rules about them. For example, 2 luxuries will boost a black hat all the way to happy, but a black hat must be brought up by each degree of unhappiness to content if "contentment" improvements are used. Another interesting bug regarding black hats is that unhappiness resulting from units away from cities actually turns them to regular unhappy (red). In the game referenced above, I mitigated my problems by swiching to Democracy (allowing me to use trade for luxuries that were subject to corruption in republic) and, having built Bach, stationing some units outside cities to take advantage of the unit unhappiness effect in order to gain content citizens.

I readily admit to never having played D+3, but I have worked diligently at getting better at the happiness rules for my wimpy little deity games. I would think that Mikes would be fully functional if you were using luxuries to improve the attitude of your black hats. The luxuries are applied first and if you have enough of them, you could turn the black hats blue. Then Mikes and a Temple can go to work on the plain old red hats (those women drive me batty!). Not having D+3 and not being able to download your save game here at work, I may be underestimating the scope of your problem. The above assumes that you have a handful of black hats and a bunch of reds in a fairly large city.

What is meant by Deity Plus Three, Deity is the hardest difficulty. Though perhaps not that hard. Did you mod the game? How is Deity plus three different from Deity?

Do you play against humans, they give the best game IMO?

Terrapin:
In deity plus three, you can expect all of your citizens to be default black hats. While two luxuries will make a black hat happy (not just content), to use happiness buildings to counteract unhappiness they must compensate all the levels of unhappiness "outstanding." If you have a large empire, as I did, the riot factor will make your citizens unhappy several times over, until a cathedral will not even turn one black hat blue. JS Bach, on the other hand, can make two citizens content if you station a unit outside the city because of a bug in the game that turns black hats red for unhappiness due to units outside cities. Bach then makes those red hats blue.

Offbalance:
Deity plus three is a modification that can only be made to classic. Essentially, you go into the rules and edit the menu to give extra levels of difficulty. In classic, you can also edit barbarian levels in order to give barbarian hordes of 99 units. I don't play against humans.

Please tell me the step-by-step procedure on how to access the "Deity plus three" difficulty.

Also, in "Deity plus three", do Barbarians attack with an insanely high bonus or just the standard Deity Bonus (150% attack strength)?

In your civ 2 folder, open the "game" text file.

Scroll down until you find the line "@DIFFICULTY"

Under the "Deity" line, write in more difficulty levels.

Then, if you want Barbarian Wrath, scroll down to "@BARBARITY"

Add an extra level of Barbarity under the "Raging Hordes" line.

And yes, barbarians are thought to attack at more than the deity bonus of 150% if you play higher levels (similary, their impact on computers becomes almost negligible).