WTF happiness

I have always had trouble with happiness. Now, it is rediculous. Barbarians at -10, then they blow up all my luxury resources and it just goes down hill from there. I was expanding well beggining/mid-game and taking over the neighboring civs. I only have the game on normal difficult, and I used to play on the higher ones. Besides playing the new civs that deal with happiness better, any ideas on what might be done to increase it?

Focus your expansion on areas with new luxuries(limit it otherwise)

Buy luxuries from the AI

Make sure you get happiness bonuses from social policies/ideologies

aim for happiness bonuses from religions

Thanks, I was doing that. I only built one other city, but took like 6 AI cities in probably 40 turns or so. I haven't gotten enough religion yet to buy the pagoda, which I always take.
I will definitely do different social policy next time, I went through the aesthitics since it is new to me and I wanted to see how well it worked, and there were no happiness benefits from that, so I will never take that again.

gremlins0 said:

Thanks, I was doing that. I only built one other city, but took like 6 AI cities in probably 40 turns or so. I haven't gotten enough religion yet to buy the pagoda, which I always take.
I will definitely do different social policy next time, I went through the aesthitics since it is new to me and I wanted to see how well it worked, and there were no happiness benefits from that, so I will never take that again.

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if you are having trouble with happiness during/after war raze cities (except ones that are really good)

Yea I will have to do that thanks. Problem is at the beginning/near beginning of game when I raze the city one of the other AI people always put a new city there. I tend to also leave most of my cities a puppet, not sure how much that is hurting my happiness either.