What factors lead to unhappiness due to ideology?

RobO said:

Is there a way to get rid of them?

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Of the happiness penalties, sure, build the darn guilds so you get to exotic over everyone yourself is normally enough to keep ideological unhappiness at a very manageable level.

Also remember that every ideology has several tenets boosting happiness.

The ideologies can generally provide more happiness than ideological pressure will place on you, so if your happiness is borderline then take the happiness tenets with your free ones then get the other ones you want.

Build the guilds early so you can work them for the culture (social policies are important for any VC) and tourism.

If you save all your great writers, win the world fair, pop a golden age with an artist and then bulb the writers for culture you might not even need any tourism.

You can always just go and stomp whichever civ is pressuring you.

Make sure you defend yourself, too. AIs often like to attack civilizations that make so much tourism and culture per turn. Increase culture per turn while not leaving your defenses behind.

RobO said:

I've switched back to a save a bit before my Ideology choice. Will see how far I get,

It's obviously a steep learning curve. I had no idea BnW was so different.

Now, in the replay I chose Order, the same as my Neighbor Rome. The Iroquis chose Freedom and had about -5 happiness from that - not a big deal as they had more then 20 to begin with.
After a while Morocco chose Autocracy. They are clearly the most influential of all 6 civs. Immediately, I lost 12 happiness. This is silly. The happiness of the people simply should not change that fast. It does not feel right (to me). I'll sleep on it - but I expect I'll have to find another game to play, unless there is a way to remove Ideologies from the game.

Is there a way to get rid of them?

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I got a massive unhappiness hit in my first game of BNW because I didn't know how the new ideology mechanic worked, and yeah, it is a bit startling when it first happens. It seems that the reason you're struggling no matter which tenet you choose is because your culture and tourism generation are just far too insufficient. This game is probably a lost cause in that respect unless you can pump some happiness into your civ, preferrably through social policies. But, if you're struggling with culture, then you're not unlocking enough social policies to keep the happiness up. I'd say this is just a live and learn situation. I bet that if you started a new game, built and staffed the guilds in a reasonable time, and made sure to focus a bit more on culture and great works, you'd have a much more successful game without trying to disable one of the main game mechanics.

RobO said:

I've switched back to a save a bit before my Ideology choice. Will see how far I get,

It's obviously a steep learning curve. I had no idea BnW was so different.

Now, in the replay I chose Order, the same as my Neighbor Rome. The Iroquis chose Freedom and had about -5 happiness from that - not a big deal as they had more then 20 to begin with.
After a while Morocco chose Autocracy. They are clearly the most influential of all 6 civs. Immediately, I lost 12 happiness. This is silly. The happiness of the people simply should not change that fast. It does not feel right (to me). I'll sleep on it - but I expect I'll have to find another game to play, unless there is a way to remove Ideologies from the game.

Is there a way to get rid of them?

Click to expand...

Not that I know of.

But I think this is your issue. If there is one clearly culturally dominant civ (or bloc of civs sharing the same ideology) in the world, then it's a simple matter of switching to their ideology.

But if you find that your unhappiness remains low no matter which ideology you choose, then your happiness really just isn't high enough to begin with. The real solution to that is to build more happiness buildings, acquire more luxuries, get a religion with happiness benefits, and so on. Also try to build up your culture so that their influence on you doesn't reach get so strong (building up tourism also helps indirectly since your influence level on them is subtracted from their influence level on you.)