Poof! Citizens want Autocracy!?!?

Hello all. Long time player of the Civ series here but never had this occur.

so I'm playing as Spain, cruising along in early modern era, running Order ideology, getting nice production and a happiness that is steady at ~30.

I complete Eiffel Tower and my people lose their minds! 47 unhappiness slapped on me, they want Autocracy I'm told. They're livid, so I switch. And now I'm building castles everywhere to get em happy again.

My question is this: what happened?

Was the Eiffel Tower a trigger for the unhappiness?

Is there something else that determines what ideology my peeps prefer?

Thank you in advance for the answers.

Eiffel Tower has no connection. What probably happened was that around the same time some other nations adopted other ideologies. If they had good tourism they could be exotic or familiar in your civilization which means their ideologies influence you and make you unhappy. Especially if your own tourism was bad for a while so that you aren't influential back towards them.

You can read about it in the tourism tab. Go to the ideologies and mouse over the unhappines and you'll see which civs are causing it and what ideologies. My guess is one guy with really good tourism was familiar on your civ (2 levels of influence) and they went autocracy same time as Eiffel tower. Since you switched this isn't applicable now, but there are two ways to defend this late: get influential toward them as well which partially cancels the effect. To do this you want to buy open borders with them, send trade routes, etc. to get tourism modifiers (but don't give OB in return) and build up your own tourism. You also want other civs that chose order to get influential over you as well so it shields the pressure from the autocracy guy. To do this give the other order civs open borders and send them trade routes. If it is a low enough level of difficulty and you have a lot of CS allies you can also force through world ideology order to shield you partially from the bad effects. This is a basic summary of how the system works.

Your culture output is your defense against other civs tourism. Your tourism is your offense against other civs culture. If you culture is low you'll be influenced by everyone like this, but sometimes its impossible to prevent so you also want to work on getting tourism to influence them to shield yourself. If worst comes to worst you can switch ideologies but this is undesirable as you lose your early adopter tenets which is a waste. If you are choosing an unpopular ideology like freedom you want extra tourism and influence on everyone else to shield yourself. Your goal should be to reach "exotic" (10% influence) on everyone before they choose an ideology, this is the safest and easiest way to prepare.

Sekou said:

running Order ideology, getting nice production and a happiness that is steady at ~30.

I complete Eiffel Tower and my people lose their minds! 47 unhappiness slapped on me, they want Autocracy

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So you give your nation a giant finger and then wonder, why they are not amused?

Inappropriate jokes aside, are you trying to tell that you had a -77 happiness hit? There must be some tourism monster on the map who just picked Autocracy and your own culture should be close to nothing then. What difficulty are you playing on? Although from this

Sekou said:

Hello all. Long time player of the Civ series here but never had this occur.

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I would say it shouldn't be very high or you would have already experienced this phenomenon for sure. But then such a drop does seem pretty steep, almost incredible.

Otherwise, the ET has nothing to do with it and everything is as danaphanous^^ said.

Playing on King.

Yeah, the tourism/culture was working against methinks.

Germany and Austria were both Autocratic and have better tourism than me.

This game I guess I really fell down on tourism. Something to correct in future playthroughs.

I started on a large island, completely isolated so I rushed my way to Astronomy, essentially. Some things got overlooked during that rush, I guess.

Edit: I took a -47 happiness hit. I went to -11. Livid status. Uggh.

the amount of happiness you plunge is a function of the number of cities you have, or if you have big cities, every 10 population you have. You can plunge a lot of you have a large empire which sucks because you are usually shorter on happiness as well.

Sekou said:

Edit: I took a -47 happiness hit. I went to -11. Livid status. Uggh.

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Oh, that wasn't so tragic then, you could try to continue without switching, just build some more happiness buildings, try to ally to more happiness CS and to get some eventual happiness from the Order. Also, building up your culture and tourism a bit could also alleviate negative influence problems.

It is when this hit takes you below -20 happy that some level of panic is justified and slamming down on the revolution button may be unavoidable. My most memorable one was a plunge from +10 to -30. I switched faster than I managed to mumble 'Oh dear!'