-40 Public Opinion (the desire for a new ideology)

Well I went ahead and chose Freedom. Because freedom! I was winning the game top of the leaderboard, building up nicely. I didn't know about this whole tourism thing, or the effects of ideology. I adopted Freedom, went for all the sweet happiness boosters, plus the specialists buffs. Great. Except every other civ adopted Order or Autocracy and I was getting 40 unhappiness from public opinion and -18 overall.

I then get a popup saying one of my cities is going to revolt and join the nearest civ! This is unlike anything I've ever known in Civ! What is this sorcery?!

Then two civs who had me outteched declared war at the same time with a sneak attack and had a massive army! I got complacent trying to build better infrastructure rather than continuing to warmonger.


This is on Pangaea/Immortal/Standard speed, Domination victory only. I am Shaka

How do I avoid this happening?

Build more culture, tourism and overall social policy input for the new social policies that become useful. You can also revolt and change your social policy over to other ideologies so that your unhappiness level drops.

Passing World Ideology may be a bit of a stretch if everyone else is following Autocracy, but if your aim is a diplomatic victory and you have most of the city states allied you might be able to pull it off. That would effectively eliminate the pressure.

Passing freedom as the world ideology can also reduce unhappiness. If you can pull that off and make other civilizations unhappy.

To the OP: You've learned 3 important lessons here and they are:

• Be first to pick your ideology, before the second proposal, or third at most.
• Have enough votes to propose your ideology, you will need to have researched Radio for this.
• Never neglect culture/tourism regardless of VC.

One well trodden path I take is to beeline Scientific Theory, then Industrialization, then Electricity. Using the Oxford University to give me Radio for free. If I can do this before 1300(on standard) on Emperor and below I don't have a problem as I can use my 3 spys to buy any needed votes. If I get the Forbidden Palace the job is a whole lot easier.

Going for a domination victory, you also have the additional option of eliminating the culturally strong Autocracy civs.

It seems that you also have a few puppets. Police state in the autocracy can help out with that because it allows courthouses to be built faster and has courthouses provide more 3+ happiness each.

I've seen this bone-headed move before, but don't sell your Open Borders for 3gpt to everybody after Renaissance. That's an excellent way to get owned on the tourism. And unfortunately, the trade routes can hurt you more than they're worth, too. You want the trade if you're trying to win culturally, but not if you're playing defence.

Before adopting an ideology, check the screens to see who has more influence over you than you do over them, especially if you haven't been running guilds.

revelation216 said:

How do I avoid this happening?

Click to expand...

Well you can start by building monuments some time before the modern era? Just to name the most glaring thing about that screenshot.

Disregard the suggestions about "fixing" your situation by passing world ideology. You're at 68 cpt on turn 300. That's 1/10th of what a warmonger should be post-modern era, and doubling your pressure from effectually 0 would do nothing. The only fix would be to go back and generate your missing 300 turns of culture and tourism.

Influence comes from someone's tourism output being bigger in comparison to your culture output than your tourism output is in comparison to theirs.

You can avoid pressure by 1) increasing your culture and tourism output to maintain parity 2) reducing the other players' culture and tourism by conquering them and stealing all their wonders. In BNW war is not profitable until late game, so ignore method 2 until after turn 200.

Method 1 is what is important. Avoid pressure by accumulating culture and tourism. Building monuments. Claiming at least one Culture CS as an ally game-long. Building writer, artist, and music guilds and staffing them ASAP, typically all in the same city (a city with a garden). Build buildings to house the great works that they produce as needed. Between Sistine, Globe, Ufizi, or Louvre, it's nice if you can build at least one.

Failing all that, if your tourism and culture suck and you pick ideology first, the next AI will choose a different one because they want the free policies, and the other AI's will pile on the same one because that AI's pressure is so much better than yours, and they don't want the same 40 unhappiness you have. You need healthy culture if you are going to rush into first selection of ideology.

Running guilds and the great musicians can become important because many people usually skip these technologies. Great artists ,great writer slots sometimes run out so getting great musicians working can get you more culture earlier and with less great people outside your cities. ..

If you have made a mistake and picked the wrong ideology you can still go to the ideology screen and change to Order or Autocracy. You can't do this if your citizens are content, but in your case, it is still an option. You will only lose the free social policies you got for being the first to go freedom, any that you "paid for" you will be able to reselect.

The other thing you can do, if you can stave off converting ideologies, is capture whatever cities have the highest tourism output. But that will take many turns before things go your way again, so if you are getting hammered, it might be better to flip to a more popular ideology.

as Shaka, you should be going for a domination victory 99.99% of the time, and freedom is probably the worst ideology for domination anyway, you will probably be better off switching to autocracy