Dealing with Happiness and Production in a SV

I recently just won a SV on BNW with the Inca on King difficulty on turn 258. However this would have been a lot quicker if my cities had more than 50 production throughout the whole game and I wasn't at 1-2 happiness.

If it wasn't for my insane economy then I would have been destroyed. I had to purchase labs, schools, universities, rather than waiting 15-20 turns to build them.

My happiness was another major problem throughout the whole game. For probably 20% of the game my empire was unhappy. I had coliseums, circuses, 7 or so luxuries (after trades) but I was still on the borderline of happy and unhappy.

For other information, I had 4 cities, my capital being about 27 pop by the end, the other 3 being 20-21 pop. I know for a SV it's important to focus on food, but it's hard when that decreases your happiness. Nearly half the game I was trying to avoid growth with my capital.

Any help with this. Dealing with production and happiness for a SV?

P.S. - My first post!

Greetings and welcome to the board!

A few questions first. Did you put any points in the patronage tree? What ideology did you go for and did you get any tenets that help with happiness?

Here's some things that help with happiness. 1. Ally yourself with a mercantile CS. Doing barb quests in the beginning helps then later I spy on a civ and get 1-2 ranks then put them in a CS. Locking in 1-2 mercantile CS will make a huge impact on happiness. I usually aim for 1 mercantile CS and 1 cultural CS with my first two spies after they are done spying on civs. Of course you should always be paying attention to CS quests as the game progresses to keep as many friendly or allied as possible.

Also if you are playing against many cultural oriented civs like morocco, india, etc they will be building up a lot of tourism early. As the game progresses and ideologies are chosen and if your ideology is different from the cultural leaders you'll see a big impact on your happiness from them if you can't counter it from your own culture and tourism. If you grant them open borders it gets even worse. So I don't ever grant them open borders, I'll trade them +2gpt to get their borders open to me only. This also keeps them from digging up your archeological sites.

There are other tips I'm missing but I got to make this short.

Thanks for the tips! I picked order, and luckily 4/7 other civs also picked Order. The first tenet I picked was something like +1 happiness for every (certain buildings) which was really helpful at the time and got me to something like 17 happiness. At this point I was blazing through the tech tree though, and happiness was becoming less of a problem for me. I didn't open the patronage tree at all because of my weak culture (like +82 when the game was over) and it was important for me to finish Rationalism, and get the tenet that makes factories produce science. Next time I play I will pay much more attention to Mercantile CS, I only bothered with them to stop Alexander from winning diplomatic. Luckily this game I was playing with civs that I'm not even sure what victory they were going for: Japan, Assyria, China, Ethiopia since I don't remember there being one influential culture besides the one over me, which was like every other civ.

Forgot to mention that sometimes it is actually better to ally a cultural CS first if they have a unique luxury you don't have and your happiness is not bad. This way you get the +cpt and the happiness from the lux. Mercantile CSes usually have 2 luxes, one of those being a lux you can only get from them like porcelin/jewelry so you get a big boost to happiness. So depends on situation, if you need +cpt badly and your happiness is good enough aim to ally the cultural CS first. Really have to pay attention to what the CSes quests are, sometimes allying with one CS gives you a lux that another CS wants you to obtain for a quest. Sometimes when I'm cruising along in a game I forgot to pay attention to these and miss opportunities. My attention span is short so I do tend to do turns a bit quickly hurting myself