Question about happiness

I started a new game on Emperor level, and things are going quite well.
Keeping my population content is the main challenge so far. According to the manual your first two citizens should be content on Emperor level, and then any extra citizens start out as unhappy. But now one of my cities - the one nearest to my capital - shows only 1 content citizen on the Happiness Analysis screen, while all the other cities show 2 content citizens.
My government is Monarchy, luxury rate is 0, I have no Wonders and I've had no dealing with other civs so far, nor even any barbarian attacks. City is size 4.
So the questions is why do this one city have only one content citizen? Is it just some random fluke, or have I overlooked something?

Neither. This is how it works. As your empire grows the number of content citizens per city shrinks. Build another city and you will see two cities where only one citizen is content. Eventually none of your cities will have any content citizens. This phenomenon is studied at length. Do a search on the forums and you should find several links.

If you don't like this mechanic (I don't), you can simply edit the file 'Rules.txt' in your main Civ II folder with Notepad. Go to the line in 'Cosmic Principles' (right at the beginning of the file), where it says "Riot factor based on # cities (higher factor lessens the effect)". The default value in my game (MGE) is 14; I edited it to 80 and have yet to see extra unhappiness from number of cities appear. Be warned that extreme numbers may have adverse effects on the game. But if you have more than 80 cities (or however many that number actually allows), I'm sure you can afford to bump up the luxuries a bit to get rid of this nuisance, or just wipe the remaining AIs off the map and be done with it.

While this is a problem in early to mid game, it actually turns to an advantage for players who build a lot of cities because once all your blue heads (content citizens) are gone, black heads start to appear which react just like the blue heads to luxuries helping you with celebrations.

Ali Ardavan said:

While this is a problem in early to mid game, it actually turns to an advantage for players who build a lot of cities because once all your blue heads (content citizens) are gone, black heads start to appear which react just like the blue heads to luxuries helping you with celebrations.

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Ah. Another way to metagame, exactly what this caravan-fest of a stoneage space-launch game needs. (However, if that's your poison, who am I to judge? I'd rather try to emulate history; so far I haven't heard of any empire dissolving simply because its citizens were all like, 'hey, our country's just too damn big and powerful!'. )

This is after all a game but this feature is not as crazy as you portray it. On the contrary, in my opinion, it is one of the more insightful additions by the original designer Brian Reynolds.

Some historical empires did in fact become ungovernable and started to disintegrate when they got too big. Immediately after Alexander's death his conquered territories broke apart into many pieces. Interestingly, that is the basis of the Rome Scenario which was one of only two scenarios that shipped with the game. Rome in turn broke apart into eastern and western pieces with the eastern piece eventually being known as the Byzantine empire. Spain at the golden age of navigation got way more colonies around the globe than it could handle and ended up losing them all.

Furthermore, it is a historical fact that citizens of big and powerful countries are more demanding than citizens of small weak ones. That has been the case from ancient Rome to modern USA. Just like in Civ2, the bigger the empire gets the more you have to let the citizenry enjoy luxuries to stay content.

Thanks for the clarification, Ali.
It's not a problem as long as I know how it works, and as mentioned it's only a problem early in the game.

Ali Ardavan said:

This is after all a game but this feature is not as crazy as you portray it. On the contrary, in my opinion, it is one of the more insightful additions by the original designer Brian Reynolds.

Some historical empires did in fact become ungovernable and started to disintegrate when they got too big. Immediately after Alexander's death his conquered territories broke apart into many pieces. Interestingly, that is the basis of the Rome Scenario which was one of only two scenarios that shipped with the game. Rome in turn broke apart into eastern and western pieces with the eastern piece eventually being known as the Byzantine empire. Spain at the golden age of navigation got way more colonies around the globe than it could handle and ended up losing them all.

Furthermore, it is a historical fact that citizens of big and powerful countries are more demanding than citizens of small weak ones. That has been the case from ancient Rome to modern USA. Just like in Civ2, the bigger the empire gets the more you have to let the citizenry enjoy luxuries to stay content.

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When you put it like that, it does sound reasonable. But I think the bigness itself is not the cause, but rather its side-effects, which Civ II doesn't really take into account. E.g. before telegraphs and such, delay in transfering messages was a major limitation when it came to governance. If they'd had cell phones in ancient Rome, we might all still be speaking Latin. I guess the extra unhappiness mechanic is a reasonable representation, but it still feels gamey to me somehow. As long as I can modify it, it's ok though.

About the size of a nation relating to demand for luxuries: I'm not sure if size is the main factor. It might simply be richness or power. E.g. China is getting more prosperous by the year, and the discontent among the population is growing. Yet they were relatively content to stay dirt-poor peasants for hundreds of years, despite the hugeness of their country. Granted that there are other factors, such as length and severity of repression, urbanization, etc... But I do think that size alone is not a determining factor. Again though as far as abstractions go, perhaps Civ II does do an adequate job after all -- especially by 1996 standards.

If Rome had cell phones, then that would be the scenario that you are trying to avoid with space ships launched then also.

timtofly said:

If Rome had cell phones, then that would be the scenario that you are trying to avoid with space ships launched then also.

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It was just an example to illustrate a point. (I'm sure you know that and are just being cheeky. Should add a smiley to your post. )