How to get over the medieval unhappiness hump?

Standard map, mostly King or higher difficulty.

I frequently get stuck losing happiness and going negative the rest of the game right around the medieval/classical eras of the game as my cities continue to grow. I've tried: using pantheons and selecting all the happiness upgrades, ICS to chase resources, and different technology tress.

Question for the pro users, what's your tip for getting over the hump?

I'm not a pro user...but I know the problem you describe quite well too

My ideas:
- build Chichen Itza, Notre Dame. Both wonders can be gone very quickly (even on prince) but if you get a chance to build them, they're helpful.
- try to ally city states (especially commercial CS): can be hard if you're low on gold, so watch for those quests they give!
- if you got a general from a war, you can use it to steal a luxury resource from a CS (or other civs) if close enough
- trade! Although I find that in BNW AI civs often don't have many spares, a straight up trade of luxuries is still the best way to get extra happiness
- and of course, happiness buildings...I find that I have to build them earlier in BNW, even if my economy is not really that strong yet. That problem however is easier to fix (and often fixes itself when your cities grow).

Its really a difficult trade off...can you afford another city, or do you have to wait with expansion until you meet more trading partners (astronomy!). If you find you are fairly isolated, it may be worth to stick with fewer cities.

Well "ICS to chase resources" is certainly not the answer!

If you found a city to grab a lux you don't have, by the time you have the lux developed, your city will be costing you happiness, assuming it has grown just one population point.

You'd need two unique luxes to more than break even. And that's not ICS; that's city founding.

There is happiness in most of the social policy trees. Explore; that gets you more Natural Wonders, more trading partners, more CSs you can possibly bring on board.

You might try managing the growth of your cities. In general, growth is all good, but if you have a city that can temporarily be put on slower growth while it gives lots of money or production, that could keep you in the yellow for a bit longer )).

How many cities do you generally found, in a non-ICS circumstance?

If your low on happiness don't expand and build more happiness buildings. Unless i am swimming in happiness then happiness buildings tend to be top priority when they are available and they will offset enough local happiness.e.g. no point trying to build a zoo if you only have 2 pop in a city as it won't provide any bonus.

If your really bad you can set your cities to no growth (tick the box) and it will still accumulate food in the food bar but a new population will never appear, it will just sit at 1 turn until growth.
If you hit that 1 turn till growth or want extra production.e.g. to build those happiness buildings then you can shift citizens from food tiles to hammer tiles while your waiting for extra happiness to grow.

Always plan ahead also. It's no point beelining a happiness tech/sp or trying to pump out lots of happiness buildings when your already really low on happiness or in the red you need to have it ready before the problem occurs.

I suspect you build too many cities early on.
Religion can give you a lot of happiness, and you should try to get hold of every lux resource through trading or city states. Get the happiness policies as soon as possible and exploit happiness natural wonders if you can. Research happiness techs for happiness world wonders first.

You should be able to get the achievement for 100+ happiness if you do all that

This is usually too many cities built; especially too fast.

The easyist happiness management tool is the tried and true 4 city tradition start.
This policy tree gives more happiness points than anything else. (50% of unhappiness in the capital + an additional every 10th person in a given city is free)

Gori the Grey said:

Well "ICS to chase resources" is certainly not the answer!

Click to expand...

It was viable at one time, but that was patch-nerfed a long time ago.

Now, settling luxes facilitates ICS, rather than being the reason to ICS in the first place.

Religion is the answer most folks throw out right away, but the founder beliefs have been pretty heavily nerfed.

I always try to find a mercantile city-state with a pleasant personality and remain ally with them at all costs. City-states in general are a big help to ICS, as they often have resources unavailable elsewhere.

My big piece of advice would be to think twice about finishing Tradition too early if you're going wide. You'll wind up with free aqueducts in four cities and bonus growth everywhere, and while that's great for many other reasons, it also means happiness problems if you're wide. In a wide emprei, you will like have major cities and minor cities, and your major cities need the pop growth.

Some of your first four cities may not need huge populations, so those free aqueducts can hurt you. Think about how big a city ought to be, and check "no growth" when it reaches that point, at least until you have reason to grow some more (i.e. specialist buildings).

TLDR: do city planning and manage your population in each city, rather than have a bunch of cities that are all experiencing rampant, pointless population growth.