Question about happiness

At each difficulty level, there is a default number of people that will be born content in each city; each additional person will be born unhappy. But sometimes during a game one of those content people will turn unhappy without notice. I was just playing a game on emperor level, in which the first two citizens are born content. At a seemingly random time during the game, one of my cities went into civil disorder, and I saw that it was because only one citizen in that city was now born content.

Does anyone know why this is happening and how I can predict it in the future? I just want to know the "rule" so that I can plan for it.

Probably because of city number?!...

In civ2 you have a penalty for this.
In civ1 may be too. May be only in some versions.

If no one else replies, the answer is somewhere on this board. I don't remember who explained it but it was probably Valen so you may want to start searching through his posts. Basically what happens is there is a set number of people or cities ('n') who are content with the default conditions. Once your population is large enough (>n), you start seeing a combination of prematurely "born discontents" and corrupted existing citizens. I'm pretty sure there is a pattern but I don't remember what it is. The workaround until you have an infrastructure advanced enough to mollify the unhappiness is to completely halt additional growth and shunt resources toward science and/or construction. Cure for Cancer becomes a miracle time buyer in this scenario, though J.S. Bach's Cathedral is more powerful if working on EARTH's "super continent". At this point, each city level gain is guaranteed to generate unhappiness in the city itself and possibly elsewhere. The sooner you pull resources together to address this the better since each pacifying Elvis takes resources away from production.

I've posted about this before, but I'm too lazy to look it up. I think I remember everything right.

First off, this only happens if you're running patch 3 or later. Apparently you are.

The formula depends on difficulty and government. In Despotism/Anarchy it should go like this, if I remember right: Chieftain 14, Warlord 12, Prince 10, King 8, Emperor 6. The pattern continues beyond Emperor, if you edit your save file and bump the difficulty. If you're in Monarchy/Communism, multiply by 1.5; in Republic/Democracy, multiply by 2.

Take the number you get, and that's the maximum cities you can have with no chance of reduced happiness. Every city after that, there's a chance some of your cities will lose a born-content, until you double that number, at which time every city will be down one born-content. Add that number of cities again, and you lose yet another born-content. If this happens long enough that there are no born-contents left, and you keep building more cities, red shirts (double unhappy) show up by the same pattern.

Thanks, Urtica dioica. The multiplication factor is why there's a red shirt explosion when the government collapses: it effectively doubles the base unhappiness while taking away the extra trade arrows and adding corruption. Ouch!

How about which cities lose a contented citizen? I thought the "randomness" was actually deterministic but wasn't immediately obvious due to the unintuitive city data structure layout.

A footnote: even with v3+, it's impossible to see red shirts under Chieftain.

Thanks Urtica dioica, that fills in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of the loss of happiness effect.
I can add one more detail using emperor/democracy as an example. It is possible to predict exactly which cities will lose born-contents at any time.

As Urtica dioica points out, the magic number is 12. In my crude illustrations, I arrange cities in rows of 12.
You can fill the first row without losing born-contents anywhere.
############

Build another city and one city loses one born-content. The big loser is city # 6.
#####-######
#

Build a 14th city and the effect is predictable. City # 7 gets hit.
#####--#####
##

Build 3 more cities and 7-9 fall.
#####-----##
#####

City # 18 starts with only one born-content. Loss of content citizens affects a column at a time.
#####------#
#####-

So city # 20 not only starts with just 1 blue shirt, it takes out cities 1 and 13 as well.
-####-------
-####---

And so on until all cities are affected with the founding of # 24:
------------
------------

As you start the third row, cities start to lose their last blue shirt.
-----0------
-----0------
-

And so on...

I suspect that you will see very similar results when the magic number changes due to difficulty level and government.

Thanks for the responses.

I have tested out the effects of expansion on happiness and they seem in line with all the info posted in this thread, except for one thing. I believe there may also be a time factor involved. Ie, at a certain date (presumably dependent on difficulty level) previously content citizens will turn unhappy. I'm currently playing a game on Emperor+1 in which the magic number is 4 (or 8 under republic/democracy) I have 5 cities, and 4 of them have zero born content people in year 1960. I'm not sure when the first citizen in these cities went from content to unhappy, but at this point in the game it doesn't really matter.

@SuperSaxon771 You didn't say what your government is, but your numbers are consistent with mine for Despotism/Anarchy. If you get a game state where it's inconsistent, I'd love to see a save.

Maybe Valen's model is correct, and order of blue-shirt loss is based on the order of the cities. When I ran an experiment to find that a long time ago, I found nothing concrete. But in my case, I lost a city early on, and I gained cities by conquest. Losing cities may throw off the calculation, and I don't know if order of construction or order of addition to the empire would be the correct criterion.

Urtica dioica said:

@SuperSaxon771 You didn't say what your government is, but your numbers are consistent with mine for Despotism/Anarchy. If you get a game state where it's inconsistent, I'd love to see a save.

Maybe Valen's model is correct, and order of blue-shirt loss is based on the order of the cities. When I ran an experiment to find that a long time ago, I found nothing concrete. But in my case, I lost a city early on, and I gained cities by conquest. Losing cities may throw off the calculation, and I don't know if order of construction or order of addition to the empire would be the correct criterion.

Click to expand...

I am a Republic, so I should be able to reach 8 cities without seeing a change in born contents.

However, I know now that my guess about elapsed time is incorrect. My capital, Washington, was at size 28 and had zero born-contents. Then it got nuked, dropped to 14, and it then had one born content citizen. Same thing happened to New York when it got nuked as well. So I am pretty certain that city size also plays a part in reducing born contents. I don't know exact numbers though.

SuperSaxon771 said:

So I am pretty certain that city size also plays a part in reducing born contents. I don't know exact numbers though.

Click to expand...

Even at Chieftain you'll get zero base contents in large cities.

Urtica dioica said:

Maybe Valen's model is correct, and order of blue-shirt loss is based on the order of the cities. When I ran an experiment to find that a long time ago, I found nothing concrete. But in my case, I lost a city early on, and I gained cities by conquest. Losing cities may throw off the calculation, and I don't know if order of construction or order of addition to the empire would be the correct criterion.

Click to expand...

My analysis is based on the current state of my current game. Some cities have more red shirts than others. The pattern repeats every 12 (my magic number) cities. Cities in columns 6 thru 10 have an "extra" red shirt. Which cities are affected depends only on the order you see them in the advisors' displays (F1, F4 and F5).

When you capture a city, it will be added to your roster in build order (usually). From what I have observed, it appears that the game keeps a master list of every city built by any player. The cities you own are listed in the order they appear on this master list. Whan a city is destroyed, it makes a hole in this master list. The next city built will fill in the hole. That is the only cities can appear out of build order on your list.

In the course of my current game, I have built and destroyed many cities to produce settlers with hometown of NONE, so my cities appear way out of build order in some cases. The born content pattern still follows the roster order.

SuperSaxon771 said:

... So I am pretty certain that city size also plays a part in reducing born contents. I don't know exact numbers though.

Click to expand...

Remember that born-content citizens are the first to get turned into specialists. In a city of 26 or more, it is impossible to tell how many born-contents you have because they have all been turned into entertainers, scientists and taxmen. The same holds true for red shirts. You don't know how many you have unless they outnumber specialists.

Wouldn't pressing the "happy" - box in the city screen tell you how many happy there would be with no wonders/improvements?

blessern said:

Wouldn't pressing the "happy" - box in the city screen tell you how many happy there would be with no wonders/improvements?

Click to expand...

This is Cunaxa's (a city of 27) "Happy" display.
The first row shows how the city starts with no luxuries, improvements or wonders.
All the normal citizens have black shirts. No happiness here.
On the right are the specialists - an entertainer and 6 scientists.
The specialists may have started out with blue, black or red shirts.
Some probably started out as black shirts, but since they are specialists, there is no way to tell how many.