Is my happiness bugged? It seems ridiculously low.

[Randomized]

As you can see here I am only missing 2 buildings in the city, and have every worked tile improved except one, yet somehow I have a whopping 17 unhappiness (10 net). And given the amount of gold tiles worked it seems insane that I have a deficit of 7 poverty. Am I misunderstanding how this is supposed to work or is my install messed up?

 

[andersw]

No, you've just growed the city too big.
Under current patch it seems you need to cap your city growth a lot.

 

[Randomized]

No, you've just growed the city too big.
Under current patch it seems you need to cap your city growth a lot.

Interesting, is it normal in that case to be way behind the AIs in population? How do they get such huge population, do their cheats just mean they don't have worry about it much?

 

[Enginseer]

Interesting, is it normal in that case to be way behind the AIs in population? How do they get such huge population, do their cheats just mean they don't have worry about it much?

They optimize everything. Whenever they see they are low happiness, they will take necessary measures such as purchasing a Great Musician or Great Admiral without saving Faith at all. They'll also sometime use Processes which reduce 25% of the yield's needs when they see they don't need to build anything.

 

[Bhawb]

A couple things to note. Deficits are fine, the new system isn't about having no deficits at all. You get reductions to unhappiness from deficits from buildings, happiness buildings, and also on a city level a bit of deficit really doesn't matter too much, especially in a fully built city. You're also supposed to do the Public Works projects (that's why it is there), and the AI will do those constantly, do the 25% conversions, and even float a decent bit of unhappiness. FWIW, in my game literally every AI sat very close to 60% from mid-late game till the end.

Anything above 60% has no empire-wide effect, just slight reductions to production at the city level, which doesn't really matter much.

That said, if you're playing a warmonger I highly suggest having excess happiness, and keeping everything except your best couple of cities at capped pop growth to be able to float unhappiness from puppets, WW, and crappy new cities. In general, I suggest you start to cap cities when they can't keep up with culture/science needs. You could easily float that 3 poverty unhappiness and 3 distress unhappiness (after Military Academy's -2 distress) if you didn't have all that other unhappiness.

 

[andersw]

Interesting, is it normal in that case to be way behind the AIs in population? How do they get such huge population, do their cheats just mean they don't have worry about it much?

In short, if you're playing on a very high difficulty probably yes, you'll be behind AI in pop.

They don't use cheats like in vanilla but AI gets some reductions which gets stronger in the late eras, see ai bonuses in:
https://civ-5-cbp.fandom.com/wiki/AI_and_Difficulty

I don't know to what extent the AI use public works, I've tested using it but didn't feel I got enough out of them, but I'm probably wrong.
It does cost upkeep.
Instead I cap pop or go over a bit and try to stay above 60% in global.
This means as a warmonger I usually stop growing cities between 10-15 pop, exception is capital which can often tank more pop.
(note I don't play higher than king)

For next upcoming patch Gazebo mentioned that it will allow for some "free" specialists with certain buildings.

 

[Recursive]

Interesting, is it normal in that case to be way behind the AIs in population? How do they get such huge population, do their cheats just mean they don't have worry about it much?

AIs don't receive growth rate bonuses at the start of the game but they do get a per-era discount dependent on the difficulty level (-10% growth costs per era on Deity). This was marked as a bug that will be fixed in the upcoming patch.