Originally posted by Sphynx
Please gimme a piece of advice. I destroyed a civ which was on despotism (btw me too) and definitely used too much pop-rush and every citizen of this civ "can not forget cruel oppression". I got a leader while destroying them and want to make the Forbidden in their capital. The new base should be powerful as their main 5 cities make a 5.5 size ring (!!!). But I can not use this power because everybody there is unhappy. What can I do in this case? Will it help if I starve them to size 1 cities and add my native workers and/or slaves of other nations to these cities? Or I should destroy their cities and build my own - but I really dont want to do this as it will definitely slow down my main (Capital) base growth and will undermine my reputation. This is deity game and any mistake can cost me a lot 
Maybe lux will help? How many lux should I get then to make them content at least?
Unfortunately, there's not much to do about this, except to wait until the rage wears off, and that can take
many turns.
AlanH's suggestion of starving them down to 1 citizen and then build it up doesn't help at all. The main issue is that the unhappiness is stored in the
city, not in the individual citizens. So if the city has pop-rushed 5 citizens, then the
city will have 5 additional unhappy citizens until the unhappiness wears off after a time. If you have only one citizen, it will need a cathedral and 2 MP (to make 5 unhappy content) just to stay out of civil disorder.
The only time it helps to starve and repopulate a city is when you're currently in war against the civ of their nationality. By doing this you get rid of the "stop the aggression against our mother country" unhappiness.
It doesn't help to disband the city either. If you do this, the unhappiness is transfered to the closest city, so now
that city will inherit all the unhappiness.
Lux and happiness improvements will help. Click on one of the unhappy faces in the city, and you'll get a messagage telling why the citizens are unhappy. From the percentages, you can compute how many faces that are unhappy due to pop-rushing.
As an example, assume a size 10 city, which says that 64% is unhappy due to crowding, and 36% unhappy due to pop-rushing.
You know that on deity, only the first citizen is born content, so there's always 9 unhappiness factors in a size 10 city due to this.
Since those 9 means 64% of the unhappiness, you can compute 9 / 0.64 = 14 to get total unhappiness, and 9 / 64 * 36 = 5 to get the unhappiness due to pop-rushing.
In this example, you now know that you need to counter 14 unhappiness factors. This can be done in numerous ways. One possibility is temple (1), cathedral (3), marketplace+4 lux (6), 2 military police (2) and one entertainer (2).
If you can achieve this, the city will be productive. If not, you'll need to starve it. If you only have access to two luxuries, you can starve the city down to 6 where there's only 10 total unhappiness factors.
:saiyan:
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