Town happiness question

[Hellfiredoom]

While tinkering in a town, I noticed an anomaly regarding happiness I've never noticed before. It's early in the game, I'm not at war with anyone, and I have no luxuries hooked up yet, so those factors aren't a consideration (not that they would be in this situation anyway).

CA2 tells me Alesia a size 4 town is about to riot. I thought the way to correct the unhappiness would be to take one worker offline. But by moving a worker from one tile (non-roaded, non-river) to another (roaded on river) that made a worker happy, correcting the problem.

So my question is: do roads or rivers improve worker happiness? Or does the increase in commerce improve happiness?

Discontent:


Content after the switch:

 

[vmxa]

It is the extra commerce. Check you have 5 before and 7 after. That means 1 gold for happy.

 

[Hellfiredoom]

I didn't realize 2 commerce applied empire wide would affect the town, but there it is right on screen. Thanks for catching that!

 

[Aabraxan]

It's not "2 commerce applied empire wide," though. Look at the "happy face scale" in each picture. Your commerce generates 0 happy faces in the first picture, and 1 in the second. The lux slider is set on an empire-wide percentage, but each town is calculated separately. Those 2 commerce have no effect on any other cities. I remember learning that you could juggle citizen placement like this in one of the TDGs that I played. If only 1 or 2 towns are close to rioting, it's always worthwhile to visit those towns and see if you can squeeze another smile out of someone before pushing the lux slider up another 10%.

 

[Hellfiredoom]

From reading posts here at CivFan I'm trying to improve my gameplay, so just this week started micromanaging my towns. I've always mm'ed my workers, but not citizens... It's been a huge learning curve, but the benefits are paying off. My Monarch/standard map games used to last to around 1500-1600AD, but I just completed one last night that ended around 1000AD. I couldn't imagine tinkering in towns would make such a difference. I'm also trying Republic as a war-monger (rather than Monarchy), and that's been a huge surprise to me as well, meaning in a positive sense. The education continues....

 

[Nergal]

I've noticed a similar thing when juggling the tech slider. It happens sometimes when researching at a deficit, in one case a town went from 2 happy 4 content and 1 unhappy to 1 happy 4 content and 2 unhappy as the tech slider moved from profit to deficit.

 

[Hellfiredoom]

I used to only micromanage towns when CA2 would give the alert the town was about to riot. Then I would go in and optimize happiness and production. But now I'm trying to be more proactive, looking into towns, planning worker improvements, and determining infrastructure upgrades by city rather than a blanket policy of "okay, now every city will build a marketplace". At the same time I'm trying to leave behind my Monarchy/Commie past and move into Republic, including using farms (I used to make every city productive under Communism). It's like I'm learning the game all over again... lots of fun

 

[tao]

One of the most rewarding interface changes is to enhance citizen icons with mood badges for the city view and thr F1 view.

 

[Hellfiredoom]

Too funny, I just spent 20 minutes scanning through the modpacks forum looking for that mod but couldn't find it, and came back into this forum to post asking if anyone can help me find it. Thanks for the link!