How do you fight crime?

[agc28]

I play on immortal...but this crime unhappiness is killing me...

Every single one of my cities is still unhappy. Very often I see something like "you have 2.00 defense, you have a deficit of 26.00 defense"...How are Barracks, Walls, Armory, Castle even useful if they each only contribute a few more defense points...? How does everybody manage this unhappiness?

Do garrisons reduce crime unhappiness?

 

[Funak]

Garrisons, right now the stronger CS (not RangedCS) the garrisoned unit, the better it helps with crime.
Building Barracks, Armory, Constabulary, Police-station
Building Walls, Castle, Arsenal, (Mine field,) Military base
As far as religion is concerned, both Synagogues and especially Orders reduce crime (Orders doubly so because they also increase city-defense)
Some wonders reduces crime thresholds a well, like Statue of Zeus, Terracotta Army and Brandenburg Gate.
Growing your cities less, Crime is countered by city-defense/Population, as cities grow population increases and city-defense stays static. This kinda makes sense, way easier to keep order in a small village than in a huge metropolis, right?
There's probably also some tenet in order or autocracy reducing crime, but I really can't be bothered looking that up, and by that time your crime should be under control anyways (once you've got Constabularies built you really shouldn't suffer more than a point or so in your biggest cities, assuming you don't grow them out of control).

In general Crime is a major unhappiness contributor during the first half of the game, the only thing you can really do about it is keeping up with your infrastructure/garrison and counteracting the remaining crime with happiness from policies, luxuries, wonders and monopolies. Crime does increase with the size of the city, but I don't think I would ever advice you to avoid growth because of it, this is more a case against focusing completely on growth at the cost of infrastructure. If you absolutely can't make it work at all, those religious buildings I mentioned earlier really do help, and might be worth investing in at the cost of religious beliefs with bigger gameplay impacts.

 

[LukaSlovenia29]

Funak covered most of my strategies. I focus a lot on keeping my other unhappiness sources low, so then I can much easier handle the crime unhappiness that remains despite my efforts, and from renaissance onwards I'll often have 5-10 unhappiness total from other sources, some from urbanization/specialists, and the rest from crime. That's low enough that I can offset by happiness sources. I also very often select Order, where the Motherland calls helps quite a bit with crime.

 

[peterw1987]

There will always be unhappiness early till mid game.
What you have to do is max your happiness source from luxuries trading, building, religion, and befriending cs to counter it.

 

[tu_79]

Don't let happiness guide your strategy. This is the same as an accountant managing a corporation.

 

[Dawnpromise]

I usually outsource crime fighting to local super-heroes and vigilantes.....that was a joke.

Seriously though crime is probably the biggest soft cap on city population if you're attempting to minimize unhappiness. I've found if you're trying to build a bunch of cities at once on of the best strategies is to 'avoid growth' when crime starts to pop up in a city. If done well you can limit unhappiness to 1 per city or so, maybe less if you calculate and preempt the population it shows up at.

Also I've rather realized that walls and castles work better then barracks and armories for reducing crime as the actual city defense is what judges crime and barracks only reduces the per citizen need.