How is this possible?

[Valen]

The InTown capture shows Ikarra with its mech infantry in town.
When I move the mech infantry out of town, I get the OutOfTown picture.
I get the (2)sad face penalty and the town gets HAPPIER.
There is no change to the luxury rate. How is this possible?

 

[hannurabi]

That's a weird one, never seen that before. It's obviously bug, maybe somekind of data overflow.
Or could it be a feature? Maybe it's an evil Mech.Inf. and your people are happy it's gone

Do you have a save game?

 

[Valen]

I love the evil mech infantry theory.
Bug? - don't think so.
Data overflow? - not really.
The save game (from earlier in the game) is already uploaded on another thread, but that would spoil the surprise.
Give the forum a little more time to figure this mystery out.

 

[hannurabi]

Ah, this was somekind of Civ quiz question?
Then I go with the evil unit theory.(Too lazy to look at the save yet)

 

[Urtica dioica]

At first I was convinced it must be the Cure somehow being abused to affect a red shirt, instead of a black shirt, then behaving like 2 luxuries to make it instantly happy. That didn't work. The solution was much more surprising, and took an experiment to figure out. It's a game mechanic that I don't think anyone was aware of before, and I would classify it as a bug.

I won't give it away, but I'll try to pseudo-code what I think happened, and didn't get fixed with the new features of patch 3:

def make_unhappy(citizens):
 for c in reversed(citizens): # from right to left
  if c.happy == 'white':
   c.happy = 'blue'
   break
  elif c.happy != 'black':
   c.happy = 'black'
   break
  # 'black' falls through

 

[Valen]

I'm not sure if your pseudocode matches the actual game code, but it does duplicate the effect.
This is probably a condition the developers didn't test, so I'm now inclined to agree with you.
This could be considered a bug.

Ikarra has an odd food supply. I was trying to use the out of town unit to suppress celebration so that the food supply could build up. Imagine my surprise when that plan backfired.

 

[Valen]

The happy display tells most of the story. The game developers were not quite consistent in their implementation of double unhappy citizens (the red ones).
It may not be immediately obvious from the resources box, but the city is only generating 10 diamonds. This turns 5 double unhappy citizens happy (as though they started out content). Had they acted as true double unhappy people, one would expect only 2 of them to be influenced by the luxuries. 6 diamonds to make the first one happy and the other 4 to make the next one content. But red shirts are as good as blue when it comes to the application of luxuries. I have been exploiting this effect so long, I have almost forgotten that it is an anomaly.
There's no effect from the military or buildings, so the next thing that affects happiness is wonders. In this case, the city benefits from both Bach's Cathedral and The Cure. The effect here is what you would expect. The Cathedral makes one double unhappy content and The Cure makes him happy.

 

[Valen]

One more look at the happy display tells the rest of the story. This time, the unit is out of town.
The third row of the happy display shows the effect of the military. The two double unhappy (red shirt) citizens turn to single unhappy (black shirt). As I mentioned in the previous post, the implementation of double unhappy citizens is not consistent.
Now Bach's Cathedral makes both former red shirts content and The Cure makes one of them happy leaving only one unhappy face standing between Ikarra and President's Day celebration.