increase happiness and healthy in my civilization

[dragonfly522]

I can't figure out by reading the manual or going through the tutorial still how to keep my city in good health and happy. Some complain that it's too crowded. It may seem simple to make it not crowded, but I am kind of confused. What are some ways that I can make it not so crowded and increase the health and happiness of my cities in general?

 

[Mozzington]

Hi,

I'll start out by saying that I am no expert at the game but can offer the following advice based on my own findings:

One possibility is to enable the slavery civic after bronze working and "whip" away some of your citizens. This will decrease the population (too crowded) and increase health due to less population. Be careful with this though as too much whipping can also cause unhappiness.

Are you going into your city screens and looking at the smily/angry faces? You just need to work on keeping these balances.

Other early happiness buildings include the temple which you can build when you have adopted a religion. You can build more temples the more religions you have in a city.

The colleseum is also another building for happiness. Just hover your mouse over the possible build options and look for the

Resources are also a good way to increase happiness. Early options would be fur, gems, gold and silver.

Other resources become available once you can build the plantation later in the game - dyes, silks etc.

Same applies for health - seafood is good.

Buildings for health early game include granary, aqueduct, harbours. Later in the game you can build hospital, public transportation and adopt the emnancipation civic.

Hope this helps a bit. You are obviously new to the game but please persevere as it is the best game ever.

I still play almost every day.

 

[ParadigmShifter]

Check out cabert's articles:

ways into happiness
ways into health

 

[GT_OKEZ]

The higher difficulty you play the more challenging the happiness cap is. At the start of the game ( Ancient through Medieval) will be more of an issue than since its cap is usually lower at this point in the game and you are not building increasing buildings other than Forges. Also , is a much lighter penalty than .

Early game buildings that increase are as follows :
Monument for Charismatic leaders ( Chm leaders also get +1 per city) something you might want to consider for choosing a leader. Btw , Washington gets both Exp/Chm raising the and caps of his cities. Even though America is sort of a bad civ , Washington is a solid leader.
Theaters, Colosseum, Mint ( for the Mali if you have luxury resources on your network).
Byzantines also have the Hippodrome which is really nice if you have horses.

Civics you might want to consider for are Hereditary Rule and Representation. Running rep is still good even if you don't have a specialist economy.

The slider also helps with and is further increased by having buildings like Theaters or some UBs like the Odeon. War Weariness can also put a strain on your threshold. When going to war I usually turn my slider to 10% or 0% and increase my slider as needed especially if I need to whip ( slavery) out some units. If its going to be a prolonged war , police state might not be bad ( available early with Pyramids.)

And like the person above me mentioned. Luxury resources like Gold , Furs , Silver, Silk , etc ( i.e. anything you can build camps and plantations on) also aid in the struggle. So trade if you have to.

is fairly easy to keep up and you may not even have to build an aqueduct at all. Settling by rivers and forests ( NOT jungles) increase your city's cap. So keep some forest around if you really need the Every city should have a Granary which adds an additional +1 to all cities in your network that have access to a land based food resource like cows and wheat. Harbors for coastal cities and a Grocer helps if you really need it. The only civic that really helps out is environmentalism but you really don't need it by the time its available since the game offers you many options to solve your problems for good.

And a last bit of advice. Learn to use the slavery civic. Its incredibly good and attuning yourself to its rewards and penalties will allow you not only to build really fast but also keep your cities free of and Just learn to switch between it and Caste System periodically to avoid slave revolts even if you don't use CS for anything in particular. Btw , if you are running Caste System , it has its own way of dealing with cities that get too or . I believe most people call its a 'Merchant Recovery' or some variant. Just set all your citizens to Merchant specialists and wait until your city shrinks down to the ideal size while collecting some along the way. You also don't suffer any slavery penalties this way though is 0 at this time but that's what the is to make up for , right?

Remember , staple buildings that every city should have are Granaries ( for Slavery mainly but the bonus is very nice too), Libraries, and Forges. Everything else is optional depending on how you want to focus your city.

 

[lymond]

First of all, dragonfly, I see the making of thread spam here. We love to answer your questions but don't blow up the boards with posts. Collect your thoughts and post them in one thread - using that thread for ongoing questions and possibly shadow-learner games. There is a lot to learn I know.

Second, check out the War Academy and read some of the intro articles, especially Sisituils. A lto of answers and basic stratagies will be found there. Check the CIV4 menu at the top and look for War Academy.

Also, I recommend posting your question over on the Strategy & Tips forum. It's more setup for these types of questions and a lot of good players are over there helping folks out.

Also, I recommend posting a shadow-learner game. Post the start and get recommendations at 20 turn intervals. Best way to learn and a lot of folks will help out and might play along.

As for health and happiness, that is just something you have to deal with until certain, techs, civics, resources, trades and buildings are available. You can adjust your citizens to slow or stall growth until you obtain happiness options. Note that happiness is more important than health so should be more a priority. Don't worry about the green face until your city starts to starve. Unhappy citizens cost you maintenance and don't do anything, so either prevent that from happening or whip (slavery) them away to finish builds or units. Hereditary Rule and/or Representation (Build the Mids) are two possible early techs that can help a lot with happiness.

 

[Archon_Wing]

You can never do anything about it being too crowded. It's based on pop-- 1 per pop.

Well, unless we count whipping to create some more space. Whip a few red guys and then ask "Anyone else have anything to say?" ;p

Theaters are cheap and great ways to get some happiness.