Need help with early wars

[northern wolf]

So my civilization skills are modest at best. I play on prince and usually do pretty well. Anyway, after watching LC's let's plays I've adopted a more aggressive playing style. I'll usually start conquering after I get composite bows and only stop for brief periods thereafter. I did this exactly last night and won domination as the Iroquois. The early wars were costly but the later ones went much more smoothly. Today, I started a game as Rome, a civ I am not experienced with, hoping to do some early wars with legions and ballista. Honestly, I failed horribly. I got three cities down with room for more if I wanted to ICS. I then cranked out a few legions and ballista as the Mayans DOWd me. I beat them easily because they were still using warriors and atlatls. But, conquering them completely wrecked my happiness. I finally retired when it was around turn 120 and I could not fix my happiness or gold and didn't have my national college yet. I reloaded to right when the Mayans DOWd me and reoriented to a defensive posture. I won easily and got Tikal in the peace deal but once again could not fix my happiness. I retired when I got to -10 meaning since it would be 20 turns before I could get coliseums in each city and even then would still be unhappy. Sorry for the long read, but I'm a bit discouraged right now. This aborted game went unusually poorly for me. All of my latest games have gone much more smoothly. Usually at that point of the game I would have a state-of-the-art military and would be pushing a tech lead. Where did I go wrong? How can wars undertaken that early still be profitable?

 

[JothHago]

It looks like your issue mainly is just handling happiness.
First off which social policy are you starting off?
Secondly, mercantile city states comes in very handy and you should explore the quests for city states. Probably make those quests a priority if possible.
In terms of handling happiness, always make sure
You have the happiness to sustain new cities before sieging them. You don't have to take all your opponents cities to be successful. You could take their capital or
Well located cities and then grab a peace deal. You just need to forecast your happiness level before making those siege decisions early on. Are you also improving all your lux resources

 

[northern wolf]

I went tradition and filled out the middle path (can't remember what those three are called) and then opened honor and went toward professional army. I improved all but one of my luxuries. I had gems and copper in the capital and improved those early on. I founded my second city by some whales but did not improve those before the war. My third city was in a nice spot but it didn't have any luxuries nearby. Mercantile city-states would have helped quite a bit. I'll have to bear that in mind next time.

 

[Octonde]

Sometimes it helps to turn off city growth (the avoid growth box under citizen management). That's particularly useful if the new citizens wouldn't be of much use. For example, if the next guy is just going to work a sea tile for two food and a gold, you're really just trading a happiness for one gold per turn. That's a terrible trade. In contrast, if you were to sell off a luxury that you were using you'd get 240g for the 30 turns or an average of 8g/4happy or twice as much as that citizen (and gold up front is more useful than a flow of the same value)

Be prepared to burn down cities. If you capture a city that is undeveloped and doesn't connect any luxuries or needed strategic resources, why keep it? If you're trying to spread your own religion, this also conveniently kills off some of the heretics.

To the extent that you can, keep up diplomatic relations so you can trade for luxuries. As others mentioned, mercantile city states are extremely useful.

 

[iconocast]

just some general advice. also like said above dont be afraid to raze the crappy citys. expanding will give you some spare lux to trade, so its wise to keep diplomatic options open. puppeting will keep ur happiness down for a bit as well iirc

honour will keep ur happiness at manageable level early on. garrisoning units +2 happiness +1 culture. and pupets will build military buildings first so walls etc will give u +1 happiness.

bully CS for gold to offset the maintenance cost of the large army.

in bnw rome is even better, use trade routes to make ur citys grow fast and the bonus to production will help them build the necessary buildings so they can manage themselves. all that tech is on the bottom half of the tech tree early on and meshes well with the uu's that are also there

get ur roads up fast for income when ur citys start to grow and build Colosseum asap.