tu_79
Deity
Care to look at my guide on happiness? It's in the strategy section.On going Progress and settling 6+ cities, how do you manage early game happiness? I find I can't go past 5 cities in the early game without running into an unhappiness spiral. Settling a 6th city usually means all my cities are unhappy and revolting. And I play on Large maps, so space isn't so much an issue. All my progress games usually get to 5 cities before I have to start taking space with my neighbors.
Anyways, the issue you're having with happiness, AI is suffering it too. It doesn't matter if you settle slowly as long as you settle faster than AI.
A sound combination of successful exploration, revealed resources, a couple of workers for connecting luxuries you can trade and some help from the pantheon. Then, a tight control over the city growth if you value more the number of cities than your population.