How do I prevent my cities from becoming unhappy? I'm around the 1950s, and most of my cities have unhappy citizens (something like "it's too crowded"). I have tried building colosseums and theaters but they don't seem to help much.
The size of a city determines the number of unhappy faces in a city due to 'it's too crowded'. You'll have to match this number of unhappy faces with happy ones to combat this unhappiness and to avoid unhappy citizens. This means that larger cities need more stuff to combat unhappiness than smaller cities. It's ineffective to let your cities grow larger than the amount of people that you can keep happy as the unhappy ones don't produce anything and eat food. So you'll want to limit the size of your cities to this happiness cap by limiting the amount of food the city produces or by using the pop-rushing ability of the slavery civic to keep cities smaller.
By far the most effective way to combat unhappiness is happiness resources plus the buildings that double the effectiveness of said resources. So if you have silk in your empire and can trade some silk for silver with one of your neighbours, then both the silk and the silver will create 1 happy face in each of your connected cities. If you also have a market in some of your cities, then the silk will produce two happy faces in those cities and if you have a forge in some of your cities, then the silver will produce two happy faces in those cities. If you can get most of the happiness resources through trade or conquest and build the doubling effect buildings, then you can get enough happy faces to keep large cities happy.
There are some other ways to combat unhappiness, all detailed in this article:
Ways into Happiness
Also how do I convert citizens of another culture to mine? A lot of my new conquests are 90+% foreign, which has led to more than one revolt. One way I have noticed that works is to wipe out said civilization, but there has to be another way...
I'm playing vanilla Civ4, no expansions.
The nationality of a city is determined by the plot culture in the centre city tile of a city. This plot culture is generated by the city (it's not the same as the amount of culture in a city) each turn. It's visible when you hover your mouse over a tile, it often says stuff like English 56%, French 44%, which shows the relative plot culture in that tile. The amount of plot culture generated per turn is determined by the culture production per turn in the city and the number of culture border expansions of this city. So if a foreign city has had a large cultural border for a long time, then it will have created a large amount of foreign plot culture during that period.
To combat foreign plot culture, you need to create large amounts of culture in said city and expand it's cultural borders. Then over time, the plot culture will change to your culture. As the foreign plot culture diminishes in relative strength, the unhappiness related to this culture (being foreign) also slowly fades.
Destroying the enemy civilization is often a lot faster.
The revolts itself can be stopped by placing enough units in the city. You can observe the odds of a revolt by hovering your mouse over the culture bar inside the city. As you add units to the city defenders, the odds of revolt will drop until they reach zero and disappear.
As you slowly convert the plot culture of the centre city tile to your own culture, you'll also need less units to combat the revolt odds. Once 50% or more of the plot culture in the centre city tile is yours, the odds of revolt will always be zero.
The odds of revolt are also zero when no foreign city is nearby (has the centre city tile of your city within it's cultural borders).
The formulas related to plot culture and revolt odds are detailed in this post:
Culture Mechanics Disassembled
The above linked post might contain a bit more details than you'd want to know.
And of course, welcome to civfanatics!


