Sooo... Happiness.

[pza]

I know, this is a particularly difficult topic, but i beg to look unbiasedly into this.

I've played 3 games so far in 4-20 patch until industrial era, single player and multiplayer.
I'm not sure as to what it's causing the massive leaps in unhappiness, but they happen every so often, like in my current multiplayer game it took me down from +22 to -22 in 3 turns, in a 16 city, tech leading, culturally leading and religiously leading empire. More than half of those cities have every single happiness producing or unhappiness-reducing available building built, the others are close to it. So it's definetly not a matter of "gitgudnub". In addition, it looks like no empires in the game have a positive happiness.

I've realized the needs increased immensely, though what i actually noticed, is that my luxuries never reach the threshold or, maybe the threshold changes when it desyncs or something, i dont know. I did not actively observe this in single player. It most definetly looks like a bug.
Example:

Spoiler :

Barbs are everywhere rioting in my eden, eating my workers, and in 7 turns, cities will start flipping. Tbh, if this is how it's supposed to be, then this is not fun at all.

 

[raphaell666]

Your gold unhappiness is nearly double the others. I'd guess that some other player in that game has a disproportionate amount of gold income from their cities, which is shooting the average gold need up, which is causing your unhappiness? If you change the automated citizen focus of the cities to making gold, how much difference does it make?

 

[pza]

Your gold unhappiness is nearly double the others. I'd guess that some other player in that game has a disproportionate amount of gold income from their cities, which is shooting the average gold need up, which is causing your unhappiness? If you change the automated citizen focus of the cities to making gold, how much difference does it make?

it goes down to 23 unhappiness from poverty. I checked - for example the capital would need 30% more gold to reduce its 2 poverty to 0. (and 40% more science to reduce illiteracy from 1 to 0)
In earlier versions, increased needs over the ages used to be the norm too, but there was always an increased happiness income, too. This is where i believe something went wrong in 4-20.

 

[Moi Magnus]

You've lost ~40 happiness, which is ~4 unhappiness per city. Which is ~1 unhappiness of each kind per city.
Did you reached a new era?
A possibility is New era -> increased cost of specialist -> automatised city work less specialists -> more unhappiness everywhere.

And 318 pop needed to have luxuries worth some happiness... I'm still not convince by the need to reduce it in the last beta.

 

[pza]

Did you reached a new era?

Nope.

 

[Stalker0]

Make sure to send the G the player happiness stats log.

He mentioned to me he was looking at making the change from war weariness smoother (aka goes up or down less per turn)...but not sure if that was implemented.

Poverty has generally been my biggest unhappy bucket in most games recently.

And those drops you mentioned i have definitely seen. I had a game where i changed 25 happy in a single turn. Saw 2 18 changes and 3 11s...over about 40 turns.

On average in the mid game, happiness is actually quite volatile. I calculated it was changing by 4 on average ever turn (for the mid game, thst wasn’t an average over the whole game)

 

[andersw]

I've had similar experience in late rainessance early industrial where my happiness just plummets (ver 4-5) easily losing like 20-30 happiness over a few techs.

That looks like a VERY big map which makes room for more cities and more unhappiness.

Grow less, raze more cities on capture and vassal opponent after capture of capital, I feel a lot of effort have been put in to prevent very big empires.

I'm not a huge fan, it basically means I have to finish the game before this stage or stay very small.

 

[andersw]

Something that just hit me (yes I'm maybe a bit slow sometimes), if you remove a small player from the game that had only a few cities that will most likely increase the averages and cause extra unhappiness.

 

[ryanmusante]

Something that just hit me (yes I'm maybe a bit slow sometimes), if you remove a small player from the game that had only a few cities that will most likely increase the averages and cause extra unhappiness.

With the mechanics of city states reworked and revolts more common, will a similar situation occur?

 

[CppMaster]

Something that just hit me (yes I'm maybe a bit slow sometimes), if you remove a small player from the game that had only a few cities that will most likely increase the averages and cause extra unhappiness.

If you conquer him and annex his cities, then the averages will decrease, because of population drop and destroyed buildings, which result in lower yields. However, if you raze his cities then the averages would increase, because of removing lowest values.

 

[Gokudo01]

I know, this is a particularly difficult topic, but i beg to look unbiasedly into this.

I've played 3 games so far in 4-20 patch until industrial era, single player and multiplayer.
I'm not sure as to what it's causing the massive leaps in unhappiness, but they happen every so often, like in my current multiplayer game it took me down from +22 to -22 in 3 turns, in a 16 city, tech leading, culturally leading and religiously leading empire. More than half of those cities have every single happiness producing or unhappiness-reducing available building built, the others are close to it. So it's definetly not a matter of "gitgudnub". In addition, it looks like no empires in the game have a positive happiness.

I've realized the needs increased immensely, though what i actually noticed, is that my luxuries never reach the threshold or, maybe the threshold changes when it desyncs or something, i dont know. I did not actively observe this in single player. It most definetly looks like a bug.
Example:

Spoiler :

View attachment 494122

Barbs are everywhere rioting in my eden, eating my workers, and in 7 turns, cities will start flipping. Tbh, if this is how it's supposed to be, then this is not fun at all.

I noticed the same thing around renaissance/industrial era.(standard/standard/communitas)
The threshold starts going mad at this point. and while having -1 -2 per city before , now i can see some cities with -7 -8

 

[StevenV]

Same happened in my current game (4-5 version) Actually, I was about to open a topic for that
In a few turn i dropped from - 6 to - 39. I am in early Industrial. I also have a relatively big empire (13 cities) but others also have 8-13 cities empire.

My plan is to

- start culture/science/wealth project is every city. This will reduce unhappiness by 1-2 / city
- start to build in my worst cities building which will decrease the unhappiness the most, but only 1-2 city in parallel
- try to keep this until I can build Neuschwanstein (this will give me 13 happiness)

 

[tu_79]

Same happened in my current game (4-5 version) Actually, I was about to open a topic for that
In a few turn i dropped from - 6 to - 39. I am in early Industrial. I also have a relatively big empire (13 cities) but others also have 8-13 cities empire.

My plan is to

- start culture/science/wealth project is every city. This will reduce unhappiness by 1-2 / city
- start to build in my worst cities building which will decrease the unhappiness the most, but only 1-2 city in parallel
- try to keep this until I can build Neuschwanstein (this will give me 13 happiness)

What worked for me:
- Micromanage specialists allocation. Set city governor to whatever I'm missing more: production if I have lots of available buildings, gold if I have poverty.
- Avoid food and science for now. Avoid food specially if you are working lots of crappy tiles. Avoid science specially if you have tons of buildings unbuilt.
- Fix some tile workers, that is, tiles that I want to be worked in any case.
- Select one by one which specialist to work on. Every 5th specialist gives 1 unhappiness, but specialists usually give more yields than normal tiles. You can see for every specialist you set whether unhappiness improves.
- Try to find if there is an underlying problem. Maybe you don't have enough villages? Maybe you need trade routes origining in more different cities? Maybe you need stronger garrisons? Maybe a few GPTI could have helped?

 

[StevenV]

What worked for me:
- Micromanage specialists allocation. Set city governor to whatever I'm missing more: production if I have lots of available buildings, gold if I have poverty.
- Avoid food and science for now. Avoid food specially if you are working lots of crappy tiles. Avoid science specially if you have tons of buildings unbuilt.
- Fix some tile workers, that is, tiles that I want to be worked in any case.
- Select one by one which specialist to work on. Every 5th specialist gives 1 unhappiness, but specialists usually give more yields than normal tiles. You can see for every specialist you set whether unhappiness improves.
- Try to find if there is an underlying problem. Maybe you don't have enough villages? Maybe you need trade routes origining in more different cities? Maybe you need stronger garrisons? Maybe a few GPTI could have helped?

Yeah, possible I can reroute some internal trade route to generate more gold.
In addition, I will buy a GA for golden ages to save some extra time until city will revolt.

 

[Rean]

I've had similar issues in late rennaisance/early industrial for a while now. Once you get to ideologies and some of the bigger need reduction wonders like Eiffel Tower/Brandenburg it becomes more manageable, but that period really is hell.

 

[tu_79]

I've had similar issues in late rennaisance/early industrial for a while now. Once you get to ideologies and some of the bigger need reduction wonders like Eiffel Tower/Brandenburg it becomes more manageable, but that period really is hell.

Maybe this is just happening after the boost to farms, the population grows faster than most other civs, but our workers are not all as efficient as workers are in other civs with fewer pops.

 

[Gokudo01]

Maybe this is just happening after the boost to farms, the population grows faster than most other civs, but our workers are not all as efficient as workers are in other civs with fewer pops.

I don't think so. In my last game, I started to get this issue while being first in tech and in renaissance. I manage to go back to 19 happiness thx to policies, I reach industrial with steam power : Boom from 19 to 1. How can we be able to plan anything if I can't forsee my happiness fluctuation.

Moreover you can forget to expand with pioneer because the city will be an unhappiness sinker.
Don't annex after medieval : even -4(16 citizen) unhappiness from one puppet city is better than all the unhappiness than a semi developed city with 12-16 citizens can bring.

 

[wistak]

Nope, I also have that problem in cities with 5 citizens, they are demanding 5 gold per citizen

 

[Bromar1]

I feel like progress really got screwed with this happiness update. I have to lock half my ciries to avoid growth just to stay afloat

 

[andersw]

Even with the hotfix?