the city that cannot be made happy

[jkk]

I hope I include enough details to make this clear without forgetting something.

Warlord, Fascism, late in the game. Captured a number of cities from an enemy but am now at peace with all. I have a couple of tiny cities, once great metropolises for the enemy, that gave me so much trouble I started rush building temples and settlers and workers. Since die-back was certain, I decided I might as well get something out of them and accelerate the process.

I expected trouble as long as the war went on, but once it ended I figured I could at least take a size 1 city and put its one available citizen on a tile. But I can't. No matter how many troops I garrison there, the citizen won't become content, which means the city cannot grow. I tried merging in a worker of my own nationality, and that didn't help either. It's the little village that can't.

Is this the long-term side effect of my evil fascism, whereby I pretty well wasted the population? Or might there be a way to get these cities on the way to a growth path?

 

[MAS]

A number of points.

When you are talking about "garrison troops in a city" do you mean the Military Police (MP) feature? Where units in a city center will give contentness to the city
You should note that there is a limit on how many units will provide contentness, depending on government.
Its 0 (zero) in anarchy, republic, and democracy, 2 in despotism, 3 in monarchy and feudalism, and 4 in communism and fascism!
This mean that placing 50 units in a city will still only give 4 contentness in fascism.

The unhappiness caused by pop-rushing and drafting will decrease by 1 each 20 turns. For example: if you rushed 4 times. You will have 4 unhappiness stacked for 20 turns, then 3 unhappiness stacked for an other 20 turns, and 2 unhappiness stacked for another 20 turns, and it will take a total of 80 turns before all unhappiness is gone.

Foreign cities can get unhappy because you are at war with their civ of origin, but this unhappiness should go away the very moment you make peace.

If the enemy has been pop-rushing and drafting, you keep the unhappiness caused by this if you take the city. (the citizens won't thank you for liberating them from their cruel oppressors)

If you abandon a city with unhappiness, the unhappiness will transfer to your nearest city. (but not if you raze the city upon capture)

Regardless of unhappiness or happiness, a specialist citizen is always content. (so a city with nothing but clowns is still 100% content, and not happy)


My advice to you would be to:
# only pop-rush cultural buildings if you are planning to win a 100K victory, and not build temples and cathedrals and the like for its contentness effect.

# only pop-rush units in late game if you are about to win, and want to sacrifice pop to win at an earlier turn, because if you are close to the game's end, pop is no longer important.

# not build any structures at all in far away corrupt cities, use them as specialist farms.

# In this specific game and situation: sell all those worthless structures, so that you no longer have to pay GPT maintenance for them, then turn your one citizen into a scientist for 3 beakers. And settle other cities 1 tile away from this city to make better use off the land around it.

 

[Jazzmail]

dito . what MAS just siad above.

 

[rysingsun]

all that pop rushing may have given you as many as 15 unhappiness points in each metro. this will take 300 turns to play out at one point per 20 turns.

if you abandon these towns to replace them you will find that all that unhappiness transfers to the nearest towns.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

Lot's of luxuries might help. It depends on how unhappy the people are!!

 

[Findus]

Military police sucks at removing unhappiness. Get luxuries and marketplaces at warlord it shouldnt be to hard to just take what you want but maybe you are still new to the game. Some cities are just trouble...

 

[PaperBeetle]

A number of points.
The unhappiness caused by pop-rushing and drafting will decrease by 1 each 20 turns. For example: if you rushed 4 times. You will have 4 unhappiness stacked for 20 turns, then 3 unhappiness stacked for an other 20 turns, and 2 unhappiness stacked for another 20 turns, and it will take a total of 80 turns before all unhappiness is gone.

Really?! This was not my understanding of the mechanism. I might be wrong, but I thought it was the case that each draft or whip action you perform gives -1 smiles for the duration of 20 turns. So if you whip 4 citizens away in a single town in turn 100, you have a big unhappiness problem, but on turn 120 it is all forgiven. Which is quite a different matter from some unhappiness lasting until turn 180.
Now if you are correct, I don't understand how the game handles staggered whipping. For instance, if I use 1 whip on turn 100, and 1 whip on turn 119, do I have to wait until turn 159 for the unhappiness to be all gone?

 

[rysingsun]

actually every 20 turns you remove one whip unhappiness and one draft unhappiness. since drafting and disbanding the unit has an effect almost identical to whipping it follows that if you really desire to convert a lot of pop into structures then the way to do it is to remove half the pop by whipping and half by drafting and disbanding. this will cut in half the amount of time necessary to remove that unhappiness.

and yes i am quite sure that 15 whippings will take 300 turns to remove. i've tested varients of this enough times. way back when i used a ton of drafting and disbanding to rush all manner of city improvements in a milking game. this was in vanilla so i had little better to do with those cities. but i was astounded after quite a few turns when it dawned on me that i had irreparably damaged dozens of cities.

 

[jkk]

I'm not new to the game at all; I'm a poor but experienced player seeking to improve and challenge respectable difficulty levels. I simply don't know every game mechanic that goes on behind the scenes, thus the question. It's now clear to me what I did wrong: I thought that the unhappiness would apply only to the people that were already there, but if it grew or I added more, they wouldn't start out unhappy. Wrong. Lesson learned

Here's something else I don't comprehend. I have a lot of small cities with temples and libraries. Some I captured and some I began myself. Not a single one of them is producing culture; they all say they are, but the meter isn't filling up. I could understand for the ones with minority-majority populations, that is, mostly captured people, but I don't get it for the ones I began with my own ethnicity. What could be holding them back?

 

[MAS]

Culture growth is effected, but not nullified, by the mobilization effect.
Also, In fascism, and only in fascism, a city can only gain culture if its citizens are natives. For the cities that you started yourself, could it be you joined foreign workers into the city?

If none of this applies, than I wouldn't know.

PS: a small far-from-the-capital corrupt city will not produce enough commerce/shields per turn to justify building any city improvements at all. Unless you are doing it for the 100K culture victory, or very specific strategic reasons, I'd just not bother.

 

[axehaxe]

What I would do is keep all the citizens in such permanently unhappy cities as tax collectors every turn and starve it down to size 1 and keep it that way for the rest of the game. At least you'll get the money and unhappiness is no longer a problem. Some cities resist like that when you have communism or fascism as your government. Also if you abandoned too many cities the same thing can happen. I play as a warmongerer most of the time so I do that a lot.

 

[jkk]

Culture growth is effected, but not nullified, by the mobilization effect.
Also, In fascism, and only in fascism, a city can only gain culture if its citizens are natives. For the cities that you started yourself, could it be you joined foreign workers into the city?

If none of this applies, than I wouldn't know.

PS: a small far-from-the-capital corrupt city will not produce enough commerce/shields per turn to justify building any city improvements at all. Unless you are doing it for the 100K culture victory, or very specific strategic reasons, I'd just not bother.

All good points. I think one of the keys to the game is managing conquest: assimilation, unloading improvements that just cost you money, turning whole cities into IRS (the USA's tax collection agency) auditors until they starve down to a manageable level, hiring civil engineers and what not. Because your conquests will either be a financial millstone about your neck, or they can be the push that brings you to dominance.