Threshhold for Negative Happiness

[malitano]

Hi I understand that -Happiness makes your science and production slower but at what level does happiness considerably take a toll on your civilization.

For example, I could be at war and rampage through a continent maintaining -1 thru -3 unhappiness and my empire is still doing alright. At what point does unhappiness become seriously unacceptable (without having to find out the hard way).

Thanks look forward to your responses.

 

[AtriumComplex]

At -10 you take a 33% drop in combat strength but low morale riflemen will still trump pikes so I didn't care too much. (Playing on King difficulty if that matters)

 

[Spatzimaus]

The only two thresholds are at 0 and -10, so it's easy to keep track of. If you're hitting the -10 without intending to then you're doing something horribly wrong. (There are threads discussing deliberately hitting the -10, hence the qualifier.)

Note that there's a massive growth penalty associated with unhappiness; you'll notice that at your -1 to -3, your cities are taking four times as long to gain a size as they did at 0. In the short term this isn't a big deal, but in the long term it's crippling to an empire. Size increases unhappiness, but it also increases trade route income, research, etc., so slowing down growth that badly really hurts.

Also, net happiness leads to free Golden Ages. If you're running +20 happy on normal speed, you might have a 10-turn Golden Age every fifty turns or so, which is a huge boost to your economy. While I'd still prefer to use that extra happiness to support a couple more cities, it's definitely an upside if you're stuck on a map without much room to expand.