Unhappiness irks me!

[jmrathbun]

Still trying to adjust to CIV 5. Sitting here at move 250 with the world's best military. A nearby Greek city and a nearby German city are calling for conquest. The only other civ on the continent is Monty. I could own this whole continent if it weren't for my citizens being so chronically grumpy!

Can you see anything obvious in my saved game that I'm missing?

 

[lemming3k]

It's a tad overdone to prevent you having a massive empire and rapidly conquering people. Large empires aren't necessarily unhappy ones, so it takes a bit of fun from the game for me. Perhaps if cities could request annexation from a more advanced empire it would make sense. After all some empires did manage to expand quite rapidly when they far outclassed their neighbours.

 

[Major_Heartfire]

The problem with happiness for me is that I don't go into a game thinking: I'm going to eventually own this continent. So when I make those early game decisions about religion and my starting policy tree, I'm not always sure which one to choose because I don't know where I am going to end up. Sometimes I will go with a rich tall empire, and get mercantilism. Low and behold I get into a war and begin expanding a lot, so I got lucky because mercantilism has a very strong happiness booster. But, what if I had gone Honor? My war would have fared better, but no happiness in sight.

Rather, I have a basic idea of what I want to do, and hopefully the game unfolds in a way that helps me use that. I started a game as the Dutch last week and it put me in the middle of the desert. My neighbor, Egypt, was plopped down in the middle of a marsh. Go figure.

Maybe I just need to adapt the attitude of being dedicated to one style of development in each game I play, but that is just boring to me. I like to adapt to the given situation.

 

[S.K. Ren]

Actually Honor has this thing where you put a unit in a city and it gets a little happier. Put a unit in every city and that s a lot of happiness. Combine that with Oligarchy from tradition and its free upkeep for garrisoned units. Meritocracy gives +1 per city and -5% unhappiness from unoccupied cities. If you're going conquest, Autocracy for Courthouses or Order for the large empire-wide bonuses works too.

 

[jmrathbun]

It turns out the correct decision was to take Athens and Hamburg. Later, I wound up with Berlin as well because Bismark was determined to take Hamburg back and he irked me. Eventually he made a play for Athens and actually nuked me. Perhaps I should have taken more of his cities after Hamburg when he was severely weakened.

The really annoying thing about the ending was that Ramses got a culture victory a few seconds before I could launch my space ship. Aaaargh! How do you defend against that? How can you even see it coming?

 

[Zednaught]

Check the victory progress screen.

 

[cjpc12]

Trade for as many different luxuries as you can. I playing a domination game against 6 on standard earth map. lucky to be only one to start alone on NA. By industrial age, had almost whole continent to myself. Had happiness at 113. Trade trade trade. Some trades were not really in my favor, but gold was not an issue. Currently my military might has embarked to embroil europe in war.


Apologize, on my phone can't see any attachments.

 

[cjpc12]

It turns out the correct decision was to take Athens and Hamburg. Later, I wound up with Berlin as well because Bismark was determined to take Hamburg back and he irked me. Eventually he made a play for Athens and actually nuked me. Perhaps I should have taken more of his cities after Hamburg when he was severely weakened.

The really annoying thing about the ending was that Ramses got a culture victory a few seconds before I could launch my space ship. Aaaargh! How do you defend against that? How can you even see it coming?

spies

 

[jahsoldier]

It turns out the correct decision was to take Athens and Hamburg. Later, I wound up with Berlin as well because Bismark was determined to take Hamburg back and he irked me. Eventually he made a play for Athens and actually nuked me. Perhaps I should have taken more of his cities after Hamburg when he was severely weakened.

The really annoying thing about the ending was that Ramses got a culture victory a few seconds before I could launch my space ship. Aaaargh! How do you defend against that? How can you even see it coming?

Don't you get a notification when they're building the Utopia Project? As soon as you see that (or yeah, your spies see it happening) just nuke the crap out of them.

As a side note, this is why late-game warmongering just blows every other VC out of the park. Your opponents are making Utopia Project? Building a spaceship? Nuke 'em. If the AI had a clue it'd do the same - I'm guessing they specifically programmed it that way because getting nuked every time you try a peaceful win would get pretty boring!

I love nukes, but for a balanced game there really needs to be a way to stop them - fighter aircraft in a city should at least get a chance to shoot them down.