I've played a couple of games now where around the middle of a long domination game (standard speed, but on a huge map with 12 total Civs), my happiness just tanks. In the game I'm currently playing, I conquered a rival Civ (which had enveloped another Civ themselves earlier in the game) while I had a net happiness of ~100 (when the war, which lasted perhaps 10 turns, started). Twenty after the war's ended, my happiness is sitting at -250 and falling, I've fought off three waves of rebels, and my progress as a civilization is paralyzed while I laboriously work on producing the buildings necessary to reduce (or, rarely, meet) the rapidly worsening needs of my many cities. I understand (or thought I did) how various needs grow, but for the second or third time trying for a domination victory with CBP, I've passed some sort of tipping point that's suddenly thrown my empire into a dark age with no end in sight. Does anyone have some insight they'd like to share?
Unhappiness Spiral
- Thread starter SirMayday
- Start date
It sounds like you conquered too fast and didn't do enough razing. Cities in resistance have an unhappiness rating of 1/2 their population, and new puppets especially will frequently have completely inadequate infrastructure because it all got wrecked when they were conquered. If it took you 10 turns to eliminate someone, and that someone had earlier conquered somebody else...how many cities did you take? 8+, pretty much all at once? Especially if you have a high level of cultural influence over your target, that leaves a lot of people to complain about what a tyrant you are for conquering them and how much of a shambles their city was left in.
Yeah, I easily took 8 cities; more than likely in the double digits. I prioritized courthouses to eliminate the happiness penalties for occupation (plus I had the Police State tenet, so there was that, too), but I think I put too much emphasis on getting XP generating buildings up to maximize the value of units generated by Conscription. So do I understand correctly, then, that dominating rivals with CBP means taking a slower pace to conquest (or more destructive one, in the form of razing), with an eye on quickly re-establishing lost infrastructure?
That right there is almost certainly your problem. Cities that are occupied (not puppeted and don't have a courthouse yet) provide unhappiness equal to their full population. If you integrate large conquests into your empire rather than leaving them puppeted, you have to do it piecemeal or they will wreck you with unhappiness.
Right, I understand that. In most cases, the courthouses were going up within just a few turns, and things didn't get really ugly until at least a few turns after the last courthouse was constructed.
Y'know, that seems obvious in retrospect. What really caught me off guard is just how quickly the problem escalates, and how it seems to spread even to my 'core' original cities (the few metropolises I'd founded). One turn I'm slowly but surely plugging away building back up the infrastructure the war had torn down while using my main training cities to prepare my next offensive; I had positive happiness and was oblivious to the horrible fate ahead. A couple of turns later I'm losing 20-50 happiness a turn while even my well-defended, very 'tall' capital was demanding safer streets and maybe a little less poverty (while new acquisitions on the far outskirts of my rival's territory reported happiness to the tune of -20).
Zanteogo
King
- Joined
- Nov 13, 2015
- Messages
- 989
I believe there is an issue myself as to how unhappiness is calculated. I have brought it up before and others disagree so maybe I am incorrect.
You can go from being in the positive double digits into the negative double digits within a single turn. (this is WITHOUT ideological pressure)
I have also had my happiness go down, from just scrolling over cities... (it's as if it recalculates it once the city "updates" when I mouse over it) Something doesn't seem right there...
You can go from being in the positive double digits into the negative double digits within a single turn. (this is WITHOUT ideological pressure)
I have also had my happiness go down, from just scrolling over cities... (it's as if it recalculates it once the city "updates" when I mouse over it) Something doesn't seem right there...
EUI used to re-allocate citizens when you moused over a city, that's what caused happiness shifts, mainly because the city's prioritized shifted as happiness changed, causing more shifts to happen. This feature was scrapped ages ago however because it totally decimated the memory or something like that.
I've been playing a new game, under very similar conditions to the one that prompted this thread, and run into essentially the same problem. Drastically slowing my pace of conquest, heavily investing in the construction of buildings related to solving unhappiness problems, and manually reallocating specialists (something the Governor AI seems particularly bad at handling) delayed the problem, but I still hit huge spikes in unhappiness between turns 250 and 300, to the tune of -40 or so every few turns. Any insights into what I might be doing wrong, or is this a balance/bug issue?
EDIT: This is using the 6/15 version; didn't even find out about the 6/27 version until after I posted.
EDIT: This is using the 6/15 version; didn't even find out about the 6/27 version until after I posted.
tu_79
Deity
Usually religious unrest. You need a couple of inquisitors and missionaries and improve your religious buildings, or go through the Rationalism tree.
After that, ideology unrest. Keep your culture/tourism high, or switch to the strongest world ideology.
After that, ideology unrest. Keep your culture/tourism high, or switch to the strongest world ideology.
Would really help if you took a look at the unhappiness breakdown and tell us why you suffer the unhappiness. I mean guessing can only go so far
Would really help if you took a look at the unhappiness breakdown and tell us why you suffer the unhappiness. I mean guessing can only go so far
I understand; the issue is that the unhappiness was on all fronts! All four needs (gold, science, culture and defense) were scaling upward faster than I could possibly keep up, to the point that even a few cities with every available building and garrisoned by my highest possible CS unit would complain about crime.
Two things have changed since: I've learned that the AI isn't very good at auto-assigning specialists to mitigate unhappiness, and I've been able to delay unhappiness spirals in later games by managing it myself. Second, and much more relevant, was the update to the (second) most recent version of the patch. The notes imply the changes to happiness calculation were minor, but it's made a pretty big difference in my current game (large, highly developed cities have very little unhappiness, and usual actually net a point or two of happiness thanks to circuses and arenas).
neo_arcadia
Warlord
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2016
- Messages
- 239
How's your new game now? Is the happiness level still a problem?
Thanks for asking, and sorry I didn't get back sooner. With the newer version, happiness has proven far more manageable. Even during war (when unhappiness from unrest/occupation was high), my happiness didn't dip more than thirty points or so from its pre-war levels, and captured cities were much, much easier to placate during the rebuilding process. After conquering between 50% and 66% of the (huge) map (including absorbing five rival Civs), I was generating a total of 30 to 50 unhappiness, mostly from boredom and poverty in poor cities on my former rival's outskirts. That unhappiness was well shy of the happiness I was generating, making sustaining bonus yields from happiness and building toward Golden Ages perfectly viable. I was not, as I previously had been, plagued by a civil war that seemed to come out of nowhere.
EDIT: Oh, and urbanization is a regular source of unhappiness. Not a lot, mind you, usually only about 20% of my overall happiness generation, but it is the most enduring source of unhappiness.
