v1.16 - England - How to keep the people happy?

[TsarAndreas]

Once again, massive love to Leoreth. V1.16 feels like a completely new game, especially coming from v.1.14. I didn't think it could get any better and he keeps pulling it off. Amazing.

I've just started playing v1.16 and i feel completely out of my depth. I collapsed as England around 1920, which never happened in the v1.14. Whereas before, I could just build a globe spanning empire and make my people happy every time I found some tobacco in America or some gems in South Africa, now I'm founding colonies that start unhappy because they have no culture and they're last in the queue!

So what's the secret to managing happiness? I found myself reluctant to trade resources because i wanted to make sure that the 6th or the 9th most cultural cities still get some.

Is it better to have to two of the same happiness resource, e.g. two dyes, or to trade so that I have one dye and one tea? I feel like the latter option means that my big culture cities are happier, but at the expense of the smaller ones.

I know there are new happiness buildings that work regardless of whether you've traded the resources away, but is there a more subtle strategy for making England work?

Thanks in advance

p.s. and again, thanks to Leoreth for continuing to make this wonderful mod!

 

[JDPElGrillo]

Are you facing any additional unhappiness outside of just the default population size? Whether from religion, war weariness, or "we want to join the homeland", I find that that's what really makes it tough, especially in the smaller, low-culture-rank cities you're describing. I haven't played much as England specifically, but as Japan settling Pacific colonies around turn 400 (1900s) I find success when I intentionally keep these cities at low sizes emphasizing hammers with watermills and workshops in Central Planning civic or farms and mines earlier, chopping in (if possible) a Factory/Coal Plant, then building an Arena for the flat +2 happiness and stagnating them on either military builds or building Wealth. Not only does this help with expansion stability, it also gets the cities productive relatively quickly (by the time these colonies are popping up there's really not enough time left in the game for the expensive commerce multipliers and cottages to be effective), mostly addresses the issues with happiness and health caps, and puts a hard limit on how much worker labor each new city needs to contribute. Meanwhile, my core cities get all the benefits from newly settled luxuries and I keep them growing and building commerce multipliers to max their size and thus core population. Also, in each new Era Settlers provide additional free buildings, and the cost scaling is such that it often makes a lot more sense to have a core city build a Settler for each periphery city than to have those cities build those buildings themselves. For example, in my Renaissance Era Monarch-Normal Japan game, a Settler costs 85h but builds a city with 5 buildings (Granary, Smokehouse, Library, Aqueduct, Forge), which collectively cost 430h. Even in situations where a city already had a Granary, Library, and Forge, building a Settler from the capital still saves 75h when it creates a free Aqueduct and Smokehouse. Now not every city necessarily benefits from all the free buildings, but if you capture an independent or barbarian city with just a Monument and Harbor intact it's a no-brainer to bring in a Settler instead of having the city build those buildings itself.

I feel that the 1.16 model of limited health and happy resources, along with the expansion stability model, creates strong incentives for this kind of settling pattern with tall urbanized core cities and small but highly focused production cities everywhere else. The core cities provide the population to fuel expansion without stability issues, while the new cities grab additional resources for the core and quickly become self-sufficient. In fact, one issue I've had capturing other Civ's cities is that their old capitals sometimes have too much culture after capture and cause my core cities to lose out on resource benefits, even when the newly captured city has been starved down to size 5 and my core city is at size 18. I haven't found a great solution to this yet, but the overall approach has still been more effective than the others I've tried.

Hope that helps, good luck, and have fun!

 

[TsarAndreas]

Thanks JDP, that was very insightful.

Merry Xmas!