What are the mechanics of Very Unhappy people and contentment with expansion?

[Kadence]

I'm playing at King mode, and over time, the number of Content people per city was decreasing for me; it went from 3 to 0 - and now many (but not all) of my cities have Very Unhappy people, who count as 2 Unhappy people (actually I think they might even count as 3 sometimes), so the number of Content people is essentially -1.

This is with Despotism; if I change to another government, I get 1 Content person per city, instead of 0 or -1.

I was extremely confused by all this, but I found this thread:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=50455

That says unhappiness is tied with the number of cities you have - the more cities you have, the less content people per city under Despotism. Though, this also seems to hold for the other governments, but to a lesser degree.

It's been over a decade since I last played this game; I just started playing it again a couple days ago. It seems that I probably played Version 1 back in the day, and now I have v4. I was having a lot of fun and remembering why I loved this game until dealing with Civil Disorder nonsense starting taking up the vast majority of my gameplay time, and I was real confused at having less and less content people over time. This aspect of the game is not fun at all.

Does anyone know what the game mechanics are for this? How many cities are needed to change the level of content people per city, what determines which cities get Very Unhappy people (it seems to me that it's the newer cities that get them), and how does it depend on which government you have?

 

[Tenochtitlan]

There are many factors that come in to this, the difficulty level, total number of citizens or cities, number of units in the city, luxury rate, wonders, improvements, the date, type of government, and possibly whether you are in war or peace, and of course number of units outside the city.

I don't know the exact equation but is somewhere in there.

So yes, it is a pain sometimes, but here's what I do, I just switch to democracy and get a really high luxury rate. and If I am rich enough, I build cathedrals, temples and colosseums in each city, so I can survive with a lower luxury rate.


This is also why I never research future techs, once I hit the last tech possible its 50:50 luxury and tax rate.

 

[Kadence]

There are many factors that come in to this, the difficulty level, total number of citizens or cities, number of units in the city, luxury rate, wonders, improvements, the date, type of government, and possibly whether you are in war or peace, and of course number of units outside the city.

The difficulty level, number of cities and government seem to be the only factors. As well as maybe the relative age of a particular city. It's the mechanics of these factors that I'm interested in.

The other stuff, like martial law and luxuries, isn't going to affect the base number of content people per city (which can be checked by looking at the 'Happy' sub-screen of the city view).

Does the extra Unhappy citizen come at the 7th city for Despotism (and does this number change based on difficulty) like the other thread said? At what point does the extra Unhappy come in for other governments? And at what # of cities point does the 2nd extra Unhappy citizen come in, depending on government and difficulty? Knowing the mechanics of this would lead to rule-of-thumb government decisions like "Revolution to Monarchy prior to settling 7th city", and how many martial law units you have to keep at various points (without having to manually check the Happy screen every time).