Civil disorder with ships.

[jez9999]

OK, so I'm having another experiment with going for Democracy as government later on (I usually hate Republic and Democracy for the civil disorder problems, and prefer Communism). One MAJOR problem I'm having is ships. At least with land units, you can keep them in the city or in a fortress near the city and people are content. Ships ALWAYS seem to cause 2 discontent citizens, making it very difficult to build ships in ANY city. Does anyone have any ideas as to how to deal with this? Am I missing something here?

[Verrucosus]

The unhappiness is supposed to democracy's main drawback, so there is no easy solution. The following ideas can help:
- Build Women's Suffrage (or police stations in coastal cities) to reduce the penalty from two unhappy faces to just one.
- Ships in port do not cause unhappiness. If you are not at war, you do not really need an offensive navy.
- Ships with an attack strength of zero (galleons, transports) do not cause unhappiness. You can use these to explore the oceans.
- You can build Shakespeare's Theatre in a coastal city with a huge resource output and rehome your navy. No more unhappiness at all.
- When using the luxury slider to avoid civil disorder, you will often have one or two more happy faces in the richest cities than is necessary to maintain order. (You cannot set the luxury rate on a city-by-city base.) You can home ships to those cities and use the "spillover" happiness to balance the unhappiness caused by ships at sea.

Regards,
Verrucosus

[rjmatsleepers]

Originally posted by Verrucosus
- You can build Shakespeare's Theatre in a coastal city with a huge resource output and rehome your navy. No more unhappiness at all.

Regards,
Verrucosus

This is pretty much the standard solution advocated in the early landing guides. Shakes is worth building anyway in your SSC. Of course it doesn't work if your SSC isn't a coastal.

RJM

[Peaster]

Originally posted by Verrucosus
- Ships with an attack strength of zero (galleons, transports) do not cause unhappiness. You can use these to explore the oceans.

That is the best answer! If you want a big navy early on, delay Demo until you get the good naval techs.

An alternative, maybe a bit tricky, is to build lots of coastal cities, each supporting ONE trireme/caravel. Mix in the usual happiness WoWs, keep your cities fairly small, and you should be OK. I don't usually need temples/cathedrals etc to do this. Build Leo's (with Magnetism etc) ASAP to upgrade the boats. Take care that Magnetism (the anti-Lighthouse tech) doesn't sink your triremes.

Shake's might work well too. I haven't tried it because it doesn't fit conquest strategy. Also, I guess there is some limit on how many units the SSC can support, so you'd probably have to invest in mining and/or factories, etc, to support a really big navy. Becomes a question of costs and benefits.