Spiral of Unhappiness (or, the importance of happines increasing buildings)

[Proteus_MST]

Maybe this rather belongs into the strategy article sub, maybe not, just put it where necessary

One of the real dangers in Civ V I discovered...
Situation: You have several cities and are allied with several city states which give you needed luxury resources and which you regularly bribe so they stay allied with you. Your happiness may be between 1-10, but you don´t have several gold in reserve...
Suddenly a war breaks out and you successfully manage to conquer several of the enemy cities.

Now you might slide into something what I call unhappiness spiral.
Due to the increased number of cities and citizens, the happiness within your empire plunges deep into negative numbers.
Due to the fact that negative happiness not only causes a slowdown in your population growth but (which obviously isn´t documented in the mouseover of the happiness display) also causes your income to drop by a large amount (I´ve seen it drop by 20 gold and more) you now find yourself in trouble...
without a steady income you will have problems the next time an allied city state needs a bribe to stay allied to you (and you´ll probably lose the alliance, also losing the luxury resource, thereby getting your empire even deeper into unhappiness).
It is even worse if your happiness plunges below -10, as then the production suffers as well, making it more difficult to build happiness increasing buildings in order to get you out of this mess.

Well, having been in a similar situation after a war (I only escaped by continually destroying barbarian encampments to give me the needed gold to pay out my allies, till, slowly, I way able to get my people happy again, by building colosseums and geting 2 new luxuries) has taught me, to never underestimate the benefit of happiness increasing buildings.
The best way against a spiral of unhappiness is, not to get into it firsthand...it can stall the development of your civilization for centuries

[Krill]

Just keep on conquering, annexing cities, and pumping out military units. Sure, you'll lose some, but numbers will win you the day. Provided you aren't playing Deity. Growing the cities that you have doesn't really matter if you are still growing population by gaining new cities with a fair few pop points, and that combat malus doesn't matter when you have double the number of units, and more iron/horse resource deposits.

[Proteus_MST]

Well, in my case the problems arose when I was at peace again...it wasn´t the great war to end all wars,
rather a war with the intention to please an allied nation and get some cities for myself as a reward
therefore I also wasn´t really military prepared to take out one nation after the other in constant warfare
(I assume sooner or later I would have gotten problems due to my dwindling gold reserves, causing units to get disbanded due to lack of funding)

[Krill]

That is where capture gold becomes a rather pleasing mechanic And you can always use those captured workers to trade post spam a city or two...and you really do want to be rushing through city captures, going as fast as you can. Blitzkrieg style.

[Choles]

was having similiar problems in a game I played, but to get my gold/happiness, I targetted captured city states to liberate, and small enemy towns <5 and raze them down.

was perhaps just lucky that I had picked Songhai and in a marathon game you get a whopping 225 gold for clearing an barbarian encampment.

also later in the game I had a few puppet states, that I annexed one by one when I had enough gold to buy a colluseum.

(btw a side note during the game I noticed that the happiness from garrisoned units isn't included in the total happiness from all sources, but is in total happiness level empire wide, small bug)