The Happiness Problem (and a city state resource curiosity) ???

[Burticus]

In my current game which I am about to either finish or just give up on, I cannot keep my stupid people happy. At 8 or 9 cities now and I don't want any more (Polynesia), I only did the last 2 to get critical resources (oil, coal, aluminum) from stupid city states. That brings up another issue which I'll come back to.

Anyway, I have avoided war with any of the AI players, although they denounce me all the time. The AI refuses to trade luxury resources without just making insane demands (like everything I own to get 1 lux). I have every lux resource on the map minus 3 I think, and everyone is road or harbor linked. I have built every happiness building and any wonder that helps happiness. I think I screwed up and helped my population grow too fast at some point 100 turns ago or such. I'm not going back to try and fix that, game has already taken forever. So is there anything else to do? I can go to war to pick up the last 3 luxuries, but that just nets me more cities I don't want.

Hmmm, can I force a population decline? Like build a bunch of settlers then disband them or send them to their deaths? Can I starve a city down?

It slays me that I cannot pick city specialists any more like entertainers etc. That would solve a bunch of problems.


Lastly, back to the city state issue. They are allied with me, and they have resources I need (oil, aluminum, etc) and the tiles are mined. The resource shows up in my resource bar as a ZERO. It's like it recognized they have it but won't give it to me. At first I thought it would take time to kick in, but 20+ turns go by and still zero. So I had to knock over a couple city states to get those resources which I was happy to pay for. And I get more cities I didn't want. Bug?

Sorry for the long rant, just frustrated.

[Burticus]

I forgot to add, playing on King current turn is 341 I think, island planet
9 cities. 153 happy / 154 unhappy
SP's = Honor (title only), Liberty MAX, Piety MAX, Commerce : trade union, mercantilism, protectionism

I don't know how to pull a completed wonders list without going city by city

Looks like I missed the Honor SP perk for garrison happiness, other than that I don't know. Switch up a little and go Autocracy?

I was originally shooting for culture win but wound up with 3 more cities than I wanted because of resources. I think I might still be able to win by culture but it's going to go down to the wire on the time limit because my size now. Probably will go Science at this point, or diplo if I have to. Gold is not a problem. But Diplo win to me seems shallow.

[Burticus]

Googling around seems that settlers no longer remove population like it used to in previous civ's. Just stops growth while the settler is built. Will try it anyway.

Also thinking about selling my food buildings, granary, aqueduct etc. Maybe I can starve the city population down a little. Will try tonight when I get a chance to play.

[MxM]

Can you turn "avoid population growth" in your cities? I do not remember if Civ V does that.
The 0 resource does sound as a bug though. I have never seen this myself though.
Another thing, when your reach new era (technologically), you get more happiness from resources traded from allied CS.
There are few wonders that gets you happiness, build them (discover right technologies).
Finally, some of the civics (or what's the name in Civ V?) can help you tremendously with happiness.

[Lambiorix_be]

I think every city has the option "avoid growth" in the worker management list. I never used that option but I am pretty sure it is there. For the happy problem. I resolve this not only via "happy" buildings but by also choosing the correct civics (ex. in the rationalism area is a civic that makes universities etc. +1 happy and there a others.) I also choose my research based upon this (for the wonder I can produce) and this way I can keep building. There is always a period where I am flirting with unhappiness but because of what I said before I don't need to build the happy building upfront and buy one when I am unhappy. Like I said there is always a period when I am close to 0 Happiness but then a wonder is build, a civic can be chosen...(so I also build a lot of culture buildings for the happiness purpose...)

[mkorin]

Can I assume you've found all the wonders and met all the city states.

If so, conquer city states that have a surprising number of happiness buildings already made.

Mike

[Burticus]

I sold all the food bonus buildings, unemployed anyone not working strictly on production, turned on "limit growth" and "manual specialists" on all the cities. I starved the overall population down by about 10 (took several turns, even at -20 food on most cities). Mostly impacted the 20+ pop cities. That settled things down. Had to rebuild a lighthouse and a granary here or there, I could have selected better rather than selling across the board. This settled happiness to around +5.

Then... I went to Order SP, which jumped my happiness up by 20. In retrospect, I could have just done that. Oh well, lessons learned. I am so DONE with this game, the endgame is my least favorite part, takes freaking forever between turns.

Working on spaceship parts when France (my best trading partner through the ENTIRE game) up and attacks me for no reason. I love the "You were a fool to trust me" dialog. Really? 1000 years of BFF then pow sneak attack. But this uncovered a huge AI bug... France had built a ton of aircraft carriers, I mean like 20 of them. Not a single plane. Those carriers went down like ducks.

That is a huge AI bug.

I hope for Civ 6 they can speed up the turn times. I have a fast computer and those 2-3 minute turn times just suck.