How Do You Keep Your People Happy?

[ETB]

I like the BIG maps but I usually get to a point where I have over 40 cities and I keep wondering why I can’t select a group of unhappy cities in my National Manager screen and add one or two entertainers to the ENTIRE group of cities at once. It can be tedious to go through 10-15 cities just to add one entertainer for each city! We select multiple cities for our build queues so why not for specialists? Or do the mayors do a better job in the mods? I recall the mayors in my unmodded games constantly allowing city happiness to get too low and riots would occur, so I stopped using mayors. What do people do to keep their cities from rioting when their empire starts getting so large?

[Martin Gühmann]

Whenever a city is rioting I give it the additional entertainers needed of course on huge maps it is a little bit tedious. I think the reasion for this is that the maker of CTP2 didn't considered that entertainers are much effective then the playing with the global sliders otherwise the AI would be able to make its people happy by using entertainers.

For the mayors: Don't use use them they can't manage a city properly. They give a city a fixed amount of entertainers and other specialist, irrespective of the fact they are needed or not. That's the reason why my AI doesn't use any entertainers. If they some they won't be used if they don't need some they use them like the mayors. So no entertainers for the AI.

-Martin

[Locutus]

Yes, the stupid entertainers thingie is by far my #1 pet-peeve about CtP2's UI! *Extremely* annoying, enough to make me stop from conquering what I would ordinarilly want to conquer sometimes! If we ever got our hands on the source code of this game, that's probably the first thing I would change!

[child of Thor]

I build everything i can that gives a happines bonus, buildings and Wonders(the Ramayana being my first wonder usually).
Then i juggle the sliders alot to control overall levels and worry about entertainers only when a city riots and is important enough to worry about! Basically my citizens work hard,eat huge amounts and get paid well!
The sliders seem the best way to control overall empire happiness,and in an emergency(lots of cities going crazy at once) it's the most effective control.

[Martin Gühmann]

Actual entertainers are the most effective controll. Is a city is unhappy use an entertainer and it is quiet. Irrespective how many cities you have fix the problem local instead of global, what might be right for one city might be wrong for another city. So usually my people work as hard and long they can, eat just a little amount of food just enough to stay alive, and the slider allow just to earn in the end a pittance, there is no use for happy people if the empire is in danger. (Actual this is always the case. But someone has to offer the sacrifices. )

-Martin

[Locutus]

Sliders can only do so much. Once I start conquering, I soon have more cities than the city limit allows and before you know it the sliders are already in the lowest possible settings, while people are still rioting all over the place. For every city you conquer, happiness decreases with roughly -1 in all your cities, so you need a new entertainer in half your cities whenever you conquer a city...

[Maquiladora]

Ramayana is probably the best Wonder in the game, highly valued in its own time and never obsolete! The advantage to max out sliders constantly so early is unstoppable.

I dont think i ever changed the Empire sliders to keep people happy. Its tiresome but adding Entertainers is the best way. I just make sure ive got all the happiness buildings first, if I havent then add I an entertainer and begin building/rushing one then take off the entertainer. In the general order of- Theaters, Arenas, Shrines, Basilicas, with hopefully no longer than 15 turns for any one.

But yeah World Domination makes it a little more complicated with all those new far flung cities, unless you start disbanding cities, but i dont like that to do that ever, only if im about to lose the city to someone.

[Martin Gühmann]

Actual I prefer it to add to every city an entertainer even if I have to do it in half of my cities.

Originally posted by Maquiladora
I dont think i ever changed the Empire sliders to keep people happy.

Yeah that's the reason why I played a little bit with the sliders, with later governments the happiness lost is higher also the gains. Unfortunatly that made it more difficuilt to research to the end of the tech tree, therefore I will have to modify some other settings in the govern.txt.

-Martin

[Locutus]

If you have a lot of unhappiness, it's usually more efficient to lower the slider settings. Your efficiency drops rapidly if you have more than 3 Entertainers, lowering your sliders does so to a much lesser extent. So when I'd dealing with mass-unhappiness I usually change the slider settings, when it's only a handful of cities, I use entertainers. And it goes without saying that if the economy can support it, I build every happiness building and wonder as well, that's a given...

[child of Thor]

Yeah i don't like the efficency trade off with too many specialist's employed, i use them for farmers mostly(besides that i carry a mental scar from 'Civ',with all those 'Elvis' entertainer heads and i can't get it out of my mind!)- that's why i use the sliders alot untill it's not enough for any cities that revolt - then i have to resort to 'Elvis' (Shudder )
It may not be the most efficient way, but i like to be nice to my people - so lots of food and gold for their hard work. If only all world leaders were as benevolant.