Civilization V: How to Raise City Happiness

What Is Happiness

Happiness in Civilization V is the measure of your civilization’s approval towards you; how happy they are with the way you’re running things. It’s measured three different ways:

• Happy
• Unhappy
• Very Unhappy

Happy civilizations are the goal you’ll want to go after. These are the ones that grow normally as well as enter golden ages faster. Unhappy civilizations hinder growth by 75%, negate production, and negate gold earnings, as well as combat strength. Very unhappy means your cities aren’t growing and you’re at risk to lose them through revolts among the people.

So, yeah, it’s important to keep your people happy.

Causes of Unhappiness

First, let’s talk about what makes your cities unhappy. These sometimes aren’t avoidable, but often can be and will optimize happiness levels so they can be a the most that they can be. Here are the causes of unhappiness:

• Number of Cities – Each additional city in your civilization adds +3 unhappiness.
• Population – For each population count, +1 unhappiness is garnered.
• Puppet Cities – These generate unhappiness as normal cities do.
• Annexed Cities – These are definitely unhappy machines. They harvest double the amount of unhappiness as a regular city would.
• Razing Captured Cities – Same unhappiness levels as an annexed city.

As you can see, Number of Cities and Population is pretty much unavoidable. However, you can do without the Puppet Cities, Annexed Cities, and Razing of Captured Cities. Avoiding these will help optimize your happiness levels. But, if you really need more happiness, let’s go into what you can do to actively produce it next.

Raising Happiness

In order to produce happiness, there are number of different things you can do. Here are actions that will increase your people’s happiness levels:

• Luxury Resources – Every different kind of luxury you harvest will give your people +4 happiness.
• Buildings – Look out for different buildings that will generate positive happiness. Some examples are the circus, Colosseum, and stadium.
• Wonders – Same as with buildings, certain wonders that you build can increase happiness.
• Social Policies – Same as the last two, you should look out for social policies that benefit your cities’ happiness.
• Natural Wonders – Whenever you discover a Natural Wonder, your civilization gets +1 happiness.
• Route to Capital – Make sure all of your cities are connected by a road to the capital. This also helps with happiness.

Use all of these actions together to get the most happiness you can get and never have to worry about being overthrown by your own people.