Civilization V: How to Raise City Happiness

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.