Strategy Guide Wiki - Civilization III

Making your citizens happy is a vital part of Civilization. As you might expect, making sure your country contains people is an essential part in having a powerful nation. Your people will have mood swings also. Generally, citizens are 'Content', which just means they are neither happy nor sad. You can have 'Happy' citizens, 'Unhappy' citizens and 'Resisting' citizens. Resistance happens when a city has just been captured by an opposing force. Garrison some units in the settlement and they will soon lie down.

Citizens generally become happy when you build wonders (such as the Oracle, Hanging Gardens) and improvements which generate happiness (such as Temples, Cathedrals). Luxuries, as we discussed, such as Wines, Silks and Ivory, make citizens happy too, though these are often costly when being bought from other Civilizations. Your best bet would be to make do with what you have on your own terrain. Once cities become large, you will find your people saying '100% It's way too crowded'. There's not much you can do about that, except for using the only tricks of building stuff for 'em. If you want to cure this, try building workers or settlers, thus decreasing the population. Of course, there's also the trick up increasing happiness generated per turn by going to the Domestic Advisor screen. However, this might cost a good bit of money, which could be used for science. Moving defensive units into your cities also increases a general sense of security in the settlement, thus lowering the amount of unhappy faces. Resisting civilians isn't much of a bother, as you would generally quell your cities with troops for defensive reasons anyway. The units there will stop the resistance.

If you have enough luxury resources (either three or four, I forget) marketplaces double the effect of the resources. I.E. you get two happy faces for the forth luxury resource, two for the fifth, three for the sixth and seventh, and four if you manage to get all eight. Once you have a large empire, getting upwards of five of the luxury resources are almost a necessity. Even if you have to pay for them with gold or techs or your own extra lux resource or a strategic one (oil, iron, horses, etc)....

Civil disorder will break out when the amount of unhappy civilians outnumbers the amount of happy ones. Stop this by increasing the happiness generated inside that particular city. If civil disorder is a real problem for your civilization, however, you might want to raise the level of direct happiness generated in your nation (again, do it through the Domestic Advisor screen).


Last Update: January 4, 2006	Contributors: TimmyTheRabidTurtle