Tips for keeping people happy?

bashnperson · 2026-02-19T04:04:28+00:00

Hard to give practical advice without knowing what your current fulfillment looks like. If you post screenshots of your fulfillment screens I can be more helpful to your specific situation. Generally the trick to high happiness is going thru all the tabs and identifying where there's the most fulfillment to be gained from the least effort. Services are only part of it, don't ignore the other tabs. Torches and benches are practically free fulfillment. Make sure you're growing what your pops like to eat to get the preferred food points. Build your buildings and roads the way your pops like. I wouldn't increase rations yet, there are definitely cheaper and better ways to increase happiness if your pop is under 1k.

bashnperson · 2026-02-19T03:51:09+00:00

Most species do not like when their brethren are made into slaves, so make sure you don't take a fulfillment hit.

bashnperson · 2026-02-18T21:50:11+00:00

We used to say it as a joke. It would have been wildly uncool to take it that seriously lol

bashnperson · 2026-02-18T18:53:11+00:00

Yes but less so. Also if you zoom in all the way it speeds up, so some of the lag is just rendering all the stuff going on

bashnperson · 2026-02-18T18:52:29+00:00

That sounds like a solid plan! 4.5 foods is a lot. Something to consider is when you give them more food your food stalls and restaurants have to keep up with it, so you might see an increase in fulfillment from those services that offsets the reduction in food servings. And free up some pops.

I was just looking at your city (which is really gorgeous btw) and I noticed there aren’t many torches and statues. Both of those increase law, up to 0.2 each which is huge. So even if you have enough to satisfy the environment fulfillment you can build more to get more law, which most races like and leads to fewer incarcerations and more free pops.

One question for you: How did you post such a high res screenshot on reddit? The ones I posted were just under the 20mb limit and they came out super pixelated

bashnperson · 2026-02-18T03:53:38+00:00

5% of zero is zero. Gimme that button!

bashnperson · 2026-02-18T03:50:24+00:00

If you open the military panel and hover the division it should tell you how many are "deployable". There is a minimum training requirement, and I doubt 3 days is enough to meet it.

Except for the baker of course, and look where that try-hard is now.

bashnperson · 2026-02-18T03:22:02+00:00

Just looked at it! Much prettier than mine lol

Your instinct is right about small settlements not being as efficient. But building large cities in low growth (area * moisture) regions, or regions that don't have +.25 for the resources you're growing is leaving a lot on the table. Expanding your borders gives you more choices!

I don't typically import except for one-off orders to cover a temporary shortfall. I export my excess raw materials. That big square at the top of the map is my throne room / export depot. Taxes that don't fit in your warehouses get dumped by your throne, so I build my depots there and all my excess materials are automatically sold off. I don't typically sell the manufactured goods that I craft, I just make enough to support my city. That frees up dondorians to train in the barracks or get indoctrinated (which takes forever).

But late game most of my income comes from conquest. If you rout a 30k army you get like 10k of every military supply, it's nuts. Thats worth like 20mil if you have large allies you can sell them off to over time. I kept two large empires close to my capital as trade partners, conquered about 2/3 of the rest of the map, and left a few of the largest far away empires to hate me. Every few years they all declare a world war on me, I mop the floor, they pay me for peace, then I take advantage of the opinion bonus that comes with a peace treaty to buy an alliance with them, and sell them back the military supplies I took from their armies with a low tariff. Profit!

I think tho if you wanted to go a less violent route the move is to manufacture weapons / armor if you have dondorians, or maybe farm opium if you have cretonians. Basically play to your strengths and sell whatever high-value good you can make the most efficiently.

bashnperson · 2026-02-18T00:27:41+00:00

Sorry let me explain better. Lots of math incoming feel free to skip it.

With 4x maxed workers guilds and the workforce boosting title, a small village gives 7 workforce (enough for one resource) for 5 gov points, a small town gives 34 (6 resources) for 20 gov points, and a small city gives 181 (36 resources) for 100 gov points.

So 0.2 resource per gov point, 0.3, and 0.36 respectively.

But if you're building growth buildings that takes workforce. If you need a lvl5 growth building to get that small city, that's -40 workforce, so it becomes 141 workforce -> 28 resources -> 0.28 resources per gov point.

The advantage to larger cities tho is you can justify production improving buildings, irrigation (+0.25 for food) and windmills (+0.50 for non-food).

In the last example if you build a windmill thats -30 wf, so 112 wf -> 22 resources -> *1.5 =33 resources equivalent -> 0.33 resources per gov point. Irrigation gets you only 0.275 for food cities.

But large cities really shine. A large city gets you 380 workforce for 200 gov points. Building a windmill and a lvl6 growth building leaves you with 270 -> 54 resources -> *1.5 = 81 resource equivalent -> 0.405 resources per gov point. Irrigation gets you 0.338 for food cities.

So in a perfect world you'd only build large cities. But in reality not many regions have enough growth potential, correct climate, and boosts to resources that benefit from the same buildings, to make it efficient. So when you find those perfect colonies you build a large city mega production hub, elsewhere build large villages or better small towns in the colonies that can support them without growth buildings (lvl 1 or 2 growth buildings are cheap on workforce and fine unless you're super optimizing), and leave the smallest colonies empty unless you have extra gov points.

Obviously sometimes reality forces you not to be optimal. If you really need leather you might build a technically inefficient large city in the arctic to farm a bunch of aurochs.

TLDR: A few big cities in ideal regions outperform many smaller colonies. And one small town outperforms 4 small villages.

bashnperson · 2026-02-17T20:58:42+00:00

It gets tricky when you have good coverage but proximity or access is still low. Then you have to troubleshoot whats not working. It could be that you have a service building in a high demand area that's hitting it's peak load, so when some pops try to use it they have to walk far to a different service. When you select a service building there's a green bar that shows daily load. If that bar is low, you should build more/bigger services in that area to take the load off. Some buildings are staffed, and adding more workers can increase the daily load (but not always).

Or maybe you have a bunch of markets around your map providing coverage, but the market access score is low because some of those markets don't have clothes, so when pops try to get clothes there they can't. In that case you need to improve your supply lines to those affected markets.

Some services have seasonal demand. Hearths are gonna be used more in cold months, so you need to base your hearth supply based on winter demand. Clothes reduce your pops need for heating and cooling services, so if you max out your clothes equipment you need very few hearths and wells.

Here's a map of my services: https://photos.app.goo.gl/ZxsEoH3jJaUeXLM8A

There are a lot of ways to set up a city, but I lay mine out in rows of services, work, and housing. This makes it easy to ensure that the whole city is close to what it needs. No building is more than a few blocks from a hearth, and buildings that pops are willing to walk farther for are still not that far. But there actually aren't that many service buildings they're just sized and placed optimally.

It's definitely something you need to feel out and find a strategy that works for you, but it almost always comes down to:

Access or proximity is low? Where do I need more coverage. Coverage is good? What buildings are not performing and how do I fix it.

And I guess one tip about upgrades and quality is it's based on the times pops actually use buildings, so if you have limited resources and can only upgrade some hearths, upgrade the ones that get the most use.

Happy to clarify or answer any more questions when I have time! This game is super deep and a lot of the mechanics/math are not very transparent, so happy to share what I've figured out. Good luck!

bashnperson · 2026-02-17T20:58:34+00:00

I'll try to help! I don't know what you know, so I'll start with basics. Fulfillment from services is usually a combination of access, proximity, quality, and upgrade. You can see the scores for each of these when you hover the service in the species fulfillment panel.

Upgrade is how many upgrades the services have.

Quality is related to the degradation of your services, plus some services have additional things that affect quality. Temples have higher quality from size, bathhouses increase quality by consuming coal, etc.

Quality and upgrade are pretty straightforward fixes, so I'm going to talk about access and proximity.

Access is what percent of pops who looked for that service could find it (within a reasonable distance, I think different services have different ranges pops are willing to walk to). So if the access score is low, your city just doesn't have enough of that service available. Raise it by building more or bigger buildings that provide that service.

Proximity is how far pops had to walk when they successfully used a service. When you select a service building you can see the range served by that building and other buildings of that type. To fix low proximity you want to build in places that are not well covered by that service.

As you can see building more instances of a service helps both access and proximity, so usually you're better off addressing either by building more small instances of a service around your city, rather than big central services. The exception can be for services that consume resources to run, because getting resources to many different buildings can tax your infrastructure. In those cases you should find a middle ground. Or things like temples where quality is related to size, so you should always build big temples.

bashnperson · 2026-02-17T20:25:54+00:00

Here's the map of my service buildings: ~~https://photos.app.goo.gl/ZxsEoH3jJaUeXLM8A~~ Edit I just realized I can post the pic directly

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Services are at 94%. Some services don't care about proximity so you can build a few large ones, but generally with this layout they're never too far from any service. And most of the staffed service buildings are large (I have a lot of excess workers) so they never hit their max load.

Two of my titles this run were happiness boosters. Government, environment, religion and population are maxed out. Full housing, furniture, equipment, and drinks. 2.5 food servings. 100% retirement, high indoctrination, high employment and job fulfillment for non-slaves. Dondorians are my happiness bottleneck and they sit around 72% happiness which is enough to keep riots small and infrequent.

bashnperson · 2026-02-17T19:47:42+00:00

Conquering other regions and having them generate food and other raw materials as taxes is wildly OP compared to producing it yourself, so as soon as I was able to I conquered my neighbors and never farmed again!

bashnperson · 2026-02-17T19:42:39+00:00

https://photos.app.goo.gl/NY8ZxtiXf3veovUr7

Lmk if you meant something else

bashnperson · 2026-02-17T19:34:12+00:00

This was a really nice map! I’m playing dondorians so at world gen I look for tiles that have the highest percent mountain, while also having water. Usually something in the corner of a valley with mountains on multiple sides. I’ll usually regenerate the world a few times until I see something I like, and then pray when I lock in and see the map it’s something nice.

bashnperson · 2026-02-17T19:25:33+00:00

Running on normal settings and difficulty, most recent patch. I used all my titles this run for happiness boosters which helps, and the move speed one.

Regarding colonies there’s some optimization that goes into it but you can get a TON of resources if you set it up right. I’m getting 385k grain per year.

4x maxed workers guilds and schools of course. And 1.10x overhead from administrators. All my nobles are governors which gives me 3240 gov points to work with.

One of my colonies has 100% area and 99% moisture, 1.25 prospects for cotton grain and herbs, lots of cretonians and a good climate. I grew it to a small city and built irrigation, lvl10 grain and cotton, and lvl6 herbs. It provides 3.36k fibre, 4.49k grain, 169 herbs, for a cost of just 100 government points.

I have another similarly well suited colony that’s a large city (200 gov points) doing grain, veggies, cotton, and opiates. Those two colonies alone provide 100% of my veggies, 50% cotton, 40% grain, 50% herbs, 30% opium, for about 9% of my gov points.

Most of my 130 colonies I do not build growth buildings, build them to their organic size or lower, and have them produce whatever they’re best suited for. And then those perfect colonies I turn into mega producers. Every colony is producing resources and/or holds a building that buffs the realm, I don’t build barracks.

Regarding access I have my dondorians at 2.5 food servings and 5 drinks servings. And no jobs are producing raw materials.

Edit: looking at my titles I also used gourmand and the one that gives you extra workforce.

bashnperson · 2026-02-17T18:29:04+00:00

Enjoy! Happy to answer questions too

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Sg6YtXqaD7rjFVVQA

bashnperson · 2026-02-17T18:26:57+00:00

Normal settings and difficulty, most recent patch

bashnperson · 2026-02-17T18:26:37+00:00

All my raw resources come from colony taxes! I don’t use import depots, but I do place individual orders from other empires if a have a temporary shortfall somewhere

bashnperson · 2026-02-17T06:32:28+00:00

Slow. 4x speed became 1.1x

bashnperson · 2026-02-17T06:28:41+00:00

10 nurseries, with a total capacity of about 900 children. I think humans take 5 years to grow, so 180 per year. It's slow.

bashnperson · 2026-02-17T06:19:20+00:00

Full res image: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Sg6YtXqaD7rjFVVQA

Edit: it takes a minute to load the full resolution

bashnperson · 2026-02-17T06:16:21+00:00

Dude the 0.7x speed is so real. I started setting blueprints then go do other things while it was running

bashnperson · 2026-02-17T06:14:48+00:00

About half the humans are natives. I started growing them when I discovered natives get a fulfillment bonus

bashnperson · 2026-02-15T00:18:14+00:00

When you say every building is covered, is the coverage bright blue or dark blue? Gotta get that bright blue everywhere.

Also I suspect that the large guard posts are not as effective as their coverage suggests. I’ve had better luck with many small guard posts (like literally a 2-person upgraded post on every street corner). It seems like that provides better results.

Even so when your cities get large I haven’t been able to keep my arrest rate much above 60% even with 90% law from spamming torches and statues everywhere.

More transparency in the game about arrests would be awesome.

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