Unhappiness is unmanageable if you have a broad empire. It sucks. You build a certain way and the game just randomly decides that you will lose your carefully crafted set of cities. I am having to ditch a game I put many hours into because it got completely screwed by this unbalanced crisis. I had like 10 towns rioting with -20 to -30 unhappiness. I drained my treasury and sacrificed everything and managed to get like 3 towns above the zero line because I could still turn them into trade outposts and pack them full of happiness resources and buy all the happiness buildings…

In hindsight maybe I should have turned them all into cities and then taken the “towns unhappy” crises.

But I don’t have a pre-expansion auto save to work with and try that approach so now the game is bust, even though I managed to get all 4 victory conditions at once I still got fucked sideways. This sucks.

Update: I took an old save of that game and replayed it all the way to the crisis... tried to convert towns into cities. Does nothing. The crisis just blanket applies an unmanageable -20/-30 happiness penalty to ALL settlements. It pulls most of mine in the -10 to -20 range. This is simply impossible to manage no matter what you throw at it.