Need help with population happiness

[TurinTurambar]

I've always chosen "Peaceful" as my race type, and because in most games I've had the upper hand it didn't hurt me too much. In the "building" stage of games it makes my population grow like rabbits, which is very useful.

Now however, the only two players left besides myself in a particular PBW game have broken the cardinal rule of role-playing and decided to gang up on me so they won't "lose." They were good allies and I wasn't really expecting it, so in the last 5 or 6 turns I've lost 10 or 12 colonies and a few ship battles.

Suddenly I find myself with an empire so plagued by "Rioting" that a planet base once fully capable of supporting my fleets is now running at -400,000 minerals per turn!!!

Is this Racial Trait really that pervasive? Even systems nowhere near the action and planets loaded with troops and training fleets are "Angry" or at the very least "Unhappy." Any planet with less than 1000 pop is rioting.

At this rate, I will lose the game just because of overall population happiness. I've tried Urban Pacification Centers but they are ineffective it would seem. Tried building some and was informed that I "already have similar facilities with system-wide capabilies." And these in systems that are already rioting heavily.

Is there any hope?

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[Fyron]

Peaceful is the only good happiness type for stock SE4. Neutral is just absurd. Bloodthirsty has way too many penalties for colonizing planets and other such early game pre-troop activities.

It is fairly easy to maintain jubilance on your planets once you get troops, if you build enough of them. How many troops do you have per planet? I have found that 120 police troops (small troops with only a cockpit, or armed if you want to spend a lot more resources) will do the trick. Losing a planet gives an increase in anger of 50. 120 police troops have anger decrease of -240 (-2 each). You can lose 4 planets and 40 ships (or 3 planets and 90 ships, or up to 240 ships) in a turn and not notice anything at all, since the 120 troops will cancel out all of the anger increase from the losses.

Urban Pacification Center IIIs decrease anger by -30 per turn, so just 15 troops already match up to the affect of the best UPC...

[Xorkh]

Newbie question, does it matter what type of troops you build? Would building 120 cheap small troops be any less effective than building 120 large troops as far as happiness is concerned?

[Fyron]

All that matters is the number of troops. The type and armament of the troops is irrelevant as far as happiness management is concerned. This is why I advocated the small weaponless police troops earlier.

[ToddT]

Its just the troop count, not their size. as fyron mentioned, police troops, are nothing more than a small troop with cockpit.
only thing size does is vary how much cargo space you use up. 120 small troops 10 tons ecah equals 1200 tons.
large troops would be 2400, and take longer to build.

oh well.............

[TurinTurambar]

Grrrr...

I assume your "oh well" referred to Fyron pimping your reply. It applies to me as well though; "Oh well, chalk this one up to lessons learned."

There's no way I'm going to get that many troops built before I run out of resources. Plus I'd have to ferry them in on transports because a rioting colony can't build anything.

Oh well indeed.

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[ToddT]

depending on how badly they have you over a barrel, combat victories, colonizing, planet captures can help bring happiness back up faster.

i sort stumbled on the troop thing in the race for space game, couldn't figure out why my morale was unaffected by losing a planet 5 ships and about 6 billion in pop in one attack, happiness stat was 50% by that time i had about 3,400+ troops throught the empire and only 120 planets didn't bring me up to 120 troops per planet by far but it added a nice cushion