MTW Happiness

The happiness (sometimes called loyalty) of provinces is important to the well-being of an empire. Provinces with low loyalty require more garrison troops to maintain and cannot be taxed at higher rates, which hurts the economic bottom line of the kingdom. Happiness can be affected by many things, and needs to be watched carefully to prevent peasant uprisings and faction reemergences.

Checking the province loyalty

The happiness rating of a province can be seen on the province info scroll. A quick way to check on the happiness of your empire is to press the Shift key while on the campaign map, this will color code all of the player's provinces depending on where each falls within particular happiness ranges.

Happiness factors

There are several factors in determining the happiness of a province. Some of these are under the control of the player, while others are side effects of the player's actions, the AI's actions, or hardcoded game settings.

Tax rate

The tax rate is the easiest way to change the provincial happiness. The tax rate can be set manually be the player from the province info scroll, or the auto-tax feature can handle this if set from the minimap options.

• Very low: +25%
• Low: +10%
• Normal: 0%
• High: -10%
• Very High: -25%

Spies

A spy placed in a province will work to root out troublemakers and keep the populace in line. The effectiveness of a spy is proportional to the spy's valour level. The spy will raise happiness by 40% + 20% per level of valour. If there are multiple spies in a province, happiness is only affected by the highest level spy. (Do counterspying assassins have this same effect?).

A spy placed in a foreign province form networks and spread unrest within the province, lowering the province's happiness at the same rate as it would raise it in a local province, 40% + 20% per valour level.

Garrison

For every 100 men in the province, the happiness is raised by 16%. It does not matter what the quality of the troops are, just that they are there. The choice of troops for garrison duty is important, maximizing the number of men against their upkeep costs is key to the economic growth of the empire. Peasants are the obvious choice here, but personal preferences vary.

Buildings

The presence of certain buildings will raise the happiness of a province.

The following buildings affect happiness in the MTW main campaign:

• Town Watch building line: +10%
• Brothel building line: +10%
• College of Surgeons: +40%
• Church: +20%
• Mosque: +20%
• Monastery: +10%
• Reliquary: +30%
• Cathedral: +40%
• Grand Mosque: +40%
• Watchtower/Border Fort: +20%/+30% (not cumulative, since the Border Fort replaces the Watchtower)
• Fort: ? (is there a hardcoded happiness bonus for the fortress line?)

These values are set in the build_prod text file for the campaign.

Province Specific Unrest

Some provinces are programmed to be more difficult to tame than others. This is meant to portray historically difficult regions to subdue.

For the main MTW campaign, the following provinces have unrest settings:

• Ireland: 10%
• Khazar: 10%
• Lithuania: 30%
• Livonia: 40%
• Pomerania: 10%
• Portugal: 40%
• Prussia: 20%
• Scotland: 20%
• Serbia: 10%

The unrest setting of a province is determined from the startpos file for the campaign, located in the "Medieval - Total War\campmap\startpos" directory. The unrest value is the third value of the SetAttributes:: line for a province, in units of 10%.

Governor

VnVs, dread, piety and religious incompatibility. The governor does not have to be located in the province for any reason, his stats and VnVs will have the same effect regardless of where he is.

King

Influence, VnVs, Excommunication, isolation (invading with the king).

Risks of Low Happiness

If a province's happiness level drops below 100%, there is a chance that an uprising will occur. If a province's happiness is below 120%, there is a chance that it may take part in a faction reemergence, if one occurs elsewhere and the reemerging faction once owned the province. For the best results, happiness should be kept above 120% in all provinces if possible.

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TBD - need to get data on governor/faction leader dread, religious incompatibilty, influence