There are many components to take into consideration when playing strategy games — How to Increase Happiness in Northgard being one of them. For new players, it may be overwhelming to have to handle all the aspects of the game, but don’t worry — we have your back!
What Does Happiness Do in Northgard?
Keeping your happiness above 0 is extremely important when building your town. This is primarily due to the various bad modifiers that come from negative happiness.
The first and most well-known factor that happiness contributes to is population growth. Happiness directly links to how fast you will receive new people within your settlement. So, if you have high happiness, your population will grow significantly faster than if you have low happiness.
Next, having low happiness (roughly below 0), your settlement will receive a production modifier. This will slow all your workers down and ultimately make your town worse.
Northgard: Why Is My Clan Unhappy?
Many aspects of the game can lower your town’s happiness. From population to spectral warriors (an enemy you will encounter often), all will lower happiness drastically if left unchecked.
Here are some things that will lower happiness in Northgard:
Population
The main source of your happiness, or lack thereof, will be your population number. Depending on how high your population is, you will lose happiness. This effect will go up to the population of 25, in which you will receive up to -15 happiness — it’s a lot, right?!
Demanding Better Houses
The next thing that will lower happiness in Northgard is your people demanding better houses; this is a demand they will make in almost every game.
When you have played a save file for a couple of years (in-game, that is), your population will inevitably demand better-quality houses. As you might know, there are two tiers of houses within the game, one that can be made using wood and another that is made with stone.
We recommend that when your people start demanding better houses, you spend five stone on upgrading one.
Demanding Better Town Hall
The same thing applies to not having an upgraded Town Hall; if you leave the upgrading of your Town Hall too late, then your people will begin to demand it to be upgraded. This message will come at different times, depending on your difficulty.
Cold, Hungry or Sick Population
Lastly, having your population be cold, hungry, or sick will significantly lower their happiness; this can come about if they lack firewood in the winter or if they lack edible food.
So, now knowing what lowers happiness, we now must learn how to increase happiness in Northgard.
How Do You Improve Happiness in Northgard?
As we have stated, there are various ways to increase the happiness of any given village:
- Brewers and/or Skalds
- How Much Land you have Colonized
- How Much Food You Have Spare
- Receiving Baldr’s Blessing
- Through Technologies
Brewers or Skalds
Brewers and/or Skalds are a worker type that can be made by assigning people to the Brewery. These workers have the unique ability to instantly increase your happiness by +2 (or +3 if the Brewery is upgraded). By placing down a single Brewery, upgrading it, then assigning three people to work there, you can increase your happiness by nine instantly!
How Much Land You Have Colonized
The next method of increasing happiness is simply colonizing more land! This means if you have some spare food lying around, we highly suggest you colonize some adjacent tiles.
Food Storage
Based on how much food you have lying around, you can get up to +2 happiness. That is:
- +1 for a stockpile of 500 food
- +2 for a stockpile of at least 1500 food
Receiving Baldr’s Blessing
Throughout a playthrough, as you gain lore and research new technologies, you will get blessing; one of them is Baldr’s Blessing, which will increase your happiness by +3
Through Technologies
Depending on which technologies you choose to research, you may gain various happiness modifiers. For instance, researching the ‘Journeyman’ technology will increase your happiness depending on how many areas you have explored. Or ‘Feeling Safe’, which gives you happiness depending on your army size.
Summary
To summarise, there are various horrible things that come along with negative happiness. Whether it’s the slower population or slower production. As a result, it is vital for you to keep your happiness above 0 at all times.
This can be done through many ways, all of which have been discussed within this article — How to Increase Happiness in Northgard
