Originally posted by: you2
Yea; I knew about that option but my guys always become unhappy and stop working. I wonder if I need to assign them earlier before the city grows; if stagnating city growth will keep them happy ?
no, except for rare occasions, you always want to keep you cities growing. the unhappiness of your citizens means you are not doing enough to appease them. depending on which civics you are using (eg despotism, monarch, republic, whether or not you are running beauracracy etc) as well as your religious status (eg theocracy, free religion, polytheism, monotheism etc), there are many ways to keep your people happy.
you need to find (and found, if possible) religion, build temples, colliseums, cathedrals, sometimes keeping troops in your cities keep the people happy, be aware of 'war weariness', commodities like spices, incense, ivory etc make people happy, having access to gold and silver make people happy and the list goes on and on. on top of that, certain buildings increase the effectiveness of commodities (like a forge will increase the effectiveness of gold (iirc) and also certain wonders add happy ppl (hanging gardens is +1 or +2 happy ppl for all your cities on the same continent). just be careful, because it is possible to build too much for the size of your cities, which will bankrupt you as each building requires gold per turn to operate.
finesse is the name of the game.
a person needs to learn to play a balanced game. war mongers have to do more than just fight wars, and the peaceful builder type needs to be prepared defensively because war will eventually come.
learn how to keep people happy and your cities will eventually grow into behemoth metropolises. in the end game, the goal should be to have no more than one or two unhappy people, whilst all the while receiving new tech advances every 4 turns (the minimum amount of turns required to research a tech). if you are not close to that in the end game, then there is much you can do to increase efficiency.
also, for the tax slider, in the early game what i do is have 100% science as my goal, and i keep it here until i am forced to start collecting revenue, at which point i gradually start increasing the tax rate in 10% increments to maintain a positive cash flow. in the early game a negative cash flow is okay if you have established a big reserve of gold. if you have reserve funds, it is okay to let it dwindle early on, down to nothing really, as gold is most useful for maintaining your empire (rush jobs with gold don't come until later).
i only use culture on the tax slider when my people are getting out of control or my cultural borders are not expanding fast enough to keep up my neighbors'. gold is easy to come by in the beginning either by selling your techs or commodities to the other civs (see the civfanatics forums for how to effectively sell your techs without equipping you neighbor to slaughter you) or finding gold in goody huts, or raiding barbarian encampments etc. it's fairly cheap to run a civ when your cities are still small and your infrastructure has not been built out, so revenue through taxes is not actually essential until your cities start getting to size 6 and beyond, but by then you should have lots of commerce coming in allowing you to convert some to gold for revenue while still having plenty of commerce being converted to beakers/science.
remember though in the early game, if possible keep your immediate neighbors weak by stunting their growth (hog the resources, land etc) and to the best of your abiblity take away their means of happiness. doing this will establish weak buffer states as your neighbors making your own civ easier to defend.
you can then trade with further away neighbors through trade routes as well as through diplomacy (for instance, sell one of your spices to a far away state for 3 gold per turn). that said, sometimes you have to trade with your immediate neighbors, as they might have a happiness resource you need, so you can usually trade one for one on commodities or whatever the AI will agree to. a lot of evil nation-state tactics can be developed using diplomacy.