Revolution: what's your experience?

45°38'N-13°47'E;13830089 said:

Well, Revolution has been changed significantly (I guess) in revision 972 (read my post in the SVN thread if you want to update); now there's a single parameter under BUG options to make it harder or easier. I suggest you try with a 0 parameter given what you've written.
And no, there's no tutorial that I'm aware of. Also, I'll probably tweak revolution more in following revisions.

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Thanks, I shall try that and let you know how I get on.

45°38'N-13°47'E;13830089 said:

Well, Revolution has been changed significantly (I guess) in revision 972 (read my post in the SVN thread if you want to update); now there's a single parameter under BUG options to make it harder or easier. I suggest you try with a 0 parameter given what you've written.
And no, there's no tutorial that I'm aware of. Also, I'll probably tweak revolution more in following revisions.

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What do the parameter numbers mean? What should we set it at if we want humans and computer players to have the same revolution frequency? Personally, I'm really leery of forcing humans to play with higher revolution numbers on the same difficulty level.

Vokarya said:

What do the parameter numbers mean? What should we set it at if we want humans and computer players to have the same revolution frequency? Personally, I'm really leery of forcing humans to play with higher revolution numbers on the same difficulty level.

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They're simply an offset. Humans and AI use the same parameters, except 4 parameters: a modifier and an offset for AI and a modifier and an offset for humans. The revolution parameter I've left visible is just the last one. Problem is that currently human parameters are applied AFTER AI parameters have been applied; I'm changing that in next revision, splitting those parameter separately for AI and for humans. I've balanced the game so that AI can experience some revolutions and can survive them without being caught in a loop of revolutions as it happened years ago. Problem is that with the same parameters it's way too easy for humans. So I've applied that offset which does just that: it adds that given number of revolution points to the revolution index. The higher that number, the harder it is for humans.

Edit: just to make it clearer, humans for example usually get a religion and that's a huge advantage because of the stabilizing factor a religion gives. But most civs don't get a religion at first at least. Hence the need to make it a bit harder for humans.

So... Let's see if I understand it:

0,0 is equal with AI.
5,0 etc are comulative numbers (not multipliers)

Right?

Sogroon said:

So... Let's see if I understand it:

0,0 is equal with AI.
5,0 etc are comulative numbers (not multipliers)

Right?

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More or less. I'm still looking for correct values but I'm more or less satisfied with current ones.

I want to make my personal remarks on revolutions (rev974):

1) I've experienced the situation where two of my cities revolted and joined another empire in a few turns.To be more precise, I had captured both cities and they decided to join their former owners who are now my vassals(through capitulation).
So,what surprises me, is the fact that no warning or even revolution had occurred on the previous turn.Only the message on the event screen says:"X has revolted and joined the Y empire".

2) On the other hand, the "welcome back" option for foreign cities who want to join my empire is still not working.

3) A personal suggestion regarding the religion spread in a city:it would be useful IMHO to display the percentage of each religion in a city-if it is feasible of course-.So a city with high percentage of state religion wouldn't revolt due to religion affairs but a city with high pecentage of non-state religions or low percentage of state religion would have many reasons to see its citizens revolting.
The current situation where the revolution factor in a city increases just because there are many non-state religions sounds a bit simplistic to me.The percentage of each religion is what matters.
However I realize that what I'm suggesting maybe hard to implement.

1. Are you sure you haven't selected the option Peacefully Revert to Previous Owner when you started the game? I always get the choice if allow them to join another empire or declare war.
2. Not fixed yet.
3. I'm not sure but I think it's not easy to implement this change.

45°38'N-13°47'E;13850455 said:

1. Are you sure you haven't selected the option Peacefully Revert to Previous Owner when you started the game? I always get the choice if allow them to join another empire or declare war.
2. Not fixed yet.
3. I'm not sure but I think it's not easy to implement this change.

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1. Ahh I always select this option but I have never seen it in action so I don't know how exactly works.
Thanks 45°38'N-13°47'E.

My personal experience (and maybe it's because I play on Marathon and slower speeds, but if that's the case then I think it needs balance for slower speeds or something).

AI Civs have quite a few revolts but they never seem to matter at all unless the city is very young because the AI begins to stack an absolute asston of units onto the city, we are talking 20+ in the early medieval era, which results in two things. One that their garrison bonus is through the roof which allows them to do whatever, and two that any revolt that does take place gets roflstomed by this huge stack.

My first game I was struggling with a city barely 20 tiles away from my capital trying to constantly revolt, meanwhile the AI is plopping them down like nothing. It was partway through that I realized the AI was spamming bowman on each and every city leading to a garrison bonus of -15+ which allowed them to do whatever they wanted (this also lead to endless tribute demands because I felt completely safe with a few horseman and 3-4 bowman on each city plus my army yet the AI thought differently).

Maybe I should play a few games on a faster speed and see what happens differently. I know slower speeds give a military discount in the vanilla game and I assume it is the same in AND but I didn't think it was as ridiculous as what I am currently experiencing.

Maybe you should just lower your revolution handicap (BUG option) or play an easier level. Count how many civs you select when you start and how many of them you can count now to see if Revolution is working OK for AI (provided you don't count barbarian civs).

I updated to the revision that introduced the Revolution Handicap in the middle of a game, and set it to 2.5 at first since I felt that would be a decent enough place to start it off.... And every city was locked at 'Good; Flat' for the *whole* game - even conquered cities miles from my borders. I got a total of four revolution brewing messages through the rest of the game.

I ended up bumping it up to 5.0 then 10.0 and saw no difference. However... Starting a new game after I finished? That 10.0 *plagued* me with horribly crippling revolutions locking all my cities at Size 1 and almost always being in 7 ~ 9 turn long resistances. I swapped back to 5.0 and dropped my Flex.Difficulty down to Warlord several times once I started getting a FULL ERA behind every other nation - two of which insisted on declaring war on me every 15 turns. Surprisingly, the game felt I was doing good enough to warrant pushing me back up to Noble and Prince while all this was going on


Fast forwarding, my empire is again locked at Good; Flat for every single city, but the AI are still getting revolutions here and there. Except for the very early game, I haven't had any revolutions whatsoever - no colonies being restless, no conquered cities wanting freedom... Everything's perfectly happy. As a final note, in the previous game I had Tax Officies built in almost every city... And it was still locked in at Good;Flat empire-wide. Usually I only build those in a few key cities since they frequently made things worse in unstable areas, but this time I was able to get away with putting one in every city!


Here's a current save of my um... Current game - if it would at all help. I'm not sure if changing the Revolution Settings mid-game like that had anything to do with it or not.

My Experience, playing at immortal level. Gigantic maps, Eternity speed.

I find the Revolution for the player, is fair, I had 2 "core" cities in constant revolt, revolted about 10-15 turns, then suddenly demanded an election, which I could 'buy' but I chose the vote, I won. Now they are fully Core cities in production and revolt status.

But the AI, I've found, its constantly getting revolts, rebels spawning all over, and rebel civ's are popping up at a rate of 1 to 1 for remaining civs.

The main problem, is them losing in a war, it just exponentially expands the revolts, lose a city, revolts, which cause another city lose and more revolts.

As I'm playing high to low, the previous 2 civs I've had, have both fallen from 'High' to a Low position of 1 city, Have Multiple rebels spawning and thriving. Mind you I left the civ inherently unstable.

Seems to me to be working fine. Civs that have War Success, have no problems with revolution.

Its a challenge for the Human, and war success helps the AI's, losing causes revolts. Maybe too many rebels spawning.

They spawn as MINORS and stay as such.

That is the only problem I've encountered.

IPEX-731BA5DD06 said:

My Experience, playing at immortal level. Gigantic maps, Eternity speed.

I find the Revolution for the player, is fair, I had 2 "core" cities in constant revolt, revolted about 10-15 turns, then suddenly demanded an election, which I could 'buy' but I chose the vote, I won. Now they are fully Core cities in production and revolt status.

But the AI, I've found, its constantly getting revolts, rebels spawning all over, and rebel civ's are popping up at a rate of 1 to 1 for remaining civs.

The main problem, is them losing in a war, it just exponentially expands the revolts, lose a city, revolts, which cause another city lose and more revolts.

As I'm playing high to low, the previous 2 civs I've had, have both fallen from 'High' to a Low position of 1 city, Have Multiple rebels spawning and thriving. Mind you I left the civ inherently unstable.

Seems to me to be working fine. Civs that have War Success, have no problems with revolution.

Its a challenge for the Human, and war success helps the AI's, losing causes revolts. Maybe too many rebels spawning.

They spawn as MINORS and stay as such.

That is the only problem I've encountered.

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THat's part of the problem I had too - up until I changed difficulty mid-game. Then it was just loves and hugs all around after that. As if changing RevDifficulty mid-game is broken somehow....

I absolutely hate that "Election" change-of-leadership Rev option. Even in the opening turns of the game, what SANE player would ever choose it? Unless you're already winning by a million miles and are bored out of your skull (In which case you wouldn't be getting a revolution to begin with) why would you bother accepting? If you can't (or fail to) buy the election for any reason, and you know you can't just give in to it, then it's free unrest for you.

I'm okay with giving up cities. I can capture them back later.
Civics? Sure why not, usually they're not so bad. (Republic is painful at larger sizes though - that's one I won't accept heh)
But change in leadership? Nope, not going to bother with that one ever again



That being said, maybe it's the difficulty I started at (Prince IIRC) but the AI only had trouble wth revolutions maybe once or twice. If anything, I was hoping they'd get some when they were expanding like wildfire in the early games but weren't, it was so painful to see my four-city empire locked in a perpetual state of revolution (Seriously, I hate that change of leadership revolution) - sans one city which remained only 'slightly unhappy' while my east and west neighbors (Ragnar and Kublai) constantly took turns declaring on me while Napolean to the north was already reaching ten cities and nearing the mid-classical (I hadn't even finished half of the Ancient!!). He had yet to receive a single revolution or any demands.


For good measure, the game increased my difficulty a few turns after he got his ninth city
That's when I said to myself I wasn't going to bother trying to fight my way out of it, when Napolean was already planting cities on my border, and swapped the Rev Difficulty and temporarily moved down to Warlord. While it pushed me back up to Prince in short order again, I never received another revolution - the whole game - after making that RevDifficulty switch, even if it was only to 5.0 from 10.0



Difference in difficulty, speed, and options - but the AI's getting plenty of revolutions, but none have been empire or game changing. The Incans spawned from the now-crippled Napolean (I did manage to fight him back and banish him from the mainland, but even with the reduced difficulty it took some time.) but they didn't accomplish anything of note until Ragnar vassalized them and assisted in breaking down Nappy's colonies, which the Incans took for themselves.


My ramblings aside, I'm honestly wondering if there's something wrong with changing the RevDifficulty - since the game immediately went into Safe Mode the turn after I changed it from 10 to 5

Rezca, read the tooltip on Revolution Difficulty. It says you have to reload after you've changed that parameter. For some reason, it doesn't work straight away. So the first time you changed your revolution difficulty, you effectively changed nothing and were still playing on 2.5. When you pushed it up again some turns later you were probably using 5 instead of the supposed 10.
As for the change leader option, I frankly think it's more insane to play a high to low game and change civ, but that's a matter of preferences

45°38'N-13°47'E;13895459 said:

Rezca, read the tooltip on Revolution Difficulty. It says you have to reload after you've changed that parameter. For some reason, it doesn't work straight away. So the first time you changed your revolution difficulty, you effectively changed nothing and were still playing on 2.5. When you pushed it up again some turns later you were probably using 5 instead of the supposed 10.
As for the change leader option, I frankly think it's more insane to play a high to low game and change civ, but that's a matter of preferences

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I am aware of that, probably should have clarified in my first post

I saved, then saved a second time (Since it's in the BUG menu, I wanted to be safe and sure) then re-loaded. Both times, it didn't seem to have any sort of effect. Actually, the second game it did have an effect: It took the revolutions I was having and completely nullified them for the next 800 turns

The second game I thought maybe I had to reload the entire game, so after my two saves I exited entirely then loaded it... But after changing to 5.0 there, I never got another revolt again, and every city was happily sitting at 'Safe' no matter what the circumstances.



They're both pretty brutal to be sure, High to Low is definitely worse since you end up doing it several times!

I think that part of the problem is that the index modifier affects both positive and negative stability modifiers in the same way. If this is the case, stable empires will likely stay stable while instable ones will collapse completely.

Randomness said:

I think that part of the problem is that the index modifier affects both positive and negative stability modifiers in the same way. If this is the case, stable empires will likely stay stable while instable ones will collapse completely.

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That's why the revolution difficulty that you can set under BUG options is not a multiplicative modifier but an offset (for humans): it doesn't make things better, it can only make them bad or worse.

45°38'N-13°47'E;13895837 said:

That's why the revolution difficulty that you can set under BUG options is not a multiplicative modifier but an offset (for humans): it doesn't make things better, it can only make them bad or worse.

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Which isnt what is happening in my experiences at all - except for in the very early game (Where I was bombarded with mostly the awful "Hand over your empire!" requests) I never got any sort of activity once I touched that value. Twice now modifying it, then saving and re-loading, has caused Revolutions to essentially vanish from my game. Every city newly founded or conquered, no matter what combination of civics, unhappiness, distance, or any other imaginable penalty, is always automatically locked at 'Good and stable'

The only time this hasn't been the case is when starting a new game. Once that Difficulty Modifier is adjusted, it reverts to a state where Revolutions just don't happen. Would it be something on my end then, if no one else is experiencing this?


*Edit in that this happens ONLY when adjusting it mid-game. Higher or lower, once I move to any value other than what I started the game with, all of my cities are forever locked at Good/Flat. Any that aren't quickly rise to that (Empire stability on the other hand, sometimes goes to Unstable/Worsening, but nothing comes of it that I can see)
When starting a game though, Revolution functions as normal with cities growing more stable/unstable as they should.

This is pretty much what every city in my empire looks like and has looked like since changing the RevDifficulty back on turn 200 or so.

Beside the fact that empire stability looks worsening, I think your stability might be caused by religion and civics. Religion is a big stabilizing factor, if you're not having troubles with other non state religions.