Haven't played in a long time- Drone riots?

It happens way to fast on low difficulty levels and I don't know why or what to do about it. What are the causes and cures?

Keep enough military garrisoned in your bases to use as police.
Raise the amount of Psych you are providing your citizens via Social Engineering.
Assign citizens to be specialists.
Build facilities/projects that raise Psych levels.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_Alpha_Centauri

Drones represent the undereducated, discontent segments of society. When the number of drones overwhelms the number of well educated citizens, called Talents, a drone riot occurs. During a drone riot all productive activity within the base is suspended. If not stopped, prolonged drone riots will eventually escalate in severity until facilities are destroyed or, in extreme cases, the entire city defects to another faction.

Drone riots can be suppressed through the use of in-base military units as police. The amount of suppression allowed depends on the degree of tolerance the society, under current social engineering models, has for policing. There also exists the temporary and more extreme solution of nerve stapling. This directly suppresses the violent tendencies of the population, preventing drone riots for a short period of time, but carrying it out is considered an atrocity and will negatively impact diplomatic interactions.

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Thanks. i had a book on it at one point in time. Can't find it anymore.

Drones come from two sources:

(1) Population within a base - this depends on the difficulty level. At the lowest difficulty level, you could see up to 5 citizens before a drone appears. At the highest, only one.

(2) Bureaucracy drones caused by too many bases.

Drones can be controlled by:

(1) Military garrisons - the ability to use military garrisons depend on your police rating.

(2) Talents - each talent balances a drone.

(3) Drone controlling facilities and secret projects.

(4) Allocating energy to psych. Each two psych points in a base cancels one regular drone. (Bureaucracy drones take two psych points to become a regular drone and another two for the regular drone to become a citizen.)

(5) Certain specialists, e.g. doctors, produce psych points. If you convert a drone into a doctor, it is no longer a drone and, in addition, it produces two psych points that can turn a regular drone into a citizen.

From your original question, I would guess that you have expanded beyond the bureaucracy drone limit, producing more drones.

The cure:

(1) If your police rating permits, use a military garrison or garrisons to turn a drone or drones into a citizen or citizens.

(2) Build recreation commons and other drone control facilities.

(3) Build the Human Genome Project which gives you a talent in every base (this cancels out a drone).

(4) Turn a drone into a doctor, if your nutrient situation permits.

(5) Adjust your psych slider.

(6) Absolute last resort: use nerve stapling.

k. thanks. it's been so many years since I played that it's taking me a while to remember the differences between it and civ and get used to them again.

There is a tech you can get which allows you to design units with the added feature of getting a police bonus. After you research it, you have to edit your cheapest unit, and choose the "may use as a police force" or whatever it is, in the abilities thing on the right right side.

Some factions allow you to use a mind worm for police, it counting as two normal troops. Because nobody wants to argue with a mind worm.

When you have tech choices to research, remember to look for the one that gives you "recreation commons" early on, because you'll need that. It turns two drones back into normal workers. Without it, those two workers will have to be switched to something else, to prevent drone riots, instead of helping you out when you need it the most.

I used to be confused by the reduce drones thing, thinking that'd kill off my workers, but no, it just turns them into happy citizens again, and sends them back to work.

When your base population gets high enough, your doctors become empaths, and give you more psyche points to turn drones into happy workers again.

Recreational Commons
Holographic Theater
And I think various things such as tree farms can improve your psych rating, citizens happy to have trees around.

Click your menu and choose Social Engineering, and you can put some of your budget into psych if you want to. I never bothered, using all that money for the labs or "economy" which means building up a reserve of energy credits.

When you choose a faction, look for the bonuses for police, to see how well you can keep the people under control. In the Social Engineering menu, you can see what bonuses or penalties you can get in that area when you choose what form of government and economy to run.

In a Police State people expect the military to smack them around if they get out of line. In a Democracy however, people are putting up with that crap.

Thanks. In the couple weeks since I've been playing again I've relearned a lot of what it takes to keep things on an even keel.

What I don't understand is why if I have a drone riot for 2-3 turns the base flips to an enemy. But the AIs can have drone riots at a base for dozens of turns in a row and they don't flip

I didn't know they could flip. That is odd.

I always just switch some drones to something else. Sometimes you'll have more people than you can feed after doing this, so you end up with resource shortfall warning the following turn, and then after another turn it'll tell you the starving citizens fled your base, so the population is now 1 less.

When your base population gets high enough, your doctors become empaths, and give you more psych points to turn drones into happy workers again.

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Emphaths and transcendi both require certain techs. As your societal knowledge increases, the standard Doctor, Librarian and Technician can all be upgraded to more powerful forms - you need 5 pop in a city before you can assign anything other than doctors (or their upgraded equivalents)

You can also reduce beauracy unhappiness by boosting your efficiency. The formulae for the limit is listed somewhere in the advanced concepts of the datalinks.

As for flipping cities firstly they will just riot for 1 or two turns. then a facility will be destroyed then after awhile they will flip to another random team (50% chance to be the drones(SMACX) if they exist).

The Punishment sphere base facility also deserves a mention for managing unhappiness - it removes all drones and talents from a city (no riots or golden ages posible)

What improves the efficiency of distant cities?

Societal Choices, and a childrans creche (but the creche does not apply for beauracy lmiit, and thus will have no efect on unhappiness)