I'm not too fond of the mechanics of rebellion

[idle]

Firstly,

I think this is a great mod. It really rekindled my interest in playing, as I had grown weary of the standard BtS games - too repetitive after 100+ games.

But,

I'm an easy prince/struggling monarch player, and I'm not too fond of the mechanic that causes rebellion. In my last game, as Korea, I started on the eastern coast of a mid-sized continent. The continent was a sort of "naturally" divided into two parts, and Washington was on the west coast. As the game progressed I expanded west, settling the entire eastern half of the continent. By that time, Portugal and Spain had emerged as new nations. I didn't bother to take any of their cities, as I wanted trade partners, and the AI will seldom trade techs if you don't make contact with a third civ.

Now, my cities had good culture, all had my state religion (confucianism), they were well defended as I was in Hereditary Rule, my tech rate was good, taxes were low and my economy was flourishing. Granted, my empire was fairly large (11 cities on a standard map), but still it seemed the only thing that made them rebel was that they kept asking for independence/change of leadership, etc. In the Revolution Watch, my cities were all "improving", even directly after rejecting independence. I did everything right, and it felt kind of unfair that even though my citizens were happy, they would rebel as if it was a scripted event.

Shouldn't it be harder to keep the cities from deteriorating instead of it being a sort of "rebel without a cause" type revolution? I'd rather struggle to keep my cities happy.

Or maybe I'm just a sore loser

Perhaps someone could tell me where I can muck around in an .ini file or something?

Nevertheless, great mod. My favorite, no doubt about it.

-idle

 

[jdog5000]

Glad you like it, though maybe with an asterisk

If you post a save (and are playing just Revolution ...) I'll take a look and see if there's anything I can spot.

There are two 'issues' I'm currently working on which are very much related to what you experienced I think, revolving around the separation of local and civ-wide revolts. The improving/worsening labels in RevWatch right now only relay local effects, they are unaffected by what's reported as national effects at the top of the RevWatch details screen. But, those national effects do directly change the RevIndex in cities just like local effects because there's no national measure of stability currently.

Beyond that, all revolt logic is really local (city-based) currently, it's just that sometimes a bunch of local revolts are teamed together. When a city has no particular local complaints but is driven to revolt based on national level factors (like civ size or despotism or something), they will often ask for independence ... this doesn't really make sense, as I think you probably felt. So, once the measure of national stability is in there will be civ-wide revolts or coups occasionally when the stability issues are national. National effects will also trickle down directly affect cities too of course, but these effects will be reported in the RevWatch properly and be influence by local factors.

 

[idle]

Well that's good news!

If you've played Colonization, there's a feature that would be nice in that game. Each city had a percentage value that told the number of citizens that supported independence from the mother country. While that value was only local based, it could serve as a warning system.

I misremembered a few details in this game, as the tax rate is actually pretty high, mostly due to the 3 new cities, and I took the Mali capital (not Spain) as it emerged.

The save in question is attached.

 

[Auren]

I've also been playing a mod a bit, and while I've really enjoyed it, it has a few problems with the rebellion mechanics. I really think that it is a great idea for the base game. Part of while the modern era in Civ is so boring, is the power dynamics among the civs are set in place from the ancient era. With rebellions/civil wars/new emerging civs, you have the ability to mix things up.

Looking at the mod currently, it seems much more difficult to hold together a large empire, or even a moderate empire. I am currently playing a game on a huge map; I have about 6 cities and have yet to contact another civ. I would put forward that this is not a large empire, but I still get the negative empire wide trait.

Some suggestions to the Rebellion System:

Have a help file that states clearly when each negative trait occurs, and how to counteract it. While a real leader might not know this, this is a game. Some of the Rebellion triggers don't reflect well on the Civ mechanics. Exp/ I usually try and run a specialist econ. I often let my research slider drop to 10% or 20%. In revolutions, I got a negative empire wide trait, "Serious Financial Trouble." That doesn't seem to reflect the reality of my empire that is clipping along the tech tree, if not out right leading.

I'm really glad to see that happiness is an important factor. Currently it's only a negative one, I'd like to see excess happiness provide more stability. In many ways there seems to be a lack of early ways to solidify a civ in the beginning of the game other then religion. This is not a problem with small maps where less civs are more likely to found a religion. In a huge map, most civ's would not found a religion.

The other complaint I have is when one is offered a choice, "give independence to Athens", the options don't list the consequences directly. In one game I declined and suddenly the city had two unhappy faces. I should be able to see that next to the option. Might I also suggest that this scale. The first decline should be 0 happy faces, the next one, then 2 so on.

Well, That's just a few thoughts off the top of my head. Keep up the work, this really could be a great mod!

 

[StormLord-711-]

Looking at the mod currently, it seems much more difficult to hold together a large empire, or even a moderate empire. I am currently playing a game on a huge map; I have about 6 cities and have yet to contact another civ. I would put forward that this is not a large empire, but I still get the negative empire wide trait.

Some suggestions to the Rebellion System:

Have a help file that states clearly when each negative trait occurs, and how to counteract it. While a real leader might not know this, this is a game. Some of the Rebellion triggers don't reflect well on the Civ mechanics. Exp/ I usually try and run a specialist econ. I often let my research slider drop to 10% or 20%. In revolutions, I got a negative empire wide trait, "Serious Financial Trouble." That doesn't seem to reflect the reality of my empire that is clipping along the tech tree, if not out right leading.

I'm really glad to see that happiness is an important factor. Currently it's only a negative one, I'd like to see excess happiness provide more stability. In many ways there seems to be a lack of early ways to solidify a civ in the beginning of the game other then religion. This is not a problem with small maps where less civs are more likely to found a religion. In a huge map, most civ's would not found a religion.

Actually, excess happiness is a very good stabilizer already in the mod, it just doesn't show up often in the beginning game. And if not knowing what's causing cities to revolt bothers you (like it does me), there's a .ini file that you can enable that gives numerical estimates on how much each factor is causing revolts. (Jdog, how accurate are those numbers? I noticed they don't add up exactly as you might think they would.)

Holding a large empire is definately much harder in this mod than in the original game though. But keep in mind that the same goes for the computer players; you can always expand later too. I've also found vassals are much more valuable with Revolutions because they don't cause large empire penalties, and a lot of times giving a capitulated vassal back most of his cities is a good idea. Empires founded mostly through your own settlers are a lot harder to maintain though; check the revolution watch icon often to see if having a large empire is causing any unstability (be sure to look under national effects). I have noticed, however, that the amount of unstability caused by large empires goes down with each era you advance. I've found that getting good government, labor, and religion civics early in the game can be good stabilization for large empires. I usually get Shwedagon Paya for free religion and the Pyramids for representation or universal suffrage.

Just a few solutions to keep those large empires stable.

 

[jdog5000]

There definitely is a transparency issue with revolts right now, if you're not me then it's not always clear what causes certain issues or how you could address them. The in progress separation of national vs local effects will help this a bit as right now that's not very clear.

Beyond that my thought is to have cities with significant negative effects start making requests ... these would be like the requests you get now but they wouldn't be tied to the RevIndex being high, only to there being things for the citizens to complain about. These requests would explain why the effect exists and give you some options for responding to the situation. They would in effect be like an in game manual, you wouldn't need to look things up outside the game because the mod would bring those issues that need to be addressed to your attention pro-actively.

The one potential issue is that if there were a lot of these request popups they could be annoying ... I don't think that will be too hard to take care of. For small issues these requests would be kind of like the "you should build an aqueduct" popups (and this kind of popup could be turned off). If the city is starving or there is some other larger issue then there would be consequences to the decisions you would make and the popups would be more like the current peaceful revolt popups. When the revindex is high then these requests would become like the current demands or ultimatums and potentially spawn revolutionaries etc.

To answer your question StormLord, the numbers in the detail screen in debug mode are the values for those issues if you are playing on Epic (the individual pieces aren't scaled for game speed, only the sum), but they won't add up to the sum for several reasons. Rounding is one small part but also not all effects show up in the list since effects of magnitude 1 or 2 are often left off. Finally, each city has a feedback term which encourages stability which is not included in the list.