Mainly, could you tell me if it's at all possible to avoid revolts and revolutions? Without turning off the feature of course. Basically I'm in the ancient era currently around 3000 bc and am unable to build any anti crime buildings, health improving buildings or change civics at this time. In my mind I'm as great as a civ as you can get. Guess you'll have to take my word for it.
I can't say I'm an expert in C2C, because I'm not. But in regards to Revolution (which I've been playing with since at least 2010) I can say a lot more. Especially seeing many modders (and also non-modders) here complaining that Revolutions is outdated, a mess, horrible, and things like that. I can agree with those statements, but I'm pretty sure that not only the concept is great, but also that many of its mechanics are great, despite being out of sync with the state of the mod. And TBH, many complainers probably don't know many of the artifices of the Revolution Mechanic.
As an example (an outdated one because it isn't in the newest SVN, but probably good enough for this), in the Massive Humans vs Humans C2C MP Game (link in my signature), although I'm far bigger then I was supposed to be by this era (~4500 BC, post-mid of Ancient Era, still with Chiefdom as the Government civic) and substantially outstretched (had to get some fertile lands far away from home), supporting 21 cities when I shouldn't go much beyond the 6th city (getting +3
for each new city, which is giving a total of +45
in every city I have), I'm feeling 0 revolution problems. I even conquered the capital of an AI which is the most far away city from my capital, and after my conquest it had 6 population points (which had put it in the top5 of most populous cities I had at the time), less then 30% of my culture, and just a few units to protect it. It hasn't revolted a single time, and now it's completely empty of RevIdx points.
So avoiding revolutions in C2C seems completely doable to me, and even a lot easier then I was used to back in the time I played Legends of Revolution mod.
My tips for handling revolution follow (nothing comes from the game's code, as I've never explored the RevDCM parts of the game's DLL):
To see what is problematic you just have to hover your mouse above the RevIdx bar in any city. If I'm not mistaken, the brighter the color of the text item, the most impacting it is to your RevIdx (I may be wrong, and it may be the darkest, I really don't remember now). National Factors are equal in all your cities, but Local factors differ. From my history with RevDCM, the worst possible things to manage in revolutions are: Holy Cities of a different religion then your own, far away cities, and a low cultural % of your own in a city of yours. In C2C (from my few experiences with it), distance doesn't seem as bad as it used to be in LoR (but once again I may be biased because I didn't play much of C2C yet), but both others are still significant. I had to bribe the foreign capital I conquered in the Massive MP twice, and when I founded my second religion in my capital, a big portion of the RevIdx bar was filled (something between 20% and 25%) just because of that (in time it faded away though).
All your cities' RevIdx Bar should always be under 25%, so even if a problem occurs (like losing a city) the impact isn't great enough for your city to go from
safe to
warning. The problem here is that when your city reaches the warning stage, it can trigger a small revolt, which will increase the RevIdx bar a
LOT, meaning that if you can't help improve the situation really soon, the city will experience a full revolution, and unless you're pretty strong and/or pretty stable, the revolution shall reoccur until the city changes owner.
Roughly speaking, the RevIdx points have 2 different forms of income: the small and steady values, and also the big and momentaneous values. The first category is the one you can see when you hover the mouse over the bar. They come from civics, buildings, happiness&health, garrison units, number of cities, traits, etc. The second category comes from happenings, like conquering/losing a city, changing civics, changing capital, paying bribes, founding religions, etc. The revolt happening seems to me a mix of both, it has a huge momentaneous impact, but it also has a length in which it still worsens until it stops affecting you. Back to the 2 types, you can only fight each of them with factors from the same nature (this isn't entirely true, but any player should assume so). As examples, even if you have a pretty stable empire, losing your capital plus 2 cities in the same turn is probably going to tear the rest of your empire down in revolution. Likewise, if your empire isn't stable enough, it doesn't matter if you spent the last 5 turns conquering a city each turn, you're only delaying the inevitable. If you can't keep conquering them for some time after, the steady values will surpass the amount you gained from conquests and will torn your empire apart.
The mechanic is there, now into C2C: What I felt was really different in C2C is the amount of buildings that help fighting revolution. While on LoR I don't remember a single building that changed the RevIdx income directly, in C2C (in the Massive MP) I have access to 4 buildings in every city that do that: Village Hall, City Hall, Alpha Female and Alpha Male. Not only that, but in their texts it says they give Stability to every city not only the ones they are built in. If this is an error in the text I don't know, but I spammed those buildings in every city (the City Hall only on those with 6+ pop because that's a prereq). I fear that when the Alpha stuff goes obsolete (which will be happening soon) I may experience some revolution, but only then I'll be able to tell. Also, I had played a game for testing a while ago, and I wished to see what would happen if I let my capital grow indefinetly without checking any properties. What happened was a pretty huge and stable empire with a Capital that was so engulfed in Banditry, that it would revolt no matter what I did. So crime does play an important role in revolution.
Final Considerations: Bribery is the worst form of fighting revolution as it is of the momentaneous category, so it doesn't solve steady problems, it costs an amount of money which is bigger the richer you are, and if you try to bribe the city again in less then 20 turns (or 30, I'm not sure) the value gets higher because you bribed the city not long ago. Take into consideration that many times a city needs another bribe before those turns have passed, and you can see that all your gold can be drained through bribery.
And remember I said that revolution aspects should be fought inside each category? Well, I have an example that proved this wrong, but it was such a paranoid scenario that if the game didn't end because of quitting, both me and a friend would be shred to pieces because of revolution, rendering our tactic useless. We were playing LoR on Huge Marathon, and in 2020 AD both of us had 100+ cities and the rest of the world had something between 100 and 150 cities. Our steady revolution was so bad, and back in LoR we had nothing of this category to fight back, that the only way we could keep our empires together was by conquering cities pretty much every 2 turns. But conquests only give momentaneous values. That's why we kept doing this until the very end. The game ended because my friend nuked me just after we conquered the last threat, and I said I couldn't play anymore as either he would win because I only had Tactical Nukes, while he had ICBMs, or both of us would perish because of revolution. In either scenario we would play a handful more turns, and each turn was taking more then an hour to do, and we had being playing that game for a year already. So I quit. Nonetheless we managed steady revolution issues with a momentaneous factor, that happened to be reocurring for a long amount of time, mimicking a steady source.
