Revolution: what's your experience?

[Noyyau]

Bribing the city should help in the short term.
Have a look at the Revolution cheats screen, that should tell you exactly how much the various variables contribute to the city's instability. distance is probably a massive factor.
Garrisoning absurd amounts of units should also help (see the total positive revindex modificator? that's how many units you need to just keep it flat, and more than that to bring it down).
You can build buildings even while in revolt: use traders/caravans/freights. They add hammers to the build even in anarchy, you just need one turn of productivity to "officially" complete the building. by moving around buildings in the city build queue, you can set multiple builds to receive the hammers from the trade units, leave them all queued so that during your turn of activity they all get completed (this obviously also requires Multiple Production enabled).
Alternatively, or even concurrently, if you're rich and can rush builds with gold, do so during the turn of activity, putting new stuff at the top of the build queue (ctrl+click) to rush more than one item during the same turn.

 

[Rezca]

Bribing the city should help in the short term.
Have a look at the Revolution cheats screen, that should tell you exactly how much the various variables contribute to the city's instability. distance is probably a massive factor.
Garrisoning absurd amounts of units should also help (see the total positive revindex modificator? that's how many units you need to just keep it flat, and more than that to bring it down).
You can build buildings even while in revolt: use traders/caravans/freights. They add hammers to the build even in anarchy, you just need one turn of productivity to "officially" complete the building. by moving around buildings in the city build queue, you can set multiple builds to receive the hammers from the trade units, leave them all queued so that during your turn of activity they all get completed (this obviously also requires Multiple Production enabled).
Alternatively, or even concurrently, if you're rich and can rush builds with gold, do so during the turn of activity, putting new stuff at the top of the build queue (ctrl+click) to rush more than one item during the same turn.

I'll need to double check that the next time I load the game. To be honest, I've been losing interest XD
Can only play 2 ~ 7 turns at a time before I stop. Really want to start a new one, but am so close to the end with this one as well....

I can't pay them off and haven't been able to for over a hundred turns now. They "Can't stand me" and refuse to accept any money

Funnily enough, half or more of the barbs that spawn end up wandering into poor Ragnar's territory and start pillaging HIS stuff - and since its spawning Plasma Armor and mechs, his marines just can't counter them. We don't have open borders anymore, so the best I can do is air strike them.


Do Patrol promotions help with the situation any? Be it Stability or reducing the time the city spends in revolt, anything?

 

[IPEX-731BA5DD06]

Let the city go, and reconquer it with your Army.

If you have influence driven war enabled, you gain influence though the winning of battles.

Patrol 1 gives; +1 sight and 10% Chance a Garrisoned city won't revolt
Patrol 2 gives; +1 Move and 15% " Yahda Yahda Yadha Yahda Revolt "
Patrol 3 gives; +15% Defence & 20% " Yahda Yahda Yadha Yahda Revolt "

Cumulatively giving you a 45% non revolt chance with one patrol 3 unit. Having 10 Patrol 3 units still equals 45% once only.

 

[nionios]

Actually you should get a popup asking you if you want to accept that city or not. And you certainly can refuse it. Can you upload a save? I'll have a look when I have some free time.

Uploaded save.

 

[Mordachai]

Playing the huge world map custom scenario with revolutions on, and ouch! I've just gotten to 5 cities, Monarchy, and my russian empire has all cities between 890 and 1290 revindex, including my capital!

This is... maybe okay? It seems harsh (I've got dynamic difficulty enabled, and I'm not doing very well, so only on noble difficulty atm).

The mechanic that is perhaps the most frustrating for me: If a city goes above a threshold size (for me, atm, that's 3), then I go from ~ 22 production and relatively content to ~6 production and rapidly worsening towards revolution.

That's... a hell of a step. And there has never been a way to automate city management to ask the city manager to not allow pop growth if it is going to go unhappy. That would be a mechanic I would sorely love to have (though population control is unrealistic as hell).

Anyway - I think it would feel less arbitrary if it didn't jump from relatively content to omg doomsday over one population. Where I could see that trouble was brewing *before* it overwhelmed any given city.

But who knows? Maybe it's just a matter of accepting revolution's gonna happen, and rolling with it?

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

I'm working on fixing the sudden unhappiness when over size 3

 

[Noyyau]

I'll need to double check that the next time I load the game. To be honest, I've been losing interest XD
Can only play 2 ~ 7 turns at a time before I stop. Really want to start a new one, but am so close to the end with this one as well....

I can't pay them off and haven't been able to for over a hundred turns now. They "Can't stand me" and refuse to accept any money

Funnily enough, half or more of the barbs that spawn end up wandering into poor Ragnar's territory and start pillaging HIS stuff - and since its spawning Plasma Armor and mechs, his marines just can't counter them. We don't have open borders anymore, so the best I can do is air strike them.


Do Patrol promotions help with the situation any? Be it Stability or reducing the time the city spends in revolt, anything?

Why even bother to keep the city then? Give them independence if they ask, or leave it empty next time rebels spawn, or gift it to someone...

The PromotionInfos.xml has this for the Patrol promotions:
<iRevoltProtection>10</iRevoltProtection>
I can't (and don't know how to) look into the code so I don't know if that affects only revolts that give you some kind of choice (i.e. "give us independence" or "change civics or religion") or generic "city in X turns of anarchy" as well.

 

[Sgtslick]

Normally I play immortal or deity without revolutions. I tried earth game with revolution on, on Emperor and man.. it seems impossible almost. If I don't want to stay on 1 or 2 cities up until the point I get some decent civics, revolutions just seem inevitable. I think the problem is the early civics. Not sure, but all these +rev modifiers in the early civics, which you can't switch out of unless you have tech, seem really harsh and punishing. In one of my attempts as gilgamesh I turtled till I got my special axeman, and conquered nearly entire egypt. Then all his cities revolted back to him. I then re-conquered most of him again, and again they flipped. Its not like I was slow about it either, I basically steamrolled him in both cases. It felt dumb/broken to me so I quit.

 

[Rezca]

Why even bother to keep the city then? Give them independence if they ask, or leave it empty next time rebels spawn, or gift it to someone...

The PromotionInfos.xml has this for the Patrol promotions:
<iRevoltProtection>10</iRevoltProtection>
I can't (and don't know how to) look into the code so I don't know if that affects only revolts that give you some kind of choice (i.e. "give us independence" or "change civics or religion") or generic "city in X turns of anarchy" as well.

Well the resources it has for one...

Would accepting the barbarian request and then simply re-conquering it help any? Couldn't be any worse than letting it sit there in revolrt for 17 ~ 20 turns with only a few turns of peace between right?

 

[IPEX-731BA5DD06]

you have a period of grace, with any new conquest. Otherwise, every new city would be unmanageable. Let it go Barbarian, and reconquer it, then rush in the Theatre, etc.

 

[Noyyau]

If you want the surrounding resources, then let it revolt/be conquered, recapture it, "raze and fortify", or just raze and have workers nearby to spam Forts in the area.

 

[MechatronicJazz]

Normally I play immortal or deity without revolutions. I tried earth game with revolution on, on Emperor and man.. it seems impossible almost. If I don't want to stay on 1 or 2 cities up until the point I get some decent civics, revolutions just seem inevitable. I think the problem is the early civics. Not sure, but all these +rev modifiers in the early civics, which you can't switch out of unless you have tech, seem really harsh and punishing. In one of my attempts as gilgamesh I turtled till I got my special axeman, and conquered nearly entire egypt. Then all his cities revolted back to him. I then re-conquered most of him again, and again they flipped. Its not like I was slow about it either, I basically steamrolled him in both cases. It felt dumb/broken to me so I quit.

Revolutions definitely makes for a very different game experience. You have to be very careful about over expansion. When it comes to conquests, there are a few things to keep in mind. Foreign culture usually gives a huge stability hit, so generating culture in newly conquered cities is very important. You also need to be able to neutralize the inevitable problems you'll have in those new cities. This generally means having enough money to bribe them and/or enough units to effectively garrison them.

The other strategy you can use if you're strong enough, which may have been effective in your case, is to completely wipe out the civ you're conquering. When a civ is destroyed, the instability from having their culture in your cities is removed. Of course, you may have to still deal with problems from distance to capital and empire size, but I find these are usually more manageable.

 

[Noyyau]

I concur, if you invade a territory you plan to keep (as opposed to exterminating everything and leaving the area barren), it helps A LOT to completely wipe out your enemy.

Also note that conquering a city gives a nice stability bonus to every city in your nation, so continuously conquering and razing is an alternative way (usually not enough on its own, but it helps substantially) to keep your revindexes manageable even while running unstable civics.
Killing enemy units should also give a small bonus, IIRC.

The new Raging Barbarians are fantastic in this regard, once you get a few city-busting units (sword-line with city raider 3 at least), you can leave a territory to them and regularly depopulate it, getting not only some stability, but some gold, experience, and slaves/captured workers as well.
New barb cities will not take long to reappear one you leave.

 

[c0dy]

I used to like Revolutions but lately they've become so annoying. My empire could be extremely happy and it still seems like every other turn they want to revolt. I usually play without it.

 

[Mordachai]

I like the challenge for myself - but I hate how often revolutions occur for the AIs. They just suck as managing their empires. This also destabilizes big games. I had to discard two different attempts at the huge world map scenario with revolutions on - because it would crash after a while.

I'm currently playing without revolutions - and not a single blip. It's just stable.

Truly, I would much prefer to have revolutions turned on. It helps with immersion, with adding real depth to civic choices, and makes for a much richer game. But !@#$ Its got to be stable.

And it can't go spawning 100 extra civs as that puts too much of a load on the game - turns become too long, and I get no real competition as time moves forward rendering all big enemies into a bunch of little enemies that can't compete.

 

[MechatronicJazz]

Stability can be a problem, but I think it's a resource problem rather than bugs. I think with rev on you need to assume larger resource consumption for your computer than with it off. As for the fragmentation of AI civs, I've actually seen less of that lately. The AI is performing a lot better in general. I'm assuming flexible difficulty is helping immensely with that. I think something else that would help is if there were some rev specific building. For example, a building that increases distance maintenance cost for the city, but reduces distance and colony instability. I know that would probably be difficult to add and balance at this point though.

 

[Mordachai]

Maybe the approach and mechanics are just inherently flawed?

It acts a bit like happiness - with distance and government and religion all playing roles. So you basically approach fixing stability problems the same way you do happiness. And you figure if the happiness is good, so should stability.

But - that's already in the game: happiness & revolting peasants.

Instead, maybe a totally new mechanic could be made - one that is based more on ebb-and-flow of zeitgeists, or "movement of the times"- a wave of nationalism, a wave of religious ferver - a desire to return to original ethnic roots - etc. More like an event - that varies not directly with happiness - but more comes & goes over the course of history as people just get an idea in their heads to separate based around some other unifying principle (other than your nation: e.g. another religion that's on the rise, or back to their collective native identity before you conquered them, or just to something new because ... they're on the other side of a river or mountain chain or ... whatever).

Then the frequency of such events could be more directly coded and controlled, and the AI wouldn't have a whole other additional set of variables to have to understand and manage (poorly).

I don't know - but when I manage to hold my 9 cities and everyone around me has split into 3 different nations with 1-3 cities each... I know something isn't making sense (and often the capitol of the original nation - say Athens/Greece, becomes a splinter faction, while some bizarre outpost becomes the new "capitol" of Greece, which makes knowing where Greece is more and more bizarre throughout a game).

EDIT: The game stability issue may come down to using the MegaCiv mod, rather than revolutions (although I seem to be getting less stable civilizations in-game than you?)

What about the mechanics - or adopting some part of - those in Realism Invictus? Having angry peasants spawn roving bands of bandit / looters is pretty solid.

 

[dbkblk]

More like an event - that varies not directly with happiness - but more comes & goes over the course of history as people just get an idea in their heads to separate based around some other unifying principle (other than your nation: e.g. another religion that's on the rise, or back to their collective native identity before you conquered them, or just to something new because ... they're on the other side of a river or mountain chain or ... whatever).

An event is even more controllable than revs because it just occurs and you can't do anything about it while you can control revs by making your people happy. For sure, it's hard in the early ages.

I don't know - but when I manage to hold my 9 cities and everyone around me has split into 3 different nations with 1-3 cities each... I know something isn't making sense (and often the capitol of the original nation - say Athens/Greece, becomes a splinter faction, while some bizarre outpost becomes the new "capitol" of Greece, which makes knowing where Greece is more and more bizarre throughout a game).

Well, in my last game (large map), I haven't experienced this. Some of the AI are splitting into new nations but some others are getting bigger and bigger. Two of the AI have more cities than me. They are getting some revolts, but they take control of the resistance. Eventually, I've seen one to vassalize a revolted city, which just came back to the empire after some turns.

EDIT: The game stability issue may come down to using the MegaCiv mod, rather than revolutions (although I seem to be getting less stable civilizations in-game than you?)

I think it's more a matter of GPU resource, but you have a crash, please report it, so we can debug it (even if it's weeks later because we're busy). It might be a critical bug instead.

What about the mechanics - or adopting some part of - those in Realism Invictus? Having angry peasants spawn roving bands of bandit / looters is pretty solid.

Well, I don't really know RI. 45° or Vokarya might be more informed about this.

 

[Mordachai]

Don't get me wrong: I love the idea of revolutions - I play most of my games with it on - and it's been given more depth in AND2 than ever!

Wish-list:

• AIs would hold it together a bit better. Revolutions should happen, just less frequently (and even better would be over a specific issue - such as over religion or civic choices)
• When revolutions happen: the capital / core of a nation should remain the original nation, and the newer cities should be the ones getting a new name!

 

[MechatronicJazz]

Wish-list:

• AIs would hold it together a bit better. Revolutions should happen, just less frequently (and even better would be over a specific issue - such as over religion or civic choices)
• When revolutions happen: the capital / core of a nation should remain the original nation, and the newer cities should be the ones getting a new name!

I understand where you're coming from with these requests, but I respectfully disagree.

The frequency of revolts is going to vary from game to game, but I think it's a pretty good level right now. That said, there is a setting you can modify to reduce the effects of revolutions in general and that should decrease the frequency for you.

Capitals/cores flipping to rebels probably shouldn't be the norm (and given the bonuses your capital gets, I imagine that's already the case), but it certainly does make sense to happen sometimes. Think of the Republic of China being exiled to Taiwan when the People's Republic of China took over. Obviously there's complexity to what happened there, but in game something like that would be represented by an almost civ-wide revolt that leaves only some outposts or colonies untouched.