Loyal "green" Provinces Reload as "yellow" from Saved Games

I have had repeated situations where having pressed the shift key and made sure ALL provinces are green at the end of a turn - to the extent of checking each province individually to make sure it is well above 100% - and saved the game, the next turn I get rebellions when there was zero chance of them occurring and many provinces have gone yellow or red while the faction leader has either not moved at all or only moved one province.

Having done more study of this problem, I have saved the game at the end of a turn when all provinces are green and verified as such, reloaded the saved file without hitting "End of Year" and some of the provinces are reloaded as yellow and in one case red. This happens repeatedly and consistently and has nothing to do with the Leader being away from the centre of his province or moving provinces. This is a significant factor at the beginning of a campaign when you are trying to squeeze every florin of income out of your provinces. I manage the provinces individually and usually try to maintain a minimum of 105 - 110% loyalty unless I am going to be moving the leader around when I try to get loyalty a little bit higher for provinces further away from him.

This problem does not seem to occur if you do not save and reload the file at the end of turn, but as I am often limited to short periods playing MTW, I save and reload my campaign games most turns. However, this approach seems far more effective in reducing population loyalty than any enemy agents or spies could possibly hope to be ~:confused:!

It seems reloading a game automatically reduces population loyalty and then this effect is permanent since it affects the outcome of the next turn. Has anybody else come across this phenomenon and how to circumvent the problem (apart from never saving games!)? MTW-VI v2.01.

Tomcat

Happens to me all the time :furious3:

I don't know what causes it, nor how to prevent it. (MTW1.1, no VI)

Anybody?

1. When you load the game in the next session, set the taxes as low as you can get away with for one press of the 'end year', then max them out again the year after and try to recoup your losses before the session ends again.
Apologies if that's totally obvious but someone had to say it!

2. Restore from a save file but move some pieces around again before pressing end-year and give the game time to do some recalculating.
There could be some 'initialisation' of variables going on when you reload - all provinces reset back to 100% +/- factors related to garrison size, remoteness from leader, faction religion versus dominant region religion etc which aren't properly reassessed until after the end year is pressed. Rebellions are set off before control of the game is returned to you.

3. Whilst shuffling pieces around, observe how province loyalty changes dynamically in response to troop movements. Right-click a province, check the loyalty, move troops into it, right-click again and see how much it has gone up and vice versa when you move them out.

4. Garrison more heavily. With my taxes set at Very High, the only provinces where I have less than 200% support and have to cut tax are the ones where I've conquered them less than a decade ago or where I have anything less than about half a stack looking after it.

(on the other hand, as Byz, I have only five territories which can't be invaded directly by sea, so I have to garrison just about everywhere anyway).

5. Don't underestimate the religion factor.
This has been in the mix since STW days. As Byz, I can attack Catholic countries with impunity (only made minor inroads into Muslim territory so far and the bits I took off the Turks are now 100% Orthodox, with the help of a couple of Churches - they seem to 'leak' conversions into neighbouring territories) but I've been spamming priests outside of my borders for many years prior to any conquests anyway. This is really due to the predominance of border forts which knobble neophyte spies and assassins, so I use priests as reconnaisance units. You can use emissaries if you like but priests are duel purpose, carrying out a function even while 'parked' in enemy territory. Once you've fixed up alliances, there's little else for emissaries to do other than bits of spying in between chasing down princesses...

There's an increased likelihood of rebellion for something like ten years after a province is taken, so you need to garrison heavily for at least that long, even when there's no difference in religious alignment. Stops you rampaging across the map at high speed, leaving empty territories behind you. Where there is a religious difference, it pays to do some work on conversion before you move in and maybe garrison heavily for longer, just to be doubly sure.

6. New King on the block.
Watch out for this one. With all the developing going on, it's likely that your faction leaders will have had the 'Builder' V&V, which gives both a loyalty boost on generals and a 10% boost on province happiness. AN additional happiness and agri output boost comes with 'Steward'. Once he dies and the heir takes over, he'll be back with a clean slate, wrt those V&Vs. If you develop very rapidly, early on, it's conceivable that you will reach a stage where there's nothing more that you need to build either economically, militarily or the fancy stuff like chancellery, admiralty etc, making it ever harder for your later leaders to acquire this useful V&V. If your empire is extensive but basically hollow in terms of troop distribution, then expect occasional trouble within the hollow regions. Whilst maintaining your frontlines, perhaps also deploy a large number of troops in a few core-area provinces where as many neighbouring provinces as possible can be reached in a single move. The surrounding ones can be left empty. They'll still rebel but at least you can move, battle, win and not suffer facilites damaged.

I've spotted at least one territory where the various border crossings are described 'plains and flatland' but the 'armies meeting here' description reads as being 'river'. This is a factor to bear in mind as I reckon rebellions are dealt with using the 'meeting here' terrain instead of the border crossing terrain. However, if you don't attack in the year the rebellion goes off, they gain the territory and then the border crossing terrain will apply once again.