Rebel insane

I have never had so much Rebel activity since I got EB 0.73
Right now I am playing the Romani and have gotten 11 turns into the game and it seems to me that a 1-2 stack of rebels spawn each turn....some of them have up to 8 units. Right now in my game Arretium, Rome, and Capua are besieged by rebels. My rebel cleaning army just doesn´t have the time to fight and retrain, the rebels spawn so fast.

I have 2 armies, one to fight rebels and one to fight Epeiros....so far the rebels have been more of a challenge and I have had to face 4 rebel stacks with 8 units....mostly hvy samnite infantry and samnite spearmen.

I think it is odd, I have never had such rebel activity before, not when I played EB 0.72

I haven't looked into it enough to say that I'm certain, but I'm pretty sure misery factors in my own towns, as well as these negative factors in even rebel towns are often the problem. With the casse, I made sure all my towns were happy (with no unrest or anything either, not just a high happiness rating)... still rebels were appearing. I'm almost certain they were coming from an irish rebel town that for some reason was being led into the ground. Once I took that town and fixed it up, the rebel onslaught stopped. So, it's possible (if I'm right) that it might not be your towns, but might even be an epeirote town or or other neighbor accidently pumping out these guys too. SPy on your neighbors and see if any are miserable or suffering from unrest, maybe that can help to find the problem.

Well, we have given the "slave" faction lots of extra cash, and reduced its expenditures, so actual rebel provinces will build units now. That may be where you see this coming from.

It will help to note -who- the rebels are. You can tell by their names which province they are coming from. Note the province they're in and their names, and I'll tell you where they come from.

Well these rebels are just popup rebels, that spawn on various locations in my 5 provinces....it could be a freaky coincidence that they spawn this fast as it has never happened to me before...

Well, I'm still curious as to what they're called in game. We've changed certain names around in this version, and so I want to know it is working properly.

Try playing as Arche Seleukeia. I have at least 5 new rebel stacks per turn and let's not forget the usual rebelious provinces :dizzy2:

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Originally Posted by khelvan

Well, I'm still curious as to what they're called in game. We've changed certain names around in this version, and so I want to know it is working properly.

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I've had a similar experience to NightStar - although my rebels and brigands just mean that my junior family members frequently pick up a Corona Civica and Corona Ovalis and spend less time with the rhetor. I did get some really scary armies of rebels in northern Italy though - gesaetae and brihentin, etc.

Mine were all "Aphistomenoi" I believe, or something very similar.

Relating to the rate at which independent towns build troops, it might be a good idea to tone this down a little - or perhaps change the rates for spy-mission success as it seems impossible to spy on towns with large garrisons which sort of seems counterintuitive to me (larger numbers of troops should not really mean that it is harder to infiltrate the city afterall, or to try and get close to the general for that matter.)

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Originally Posted by GMT

Try playing as Arche Seleukeia. I have at least 5 new rebel stacks per turn and let's not forget the usual rebelious provinces :dizzy2:

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do you remember that this is hisorical accuracy mod? ~;)

This is how it should look like with Arche Seleukeia ~:)

I usually get to around 12 provinces or so and start a new faction. Gets boring putting down rebels constantly. I have to fight each one myself or else the random battle generator dooms me. Such as my 3:1 battle with 2 family remembers. Got a crushing defeat and lost both generals along with my best troops.

We can't change brigand frequency until we move to 1.5. They are coming at the same frequency as before, but with the high unit costs their appearance is more troublesome for the player.

Most of the rebel armies I face are aphistamenoi, which I guess this is 'brigands' in greek. One thing I find incredibly annoying is that rebel provinces are building up, perhaps a bit too much. All the Aegean Eleutheroi cities have a full stack in them, they're just sitting there without doing anything or moving around in their territory, and it takes a complete bloodbath to break the walls and take the city by storm. Not to mention they don't even try to contest my invasion of their provinces. Is this because I'm on M/M, or what?

Thank goodness I'm not playing on VH, though. I don't think Eleutheroi should take -that- much of your time so you don't have time to look outwards.

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Originally Posted by pezhetairoi

Most of the rebel armies I face are aphistamenoi, which I guess this is 'brigands' in greek. One thing I find incredibly annoying is that rebel provinces are building up, perhaps a bit too much. All the Aegean Eleutheroi cities have a full stack in them, they're just sitting there without doing anything or moving around in their territory, and it takes a complete bloodbath to break the walls and take the city by storm. Not to mention they don't even try to contest my invasion of their provinces. Is this because I'm on M/M, or what?

Thank goodness I'm not playing on VH, though. I don't think Eleutheroi should take -that- much of your time so you don't have time to look outwards.

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On VH/M the Eleutheroi can be a real pain - but that is kind of good in some ways. I do wish they'd build fewer, better, units. It's not that hard to break horde after horde of lugoae with veteran legions after all; peltasts are the same, although they seem to be REALLY good at routing for a while, then regrouping quickly.

....20 units of peltasts can be a real nuisance when all you've got to face them down with are hastati, hippeis and galatian kluddolon. Not to mention I'm loth to face more than six untis of peltasts on the field since the last time I did that they held off my entire eight-cavalry mobile wing until the rest of the army was routing, even when surrounded.

Yep it was Aphistomenoi I was facing....but it must have been a freaky coincidence that I got 1-2 stacks spawning every turn, now it has turned to the better with the occasional stack spawning now and then.

It has gotten out of hand--every rebel province I try to take is turning into a solid bloodbath that necessitates my army returning to Italia to retrain after every city I break. Every single province now has a fullstack sitting in it, and another half-to fullstack wandering outside of it. The area of Noricum north of Italia is covered in rebel stacks now. I really don't know how I'm going to break them short of spoiling my consular-army setup and spamming full-triarii armies.

In my latest campaign the German faction has taken 1 city after 45 years and done nothing else since they can't beat the rebels. The Iberians are pretty much the same except they haven’t taken any cities and currently have 1/4 of a stack of an army with a full stack rebel army next to the city, and not attacking due to the difficulty setting. Even the Sarmations are doing better which is odd. Although granted this is on Medium campaign difficulty (Since I was just punching turns as Casse to see how the world went without rebels bothering me.)

Its quite amusing looking at my starting province. There are around 5 full stack rebel armies standing right next to my city with full stacks in each rebel city on the continent.

Even more odd the Epirus owned 2/3 of Sicily at one point before the Macedonians ended up with one of the cities somehow, before the Romans took it and the Epirus town left rebelled.

PS, I have no idea how to spell the factions names. :sweatdrop:

I hope that when you port the game over to patch 1.5 that the rebels dont come if I manage my towns well as it do now???Or will they still pop up every were..That is very anoying...Sorry for my bad english...:2thumbsup:

I'm playing as Ptolemies right now, and while some rebel cities I had to capture were certainly full stacks, still I haven't had hardly any problems with rebels inside my lands (after maybe three years of holding each one). I can't remember teh last time I saw a rebel army near the nile. Granted, I'm playing M/M.

Ah i wondered why there were so many random rebels. They weren't random they were being built by the reb cities.

Generally i like how the rebels are much more trouble and i like how conquering each province is a challenge so you have to expand one at a time and then rebuild a bit before the next one.

What would be better though (i think) is if in the 1.5 version the spawning of brigand type rebels were cut back to semi-zero, as they are just boring in whatever language. Voconti rebels just looks much better on the tooltip,

And instead this new system of reb armies building units plus some big scripted random rebellions with the probabilities related to your city's unrest levels. I don't know if it is possible to tweak what units the reb cities build as in my casse mini-campaign it was large armies of all the same unit. Maybe that was just them only having built the base barracks. The rebs must be rich now though as i noticed they'd built the port expansion in one place in hibernia :)

ps mines give too much money imo

1.5 will surely improve things here. However, I was wondering about the announcements to decrease the rate in which experience was gained. The proposed solution was to give each unit a starting experience of three and reduce their stats so that they end up being equally strong. Won't this tactic hurt the spawning rebel stacks? IIRC brigands always spawn without experience, making them weaker than normally produced units.

Yes, reducing the experience scale will likely harm brigands.

I've been facing masses of rebels too as Rome since the 0.73 patch - I'll check the names.

What is frustrating are the pop-up ones - not coming from rebel cities. I have to have permanent army on stand by as a fire brigade to rush around squishing them. I don't think it is realistic and it is boring as anything. 1.5 should solve it, but I am curious what affects their spawn rate more generally? The Ludus Magna thread on this does not seem to have positively identified anything that affects their spawn rate.

The other rebel masses are coming from the towns, but I don't mind that so much. Taking a province should be hard work and those that stray into your land you can think of as raiders. As long as they don't stall the AI factions too much, it is good (Dacia was hacking into them thanks to its mine income, dunno how they will cope with 0.74).

I wonder what the problem is with experience? I operate a "no-retraining" policy and so attrition means that only my general units (which regenerate anyway) accumulate very high experience. I don't know where the AI gets the very high experience it has on some of its units. But the proposed change sounds interesting - I would not worry about it weakening the rebels. The game should be focussed around the named factions.

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Originally Posted by Danest

I haven't looked into it enough to say that I'm certain, but I'm pretty sure misery factors in my own towns, as well as these negative factors in even rebel towns are often the problem. With the casse, I made sure all my towns were happy (with no unrest or anything either, not just a high happiness rating)... still rebels were appearing. I'm almost certain they were coming from an irish rebel town that for some reason was being led into the ground. Once I took that town and fixed it up, the rebel onslaught stopped. So, it's possible (if I'm right) that it might not be your towns, but might even be an epeirote town or or other neighbor accidently pumping out these guys too. SPy on your neighbors and see if any are miserable or suffering from unrest, maybe that can help to find the problem.

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Oh fine, blame it all on the Irish! As though we haven't heard that before. Bloody English always thinking they're b....

Sorry, got a bit carried away.

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Originally Posted by Danest

I haven't looked into it enough to say that I'm certain, but I'm pretty sure misery factors in my own towns, as well as these negative factors in even rebel towns are often the problem. With the casse, I made sure all my towns were happy (with no unrest or anything either, not just a high happiness rating)... still rebels were appearing. I'm almost certain they were coming from an irish rebel town that for some reason was being led into the ground. Once I took that town and fixed it up, the rebel onslaught stopped. So, it's possible (if I'm right) that it might not be your towns, but might even be an epeirote town or or other neighbor accidently pumping out these guys too. SPy on your neighbors and see if any are miserable or suffering from unrest, maybe that can help to find the problem.

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I'm actually quite sure that this is not the case. In my current Seleukid campaign I've still got rebel stacks popping up right next to Seleukeia and Antiocheia while the public order level is like 150% or more. They couldn't come from any nearby rebel town because there simply isn't any rebel town anywhere near these cities.

I really don't mind that much any more about the rebels though. It makes the campaign more realistic, especially as the Seleukids plus it gives me a chance to let my generals pick up some experience.

might help if you edit the starting treasury of the rebels no?

No, brigands spawn independent of the slave faction's wealth level.

I suppose it would be about right to let the brigands at least have no experience, even if it harms them. Brigands were not supposed to be awesome fighting forces, and only got together for plunder. And it would balance things a little, since historically the Romani at least never lost even 10% of their army fighting a mere band of brigands as the game seems to suggest they do.

If you want to stop brigands, try placing a couple of forts in each province. You'll notice that brigands usually pop up on the same two or three tiles in each province, so placing a fort on said tiles will drastically reduce the number of brigands you get per turn. There will be a few tiles that are right next to settlements or watchtowers that brigands will spawn on, though, in which case if you just place a single unit on that tile it should get rid of them.

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Originally Posted by Cheexsta

If you want to stop brigands, try placing a couple of forts in each province. You'll notice that brigands usually pop up on the same two or three tiles in each province, so placing a fort on said tiles will drastically reduce the number of brigands you get per turn. There will be a few tiles that are right next to settlements or watchtowers that brigands will spawn on, though, in which case if you just place a single unit on that tile it should get rid of them.

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That sounds like it might even work.

btw i've changed the rebel frequency right down in (semi-vanilla) 1.5 and I can't see a difference.