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As I understand it, a governor can improve happiness/loyalty with piety or dread. If the province to be governed has a low percentage of your religion’s followers, then dread is used. If the percentage is over 50%, then piety takes over. I believe that a faction ruler’s piety affects whether rebels (the faithful), in a former province who are attacking your enemies, will automatically rejoin your realm. So what does a faction ruler’s dread do?
Other than add character to them? :egypt:
Difficult to say, really. Even more difficult to make measurable observations, I'd imagine. For that, you would need one of two things to happen: -
1) Change of dread score: Actions by the player, such as prisoner executions (+) or prisoners set free (- {?}), or actions by the game, such as a new VnV adding or taking away dread.
2) A change of ruler, with the successor having greater or lesser dread than the predecessor. This is an extremely awkward moment to measure what I'm about to suggest, below, because the succession event itself has issues attached, such as the complete re-assessment of loyalty to the new ruler.
In either case, it would take a lot of pain-in-the-ane note-keeping about the province happiness ratings for it to be possible to notice any fluctuations. Very time-consuming and, ultimately, probably not worth worrying about. If you want to save some time, you could just concentrate on the pre-programmed rebellious provinces, if you happen to hold any of them (Portugal, Scotland, Lithuania, etc).
I have no idea if dread rating has any bearing, whatsoever, on the likelihood of civil wars and would be grateful if anyone else was in a position to comment on that. I take it for granted that disloyal generals (due to low influence score on the ruler) and a royal-blood ringleader are the main pre-requisites but am speculating that high dread on the ruler might be enough to scare them out of trying their luck!
As I've always understood it, a faction leader's dread works similarly to his acumen. Higher dread improves the loyalty of his provinces across the board, but it has a smaller overall effect than the dread of the local provincial governor. This reflects that the local lord is usually going to have more to do with keeping his population loyal than the monarch in some distant capital.
I pulled together some approximate calculations a while back, although I doubt they're very accurate -- they're based only on my general observations and educated guesswork as opposed to actual math (I'm just too lazy to bother ~;p). For every point of dread a faction leader has, I believe it improves the loyalty in his provinces by ~2%, whereas a governor will improve loyalty in his specific province by ~8% for every point of dread he has.
To give an example: Let's say I'm looking at Castille, which is owned by the Spanish. Let's say that their king (Alfonso) has 4 dread, and that Castille's governor (Lord Santiago) has 5 dread. In this case, Lord Santiago would give Castille a loyalty boost of around 40%, while Alfonso gives it a loyalty boost of about 8%.
Note: Before anyone asks, I'm reasonably certain the faction leader's loyalty boost via his dread is not affected by the distance-from-the-king penalty suffered by provinces that are far away. That's a separate function, and does not directly interfere with the leader's dread ability. So in my above example, King Alfonso would still give all provinces an 8% loyalty boost, even if the Spanish occupy Novgorod on the opposite end of the map. Of course, Novgorod's loyalty will still suffer from the distance penalty, which will mostly likely negate most - if not all - of Alfonso's relatively meager dread boost. That 8% bonus is still there, however, even if it is virtually nullified by Alfonso not appearing in Novgorod in person.