What is your minimum border garrison?

[Xipe Totec]

You probably forgot to take them out during the last rebellion.

There had been a rebellion about 15 years earlier, with a 5 or 6 unit army which vanished without trace. This was 9 units of identical Gorodskye Streltsy. Can a rebel army hide in the woods for 15 years, growing in strength and then attack when it finally judges the time is ripe for a Tet Offensive? If so then I have seriously underestimated the quality of this game's strategic AI. I suppose it should be possible to test the theory by moving a full stack into such a conquered and pacified capital to remove the grey bars, then moving it out like I did. If such an event is scripted it should be repeatable. Hats off to CA for sneakiness if that's true. Otherwise hats off to CA for making rebel generals have good judgement, even if regular army ones don't. On the last point I recently had a Polish rebel army emerge near Warsaw which did not move or attack, even though there were plenty of cities nearby with 1 or 2 unit garrisons, and plenty of woods to hide in.

I'll see what I can find out.

I've done some testing with Warsaw in my Austria campaign and I can't reproduce the complete loss of grey bars. When I move a full stack out it seems to leave at least one grey bar behind. The Streltsy army took Moscow without me getting a chance to defend it, so it can't have had any garrison at all. It did have first level fortification. Perhaps we need to try to understand what governs the size of the grey-bar militia garrison in all circumstances. Moving a full stack out I always got one bar. After that I moved 2 cavalry back in and the one grey bar became 2 grey bars. I have noticed before that the number of greys in ungarrisoned provinces does not seem to be affected in any logical or consistent way by population size or how long you have held the province. Anyone else got any thoughts about this?