MTW TIPS and Observations

[VersusAllOdds]

-Use Crusades in a high catholic zeal era to drain your future enemies' power. If you are, say, English, and French have amassed troops on your border, send a crusade through and it will take many of their troops.
-Joining your Faction Leader into a crusade zeroes his influence!
-I believe that spies can lower loyalty just to a limit. I had 6 spies (all 3 star) in a province, and somewhere around 12 cath bishops (it was an Almohad province). The loyalty never went below 95% on very low taxatation.
-A good strategy is to ask for hand of a foreign princess and then slaughter her entire male family with grand inquisitors, I've done it numerous times. But make sure you move your inquisitors, because inquisition, when started, halves the catholic zeal. Also make sure that you kill heirs first, and faction leader last.
-Once your faction leader becomes a good steward, don't upgrade farms until he's succeeded. Also, don't try to promote faction leader with steward/builder traits if he's too old.

[nzd07]

-Trade with as many nations as possible
-Never use your king in battles unless he has high command
-Constantly build and upgrade your cities. After you've built military buildings make an armorer, church, tavern, border forts, monastery, farm upgrades, etc. Eventually, you will even get +10% happiness in all your provinces.
-Keep loyalty above 100% at all times or risk rebellion
-Bribing rebels in the beginning of the game, (i.e. wales rebels) can be very beneficial: You can acquire good units (i.e. welsh longbowmen) early on, acquire rebel territories before others can, and not to mention it saves the lives of your soldiers.

[m52nickerson]

-Never use your king in battles unless he has high command

I'm going to disagree with this. As long as your King does not have any negative vices I think he should be used. It seems that a Kings that leading an army tends to produce better heirs.

[gollum]

Actually i think that the threshold for rebellion is 120% loyalty in MTW. Bribing enemy stacks in the early game, saves you forces and gives you formiddable units, true, it kills however your cash flow. It all depends what your strategic goals of the early game are. If they associate with quick and drammatic expansion, i say bribing rebel armies is not worth it.

[Taedius]

100% loyalty to prevent rebellion: 120% to prevent reemergence. A spy in each province does the trick nicely.

[caravel]

It's actually as follows:

100% loyalty to prevent peasant/religious* revolts.

120% loyalty to prevent loyalist revolts (also trigger for faction reappearance)

I can't remember about bandits offhand. I think 100% loyalty, a castle and/or 100 man garrison is required.

*Religious percentage is not a factor - a province can be 100% catholic and the occupying faction orthodox, so long as this can be countered with garrison size and spies/happiness buildings and the loyalty kept >= 120% no revolts/uprisings should occur.

[drone]

On using your King on attacks, once your empire begins to grow, it is probably a bad thing to use him, as the attack will isolate him from your other provinces, leading to a temporary drop in provincial loyalty. Use heirs instead, to groom them for their future role. And whatever you do, don't use the King to attack an island...

100% loyalty will prevent revolts inside a province. If there is a faction reemergence in nearby provinces, you need to have the loyalty up to 120% to avoid being sucked into it.

Spies will increase provincial loyalty by 40% + 20% per star. Only the highest valoured spy counts, so having multiple spies in a province is a bit of a waste.