Quote Originally Posted by The Apostate
Under 1.1 you could just bribe them for a few hundred denarii - however in 1.2 even small rebel armies can cost 20,000 or more denarii to bribe.

Found playing Scythia on VH that you couldn't even ignore them as they would besiege your cities - and given the distances involved and the difficulty of sending relief armies I think I lost every one of my starting cities at least once to rebels.

This however wasn't a problem with Macedonia - probably because the cities are closer together and I was using several big units of Levy Pikemen as garrisons which seemed to dissuade the rebels from attacking.

Rbels now often employ mercenaries - which can make them a nasty surprise if you attack a rebel army with a couple of units and a junior general only to find that they include Cretan Archers, Bastarnae or Horse Archers.

Generally I tend to keep small armies of 4 level 1 or level 2 cavalry units in each region (one in Gaul, one in Spain etc) as anti-bandit patrols they are relatively cheap and can deal with most rebels.

In the later game you might as well just bribe them as otherwise the money will just sit in your treasury and encourage corruption

However in border territories it sometimes pays to leave them alone as they will help keep enemy factions away.

OTOH am finding that there are a lot fewer city rebellions under 1.2 - which on the whole balances out more whack-a-mole rebels.
I play on Medium, so I don't know about VH, but I can say that the bribe costs you mention in 1.2 are untrue. It only still costs me a few hundred denarii to bribe rebels in my game, even though I have it patched to 1.2. Highly unlikely that on VH this number will balloon to a 5-digit number. Was it just that you tried bribing rebel generals?

On Medium, the Scythian rebels don't besiege my cities (I'm playing scythian), but that might just be a VH thing.