Help! Empire Keeps Getting Out Of Control!

**Kommodus** · 06-14-2005, 17:23

Here are several points that might help you:

1. In general, provinces rebel when loyalty gets too low. Anything below 100% is in the danger zone, although I think that factions can re-emerge in territories where loyalty is under 120%. As a matter of preference, I try to keep loyalty above 150% if possible.

2. Use the SHIFT key to quickly check loyalty levels in your provinces. Any yellow or red provinces might cause you problems in the future - do something about them before they revolt.

3. Tax levels have a lot to do with loyalty. In vanilla MTW, auto-tax tries to keep loyalty at 100%. This is risky, since many events can cause sudden loyalty drops, so I manage taxes myself. Once you have a huge empire, you can usually afford to leave taxes at a low level in most of your provinces; just raise taxes in your rich lands and make sure they are properly garrisoned.

4. Religion has a lot to do with loyalty. Make sure you convert all your conquered lands to your religion as quickly as possible. Sometimes it helps to send religious agents ahead of your conquering armies to get a small head-start.

5. Garrisons have a lot to do with loyalty. With most provinces, one unit of 100 peasants is enough once the province has been yours for a while (some provinces, like Portugal, are more rebellious and require larger garrisons). I prefer small garrisons in most of my non-border provinces, as this keeps my upkeep costs small and enables me to keep taxes low.

6. Some buildings affect loyalty. In general, you should do at least some building-up in your conquered provinces, as this will make the people happier. Castles and religious buildings are of particular note here.

7. Certain events can cause sudden drops in loyalty. These include famines, diseases, floods, and other disasters. If a disaster occurs in one of your provinces, check its loyalty level and take appropriate action, such as lowering taxes or increasing the garrison.

8. The virtues/vices of your ruler have a significant effect on loyalty. It always helps to get the Builder virtues (especially Magnificent Builder) as quickly as possible for a new ruler, as this increases empire-wide loyalty. Often, when your ruler dies, his heir will not have the same virtues, and this will cause a loyalty drop. Whenever your ruler dies, review empire-wide loyalty and start working on building up the new ruler's virtues.

9. Under no circumstances should you allow your ruler to be isolated from the rest of the empire. For example, do not send him overseas on a crusade or to capture an enemy island. Areas of your empire that do not have a clear route to your ruler's location will suffer a sudden, catastrophic drop in loyalty, resulting in mass rebellions.

10. Place spies in your own territories to increase loyalty. Spies in enemy territories undermine loyalty there, but they can be caught quite easily.

11. At least once during a campaign, when your empire gets very large, you will suffer a large, multi-province rebellion. I think this is a built-in feature to make the game more challenging, and is virtually unavoidable. You can limit it by following the above advice, and most of your lost provinces will be easy to recapture. It should only happen once; if it happens more than that you are doing something wrong.

I hope these points help. If you do it right, you will have very few rebellions at all.

**Total War Merc** · 06-14-2005, 17:53

9. Under no circumstances should you allow your ruler to be isolated from the rest of the empire. For example, do not send him overseas on a crusade or to capture an enemy island. Areas of your empire that do not have a clear route to your ruler's location will suffer a sudden, catastrophic drop in loyalty, resulting in mass rebellions.

that was the problem, my king was on an isolsated island with the waters around it owned by the enemy

**antisocialmunky** · 06-14-2005, 17:55

On VH, factions tend to grow back like crab grass. Maybe you should consider making some factions pets on an island or an easily isolatable provence like Italy on Corsica or Sicily on Malta. Byzantines on one of thier little islands, the french on that one little island(Cypress?) in high, England on Ireland... etc.

**Total War Merc** · 06-14-2005, 18:05

its a good idea but how do you get the faction to go onto a island which they wernt already on.

**Satyr** · 06-14-2005, 19:04

I have played all the factions many times and I almost never get a major rebellion. There are a couple of things I do to make sure of this.

After my first couple of bouts of territory grabbing I go into a major ship building process and I put whatever resources I need to until I have way more ships than anyone else. This insures that I can dominate the seas when I go to war with people and my remote provinces will NOT get cut off.

I put my king in the middle of the map in a heavily developed coastal province and I leave him there. I make sure no one can ever attack that province (secure surrounding provinces and lots of ships in the surrounding sea zones). I try to make this province the most developed one so that when I get a new king he appears here and not in some remote corner of the map.

Things that I never bother with.

Large garrisons - I only keep enough troops to get to very high taxes and 120% loyalty. After taking a new province I just worry about that 120% mark, the taxes will slowly increase as the loyalty increases because,

Manual taxes - are a waste of time. I always use auto-tax. If you have VI loaded autotaxes will do everything possible to keep you above 120% loyalty. Anything less than this and you can get reappearances. Be careful of the Shift key, green only means 100% loyalty!

Spys and assassins. The only time I build assassins is to control inquisitors. I don't really build religious guys either. I do build border forts and churches.

Try these tips and you will quit getting rebellions and reappearances too!