Research: what causes rebels to appear?

[teja]

Hi
Rebels and City unrest:

I also had a rebel unit right next to Tylis when I captured it from Thrace. Unrest in Tylis was 45%. I immediately attacked the rebels..who retreated away from Tylis. Unrest remained at 45%. Then wiped out the rebels. Unrest remained at 45%. So those rebels didnt have any effect on unrest in Tylis.

I am not that sure about all of your conclusion. You only proved that loyalty is not directly affected by rebel armies. You have to differ between “unrest” and loyalty to find the facts!

I my theory, relating to my post above is the following: I am talking about those "unrest" icons in the city details. The more "unrest" icons you have in your city details, the more rebel armies are likely to appear.

1st Some ways to raise “unrest”:
Same with foreign armies: Huge, unallied stacks for foreign armies raise the number of "unrest" icons too. This must not happened in the same turn armies pop up or move into a province, but you can track it in upcoming turns. Rebel armies are always hostile and do similar.
A spy inside of a foreign city improves the same "unrest".
All this affects the chance that rebel armies will pop up in your province.

2nd When will “unrest” affect the loyalty of a city?
Only when the city details show that any bad affects (high taxes, bad traits of leaders, penalties for the wrong culture, corruption, waste and what else is showing in these details) are bigger but the positive affects (loyalty buildings, law, big garrisons....), the loyalty will fall down and the chance of rioting citizens INSIDE of a city will is improving.

3rd Random Rebels:
I always thought that when provinces are not very loyal or close to rebel it will only affect the city where it happens and the province alone. That is not completely true. I made the experience that if you have several “close-to-rebel” cities, the chance for new rebel armies in all of your empire gets higher.
Those rebel armies elsewhere will following the same rules of “unrest” I showed up earlier in this post under my 1st point.

In conclusion the best you can do against rioting citizens apart of good governors and big units (the more men are serving, the better they work = mass, not class is working best here) is to work with own spies inside your towns. “Counter-spies” will affect both: Calm down unhappy citizens from rioting and to decree the chance to see pop up some rebel armies in your province.
Meanwhile I changed my mind about the use of Forts. No matter how big the army garrisoned there is, they do some minor effects in preventing to let rebel armies appear. But I still think that the other measures I wrote will work better.

Relating on RTW 1.5 & earlier versions - no mods

[GottMitUns]

A humble and fairly ignorant hunch-

I am wondering if the hiring of mercenaries could in any way affect the number of rebels that pop up in a given province. If you trot a family member out of a city regularly and hire every mercenary there is to hire could that possibly reduce the number of rebels that will/could pop up in that province?

Thinking in real terms rather than game terms, it seems if you put as much of the overall population (urban and the 'uncounted' rural people) to some productive use, you will have less of a problem with them. eg. less squalor, less banditry outside city walls.

I game terms, perhaps there is a base "hidden" pool of rural population that is always there and each turn there are triggers which will increase the chance of the appearence of rebels/availabilty of mercenaries for hire. The family member triggering an increased chance of hiring from the pool, other factors triggering an increased chance of the appearence of rebelion, a fort generaly balancing both merc/rebel chances out. For example, a fort could increase the chance of mercs for hire naturaly decreasing the possibility of a rebel appearence.

Rebels as the rural version of squalor.

Any thoughts?

[Severous]

Hi

Usually I hire all I can. Rebels still appear. In my current campaign I rarely hire mercenaries. Rebels still appear.

It doesnt feel that there is any correlation between rebel appearance and the number of mercenary hires.

Any one else?

[Biggus Diccus]

In my current VH/M Alexander campaign I had multiple large battles every turn until turn 20 (80 turns left) and I saw no rebels appearing in my territories during this time. When I took a break to retrain my troops and bring up reinforcements 3-5 stacks of rebels popped up every turn in my provinces. It was so annoying that I stacked some generals together and used unlimited movement cheat and auto_win to autocalc them all to death. It was just too boring to hunt them all down.

Too bad you can't remove or tone down the rebel appearences in this game. Fighting 4-5 battles against rebels every turn is just plain annoying and boring.

[bedlam28]

Hi all.

A very long thread to read through, but I've gleaned some good ideas from the comments.

One thread on this that I havent seen mentioned but I have experienced - just through gameplay not experimentation =

when I take a city and massacre it I dont seem to get rebels near my home cities, but when I keep the populace alive for slavery I seem to get more; this just seemed to me to be a realistic add on
ie: a train of slaves are now crossing my territories to go to my cities to be added to the population; unfortunately not all of them stay in line and some escape to become rebels.

how does this fit in to the model everyone is working here????

[HighLord z0b]

A friend recently played RTW for the first time and the first time he saw rebels the advisor came up saying that a good way of decreasing the chance of rebels is by building forts nearby.

I know this is just one of many factors but I figure if CA programmed it to tell you it must have a fairly significant effect. I wouldn't know because I never bother building forts.

[shizzernockers3]

you can limit how often they apear