Darn, I screwed that up...

[Poncho400]

So recently, I've been 'fighting' the Danish as Russia for 90 turns. I fianlly decided to take their capital, but felt I needed to screw with them before I took it over.

So I send in 6 assassins, all level 7 or higher, and begin to butcher every family member or agent that happens to pass by. After a while, they stop coming by. After that, I beign to sabatage every building I can get my hands on. Eventually, their capital rebeled, and I had a free shot at the city.

After taking the city, I decided to occupy it and merely convert the populous. The only problem was, all those buildings I had sabataged were still broken. So here I am with this big army in a 17,000pop city, and absolutly no happyness nor law buildings running. As you guessed it, within 3 turns, they rebeled against me, as I couldn't convert the populace and rebuild fast enough. The best part is, they now have a huge army of amazingly good troops (when all troop making buildings were blown to hell when I left).

I've learned my lesson now. Being orthodox, every city from now on will get exterminated.

And to top it off, I now have enemy spies in my bigger cities, so almost every city is starting to get pissy with me (and I only own 8 cities!).

[Flavius Merobaudes]

Hi Poncho! Are you aware that you can repair multiple buildings in one turn? Just put them in your construction line and they should be like new next turn. Before conquering an enemy settlement, you could send in a group of priests to convert the population before taking them over. This might help avoid rebellions.
You can counter spies by keeping some in your cities yourself. This makes infiltration more difficult/less likely. And you've got to build the town hall and church line of buildings to keep public under control.
Extermination is only a last resort for me because it cripples your development. Or do you want to lead your country to technological backwardness?

[Rhyfelwyr]

Unfortunately as an Orthodox faction you will often have to exterminate the population, or face up to an 80% happinness penalty for religious unrest.

I made the same mistake when I took Milan as the Byzantines, rebelled after a couple of turns, with a decent army of Italian Spear Miltia and Men at Arms.

Even when I exterminated Miccosukke (the little village in the USA) and planted a full stack army, it was only on 'yellow' happiness.

[Ramses II CP]

Jeez, just send in the priests first. No need to exterminate your future citizens! You know your priests need to be converting people to gain piety anyway.

[Quillan]

Byzantium to South America is about as far as it's possible to get, so the distance-to-capital penalty had to be huge. I'm not surprised that public order is low.

On the original instance, send 2-3 mid-piety priests into the province several turns before you move in. It is impossible to stop you from converting a portion of the population over to your faith because of how the conversion mechanics work. Unless he puts in a bunch of high-piety priests in opposition to yours, you'll be able to get it close to 50% orthodox in fairly short order. Then once you take the city, the very first thing you should queue up is repairs on all buildings that give public order. The game processes the first building in the queue before any others, and repairs take zero turns, so if you do 5 repairs followed by one new building, it will fully repair all 5 then do one turn's worth of work on the new construction. If you reverse that order, it won't start repairing until it has finished the new construction, which might take 3-5 turns depending on what you're building.

I don't recommend extermination unless you're taking a huge city. Definitely keep a spy in each of your cities to make them harder to infiltrate.

[ReiseReise]

I would like someone to confirm this for me, I am only doing it off of my memory...

Exterminating a settlement results in greater unrest than the other options. I may be completely wrong and PLEASE feel free to correct me. This is only what I have noticed and I may be completely wrong.
Occupying has least unrest but more religious/squalor due to more population. Sack is a compromise but you get all the money! Exterminate has high unrest but other penalties are lowered due to having 1/4 the population If anyone could elaborate or link to other threads I would greatly appreciate it. For the given reasons, I will sack most settlements, but I occupy those that are close to gaining the next level or those that are so low that Sack gives a very low amount. IMO exterminating is only an option if: 1) you are roleplaying and want to pay those backstabbers back for their treachery, 2) You are doing a "slash and burn" type war where you take cities, sell the buildings, then let the enemy take them back in an effort to hurt their economy when you are too weak to actually hold their lands.

I only exterminate if I am extremely angry and don't care about future economics - "I will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe" in order to crush the backstabbing bastards, which is usually every nation in the game.

[Cheetah]

Conquering is much more difficult with the orthodox factions, it is a necessity to have squad of 4 or 5 priest in front of (each of) your armies.

[Poncho400]

After I had taken the city, I repaired all buildings, and built the first two Orthodox churches. But the city slowly slipped away before I could regain control (I'm pretty sure there was an enemy spy there too, but my two level 7 spies never found him). I'm definatly going to be sending my horde of preists into the to-be-Othodox lands now. I should probably invest in that Master Ikoners Studio too. 100% increase in church conversion sounds really nice right about now.

Maybe I won't exterminate the large cities, as you get a ton of money from sacking. But this city, oh no, they're gettin the sword.

And since I've learned the art of causing rebellions now, I think I'll go pay a visit to the Polish capital...

[Quillan]

I'm not 100% certain of the mechanics of conversion, but it seems to go like this: a priest gets a X% conversion rate per point of piety, a church gets a Y% conversion rate depending on its level, and in the case of Orthodox churches the iconer's buildings make that either 1.5Y or 2Y%. Add the modified church level to the conversion rate total of all priests there, and you'll convert that total percent of non-aligned population each turn. So if your total comes to 20% for your Orthodox priest squad, each turn you'll convert 20% of the non-Orthodox population over to Orthodox.

That's why it's impossible to completely stop foreign conversion. If he has priests and churches in a Catholic province converting 20% and you have priests converting 20%, he'll be switching 20% of your fraction back each turn while you'll get 20% of the mass number. This will eventually stabilize once you both start converting the same amount of people each turn, but until that point it'll swing your way. Converting in advance helps you out a lot once you conquer it.

There's a certain amount of unrest present when you take a province, but I don't know if it's greater following a sack or extermination than it is for just an occupy. This level of unrest decreases every following turn until it reaches the basic level for the province, but you can also get penalties with a governor with the wrong set of traits. You have to pay attention to those things.

[Poncho400]

I finally have Arhus secured! I took back the city and exterminated them for being so arrogant to think they could kick me out! A few turns later, a nice big 1200 troop Danish army came trumping back to reclaim what they foolishly lost. After assassinating their two generals, they somehow managed to gain a new General and attack. With my 400 men, I defeated 980 of theirs (along with killing their general). I had 16 men left at the end of my battle. The stupid thing is, the only traits my generals gained were Pagan Magician and Canfident attacker. Whoopdy doo...

I noticed one of their spies leaving the city. He will be getting a nice blade ot the back very soon...