Late in the Game the cities start rebelling!

[wallece1]

Okay so I've played this game for a long time and every time I play I start to give up by turn 150 because of a mass rebellion that includes about 3-7 cities rebelling every turn. If I can learn a way to control this I can finnaly win the game

Any Tips on how to make cities not Rebel

ps. Don't say the usual stuff like build buildings to make them happy. That takes forever when you own most of the world!

[Mithrane]

Keep some generals back in your lands as "Governors". Keep them in cities which build a lot to give them good city-oriented traits. Move them around your cities, leaving them in each for a few turns to raise the public order, then move them to the next.

Keep large garisons in the cities. 5-6+ is a minimum at "end game", imo.

Ensure you have a lot of priests keeping your religious stats high in all of your provinces.

Put spies in your towns to make sure you don't have enemy spies in them. Enemy spies cause disorder and can cause rebellions. The AI looooves to make spies.

Move your capital to a more central location in your country so as to limit the distance to the extreme borders.

[ReyMandez]

You need to change all of your castles to cities. Then make them all low tax. It will keep most of them happy. Also, make sure your capital is in the center of your empire to keep as many cities happy as possible.

[Alxaro]

If all that fails, abandoning and exterminating cities on a regular basis works just fine to.

[wallece1]

I have tried that but here's the thing:

Training priests and spies and building buildings take WAY to much time
I don't have enough generals to pu them in enough cities
I can't keep a large garrison because too many troops cost too much money
Even though I move the capital to the center cities at the outscirts of the map still rebel
Re-capturing rebel cities are too hard and require too many troops!

[Mithrane]

By turn 150, especially when you have a large enough empire to have such problems, your economy should be large enough to support priests, spies, and extra troops. You've had plenty of time to grow your empire by then. You might want to look into your build order and see if you can better manage your economy.

You don't need a general for every city. Just have 3-5 (depending on what you have available) good ones running around and babysitting a city for 4+ turns at a time. That should raise the order enough to let them take a vacation. I tend to have my generals cycle through my cities so as to gain specific traits as things get built.

By turn 150, you should have mostly large-huge cities. Those can support 5-6 militia units for free, assuming you've built up your garrisons. You can afford an extra 2-3 stacks of cheap units per city if they are getting overly bad.

The edge of your empire will always have troubles. My personal advice is to keep the edge of your empire mostly castles, so as to greatly reduce the problems with public order (castles naturally have high order). Keep only a few of your "inner" cities as castles, and convert the majority to acutal cities so as to make money.

If you follow our advice, and work to limit your rebelling cities, you will have few enough that 1, 2 generals tops with medium sized armies specifically designed to take towns will be more than enough to keep them in line. If they rebel more than once, exterminate the populace. Public Order problem solved right there.

It really is easy, and expected, to have a good number of priests keeping your empire under your religion. In fact, it is expected for you to have enough that you can send extras to enemy lands and conver them to your religion, thus causing order problems. You don't need too many spies.

Make 1 city in your empire devoted to making spies, 1 to assassins, 1-2 to making priests, 2-4 to making merchants. You do this by only recruiting those units at those cities. This, coupled with continually building those which help such things (markets in your merchant cities, cathedrals in your priest cities) will give you the option to get guilds, and, eventually, master and even guild headquarters. These will GREATLY increase the strength of any of those units recruited there.

When I play Byzantium, Constatinoble recruits merchants which START at 4-5 finance on average. Same for the other cities. This game forces you to specialize cities to an extent to gain access to top end / quality troops.

[The Count(er)]

If all that fails, abandoning and exterminating cities on a regular basis works just fine to.

by turn 150 you should be so far in the campaign you have to exterminate every city anyways if he did that he probably wouldn't be in this problem every time if you exterminated the city the first time you shouldn't have to do it again on average

[Confederate Jeb]

Are you playing a mod?

How does training agents and building buildings take too much time? Agents take 1 turn.

[wallece1]

Not that but training a priest and spy in every city takes a heck of a long time!

[ReyMandez]

there could be another problem. Right from the start i just exterminate every city i take, it cuts rebelling at least in half.

[The Count(er)]

way more than half once you own about 50% of the map only occupying will have about 10 settlements rebelling per turn and exterminating you may get 1 rebel city every 5 turns

[Strom]

Are you saying that it takes you too much time sitting at the computer to manage your cities, so you essentially just abandon them unless you want to raise some more troops so as to save yourself time?

If so then you might want to consider putting your cities on AI management in 'Growth' build mode and *this is important* disabling AI troop recruitment. In growth build mode the AI mostly builds buildings that provide happiness and it sets the tax rate low. This combination results in relatively few rebellions as long as your economy is healthy enough for the AI to afford to build the buildings. If you drain every florin for your standing armies and don't invest in your cities then your cities will automatically grow unhappy and revolt as time passes. It's still a good idea to scan around your empire looking for blue/red faced cities every few turns though.

You may also have a problem with religion... If you don't bother to build many priests then there's a good chance that you'll have heretics running around converting your people away from your religion. You need to assassinate them or, if you're feeling pious, send waves of priests to denounce them. Then convert the people back.

You can use the [ and ] keys to cycle quickly through your cities, which makes city management much quicker.

I sympathise though, the UI isn't really very well geared towards effective city management especially when you're trying to mix human governed and AI governed cities.

[DarkYellowFire]

best option to get no revolt citys is to EXTURMINAD THEM lol

[Khassaki]

Okay so I've played this game for a long time and every time I play I start to give up by turn 150 because of a mass rebellion that includes about 3-7 cities rebelling every turn. If I can learn a way to control this I can finnaly win the game

Any Tips on how to make cities not Rebel

ps. Don't say the usual stuff like build buildings to make them happy. That takes forever when you own most of the world!

Well then work out to put down rebelions, because if you don't build infrasturcture there is no other way.

Start additing it early in the game to cut down on corruption and you won't ever have an issue latter. My Cairo has a garrison of 2 archers so people can't walk in and a population of 20K plus and is blue on very high taxation.