How to hold settlements?

[Haakon]

I'm having issues holding regions that I have captured. In order to hold places I'm forced to have almost a full stack in order to not have a rebellion......advice?

[nvm]

Exterminate.

[Haakon]

Yeah, I fear that. Its just that its so unbalanced compared with medival :/

[Tidybeard]

Squalor's your biggest problem. Lower taxes are ultimately the way forward, until you hold the settlement for several turns. And yes, if it's worth it financially, exterminate populace.

[Kiwiphoenix]

Do as the Romans did. Specifically, set low taxes in newly conquered areas, and keep plenty of legionaries around to pacify the people. Then, as the people get more accustomed to your rule, slowly raise taxes. Maybe build some temples here and there, as well.

[Basil II the B.S]

If you need your settlements to grow, enslave. If not, just exterminate.
It depends anyways, on which settlement you are trying to keep.
Certain are just pain in the ass no matter what, others may just be too distant from the capital and so on.

[HanatielHawk]

Here are a few tips to raise your PO

1. Destroy the excisting foreign temple if it has a low PO bonus and build your own temple there, if it is a awesome temple which gives you huge PO bonus you'd better wait until you're able to build your own there.
2. Exterminate gives happy faces, use this ONLY in cities like Alexandria and Carthage, since they are very hard to hold when the population is above 30.000 -.-
3. Build arena's, hippodromes, temples, academies etc.
4. Change capitaldistance.
5. Create peasants to guard the city.
6. If the city is too great and you can nothing do about it because it rebels continuously, let it revolt, take it again and exterminate the population.
7. Place governors in the city, unless they gives more unrest or lower the PO, see option 8 how to fix this problem with governors.
8. In 3 i told to build academies, why? I'll explain:

If you put a general in your city as governor, normally your cities PO raises. The governor however, can be very stupid and so your influence and your PO decreases. If your governor learns because of the academy, scriptorium or ludgus magna you built in that city, the influence and management etc. increases so your PO. The best thing i alway's do is: When coming of age, send your 16year old teenager to a city with a very high level of academy until the age of 25 or 30, at this age he must have learned alot and his time is then ripe to govern a city. Send it to a city with low PO and (if he studied right and got many good traits and ancillaries) the PO raises more than if he were dumb. With this manner i got all my faction leaders to get the nickname: "The Cunning" one faction leader was called "Marcus the Cunning" and he got command 10 management 9 and influence 10 because of this Perfect not? Another example, very funny example actually. In the same campain of Marcus the Cunning, i got a character called Nero the Mad, he was dangerously mad, until I put him in Venice (renamed it from Patavium) where the Lugdus Magna was built and in a few turns, he got converted from Nero the Mad into Nero the Good

[LogicOneTwo]

If money becomes an issue, use peasants to hold cities (assuming the cities aren't in danger of invasion). The public order metric only factors in number of troops, not what type of troops. For example, with the Roman families, peasants are 120 troops at 100 denarii per turn. If you used Legionaries, you be paying 210d per turn for only 80 troops. I usually have about four peasant units for a large city, with low taxes. This whole thing assumes you don't have enough family members to act as governors, which is a much more effective way of keeping up public order (refer to H-Hawk above)...

[Kiwiphoenix]

Wait... don't peasants only count as half-size in garrison calculations?

[nvm]

That is only for Barbarian Invasion. And even then, it will be cheaper to keep peasants as garrison, unless the people are so rebellious you need 400 soldier bonus.

[Agent Miles]

You need a governor with high influence and/or traits/retinue that reduce unrest or improve law. So take a promising FM and design him for the job. Also, if you use huge units like I do, then just queue up a full row of peasants. That should take 2160 people out of the population.

[nvm]

Resist building farming in settlements that can grow into huge cities, as you can not destroy it. Patavium is one such example - do not build higher than Land Clereance, or even at all.

[HanatielHawk]

Resist building farming in settlements that can grow into huge cities, as you can not destroy it. Patavium is one such example - do not build higher than Land Clereance, or even at all.

You can better just build the Aquaduct and no panthenon because it causes 1% extra growth. But when built everything with PO bonusses you can hold patavium easily with very high tax. Best way to regulate pataviums growth is to make patavium a military city.

[MortenJessen]

Hi there.
Well, what size settlements are we talking about? There is no way exterminate is ever worth it if a city has below 6000 inhabs. But for the really big ones, extermination is your only option. Especially the Iberian, Egyptian and Carthaginian cities.
Y.S.
M. Jessen

[Haakon]

Yeah holding settlements in Rome is def. much harder than in medieval.

[Drowsy]

Exterminate, taxes to max. If they resist remove your Army from the town and let it rebel. Then exterminate again. The people will learn, it just sometimes takes them a while

[HanatielHawk]

Exterminate, taxes to max. If they resist remove your Army from the town and let it rebel. Then exterminate again. The people will learn, it just sometimes takes them a while

I don't like this way of treating a city/town etc. Because:
1- constant extermination is not the sollution to: - growth of wealth, military and eventualy your might and the ability to create more armies (because of economy).
2- If the town rebels you have a great chance that the rebels in that city have a full stack, or even worse: elephants such as yutsebs. They aren't always peasants but sometimes severe enemies. Think carefully before you apply this strategy.

[eugenioso]

exterminate the settlement, lower the takes, set a very dreaddy general or nice one, spam peasants...

the whole shebang

[Kiwiphoenix]

I've always found enslavement a better option than extermination. It drops the town's population considerably, making them easier to manage. But it also puts the remaining people to good use elsewhere, increasing your empire's population and speeding its development. Come to think of it, slavery seems to be the best option available...

Also, putting men in your training queue removes them from the population, so if a town is teetering on the edge, you can mass-recruit bulky units to reduce squalor, hopefully pushing them back into the blue. And if that fails and they do rebel, you at least will have several units on hand to chastise them with.