What's the point of superrebels?

Colossal_Elk said:

England had lots of peasant rebellions. Crushed them.

Spain had Muslim and peasant rebellions. Crushed them.

France had peasant rebellions. Crushed them.

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French revolution? Independance revolts in the Americas? Then it is not something I know very well, but I believe the Mughals did break up against rebels (and other nations). I like rebelions the way they are, except for the fact that I can simply accept demands for a very minor penalty (getting rid of sometimes 2 rebel stacks of 15k just for an improductive province for 20 years is insignificant once you blobbed some even if you had no chance to beat both rebel armies). Earlier, rebelions were just a minor annoyance; now it's more than just this. As of now it seems good because often times rebelions are easily delt with (rare and unless weakened, should be a minor annoyance) though if you end up with a low legitimacy ruler while having some religious disunity, then there's trouble on the horrizon. Rebelions are part of history, and impacted it; it shouldn't be click and forget. A poor ruler should threaten the realm stability/integrity; not just teching.

For everyone saying you should be able to beat untrained peasants pretty easily: you can. Peasants get no general, don't reinforce, and (like most rebels these days) die if you make them retreat.

More broadly: rebels can sometimes get excessive. But if they were never hard (or even occasionally impossible) to beat, rebellions would literally never succeed. While it's always annoying to have rebellions succeed against you, it's not unreasonable that it happens sometimes. And in EU game terms, that pretty much requires them having enough troops that they are hard to beat in the field.

drac313 said:

The main problem is certain rebels at certain times are way too strong.

For example, religious, peasant, and nationalist rebels...like in real life, should not be strong at all. They should be easily defeated. On the other hand, I feel as though pretender rebels should be strong because, as in real life, pretenders actually could amass armies that had a chance of overthrowing the king. This should also be the same with revolutionary rebels. So far, the most tedious to fight, difficult to defeat, and often conceded to rebels are the nationalist ones. ...

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One can of course question whether there were nationalist rebels before the 18th and 19th century. Before such a point it is probably more relevant to talk about noble/pretender/local leader, religious, peasant rebels - which certainly could fight and sometimes were successful. However the nationalist rebels of the 19th, 20th and 21st century have certainly proved their mettle - frequently to such an extent that the ruling class accepts demands before any actual fighting happens.

The introduction of nationalism made it even worse in 1.6. It's got a nerf bat slightly bu IMO the rebels are still the most powerful nation in game. I bewilders me on how nationalists can have the best generals in the world. Where were these guys when I needed them? Sure, the leaders might be local nobility, but the bulk of the force is commonfolk. There's no way they can beat my disciplined professional standing army!

Zander said:

For everyone saying you should be able to beat untrained peasants pretty easily: you can. Peasants get no general, don't reinforce, and (like most rebels these days) die if you make them retreat.

More broadly: rebels can sometimes get excessive. But if they were never hard (or even occasionally impossible) to beat, rebellions would literally never succeed. While it's always annoying to have rebellions succeed against you, it's not unreasonable that it happens sometimes. And in EU game terms, that pretty much requires them having enough troops that they are hard to beat in the field.

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Rebels were plenty hard in 1.5 up until post 1600, when any aggressive player should be strong enough to beat any nation one on one, much less some rebels.

To make rebels more challenging they made their size scale over time. This was a great idea.

Then, in true Paradox fashion, they also skyrocketed the total number of rebels by adding EU3 style nationalism. I'm not sure they realize there are settings below 11.

grisamentum said:

Actually if rebels get supported from elsewhere then the rebels get the unit types or tech level of the supporting country. I can't remember exactly how it works but that might have been what happened to you.

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Huh, if that's true half my attempts to foil my enemies as a low tech nation is actually helping them. Doubling their army size but making it horde unit makes rebels easy to squash.

Also, yes, EU4 needs a population mechanic, around this time period the world population never exceeded 1 billion,

http://blog.dssresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/world_population_1050_to_2050.jpg

http://www.geohive.com/earth/his_history1.aspx

Except most of you will have seen armies on islands that number the 100,000s. With the new OE mechanics you can get million strong rebels, especially with a large empire they just start spawning as 80 stacks.

When I wipe out 80,000 fighting men they should not be respawning soon, the revolt risk should not be identical before and after.

Thrake said:

French revolution? Independance revolts in the Americas? Then it is not something I know very well, but I believe the Mughals did break up against rebels (and other nations). I like rebelions the way they are, except for the fact that I can simply accept demands for a very minor penalty (getting rid of sometimes 2 rebel stacks of 15k just for an improductive province for 20 years is insignificant once you blobbed some even if you had no chance to beat both rebel armies). Earlier, rebelions were just a minor annoyance; now it's more than just this. As of now it seems good because often times rebelions are easily delt with (rare and unless weakened, should be a minor annoyance) though if you end up with a low legitimacy ruler while having some religious disunity, then there's trouble on the horrizon. Rebelions are part of history, and impacted it; it shouldn't be click and forget. A poor ruler should threaten the realm stability/integrity; not just teching.

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And? You realize that France and Britain defeated a laundry list of insurgencies before that? Those are exceptions, not the rule.

The American Revolution and French Revolution went way beyond simple peasant, religious or nationalist rebels. The French Revolution occurred on a scale far beyond the uprisings in France and Germany centuries prior. The instability in the Mughal Empire was in a country that was majority Hindu and had been ruled for decades by Aurangzeb, who fiercely pushed Islam on his subjects to public anger. Weak successors who followed his death compounded problems.

I think the biggest weakness with the rebellion system is that it's impossible to prevent them peacefully. There's no way to manually lower taxes on provinces, and if you invade an enemy province that has no other cores, you can't create a client state to minimize revolt risk (EVERY province should be able to have a vassal made, even if no other cores exist. Just make such nations limited specifically to their own culture, and whose cores are gone 25 years after the end of their existence). You can't say "special concessions for you, minority religion province!" Nope. Province stability should be individualized so that you can prevent revolts where you need without necessarily needing "harsh treatment," if you have the financial or political resources to do so.

Rebellions should be doom for crippled or unstable countries but shouldn't be a threat to an otherwise healthy state. If the state is healthy, it should be self-explanatory; they shouldn't have major uprisings except in exceptional circumstances (succession crises; junior partners in a Union being stronger than their overlord; etc.). And beating a major uprising should have long-reaching consequences.

Colossal_Elk said:

Read any history textbook that has a section about the Reformation and the thousands of peasants who got totally slaughtered by noble/merc/pro armies. Plenty of examples are in Lindberg's The European Reformations Sourcebook, a solid university text.

Commoners didn't have the leadership, logistics, equipment or funding to wage an effective war against a sovereign state. Most religious and nationalist rebels are going to be peasants because that was the class most people in almost every country hailed from.

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Better example: the Peasant's Crusade, where tens of thousands of peasants marched into Anatolia. And the Seljuks killed pretty much all of them with basically no losses.

Look at American continent. Every country there formed from a rebellion against European colonizers. A lot of countries in history had super rebels, and not just overseas.

Colossal_Elk said:

And? You realize that France and Britain defeated a laundry list of insurgencies before that? Those are exceptions, not the rule.

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My history here isn't that good, but I thought massive rebels were almost the rule in France and England during this period. The English Civil War / War of the Roses, before that the Magna Carta. In France, the Wars of Religion were something of a blip
One of most the interesting things about history, is that internal turmoil has been more problematic than external. Even a lot of international wars are truly more often civil or class wars. That was Thucydides take on it, anyways.

Since Cain and Abel it's usually somehow been a struggle between the aristocracy and the democracy. Cain represents the democracy, Able the aristocracy.

MustLoveCats said:

Look at American continent. Every country there formed from a rebellion against European colonizers.

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Not Canada-well unless you count it's formation as a result of the American Revolution, which is in some ways true, as loyalist migrations north did essentially establish non-Atlantic, English Canada.

MustLoveCats said:

Look at American continent. Every country there formed from a rebellion against European colonizers. A lot of countries in history had super rebels, and not just overseas.

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Nope. Most of Britain's colonies in the western hemisphere didn't become independent until the 60's or later. America's the outlier here, not the norm. Brazil's independence was a fairly short-won affair, since the Portuguese didn't really have the heart to double down on the war (whereas they'd do exactly that in Angola) and was cheaply won in terms of blood on both sides. It's only in the Thirteen Colonies (of, what, thirty two?) and the Spanish colonies that we see anything even vaguely reminiscent of the uberrebs in EU4.

If you look at the historical Janissary revolts, they were fairly small-scale affairs and typically decided long before major military action had to be taken. Contrast that to the game, which dropped 66 regiments on my capital in my current game. I understand that these scripted revolts need to be a big deal to be worthy of an event, but eventually the revolts just get silly. Like that reddit screenshot of some Byzantium player getting something like 107 peasant regiments in Rome.

MustLoveCats said:

Look at American continent. Every country there formed from a rebellion against European colonizers. A lot of countries in history had super rebels, and not just overseas.

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That's not quite what's represented by rebels in game. Those were rebellions of whole colonial governments, for the most part, and more akin to the way Karamanli achieved independence for Tripoli.

A lot of threads about rebels argue, on one hand, that rebels should be poorly organized and weak and, on the other hand, some rebels were real armies led by nobles rebelling against their overlord. The problem is that when you have rebels of the latter type, they have way more troops than rebellious nobles/governors/generals could possibly field. I almost never see a rebel stack that is small enough that, when they win independence, the newly formed OPM or 2PM can afford to keep them and disbands a good chunk of them immediately. When I do see them, it's in a 1BT province in the early game. Even the AI does not think the scaling is believable. And that is not even considering when multiple rebel stacks spawn in a single province.

Colossal_Elk said:

Read any history textbook that has a section about the Reformation and the thousands of peasants who got totally slaughtered by noble/merc/pro armies. Plenty of examples are in Lindberg's The European Reformations Sourcebook, a solid university text.

Commoners didn't have the leadership, logistics, equipment or funding to wage an effective war against a sovereign state. Most religious and nationalist rebels are going to be peasants because that was the class most people in almost every country hailed from.

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And when greater Poland rose up against their Swedish "liberators" in 1656 it was by no means a walk in the park. Some rebels are weak and get squashed but other are strong and topple lords. Most of the time peasants are weak but being peasants should not hinder them from having good leaders. There are precedents of low born being natural leaders.

Colossal_Elk said:

I think the biggest weakness with the rebellion system is that it's impossible to prevent them peacefully. There's no way to manually lower taxes on provinces...

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With humanist ideas and a theologian revolt risk is very low. By accepting local autonomy etc you achieve your lowered taxes and revolt dies down peacefully. The game gives you the tools, use them.

Colossal_Elk said:

snip

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I believe VeF has province specific stability.

Thrake said:

French revolution? Independance revolts in the Americas?

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As people already explained, revolutionary rebels should be strong. Not the billion random peasant rebellions that happened throughout history.

The independence revolts in America are a colonial nation declaring war for independence. Has absolutely nothing to do with rebels at all.

dstarsboy said:

but was 3 levels behind on military tech

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I think I found your problem.

Rebels are fine for the most part, I haven't had severe issues with them in a while in my Ironman game, but there is something I will complain about is the rationale for them spawning sometimes. I've been getting event rebels recently complaining about taxes while I've been at max legitimacy, max prestige, and +2 or +3 stability, which to me makes little sense. That being said I haven't had a problem wiping the 17-20 stacks that keep coming up because they've got significantly less discipline than I do.

drac313 said:

The main problem is certain rebels at certain times are way too strong.

For example, religious, peasant, and nationalist rebels...like in real life, should not be strong at all. They should be easily defeated. On the other hand, I feel as though pretender rebels should be strong because, as in real life, pretenders actually could amass armies that had a chance of overthrowing the king. This should also be the same with revolutionary rebels.

So far, the most tedious to fight, difficult to defeat, and often conceded to rebels are the nationalist ones. For being the nationalist rebels of two provinces, it can take my entire army plus mercs to defeat them...and only then with heavy losses. They should be adjusted.

I'm basically saying the "common rebels" (the kinds that always have a chance of popping up) should be nerfed while "event rebels" (like pretenders or revolutionaries) should be stronger or remain the same.

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This. In the sense that not all rebels are created equal. I don't see how a local peasant army for example could take down a large fort, with artillery, and have a super general, and beat regular armies with relative ease, even allowing for exceptions. Not to mention the sheer amount of rebels that spawn. From what I gather there may still a population modifier in EUIV.

There is a file within EUIV that accounts for these kinds of differences:

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?791021-How-to-adjust-00_rebel_types-in-a-mod

So, a good start to adjust this could be to start there.