What's the correct way to integrate your new lands and avoid low provincial loyalty?

[klopkr]

I've played Imperator a fair amount, got back into it again recently and having a blast. But I'm running into the same problem that made me stop playing back when the game was abandoned by pdox.

I always get to a point where I control a decent area of my portion of the map, and I get into a low provincial loyalty spiral. Is it because I'm going too fast? Not integrating well enough? What do I do when they start endlessly rebelling and keeping me at war all the time? Should I have built some more buildings everywhere?

 

[olivenkranz]

I've played Imperator a fair amount, got back into it again recently and having a blast. But I'm running into the same problem that made me stop playing back when the game was abandoned by pdox.

I always get to a point where I control a decent area of my portion of the map, and I get into a low provincial loyalty spiral. Is it because I'm going too fast? Not integrating well enough? What do I do when they start endlessly rebelling and keeping me at war all the time? Should I have built some more buildings everywhere?

There are a couple factors that go into it. A happy pop does not add to unrest or very limited amounts.

First, the governor should be highly skilled in finesse and have a low corruption (that is to say 0) and have a decent loyalty (at least 50)
Second, building buildings that improve pop happiness helps, especially Temple and Theater.
Third, inventions, laws, deities and other sources of population happiness. Very important here is stability. War exhaustion matters too, although I usually don't mind it that much for the mil xp and compensate it.
Over time, if you invest enough in the religious invention tree you'll never have that bad of a happiness that a province rebels. Loyalty may still go low and some mods such as Bronze Age will make this harder. A focus on assimilation (or integrating a culture) will also keep happiness high, provided you don't have too many integrated.

 

[DukeLeto42]

Adding on, war exhaustion is mostly a problem when you keep levies raised long-term. A transition to legions or even mercs means having a stack rebel-busting is not much of an issue. As for governors, prioritize low corruption above most other things. Yes, high finesse will make their focuses better, but even 10-20 corruption will put a lot of your provinces into the red.

 

[Zander]

I always get to a point where I control a decent area of my portion of the map, and I get into a low provincial loyalty spiral. Is it because I'm going too fast?

Aggressive Expansion is a huge component here, so certainly if that is high you will have general province loyalty problems. AE also drops pretty fast at peace, though. If you're not explicitly taking advantage of the ways the game allows chain conquest and staying at 100 AE, letting it drop low between big wars can do a lot to help your provincial loyalty.

 

[Grandpa Maur]

While in general, as other said, you appoint good noncorrupt governor and either order harsh treatment/the policy increasing happines i forgot name of, or conversion/assimilation policies, and build buildings speeding these up, there are few more things like anabasis, fort building or even provincial improvements...


But, i wonder if it would be feasible to approach it in another way. Instead of waiting for assimilation, enslave the population, move in some of your primary culture pops (slaves or tribesmen) and order promotion/demotion policies so that nobles anf citizens are soon replaced by your primary culture from promoted slaves and original pops reduced to slavery.

In general, loyalty and unrest depend a lot more on higher strata and slaves have negligible impact so in theory that should also work, though i have not tried it.

 

[Barron of Gondor]

OK, so this is actually a deep mechanic that took me some time to understand: Provence loyalty is tied to unrest, which is generated by unhappy Pops(any pop less than 50% happiness is unhappy). So you would think that your job is to make them happy right? eh... sorta. If all pops were equal, that would be your job. But in Imperator, Some pops are more equal than others.

Pops have something called "Political Weight" A Noble has a weight of 3, a Citizen has a weight of 1.5, A Freeman has a weight of 1, A Tribesman of .75, and a Slave has .35. So a you need 9 unhappy slave pops to generate as much unrest as 1 Noble.

Knowing that, you can do one of two things. First is the easiest, integration of the conquered pops. If you integrate the pops, they will not assimilate to your culture, but become loyal subjects. This is very good early on when you only have a handful of cultures. But later on you’ll have dozens of cultures, and want to integrate cultures for their traditions rather than their pop happiness.

Second option; If you can't make them happy, make them not matter. Enslave a population, then found colonies. When you set their rights to slaves, they cannot promote up and can only demote. This will take some time, but slowly, your incoming colonists will promote to become the city's nobility, and the local populace will slowly demote to slaves. This will aid you in the long process of assimilation of a culture. You also want to build Court of Laws, Temples and Theaters. The Temples and Theaters give you a noticeable boost to provincial loyalty, as well as aid in conversion and assimilation. The Court of Laws give a minor bonus to loyalty, but you’re not building it for that. You build them for the citizen ratio. Because you’ve set the local population as slaves, your incoming freeman pops from migration will promote up to citizen and count more in political weight.

A tip when you do this; try to do as much, fresh after a conquest. You get an assimilation boost fresh after a conquest.

 

[Barron of Gondor]

Another tip:
Building all those buildings cost a ton of money, and you don’t always have all that money…

If you 100% annex a nation you get the “nobility of X” event. Take the imprison option. You’ll imprison a ton of characters, that you can then sell into slavery for about 10 ducats a character. That will fuel your infrastructure efforts.

 

[kimuyama]

I have the same problem. The issue for me is that I can't seem to get out of the spiral once it starts, I can't build buildings, conversion is not fast enough, harsh treatment is not effective enough, a non corrupt governor mitigates it a little, but again - not enough.
The game is a bit opaque about my options at this stage

Aggressive Expansion is a huge component here, so certainly if that is high you will have general province loyalty problems. AE also drops pretty fast at peace, though. If you're not explicitly taking advantage of the ways the game allows chain conquest and staying at 100 AE, letting it drop low between big wars can do a lot to help your provincial loyalty.

I'm not disputing this per se, but there seem to be no info in any tooltip I can find that aggressive expansion is impacting loyalty, or pop happiness (but of course, paradox could just have missed adding that info, as is tradition ).
Speaking of which, how do I quicken AE reduction? I'm losing 0.22 a month, and I'm currently at 32. There are techs of course, but can I do anything else?

 

[Synen]

Speaking of which, how do I quicken AE reduction? I'm losing 0.22 a month, and I'm currently at 32. There are techs of course, but can I do anything else?

Go to the diplomacy tab and change diplomatic stance to appeasing.

 

[olivenkranz]

I have the same problem. The issue for me is that I can't seem to get out of the spiral once it starts, I can't build buildings, conversion is not fast enough, harsh treatment is not effective enough, a non corrupt governor mitigates it a little, but again - not enough.
The game is a bit opaque about my options at this stage


I'm not disputing this per se, but there seem to be no info in any tooltip I can find that aggressive expansion is impacting loyalty, or pop happiness (but of course, paradox could just have missed adding that info, as is tradition ).
Speaking of which, how do I quicken AE reduction? I'm losing 0.22 a month, and I'm currently at 32. There are techs of course, but can I do anything else?

The religious tree is what you need. It is imo the most important tech tree.

 

[Grandpa Maur]

I have the same problem. The issue for me is that I can't seem to get out of the spiral once it starts, I can't build buildings, conversion is not fast enough, harsh treatment is not effective enough, a non corrupt governor mitigates it a little, but again - not enough.
The game is a bit opaque about my options at this stage


I'm not disputing this per se, but there seem to be no info in any tooltip I can find that aggressive expansion is impacting loyalty, or pop happiness (but of course, paradox could just have missed adding that info, as is tradition ).
Speaking of which, how do I quicken AE reduction? I'm losing 0.22 a month, and I'm currently at 32. There are techs of course, but can I do anything else?

That's because AE does not affect loyalty/happiness.

It does affect, quite strongly, stability drift, and stability level affect happiness and happiness affect unrest and unrest affects loyalty. So, it's quite long causal chain. But it's all there in tooltips, iirc.

Anyway, it's doable to stabilize the situation even if you conquer wrong culture wrong religion province if barely (might be impossible if it's very populous). It just requires focusing on doing all that's necessary (i think everything was already mentioned here. You missed anabasis btw), though that's costly.

Oh, imports were not mentioned. Impiorting stuff can raise happiness.

But even if you don't, if ypu slow it enough, after reannexing revolters, you should have converted a bit so the second time would be easier.

Btw, 32 isn't that bad. Once as Parthia agter particularly good main Arsaces war i was at 100 and even then i managed to stabilize most of Iran (granted, it had the right religion, rest was hopeless), even at 0 stability... Even though i was constantly at 0 PI due to spamming anabasis

 

[DukeLeto42]

Oh, something we've all failed to mention:

Civilization matters

Every 1% civilization means:

+.3% Noble happiness
+.2% Citizen happiness
+.1% Freemen happiness
-.4% tribesmen happiness
(no effect on slave happiness)

This means that raising your civilization values is generally going to have fairly substantial pop happiness effects, but it also means that conquests in tribal areas are going to become unhappy until such a time as the local pops get dragged out of tribesmen into freemen and slaves.

 

[Grandpa Maur]

Hm, interesting. In practice civ values are fairly slow to change, except that founding a city in tribal are - especially if you get some your culture pops - is very impactful.

But then, tribal areas usually are not that hard to stabilize with low population.

 

[DukeLeto42]

Hm, interesting. In practice civ values are fairly slow to change, except that founding a city in tribal are - especially if you get some your culture pops - is very impactful.

But then, tribal areas usually are not that hard to stabilize with low population.

True, but it means country civilization modifiers are not just output boosts but secretly happiness boosts, which scale up as tribal areas are forced out of tribesman and their territory civilization values catch up to what they're supposed to.

 

[Grandpa Maur]

True, but it means country civilization modifiers are not just output boosts but secretly happiness boosts, which scale up as tribal areas are forced out of tribesman and their territory civilization values catch up to what they're supposed to.

I agree, long term it's important.

That said i'm not sure i like the fact in long term countries get more output and more stability...

 

[DukeLeto42]

I agree, long term it's important.

That said i'm not sure i like the fact in long term countries get more output and more stability...

It's meant to be countered by rising military costs from tech, not to mention the expectation that you're expanding and having to manage more provinces (and more provinces outside your home region, so less loyal by default).

Still, I'll completely agree that there's really no mechanic for a big nation to really collapse, and that's an issue for the late game.

 

[GrandEurypterid]

Another thing of importance- the first building you want in a new conquest is a fort. Forts reduce an entire province's unrest, and any that hit zero will add to province loyalty instead. A good idea is to make sure the province has a local capital; if you build a fort on it (or multiple levels if you have the spare change), as well as a few tiers of one of the 'ratio/happiness' buildings (preferably aligned with the province's trade goods- even if you're exporting most of your marble you'll still have a +4% noble happiness in that province), you'll get a reasonably stable city in the middle and some lower-power hinterlands around it that you can suppress with forts.

If you don't have enough money to make investments like that, you might not be investing it correctly. You always need to allow yourself enough of an income that you can build more things that boost your income- you don't want a long wait between conquering a province and building a fort, or building new roads so your armies can readily fight multi-front wars against fellow large powers, for example. As a general rule, getting more trade is the quickest and easiest way to get more money, so prioritise ports (which help build import routes), multiple of the same trade goods in one provinces, and mineral or agricultural resources that you can place down a Farm Estate or Mining Estate (or even just give to a family so they can build farms or mines on your behalf!) for +1 trade good from that building. Once you have enough cash that you can invest in cities, you can go and unlock Foundries in the military tree, which are +1 trade good from that building in any city. Basically, more base trade goods = quick cash.

(In addition to point 2, don't overspend! Start your legion with cheap troops like light infantry, archers or light cavalry. Heavy troops require heavy infrastructure.)

A third useful thing is to use client states and other subjects, especially on borderlands that will need a lot of investment to build up. Each client state's capital province is basically a free 100% loyalty that comes with its own income and a free army! If there aren't already forts to work with, that's a big bonus you get for 1 diplo-slot immediately rather than lots of gold later. It can also make it easier to balance the power of your governors (a small governor and a few client states are easier to manage than one big governor).

 

[Grandpa Maur]

That reminds me, anyone knows what is the mechanic of families building buildings in holdings?

 

[GrandEurypterid]

That reminds me, anyone knows what is the mechanic of families building buildings in holdings?

For the most part they just build mines on mining settlements and farms on farming settlements. So if one of your families is noticeably weaker, it might be worth giving them some vegetables, marble or other such products to invest in.

 

[Grandpa Maur]

For the most part they just build mines on mining settlements and farms on farming settlements. So if one of your families is noticeably weaker, it might be worth giving them some vegetables, marble or other such products to invest in.

I was thinking more in the direction of how often does it happen. Is family head cash important, does the number of holdings held influence, for example, on frequency of building, etc.