It’s really frustrating and I regretted pulling the trigger almost as soon as I did. I thought it would be based on loyalty or something, but no it almost seems like it’s random. The revolt ended up with a much larger army than I could field. Of course their soldiers fought like tissue paper (I guess they don’t retain your mil traditions and innovations?) so it wasnt too hard to level the playing field. But the amount of land involved still made the thing drag on forever. And the revolt deletes a bunch of your buildings, so that sucks.
And then when you win, your reward is to have a couple hundred pops in major cities across the empire convert to Hellenistic. Macedonian gets demoted from noble to citizen but remains your primary culture (so you cannot regrant noble rights).
the whole thing is a waste. Rather than a fun end game boss it feels like you randomly shot yourself in a dozen places, then struggled to stop all the bleeding, and your reward is to knock a bunch of levels off your iq. FUN
I quit and started a new game. This time I never clicked on the mission. Discovered a bug in the process too. Once you get access to the mission you always have access to it until completed. Missions don’t remember your progress if you quit and restart them though. This means you can click the first mission that gives you 4 innovations. Then cancel the tree. This particular tree is always available if you have access to it, so there’s no cooldown. You can Immediately select the tree and get 4 innovations again. It doesn’t matter how far you progress either, as long as you don’t actually finish the tree you can get infinite innovations this way.