Endless provincial revolts, how to solve them?

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Cassilda

Queen in Yellow
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Oct 18, 2005
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A regular problem that I have is that I'm always stuck in an endless rinse and repeat cycle of provincial revolts. The rebels more a nuisance than a real problem, but since I'm seeing that Carthage, controlled by the AI, is mostly of the same size and doesn't seem to incur in any similar problem, I guess I'm doing something wrong. And in my previous game as Egypt, AI Rome got really big and almost no revolts either. My strategy is to give some of the rights to the non integrated cultures like intermarriage, inheritance and so on and also developing the provinces with new cities and buildings that increase the pops happiness, but it seems it's never really enough. There is something I am missing?
 
How is your Stability and War Exhaustion? They're big components of Pop Happiness, which in turn causes Unrest, and ultimately poor Provincial Loyalty.
 
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Raising civilisation value is a governor policy often overlooked as it grants non tribal pop happiness regardless of culture.
Also, to raise civ value substantially, you must also invest in many buildings to raise it's maximum limit even higher.

Edit: Harsh treatment is ok if you're expanding quickly but it's cost is it pushes pops out of the province. I think it is simply putting a band-aid on a wound but a good short term solution. If you plan to grow wide, use harsh treatments, if you plan to grow tall, work on raising civ value.
 
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I only integrate cultures or ignore them completely. What I do however if province loyalty is going down is switching governor policy to harsh treatment and/or replace governors with a lot of corruption. Also try to assign governors with high finesse.
 
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It means you're having problems with your pop happiness (which can be remedied by building certain buildings, importing trade goods, integrating their culture, making sure they have enough food). Try and see if you can't use the harsh treatment governor policy until you've improved their happiness through other means.
 
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I just finished a Rome run where I accumulated almost all of what Rome had at the End of this timespan. Key for me was to give Citizenship to the major cultures like Punic und Macedonian in the Mediteranean. I tried to stay with the number of accepted cultures at a happiness level of 30-40 as shown in the culture tab
In cities I alway built the two unique conversion buldings, the great temple and the great theater which also provide happiness once the population is converted. Furthermore after getting the AE reduction and Imperial Challenge CB I focused on getting inventions that give province loyalty, state religion happiness etc.
It's also important to check if your governours have a high corruption value. That also generates unrest in provinces.
You can also check which types of pops specifically are unhappy in the province and import some appropriate tradegoods if you have some trade routes available. Olives for Slaves, Wine for Freeman, Earthenware for Citizens and Cloth for Nobles are usually not that rare.
 
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There are also some must have capital bonus which helps a lot for pop happiness and thus less revolt. The surplus of fish (+8% freeman happiness), prec. metal (+8% citizen happiness) are nice to have.
Furthermore you should have a governor with low corruption and there are some invention that gives flat provincial happiness. Grand Temple is also nice to have to get faster religion convertion ( note that the + loyality is territorical not provincial so it is only good in high pop territory)
 
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Play the game slower, look at your unrest map mode and the loyalty tooltips, dig down to province->territory -> population view as needed to see what's causing unhappiness -> unrest -> province disloyalty -> rebellions

Roughly speaking, the ways to make your pops and provinces happier is to harmonize their cultural composition / cultural rights and to balance out rowdy lower-class pops with happy higher class pops.

Then of course there are considerations from AE, WE, stability, laws, ideas and omens...


edit:
you are no forced to engage with all this granularity. it can be treated as background simulation... what you ought to do with it is wholly relative to how you would like to play the game and what you'd like to achieve.
 
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