As I played on: I had a new king come to the throne. I had two separate independence wars because each was it's own faction. I could have handled the vassals themselves, although it was a fight. But EACH got a 100k doomstack. Since I had just fought a war, and because half my levies went rebel, I could raise about 50-60k. Plus my retinue, which spent me broke in about 5 minutes as soon as it started fighting.
And then the dynamic of the war. You've got dozens of little vassal armies everywhere, siegeing things and getting warscore. Plus you have the doom armies to deal with. It's an impossible situation, when you deal with travel time. You can either clean up all the little siegeing armies. Or you can build superstacks to deal with the doomstacks assaulting your forts everywhere. You can't be everywhere at once. So good luck keeping all these groups from taking enough to win just in the time you can get a force there to deal with it.
This is frankly absurd and just not enjoyable.
I just posted in another thread about how I just beat the first Mongol invasion with this country a little bit before. It was very difficult, but I pulled it off. This revolt was much much worse. I would rather face the Mongols again than two revolts at the same time. The revolts are more troops. They're spread out all over the map, so you can't contain them. There's a million little armies seiging everywhere in a patchwork over your country. You have no idea what's going on half the time. And the revolts are more powerful.
That's just wrong. Two internal revolts should not be more powerful than the entire Mongol invasion. But they are. In raw power. Then with the dynamics of the war, they're even worse to beat.
Look, I like the new faction system a lot. I like the late game challenge it brings. But really? This free troops event is way unballanced. It awards far too many troops for the strength of your nation. It doesn't take into account that there are likely multiple revolts at once because of how factions work. It doesn't take into account the strategic situation of a million little armies all over the map PLUS doomstacks PLUS a timer to win before they reach 100 percent. It's way too easy for them to reach 100 percent anyway, because when you're a big empire a dozen counties is nothing. They can easily win before you can even get a force in place to beat them.
This wasn't a problem for a smaller nation. But for a big one -- this is very out of whack. I'm thinking I'm probably going to abandon my game now. It's just not fun at this stage. The only way to keep playing is to savescum. I have to make sure there's never more than one revolt at a time. Never one when I'm low on manpower. Never one when I'm at war. If the timing doesn't work out, I have to reload. Not because of the revolt itself. But because the number of free troops it awards is a like a Mongol invasion each time. 100K? Really? 200K on the field at the same time PLUS their own natural armies? Against a nation that can only call up 175K levies in the best circumstances when everybody's happy, which is much less when half the nation has revolted and everybody's angry because you got a new king.
Oh, and that new king was a grey enimnence with 25 diplomacy. Good luck if he had been a loser. Also, I did by best to keep folks content. When my new king came to the throne, I started buying off the biggest guys until I went broke -- about 1000k worth of bribes. Imagine what would have happened if I hadn't.
The game is really unplayable at the late game now. It's sad. It's otherwise a great patch.
