How to deal with an absurd number of rebels

[WoollyMammoth]

I took 24 provinces - only had to core 10 (5 in each colonial zone) to make a nation which would core them and take them from me

Of course, the rebel mechanics determining their strength and size is a bit out of whack

Are they? And if so, by how many. So, what is the other option? Player creates (merc) stack-o-doom to whack-a-mole a normal sized rebel stack? It's such a tough thing to nail down. Before 1.8 I loathed rebels (don't get me started on adventurers that were in CKII), but with 1.8, I like it better. If there can be improvements I'd be glad to hear it, but let's not get all hyperbole on what could be a step in the right direction with 1.8. It's been requested a number of times, and that is re-introducing a population number, that would quell this discussion once and for all. If people can see how many population a province has. A nice touch could also be a drop in manpower when there is (a certain kind) of revolt.

Another option is to create a mod to adjust the number of rebels. You can even use a console command to add manpower if you feel the numbers are off, and you need to adjust for accuracy and to rebalance a part of the game. You can't do that on Ironman, no, but in the end it's about the fun of the game, and not getting all frustrated about not getting an achievement in a game exactly as you want it to be. Until the rebels are perfectly balanced anyway. I use console sometimes when I run into a bug and it is one of the reasons I don't play in ironman. It makes the game a lot more fun and relaxing. Not a cop out, or excusing Paradox. If there is a problem it should be fixed or balanced, but to take the pressure off while you are playing. In the meantime hopefully all the bugs will be worked out.

It's still not clear to me though what would people consider the optimal (or practical/ realistic) amount of rebels then? How about some concrete numbers or formulas?

 

[BarrosRodrigues]

It's still not clear to me though what would people consider the optimal (or practical/ realistic) amount of rebels then? How about some concrete numbers or formulas?

Would you be convinced if I showed you a video where I kill 10000000 professional soldiers (i.e any kind of EU IV rebel) in less than 20 years? How about 100000000 rebels in less than 20 years? That's at least 1885000000 professional soldiers killed by the end of the game but if I really want it I can double or triple that number with ease. You know this game's mechanics allow this kind of BS but people seem to think this is fine.

 

[Big Blue Blob]

Just base the numbers on historical army sizes at the time. So a rebel army in England around 1500 might be a few thousand strong, maybe 10,000 if it was very well supported by some nobles. Absolutely not 40,000 with thousands of cavalry.

Army defections would be an important part of this. When rebellions succeed, it is often because some of the army defects to their cause. Units recruited in the rebelling provinces have a high chance to defect. This would require a switch to manpower per province instead of overall, but that would be a far better system (why can I recruit thousands of men in Senegal as France when almost all my manpower is in France? Seems daft to me). That way, regiments could not be recruited in the same place over and over again, and an area could only sustain so many regiments at once since soldiers are constantly retiring and being replaced.

 

[AlphaSonic]

IMO, all people strugling with rebels should use the button INCREASE AUTONOMY. It's so easy not getting a single (non event) rebelion.

 

[Naresh]

I was dealing with 10/15% RR in these provinces. Non accepted culture, nationalism, wrong culture, over extended, everything. Can't increase autonomy past a certain point. As I said, it was my fault.

You can't just state increase autonomy as the catch all solution to all issues. Admittedly 9/10 it does significantly help, but there are other times where even that nice reduction to RR isn't enough.

 

[Freudia]

I really don't like 'increase autonomy' as a solution early in the game; the extra autonomy added to the provinces takes forever to come down until you get a LA-reducing government type. If you happen to start the game as one, then go ahead, but for a large number of monarchy starts it's kind of a bleh solution. However, if the alternative is 'die to rebels', then there's no reason not to, so I guess it's more 'don't do it unless you know you can't survive otherwise'.

 

[lizardo]

Nobody has mentioned the fact that those rebel armies comprise much of the able male population of Anatolia. Who's going to gather the harvest in? Be careful killing them, or you may have a famine on your hands.

O, no, wait, you won't, because EU4 is a strange world where huge rebel armies form and are slaughtered with no consequences.

Having seen 40,000 Lollards rampaging around England before in my Bretagne game, I say this has gone too far. Rebel numbers must be reduced to levels that make sense, and the consequences on agriculture of mobilising that many peasants must be clear.

This is because in EU there are only buildings, not people. All units are actually magical constructs that look like people but are made of straw.

It's interesting that in EYU IV there's not even a pretense of listing population. One would have hoped that finally the designers would have put that previously useless number to use, but they just eliminated it.

Given where EU is, the most reasonable thing to do is have both the rebels and the government pull from the same force pool. That way there is some rational limit to rebels.

The other thing I noticed is that in my colonies the rebels have the same level of technology as I do. And better generals. And consistently better die rolls. What happened to their spears? Wasn't I able to conquer them because they were backward?

The game counts gold but refuses to count people. It's inane.

 

[radiatoren]

It is kind of a reverse Robin Hood.

I played as Catstill and was careless enough to get a peasant revolt after having expanded in Africa and eaten Portugals islands, while having 10k army, 30k manpower debt coincidently corresponding with my potential manpower pool. 20 years and more than 300k rebels later, they have been handily defeated by merc armies, combined with allies. My manpower after dealing with the small issue is positive, I have managed to build several buildings and a stronger navy while I am still making a handsome profit. All in all, it was not that much of a challenge apart from keeping me out of wars with other nations for a bit of time.

Another game I played as Catsina. I expanded slowly but ended up with a few bad events increasing unrest, not enough military power to delay them and no way to increase autonomy to stop them. 3 stacks of rebels, the size of my forcelimit spawn with better leaders than I have, my vassal and my allies have insufficient forces to defeat them and I don't have enough economy to merc them down due to how extremely hard the penalty for going slightly over land forcelimit hurts the economy. Needless to say that when my enemies declared on me and didn't have the forcelimit to even get close to fighting them, I was a bit perplexed...

I am confused on that account since exactly the challenge for smaller vs larger country was mentioned as something they had tried to improve from 1.7. Somehow they have managed to make it even harder for small countries and easier for large countries, which is impressive! The only reasonable explanation would be that the system is bugged somehow.

 

[ChildeR]

It's still not clear to me though what would people consider the optimal (or practical/ realistic) amount of rebels then? How about some concrete numbers or formulas?

They should remove concrete numbers so comparisons to historical population figures don't offend people's sensibilities.

 

[WoollyMammoth]

Just base the numbers on historical army sizes at the time. So a rebel army in England around 1500 might be a few thousand strong, maybe 10,000 if it was very well supported by some nobles. Absolutely not 40,000 with thousands of cavalry.

Army defections would be an important part of this. When rebellions succeed, it is often because some of the army defects to their cause. Units recruited in the rebelling provinces have a high chance to defect. This would require a switch to manpower per province instead of overall, but that would be a far better system (why can I recruit thousands of men in Senegal as France when almost all my manpower is in France? Seems daft to me). That way, regiments could not be recruited in the same place over and over again, and an area could only sustain so many regiments at once since soldiers are constantly retiring and being replaced.

That sounds like an interesting idea.

The thing with historical army sizes is that player army sizes can be much bigger. Adding a population and manpower number to the province would allow for more accurate numbers.
It could work well with new rebel mechanic as well. Nonetheless rebellions should have various impacts on the current state of affairs, but I don't think that is the complaint here?

 

[AlphaSonic]

I was dealing with 10/15% RR in these provinces. Non accepted culture, nationalism, wrong culture, over extended, everything. Can't increase autonomy past a certain point. As I said, it was my fault.

You can't just state increase autonomy as the catch all solution to all issues. Admittedly 9/10 it does significantly help, but there are other times where even that nice reduction to RR isn't enough.

Core all the provinces an cede them back to their owners, you won't lose cores. Reconquer them, you don't have nationalism now.

 

[Big Blue Blob]

They should remove concrete numbers so comparisons to historical population figures don't offend people's sensibilities.

It is easy to make a good enough guess as to how many people, horses and guns there were in different places at different times. Well-equipped rebel armies of 60,000 with many horses are fine in China if they are well supported by some richer people (not just peasants), but seeing the same of peasants in Mexico revolting over conquering some provinces in Peru just makes no sense at all, even in alternate history. My system of manpower by province would solve at least some of the problems. What would we do without numbers? Have rebel armies of ??? men? That is fine when the player has no intelligence on them (he should not know how many are in an enemy army exactly, or where they are, without spies or scouts), but once in battle he should have a very good idea of the size of the force facing him.

 

[ChildeR]

What would we do without numbers? Have rebel armies of ??? men?

I mean have 42 units of undefined size instead of 42000 men. That way those who find such a large rebellion unrealistic can imagine each unit only has 100 men.

 

[Thinuel]

They should remove concrete numbers so comparisons to historical population figures don't offend people's sensibilities.

Or they could at least limit the number of rebels that can spawn in a province to be less that the population of given province. I was playing as byz around 1600. Went to war with countries around the Horn of Africa and gave a ton of provinces to my vassal Iraq which went from 67 basetax to 122 basetax in a matter of years. Now i was fully excepting some major rebellions to crush but wwhoah. In a year 512 rebel divisions had spawned with 121 in a single province. I took me 5-6 years to kill them all, since more just kept spawning. Don't get me wrong, I totally expected this from the gameplay point of view, but they should really cap the number of rebels to the population of given province.

 

[WoollyMammoth]

Or they could at least limit the number of rebels that can spawn in a province to be less that the population of given province.

Unless it is a gathering point of sorts, attracting rebels from surrounding provinces. Similar somewhat to CKII. However, these numbers could still be based on the population of those provinces (from other countries).
Small stacks popping up in different provinces could make it easy for the player to whack-a-mole small rebel stacks.

 

[vranasm]

next time feed territory to vassal who is 5 military tech levels behind you

you can see and manage something like this ;-)

I had no troubles in 1.8 AoW with the new vassal feeding in wars mechanic with rebels. I had like 1 rebellion which spawned in 18th century... managed the early game with careful vassal feeding and small mine expanding.

vassals otoh...they had some troubles :-D

 

[Thinuel]

Unless it is a gathering point of sorts, attracting rebels from surrounding provinces. Similar somewhat to CKII. However, these numbers could still be based on the population of those provinces (from other countries).
Small stacks popping up in different provinces could make it easy for the player to whack-a-mole small rebel stacks.

With 500+ rebels there were own sizable stacks (32-78) in all neighboring provinces as well. More generally the number of people in provinces with unrest * SOME_CLEVER_MODIFIER (unrest %?) needs to be an absolute ceiling for rebellions.

 

[Path]

I had no troubles in 1.8 AoW with the new vassal feeding in wars mechanic with rebels. I had like 1 rebellion which spawned in 18th century... managed the early game with careful vassal feeding and small mine expanding.

vassals otoh...they had some troubles :-D

Enjoy it while it lasts--it's only a matter of time before this gets nerfed into the ground, seeing as it's ridiculously overpowered. Feeding low-tech vassals (hordes are fantastic for this since you can expolit their CB too) with land means all those rebel stacks spawn at a tech level far below yours, making it trivial to kill off hundreds of thousands of rebels at the cost of a few mercs.

 

[Pilot00]

4 Pages and only a couple of guys opened their eyes to see that those damn are PRETENDERS meanwhile->Its your fault for OE Op.....yada yada yada.....

Sigh....

 

[gaius valerius]

You grew to fast and ran into bad luck with a ruler with low legitimacy.

Don't see what is wrong. Game is working as intended. People have a hard time accepting setbacks in games - me to ofc - while if you think about it, this is part of this game.