Rebellion

Unrest

Unrest is generated through unhappy pops, low stability in your country, war-exhaustion, governors policies and corruption. It can also be reduced by various laws, positive stability and by assigning armies to the local governor.

The happiness of a pop depends on its culture and its religion compared to the country’s religion and culture. Different pop-types also want different civilization levels to be happy, while a tribesman want it as low as possible, the citizens want it rather high. Different laws makes different types of pops more or less happy as well. Access to different goods in the city will also make pops happier.

If a pop has less than 50% happiness, they will contribute to the unrest of the province.

Governor local troops

An army without a general can be assigned to a regional governor. Once assigned, the army cannot leave the region until detached again, but it can freely move within the region. It can even fight in a war and occupy enemy land inside the geographical region, with governor simultaneously acting as an unpaid general for all his armies. Unlike with generals, there is no cooldown on assigning and detaching an army to a region.

Each full cohort of the assigned army suppresses -1 unrest in each city per 25 province pops (see game file references to AREA_TROOPS_POP_COUNT). Suppression is capped at -4 unrest.

Cohorts lacking manpower count proportionally.

Neither cohort's morale (maintenance), nor governor's attributes impact the suppression.

Since region provinces will usually have different population, unrest suppression in each province will also be different. For example, a 4-cohort army assigned to a region with a 25-pop province and a 100-pop province will suppress 4 unrest in every city of the first province and 1 unrest in every city of the second province.

Impact

Each point of unrest applies the following modifiers:

• −2% Local tax
• −2% Commerce income
• −2% Research points
• −2% Local manpower
• −0.1 City provincial loyalty

Once the city's unrest reaches 10, some actions are unavailable:

• Regiments recruitment
• Buildings construction
• Pop manual interaction

If the unrest is brought below 10, these actions become available once again.

Loyalty

There are three types of loyalty:

Province loyalty

Each province have a loyalty value to the country. If it goes down to 0, then that province is basically 100% autonomous and provide nothing to you. They will cancel all trade to other parts of your country and every city will be acting as if it had at least 10 unrest.

If enough provinces are disloyal, they will either start an independence war, if the dominant culture is not your primary culture-group, or a civil war if they are of your culture-group.

There are alerts if your provinces are disloyal, or if you risk a civil war or major revolt.

Cohorts loyalty

Each cohort in an army can become loyal to a single person. This depends on the charisma of the commander during a battle or a siege.

When a cohort is loyal to a character the country pays less maintenance for it, as the commander of the unit it is loyal to, starts paying the unit him or herself.

There is a slight drawback or two to having cohorts loyal to a character instead of the country, like for example, a cohort that is personally loyal to a character will not allow it to be transferred away from the unit in any way. Also, a character with cohorts loyal to him tend to become more disloyal over time.

Character loyalty

Characters loyalty to the Country is one of the more interesting aspects to manage, as disloyal characters is a huge risk, as disloyal characters will refuse to abandon their armies or provinces, and if enough are disloyal they will form a block together to form a civil war.

Some forms of government, a few inventions and some ideas increase loyalty of all characters. Giving people titles and offices will increase their loyalty, but removing them decrease their loyalty. Characters of the same faction as the ruler tends to become more loyal over time, while friends and rivals of the ruler will see their loyalty go up and down as well.

When the loyalty of a character is below 33%, that character is considered disloyal.

Civil war

While a major revolt is not very different from having a large nation revolt from you in other games, civil wars are dramatically different. A particularly weak or tyrannical ruler can see a significant portion of their characters, armies, and provinces revolt against in them in the name of overthrowing the government.

The countdown to a civil war will begin when the power base of all disloyal characters is greater than the state's current Civil War Threshold. The base threshold is 25%, which can be increased by positive stability and decreased by negative stability and higher country rank. Larger nations therefore tend to be more prone to civil wars, as they have more powerful characters to handle and need a smaller proportion of them to be disloyal before a civil war can break out. This timer ticks up every month, and if the situation is not brought under control the civil war will break out after 40 months. During this time there will be an alert notifying the player that attention should be brought to the loyalty of powerful characters immeidately. Of course, there are also alerts as soon as a single province is disloyal or a general is.

When the civil war begins, a new dynamic tag is created with all disloyal characters (with their commanded armies) and provinces joining it, and possibly friends and families as well. The civil war revolter will start new wars with any nation that the parent country was already at war with. Civil war tags can be recognized by their name, which will always be the adjective of their parent nation followed by "Revolt". The flag will normally be randomly generated, but a few major states have pre-scripted flags for their civil war revolters that reflect an inversion of their normal flags:

• Roman Revolt
• Seleukid Revolt
• Phrygian Revolt
• Egyptian Revolt
• Macedonian Revolt

A civil war is a war-to-the-death, where provinces automatically switch owners when they are occupied, and losing a civil war is considered a game over like any other annexation. Peace deals cannot be made during civil wars; the only way to end them is to completely destroy the other side.

Mechanics