How to deal with going bankrupt?

[Teskje]

I am playing as Great Britain and things were going quite well, I was winning wars in europe and setting up colonies in America. Protestantism began to spread around England faster than I could convert the territories to Catholic. About half of my territories became Protestant, and the other half Catholic, so I decided to convert to Protestantism since my country seemed to be heading that way anyway. I had hundreds of uprisings with armies twice my size, forcing me to take out loans and hire more troops. So at this point I was heavily in debt, I wasn't getting a lot of tax due to half of my provences being the wrong religeon, and every 5 minutes I had a new uprising to deal with. I soon became bankrupt and now I don't know what to do.

Even if I have everything down on 0 maintainence I am still in the red due to now gaining tax on Protestant territories. I am worried that I will have to disband a lot of my navy and leave myself defenceless.. Does anyone have tips on what I can do to resolve this?

[Teskje]

I now have 8 different uprisings counting at around 78 enemy troops.. I can't deal with this , lol :/

[Kagemin]

Yeah, if you actually went bankrupt you're pretty much doomed. You can try to accept demnds with as many rebels as possible and somehow make a wondrous recovery, but I wouldn't count on it.

If you're in a tough spot with rebels check for which rebels you can safely accept demands without too bad things happening. Simply not worth it to fight them sometimes.

From what you wrote quite a lot of things came together, hard to pin it down to one thing. Regularly check your rebel risk and the things affecting it (overextension, religious unity, war exhaustion, etc), and maybe invest the military points for harsh treatment to be safer.

[happy]

when things usually get this tense(i never went bankrupt, i don t know what it does, but i had nasty religious wars and negative economy), this is what i do

i dismiss my regular army, especially if it s badly hurt
reinforcement costs a lot, and a recovering army will never be able to deal with all the revolts anyway
i just hire one big mercenary army(their reinforcement is quite quick) and deal with the rebels with it

that way, my manpower recovers and i m able to quicckly rebuild a national force when better times come, i don t pay army wages nor reinforcement(excpet for mercs of course)

but i believe it might be too late for you to do that

so, dismiss all your warships(since they get obselete once every few diplo tech, it s no big loss)

being engalnd, you don t have much to fear, no one will invade your island

you can agree to some rebels demands(the lower tax ones) this helps, it lowers your income but in your situation you probably have independance rebels , these are your true ennemies

raise stability at whatever cost, take tolerance decisions, use harsh treatments on rebelious lands

i don t know what you ve done if you are bankrupt with england, i find it hard to believe, i would guess when you mean bankrupt you mean badly screwed up but still have the possiblity to take loans

if so

take more loans, trim your armies

it might be too late for you, 78K troops in one stack is pretty much invincible with only mercs on your side, might as well yield to their demands

i guess you didn t act fast enough and got overwhelmed

but next time this happens, you ll have the right reflexes

[Kagemin]

You're bankrupt when you're in debt and can't take any more loans.
As long as you have the bankrupt tag you have higher revolt risk, no morale, no manpwer recovery, and some more nasty modifiers. Oh, and you lose all monarch points upon going bankrupt.
http://www.eu4wiki.com/Bankrupt#Bankruptcy

So no money, no army in fighting shape, and pretty much no way of doing anything about it.
It's just one of those things that really kicks you while you're down.

[clif9710]

The OP raises a good issue - how to decide whether or not to change religion. I was playing as Commonwealth and had most of my provinces going to Protestantism. Figuring that it would make sense to go with the flow, I declared for Protestantism. All seemed well for a while and then Catholic rebels brought down the country.

Is there a way to gauge what the strength of a revolt will be before making the religion change?

[Kagemin]

If you want to convert to Protestantism the easiest way is to wait for Protestant rebels and have them siege as much of your territory as possible. When you accept there demands all those provinces will convert "for free".
The more provinces already converted through events the easier it gets of course.

Other than that you'll need multiple missionaries if possible, and enough missionary strength to convert the remaining provinces asap after converting. The shorter you stay at low religious unity the better.