Serious rebel problem. Perhaps a bug?

[Alek]

So I booted up Europa Universalis again and loaded the game I had in progress. The last time I played it was about a month or so ago.

Now I was winning a war with Austria etc. and I was just about to make demands, so the first thing I did was of course to take as much of their territory as possible and laugh at their misfortune. However it seems they got the last laugh.

Now I have an army value of 23 left after a long and tiresome war. I think my max was around 40 at any point doing the war, and theirs was about 50 or so. I first notice something has happened (patch) when the victory screens pop up when I defeat the rebels.

"Interesting" I think. I then pop open the tab with possible revolts and I am quite surprised by what I see there. Basically the new system is, that instead of having a risk of something happen it WILL HAPPEN no matter what, and it is just a question of how soon? I start out with the typical 30% rebel threat, and see that I have about the same from a nation (the swizz) who I defeated some time ago. But they just keep increasing. I try the new option of autocrazy, but that doesn't stop it.

"♥♥♥♥ it" I think and prepare to go to war with the rebels. I have a 2 star general and a bit of money I can use on mercenaries.

HERES THE PROBLEM (highlighted in caps so people can skip to here if they so desire)
The Swizz manage to pull 100 units out of their asses, even though that was 10 times as many people as they had when I defeated the bloody idiots. I am not joking. There were 2 companies of 50 or so units.
Bear in mind at this point before the patch a large rebel force was like 20 units or so. These guys then also have artillery because of course they just happen to procure those from god knows where.
At the same time the Austrian rebels also spawn. These guys had a much larger territory, but still 100 units as well?

I had a mighty army that had won again and again with a two star general, but they were now down to 23 man, and I had no way to get more people as I was just recovering my numbers after the war.

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED? How is it possible that the rebels will come no matter what I do, and how the hell can they bring that many units? Please, help me out here. Is this some bug, or what am I supposed to do?

[Kagemin]

It's possible that some things got screwed over a little by the patch, that can easily happen with ongoing games from a previos patch.
The large rebels sizes aren't neccessarily a bug though, it all comes down to the numbers. Overextension over a 100% directly increases rebel size, and the total amount of unrest as well as tax and manpower of the provinces they spawn in, as well as your own forcelimits, all factor into the size of the rebels.

The way the new rebel system works is as follows:
Each province has avalue for unrest that is modified both by national (stability, religious unity, overextension, legitimacy/tradition, etc) and local (accepted culture, tolerance of religion, nationalism, adjusted autonomy, active missionary, etc) modifiers.

As long as the value is at zero or negative you're fine, but when it goes positive it will start contributing towards an uprising of a rebel faction depending on what causes the most unrest in that province (newly conquered provinces get a big "nationalism" penalty and thus usually generate unrest for nationalist rebels for example).
All the unrest contributing towards a rebel faction gives a monthly percentage that the progress towards an uprising will increase by 5, leading to an uprising as soon as it hits 100.
For example, you have 2 provinces generating 5% unrest towards Austrian nationalists, and one province generating 10%. That means there's a 20% chance per month that the progress will increase by 5.

As long as there's any unrest for a faction the progress will keep progressing, but as soon as there is no more unrest it will start to tick down.
Harsh Treatment directly reduces the progress by 25, but has no effect on the actual unrest generated. The cost for it depends on the unrest though, high unrest makes it much more expensive, so you should try to decrease the unrest by as much as possible before using Harsh Treatment (park troops on the provinces, increase autonomy, maybe increase stability, etc).

The easiest way to control unrest is autonomy. Manually adjusting autonomy increases autonomy by 25 and decreases unrest by 10, or vice versa (the unrest stays modified for 30 years).
Since autonomy directly affects how much you get from a province (50% autonomy means 50% less taxes, manpower and forcelimits, 50% longer recruiting times, and 25% less trade power from that province) it's a trade off, but usually it's best to decrease autonomy in newly conquered provinces.
Autonomy ticks down by 0.1 per month while you are at peace, the more advanced government forms add another flat modifier to that (up to 0.3 per month for monarchies, and 0.5 for republics).

There were several more changes in the 1.8 patch, here are the patch notes if you are interested:
http://www.eu4wiki.com/Patch_1.8

Feel free to ask if you have any other questions.

[Alek]

But how come the Swizz get 100 rebels if their country is so smallwe compared to everyone else or in this case Austria? Should it not also factor in how many provinces were conquered?

Say I take a faction which is one province, how many is the maximum amount of rebels (nationalists) they can produce. Is it my country's stats that are meassured or the province?

[Kagemin]

As I said, there are several things factoring into that. Having more than one province generating unrest for a faction means that rebels may appear in all those provinces upon a revolt, but the individual stack size won't change.
So yes, having only one province contributing for a certain faction will lead to smaller uprisings because there will only be one stack.

The base modifiers, as far as I know, for the revolt sizes are your maximum manpower, the local manpower, and the local base tax. I think the total unrest for that faction also plays a role, but I'm not 100% sure on that right now.
As for the maximum amount of rebels, there's not really any limit to that. If you screw yourself over enough with overextension etc rebellions very quickly grow very very big (I had about a total of 750k rebels after taking over 200% overextension as Qing once).

[Alek]

I am very thankful for your replies as they explain a lot :)

One of the big problems I have with it, is the fact that I got 3 different factions of Nationalists by conquering parts of Austria. Why? Because they had previously been conqured (however this is a long ass time ago and they should not count any longer). I then went and tried to appease the Salzburg rebels by making them a vassal. The problem here is, that the rebels are in 6 states, while my new vassal was only 1. This means I have a vassal and rebels that are of the same factions. *sigh*

So far the only thing I can do is restart my game. There is no way my army of 23 can defeat 200 rebels.