City rebellion mechanics?

[Elshar]

Can someone explain how this works exactly? I've had cities that haven't so much as seen a raider in ages decide that they're tired of being attacked and rebel.

I mean, I could understand if rebels were actually getting to my city walls. Or if my enemies were getting close to the city. Or if there was some way for me to know they were unhappy. But, it seems totally random. I got "lucky" and an autosave happened ~10s before one of these events popped. First it was one city, then after a reload it was a totally different one.

I honestly have to say that while it could be an interesting mechanic, since there's no way to tell when it's going to trigger or why or anything that it's just frustrating right now.

[Wenchbane]

City rebellion happens for multiple reasons,

1) Different faction/cultures.
If you conquer a city belonging to another faction they will naturally rebel if both food and a garrison aren't present. Garrisoned units require food to be effective at keeping morale up.

2) Food and morale.
Like garrisons city morale is heavily dependant on food, You need to make sure food is always above zero. This keeps the cities morale up.

3) Raiders attacking nearby resource nodes.
I've noticed what you've described happening to me too. Raiders usually manage to start raiding a farm or fishery and it triggers the first step in that event. If they manage to raze a city, they only need to start not fully raze a city, it then escalates to the next phase. It's doubly effective if you've taken the city from another faction or even "peacefully" united you're native empire cities.

4) Low morale.
City rebellion always happens if a cities morale hits zero, each of the above contribute to reducing morale. You can negate this heavily by assimilating conquered cities so they belong to your culture.

Late game this becomes less of an issue as you usually have enough income to station punitive forces to drive off the raiders before they can attack a node or a city,

Hope this helps!

[Elshar]

I keep spearmen/peltasts in every city to fend off raiders. Works pretty good. I honestly don't think any of the cities that flipped during the reloads had any of these things going on. It was late spring, so they were all full of food. All had garrisons, max morale, etc.

The only thing that did happen was way on the other side of the map a single spearman unit on my front line routed because I lost track of him and a heavy hoplite got in contact with him. Otherwise, none of the factors I'd normally look out for were in play. I'll see if I can get some screenshots or something later.