Squalor

[PrimusPilus]

Squalor is causing unrest in most of my cities, I already built sewers and bathrooms. Help please D:

[Andy]

Lower taxes, increase the troops in the city, build bigger walls, build bigger religious buildings.

[Jambie Lionheart]

Long term the only way to alleviate squalor is to find that perfect sweet spot for your settlement where they are at 0.0% growth rate. You have to decide at which point the settlement stops getting any bigger. The closer your settlement is to your capital the easier it is to grow them bigger before squalor causes revolts. Even those have to be capped though.

It's easier to manage if you're playing as Romans. Barbarians can be a bit of a nightmare though, because they cap at minor city level.

Building anything that will increase your growth rate actually makes the problem worse if you're already having a squalor problem and once squalor issues present, it's very hard to balance without a few decimations of a settlements population.

Farms
Markets
Certain shrines/temples
Sewers
Baths
Aqueducts

all increase growth rate and therefore increase squalor in the long run.

Any building that increases happiness without increasing growth rate mitigates this. Also depends on ratio between growth rate increase and amount of happiness though. Temples generally do more harm than good for moral if you have a shrine or temple that also increases growth rate.

So, walls,
Colosseum's
Hippocampus' execution squares, ect

all mitigate long term squalor. They increase morale without increasing pop growth.

Your governers traits and retinue can also affect both settlement growth to small degrees and settlement morale to very large extents, for better or worse.

Also be careful with lowering your taxes to deal wth squalor. Because lowering taxes also increases settlement growth rate by 0.5% per tax increment. It's a good stop gap if you need to keep a settlement you care about or delay an inevitable revolt but 9 times out of ten, lowering taxes will result in revolt in the long term. Sometimes it's better to just slaughter the ungrateful turds and be done with it >: ]

Decimations of settlement pop is a very reliable, short term solution. It kinda just resets morale and allows you to try and find an equilibrium between settlement growth and morale. Ultimately, that's what you have to balance.

[Obdilord]

Try to avoid pop growth unless you really need a town to grow. If squalor is becoming a problem and you're forced to lower taxes, which in turn promotes more growth, your best bet is to produce a bunch of troops in order to lower the pop so it becomes more manageable. As producing troops also cost pop of a town/city so making a ton of peasants will reduce the pop and make it more manageable.

Alternatively simply gather all of your forces outside of the settlement, set the tax to very high and let the city/town revolt and then take it back while decimating the pop. Could also give you some extra gold while your at it.