Rebels in EU4: A Brief Guide

Rebels in EU4: The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

How do I deal with Rebels?
Who hired these Rebels?
Why are there rebels?
Is Paradox responsible for my genocide against the Armenians for inducing unrest because of unaccepted culture to my centralized ethno-state which actually might be a fascist regime responsible for the hundreds and thousands deaths of civilian dissidents?
Why does this game only run on one of my cpu cores?

This guide is up to date as of April 20, 2023. Probably.

Introduction

Are you tired of rebels constantly spawning in your burgeoning empire? Are you sick of having to micro armies of soldiers to quash rebellion? Well listen up and listen closely because you're not gonna hear a word out of my mouth because you'll be reading! That's right my friend! Reading! Because what better way to skip out on a twenty minute video guide when you can just skip the ten minute introduction and know what you should know. I will address your problems, but like a unlicensed doctor, I won't prescribe the medication you need. You can find those on your own out in the gutter and back alley ways of idea groups, government reform, and alt + F4ing.

ARSing otherwise known as Autonomus Rebel Suppression

ARSing otherwise known as Autonomus Rebel Suppression is a lot more simple than you'd imagine and is readily available.

Click on an army, I'd recommend 20k, but you can use 15 or 30 depending on how large the enemy rebel stacks will be , sometimes the AI gets scared of stacks smaller than theirs so make sure you have about twice their amount. Larger stacks will also help in passive suppression.
click Enable Autonomous Rebel Suppression (ARS).
We do not negotiate with dissident citizens, any rebelling citizen is a dead citizen. Crush their armies, scatter their bones, and commit S T O M P.

The region where lines are running through your land is the area they will automatically suppress when you press accept.
Warning: If your army is not currently ARSing then they will only reduce unrest in that single piece of land they are standing in.

Now here's where things start getting hard, and when I say hard, I'm talking about our metaphorical mings and yangs. Click on any adjacent land to the currently striped land and that will also become striped and it will be added to the list of land being suppressed on the army's suppression menu.
You can chain this across your entire empire, allowing your singular army to passively suppress unrest across all that land, though how effective it is depends on the amount of soldiers ARSing. When rebels do spawn, your army will go to attack it and return to the area where they came from.
The biggest benefit is the passive suppression, which will help prevent rebels stacks from spawning if you just have 1 unrest across a series of provinces, but can also help in not having to micro three different armies across the board as rebels spawn. This will allow you to not only suppress rebels that will initially spawn after taking over a region, but allow you to decrease their separatism overtime without additional rebels crawling out of the woodwork.

WARNING
If you take land from another country and their rebels rise up, their tech will match the country you've taken from. Rebels will only copy your technology when their home country is completely and utterly gone.

This is by far the most vital thing you need to know to help reduce that rebel inducing migraine and makes rebels a economic, manpower, and land force limit problem rather than a micro intensive one.
Now you'll be able to finished your campaign without giving out half way through because there's too many ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ rebels.

WHRing: "Why the Hell am I getting so many Rebels?"

otherwise known as: "your mum"

Beginning Your WHRing: No need for Shame

Conquering Provinces: When you conquer new land, you will get an initial rebellion to put down. This can be handled in three ways:

1. Increasing Autonomy by 10 in the autonomy menu.
This will give them 100% autonomy, meaning your new lands will give you zero benefits. It also may not stop the rebels if they have more than ten unrest after being cored.



2. Killing them. c:

3. Creating a vassal from the land and giving them the land that has unrest and reintegrating them ten years down the line.

The last two options will be your preferred choice. I recommend increasing autonomy if the land is garbage which is determined by its development and its trade good (2.50 or below is average/bad) which can be seen by clicking on the province or using Trade Good Map Mode which can be assigned to a hotkey on the bottom right.

Post WHRing: Unrest Modifiers, Regret, Later Rebellions

Now that the initial rebels are rotting on the pike of your Centralized State. We're going to look at what's causing all that gerd dern unrest.

Click on a province


mouse over the unrest modifier, you will see where exactly it's coming from, what's decreasing it, and how long you'll have to wait for separtism to go away.



As we can see, there's a number of problems with this province. My legitimacy is low, my stability is +1 giving me -1 unrest, due to my low religious unity I am getting +1.35 unrest, corruption decreases unrest though it will increase tech costs and autonomy, the culture is unaccepted, their religion is shia while mine is Sunni and because I don't have enough tolerance of heathens it will increase unrest, and the safawiyyah which is a Persian event related to arbadil.

For every point of War Exhaustion, you will receive one point of unrest in all your provinces.

Over-Extension will give unrest, countries will view you negatively and increases the chance of having war declared on you.

New taken land starts with base 30 separatism and capped at 40, this starting separatism can be decreased with ideas and a few nation specific missions. Separatism will automatically decrease by .5 every year. However, because this land was one of my cores and I had legitimate claim on it, I do not have separatism.

After you've fought a rebel army in an area, you'll have ten years of peace where there won't be any unrest. Afterwards, you should be prepared to have an army ARPing the area.

The Ethno-State and You

Unaccepted cultures cause unrest and give negative modifiers, never state land that is an unaccepted culture. You are also unable to change a culture if they have separatism. You can instead, make trade companies in rich areas that are outside of your subcontinent which can be seen on the mapmode, the bottom right one.

You will gain additional merchants when you go over 51% trade power in that trade area when you have a trading company there. Trading Companies cannot control stated regions.

If and when separatism is gone, you can commit cultural genocide with diplomatic points just like how our good friends at the CCP are making their Uighur Muslims pick cotton, get a "new" education, and graciously "letting" their wives sleep with han chinese. (Taiwan is number one China). The button is available on either the production interface or clicking on a specific province. Please note that changing an area's culture isn't that useful and is in fact, a waste of diplo 99% of the time.

Only accept cultures that span large areas, have high development good trade goods, and preferably on the same subcontinent.

The Holy Men and their Religious Gauss Sauce

Heathen religions can cause unrest. Keeping your religious unity +75% will help reduce rebels. Every point of unrest counts. There are methods to give a flat percentage increase to your religious unity, (they're quite useful). Every percentage of missionary strength is important, you may even find yourself taking defender of the faith to convert heathens faster with the additional missionary and god sauce.
Remember kids, if they don't believe in your God, you gotta beat them with the holy rod.


You can go the humanist route and tolerate heathen religions. This depends on who you're playing. Sometimes it's easier to take Religious Ideas and convert everything (Deus Vult Casus Beli — exterminate the non-believers).

Consider bonuses you can get from taking and combining ideas, examples such as Offensive + Humanist gives -2 unrest if you finish both ideas and take the bonus in the decisions and policies tab.

Concluding Sentiments

Next time you find yourself or your friend getting Paradoxed with rebels, just remember,

♫ If a rebel rises up ♫
♫ Put them down ♫

♫ If a rebel rises up ♫
♫ Put them down ♫

♫ When a rebels rises up ♫
♫ Conquers the land all about ♫

♫ Reach down and pluck their eyes out one by one ♫

This song has been brought to you by the Glorious North Korean Moranbong Band.

[1000boa]

Best but not funny part of the guide is:

"If and when separatism is gone, you can commit cultural genocide with diplomatic points just like how our good friends at the CCP are making their Uighur Muslims pick cotton, get a "new" education, and graciously "letting" their wives sleep with han chinese. (Taiwan is number one China)."

Fuck China!!! May Allah be with you my Uighur brothers and sisters! Greetings from Türkiye (hate the shit word of Turkey!).

[odieonekanodie]

Step one: don't let the rebels spawn.

[geekspeak]

I didn't know that ARP gave passive to a bunch of provinces instead of just one, omg thanks.

[T95Kush]

Love it

[wjkstra]

Holy shit this is the funniest guide I have ever seen

[Larry Krappenschitz]

Didn't know about ARPing, thanks bud.

[OntologicalWeevil]

Thanks! I noticed there weren’t any actual guides to dealing with rebels and decreasing the amount of micro involved so I cobbled this together.

[no skill but still]

Accurate, fun, and most importantly useful guide; nothing but the best!