Hail!

The short answer: you can't.

People bitch and complain. It is what we do. This is reflected in the game.

There are things you can do- especially as a Roman- to slow unhappiness down.

I always (ALWAYS ALWAYS) put up taxes to Very High, and move my capital to the economic center of my realm. I also garrison almost exclusively with Peasants. When unhappiness creeps in, I bump up the garrison by a peasant or two. If that does not do the trick, I lower taxes and being building an army to take the city back (I usually keep a theatre army of some legionaries, some archers, and some onagers within each group of cities for such an emergency). When the inevitable revolt comes, I rush it, exterminate for the instant happiness, then use that city to retrain my forces. Next round, set up taxes to very High and start the cycle over again.

Note- you do not need green faces. Blue and yellow are fine, with Blue being about (+/-) a turn away from red. Red is bad- do something or suffer the revolt. I am bloody- I take the revolt, crush it utterly, rape and slaughter the ungrateful pixels that dared defy me, and let the survivors refill my ranks with hardened warriors. But that is just me.

Romans can also shorten the interval of Games and races if they have a circus maximumus and arena. These also make the peoons happy and forget their troubles.

If you have a huge city with a massive population and there is a plague somewhere, send a spy to get it and bring it to that city. It will burn out after a while, but will lower the population.

I also set Peasant Production to 0 turns, and since I play exclusively on HUGE, I can pump out 2000 peasants per turn. TYhese I send to where population is needed (or to enemy provinces) and there disband them into the local population. I have caused other faction's cities to revolt in this manner, most recently I took Nicomedia from the Greeks via the Rebels through this.

You can also modify the game to have walls give a law bonus.

[This message has been edited by Terikel Grayhair (edited 04-03-2014 @ 02:56 AM).]

How do you change the peasant production time? (I haven't had it for that long)

Find and open in Notepad or similar the file RTW\Data\export_descr_unit.txt

Save As EDU-orig.txt

Close Notepad.

Re-open RTW\Data\export_descr_unit.txt

Search (ctrl+f) peasant

Change recruit time from 1 to 0.

Save.

Close.

Done.

Enjoy emptying your cities of those ungrateful, lazy peasants.

I would, but I have a mac. I think I'm getting a laptop in a couple of weeks, nit sure.

That makes things a bit different. I don't know mac tech.

Your laptop will not have XP on it, thus you will not be able to edit the text files in their current locations. You will have to drag them to the desktop and edit them there. Otherwise the same procedure.

Macs make modding of text files hard, but it'd definitely worth it to make some modifications, especially playing as Carthage, seeing how they get screwed over in the public order category.

I recommend making sure to build Temples of Baal and Secret Police facilities in all of your towns, as that will help a little with order (and has the side benefit of reducing corruption). Also, try to keep large garrisons (15-20 units) in your town, and send your family members with the highest influence to be governors of problem spots. And, as you've found out, sometimes you just have to let it revolt and wipe it out to fix the problem.

It's one of the flaws of the game, although realistic to a degree I suppose, that large cities end up being overrun with squalor and there's no fix which really deals with it and attempts to manage it, as you can see, are not easy. For future reference, build administration buildings as soon as they become available, and do not build any farm improvements anywhere you're expecting high population growth or where there's in-built unrest. Only let your populations get as high as you want them. I think you'll be okay to build sewers and such though, these increase population but that's offset by an increase in public happiness due to health, which in turn reduces squalor.

Another way to cure civil disorder is to cheat. I've only done this on Mundus Magnus because the map is so huge that you can't possibly create a large empire without it. Edit export_descr_buildings and give 5% law bonuses to each stage of admin building and city wall. That'll gain you an instant additional 50% order everywhere that's got all the upgrades.

Re giving walls a law bonus:

You call that cheating; I call it restoring a missing piece of the game. Historically, walls around a village provided security from without, and can provide a sense of order within, be it pride or that the town lord can put his troops on the wall and keep the town under scrutiny. The bigger the walls, the more docile the population. Thus it appears historically correct to correct this error by restoring the law bonus.

Yes it's not cheating in the traditional sense, those bonuses can be justified. Adding public health bonuses to execution squares would be cheating!

I could probably come up with a good justification for that too, but was laughing too hard to try that now.

At least you're not adding happiness bonuses to them. Or putting a law bonus on taverns.