How do I stop unrest?

[meldorian]

Ok, I have played a game as the Nomo with the citzenship-rating increased by two in the race-setup. I started in the senate and at around turn 100, I suddenly got into trouble with unrest. No matter if there were government, military and recreation deas on a planet or not, almost half of them started a revolution, and five turns later I had already spawned 2 new empires. How am I supposed to stop this? I didn't change the tax ratings, I did not build to many industry deas, nor did I allow piracy to get out of hand. I tried building troops, but only huge numbers had any real effect, which is useless when half your empire is revolting.

I have occasionally captured new oronian (sp?) spies, so I believe the new oronians might be responsible for this. Is there any way to verify this? I never got a message that unrest was started by foreign spies, after all.

[neatstuff]

I think it was found that spies had little effect in regards to unrest. Was your empire low on food? Reduced rations can make populations cranky.

[DavidByron]

In a study of unrest effects (on the unrest 101 thread) I could not confirm any difference made by the various spy reports that mention terrorising citizens or creating unrest using spies.

It sounds a lot like you changed government type to a government type that has a lower tax threshold. This happens easily if you change from a Unification to a Hive government, but other combinations will do it sometimes.

Hmm.
You spawned two separate empires eh? I've only managed one before now. Always trying to figure out a way to make an advantage of that feature of the game.....

At any rate no matter what the cause of unrest there is one cure all: lower your taxes. 1% tax to about 12 unrest points.

[meldorian]

Food isn't a problem. I have double as much of it as needed in my empire and not a single blockaded planet. I did change gov from constitutional monarchy to oligarchy, but only after the unrest was already there. Afterwards, it got worse, though, which I blamed on the lower efficiency of recreation deas. But changing back government to constitutional didn't do anything about the unrest, so I concluded that this wasn't the primary cause. I will try lowering taxes, even though they are only at about 4 % for systems and 11 % for the empire. Should I also lower the planetary tax ratings? I have never changed the 24% the computer sets on every new colony automatically. Thanks.

[Strifeguard]

Unrest has MANY, MANY causes in Moo3.

How big is your empire?
What does your oppresometer look like?
How much income goes to Planetary Grants?
Are you spending any AUs on unrest reduction?
Do you have inexpensive SystemShip designs available?
How many times have you changed governments? (the act of changing causes unrest, and each change generates its own unrest)
Are you currently fighting any wars which you are losing?
Do you have any unrest-generating leaders?
Are you disobeying any Senate Laws?
Are any Harvesters within your borders?
What is the average population on the planets with the highest unrest?
Do many of your planets have Government AND Military AND Recreation DEAs?
What tech level are you?
What is your military-political economy set to?

I know this is A LOT of info, but unrest can come from SO MANY sources in Moo3 that without an accurate "empire snapshot" diagnosing unrest is almost impossible.

[DavidByron]

I did change gov from constitutional monarchy to oligarchy, but only after the unrest was already there.

Constitutional Monarchy supports a basic tax rate of 40% --- about the best in the game --- whereas Oligarchy is an average 35%. In effect changing government increased your tax by 5% across the board. That's the equivalent of a 60 point unrest increase on every planet. Plus for the first 5 turn after the change of government you get a temporary unrest increase for the act of change itself which is smaller --- +10 unrest on the first turn decreaseing by 2 per turn until after 5 turns it's nothing.

So you might have had a little trouble with eg piracy before the change of government - that is the only other likely empire wide problem - likely a few of your more developed systems gained new planets and that would increase piracy in all the planets in that system which would give you a scattering of unrest but nothing serious.

(Usually a bit of low unrest is not a problem to production as long as you nip it in the bud - unrest level 1 is listed as -25% production but usually it's only one region effected on the first turn of unrest).

Now on top of that you add +70 points unrest across your empire - disaster. On top of THAT when you have regions in unrest that tend to create MORE unrest points again.

Changing back to Constitutional Monarchy should have fixed the worst of it but I'd recomend -1% on empire or system. Some planets won't need it but their viceroys will adjust the planetary tax up to compensate. Eventually they would have compensated for the higher taxes by reducing planetary taxes but by that time you'd have lost half your empire....

Ok for the record the basic tax thresholds for your gov choices are:

Despotism 35%
Monarchy 37%
Oligarchy 35%
Const.Monarchy

[DavidByron]

Despotism 35%
Monarchy 37%
Oligarchy 35%
Const.Monarchy 40%

So you can see that if you change from Const.Monarchy "down" to Oligarchy you need to change your taxes down by (40-35) = 5%

On the other hand if you go from a low tax to a high tax gov type you can hike taxes accordingly....

I recommend decreasing an additional 1% on the first turn just to cover the temporary unrest caused by the gov change (which happens whichever way you go), but add this 1% back after a turn or three. if you forget to the viceroys will do it for you but they will add it to planetary taxes and you may prefer adding it to empire or system taxes.

On the other hand now you know that Constitutional Monarchy has an additional money advantage over the other three (this is listed in the stickied threads on gov types but it's right towards the end of the threads), you may decide you're happy to stick with Const.Monarchy.

There's also an issue of oppresometer unrest when you change gov types. In this case Const. Monarchy and Oligarchy are the same. However Monarchy and Despotism support oppresive settings better which in practise means if you don't change oppressometer and do change gov types you get the same kind of effect as with tax.

Despotism 7
Monarchy 5
Oligarchy 4
Const.Monarchy 4

A level of oppresometer is worth 10 unrest.

There's a similar but much smaller effect with the forced labor setting.

Despotism 5
Monarchy 4
Oligarchy 4
Const.Monarchy 2

I'm not sure about the unrest effect here but I get the impression it's small enough to ignore. Maybe 2 points a level?

If we were to accept 2 as a guess then the total becomes:

Despotism 20
Monarchy 22
Oligarchy -12
Const.Monarchy 44

Where these numbers represent unrest points and the higher numbers are better.

This is a simplified model. If you push the tax level over the base each 1% of tax becomes worth about 20 unrest, and if you under tax they become worth only 6 unrest. But you can probably ignore that unless you really push the envelope in terms of taxation (which I do).

Don't worry too much a planet won't go into unrest until the unrest points exceed 20 in my experience, so you have a margin of error. Above 20 unrest they chances of unrest *levels* (yellow/red icon) start off not too bad but increase quickly. This is why you can normally change gov types without worrying about any of this, but if you go from a gov type that's good for unrest (Const. Monarchy or Unification) to a poor one (Oligarcy, Republic, Hive) you will probably see red.

[meldorian]

Ok, I have found taxation to be the problem. Planetary, System and Imperial Taxes together were at about 42%, which the population didn't seem to like very much after I changed gov from constitutional monarchy to oligarchy. With a little help from my plentiful armed forces, i.e. 1 division on every single planet, the unrest quickly disappeared after setting System and Imperial tax levels to 1% and 2% respectively. I had reloaded a save game from a few rounds before my planets started to form their own empires, and this time, it didn't happen. I have to admit, though, that suddenly having two new neighbours in my own systems was hilarious.

Thanks for the help, guys.