taw's gaming: Prussian Amazons: Part 75: 1345-1354: Late Game Rebel Experimentation

So here are invention rules. You choose war, prosperity, or knowledge, and then you get one of 3 outcomes (not counting fails):

war, best - handgun artifact
war, good - giant crossbow province modifier for 100 years
war, ok - plate armor artifact
prosperity, best - compass artifact
prosperity, good - blast furnace province modifier for 100 years
prosperity, ok - great mill province modifier for 100 years
knowledge, best - radius astronomicus artifact
knowledge, good - cipher machine artifact
knowledge, ok - glasses artifact

I'm not sure why but sometimes you get multiple choices, so with some rerolling I ended up with all the inventions.

For rebel testing I decided to remove attrition from the game completely to see if that gives peasants a chance - if not, they might just as well get disabled. Actually even early game peasants are mostly just nuisance, but late game they're even more pointless.

I got a chance to test my changes:

52k host attacking 116k Decan Empire, and able to walk over without attrition from Bengal
14k Visigotic peasants against 8k Andalusian Badajoz
32k independence revolt against 4k Abyssinia (bankrupt and without allies)

So problem number one is that landless characters have zero technology, so their siege time is at this point 2x slower than normal - and normal is very slow. And their troops fight like crap - total bonus at max tech is 60% attack, 60% defense.

So even removing attrition as a factor, they'd have real hard time doing anything.

And indeed, Deccan host didn't even siege anything, just got wrecked uneventfully.

Peasants had better luck - they took 2 years to siege first castle, then over next 2 years they sieged 2 temples, leaving them just one city short of achieving a whole county. AI Badajoz showed zero interest in fighting them.

Eventually Francia attacked Badajoz for another county, so I thought they'd accidentally get them - instead one of Badajoz's vassals rebelled, and peasant rebellion ended inconclusively. What?

I don't think there's any way to give rebels something ressembling contemporary technology. Maybe the whole system needs to be remade? Supply limit could be based on passage of time or province development, so everybody gets it.

And then sieges could be unlinked from tech, or maybe rebels could get some modifiers. Or maybe sieges could just be faster overall? I almost never siege, just assault 90% of the time.

The part where their troops fight like crap isn't actually that unreasonable.

Abyssinia war at least looks reasonable, but due to slow late game sieges (even when you have matching technology) it's taking its sweet time even with such overwhelming numbers.

Probably the least I can do is remove siege defense from tech - you get ton of it from just building high level building and from larger garrisons. Piling up direct tech bonus on top of it results in rather excessive late game sieges. Not like that many people ever play "late game", so I'm not suprised they never addressed that.

And then when independence revolt won that faction turned out to be just one guy - king of Abyssinia and Nubia and its former emperor. So I guess faction revolts also don't really work late game.

Also annoyingly there's no way to see siege progress in neutral war, but those peasant's ticking warscore went to almost halfway before even one siege ended.

As for other things:

A nice thing I discovered that "stay at peace for 5 years" ambition is not cancelled by peasant rebellion, only actual war.

Luxembourg created a custom kingdom.

Last Zikri county is gone. Sunni clan rebelled against Mongolia in probably the last notable thing any of these infidels would ever do, but rebellion fizzled as its leader died, and heir was Buddhist.

That sadly didn't end up Islam for good, as there's still Sunni 5-countess under Marrakech under Francia.