Forums / Questions and Answers / How to Lower Morale in my City

You cannot make a city revolt, it will either do so on it's own after you've taken it, because of angry peasantry of some other player, or it won't revolt.  (as far as I am aware)

Have an orc prep on it

if youre human you could choose mobilise. apart from that i cant think of anything that doesnt require someone elses help

Its something I've tried multiple times in the past. Gone to the extent of getting allied kingdoms to cast anger on the city even. I haven't tried to mobilse troops and I've never been able to get an orc to prep the city. But from my experience with  anger the moment you try to manipulate it the lower your chance of revolting the city (Ie it has never revolted after casting) As for mobilising of troops, remember you need pes in the city to revolt with no (or little) troops. If you train majority of your pes into troops fat chance of it revolting.

Also Archi I'll presume you already know but for anyone else. If you get a message saying the cities peasents escaped then the city wont revolt.

So if I take a city all peasants escape, morale at 2%, next tick 217 peasants arrive, it would not revolt on second tick if morale is at 2 %?

Is there any way I can lower the morale in one of my cities?
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I believe it is possible.

Try this: spend all your gold & wreck all taverns.
Then put a huge army into the field so that your income is negative.
I know that your armies will lose 1% morale every tick (b/c not getting paid).
I know that cities will lose buildings each tick b/c you didn't pay to maintain them.
I think that cities will lose morale each tick too.

------------- when does this happen naturally?
This happens to me once every 2 years or so. My KD is all dead and I got 1 last city being prepped by a superior army. My army escapes and makes a run for it and my income is negative until I capture a new city.
If my morale gets below 50 (I think) then each tick soldiers desert the army. :(

However for me, I never looked back at the cities I escaped to see what happened with morale.

I'm not sure how to word this so I'm going to make up the words 'revoltable' and 'revolt score' and I'm going to preface it by saying that this is just my understanding of a game mechanic and that I could very well be wrong. I've done a lot of testing but haven't read much discussion about revolt so it's an interesting topic.

It's really hard to force a city to revolt on you because revolt is an 'event' that can only occur if your city has the 'revoltable' tag/hidden status affect and other parameters are met.

You can lower the morale of your city as much as you want with Mobilization, Anger, Razing, Orc Prep, etc but you won't be able to force a revolt because morale is only one of many factors that dictate if a city revolts and a city simply cannot revolt unless it is 'revoltable'. Revolt as a whole seems to be another game mechanic that factors in land count, I will go into greater detail below.

As Pure mentions above, a city will never revolt if the initial peasants escape regardless of morale. What happens when you capture a city as far as the peasants are concerned is based on a couple of different things like siege status, land count, etc. If you have more land than another player but not overwhelmingly so and you capture their city in such a way that you end up killing or enslaving a % of their peasants in battle and subjugate the rest then you will end up with a revoltable city. The conditions for this happening are almost never going to arise if you have less land than another ruler- if you have less land than another ruler you will end up taking the majority of their peasants as slaves (also a land based mechanic) and if you have overwhelmingly more land there is a good chance that you will kill all of the peasants in battle and end up with an empty low morale city that can't revolt.


Some things to note:

You can check if a city is under the revolt-capable status affect by attempting to transfer peasants out of a city

Revoltable status affect fades rapidly over time (I have not confirmed, but I strongly believe morale plays into this)

Morale is one of a handful of factors that dictates revolt, not the only factor. Cities can revolt even if they have high morale and high morale alone will not immediately remove the revoltable status of a city

Revolt is primarily based on peasants and peasant count in a city. If a city has no peasants it cannot revolt. If a city has an extremely low peasant count relative to the buildings and troops in a city it cannot revolt either.

When it comes to troops stationed in a city counteracting revolt I am reasonably sure that every troop stationed within the city just removes some amount of 'revolt score' regardless of OP/DP, unit rank, or unit score, thus a Nazgul and a Farmer are equally effective at deterring revolt.

I remember being told something incorrect a long time ago about how a city couldn't possibly revolt if it was above a certain morale% and had troops that were some amount more powerful than the DP of the peasants in the city.

I realized that that was wrong when I lost a very large amount of Nazgul to a revolt that had occurred on reasonably high morale.

These days most people know to keep a higher number of troops within homes in a city that might revolt than there are angry peasants. A lot of people also train all the angry peasants into units like Farmers/MU and then use or release them later.

The best way to deal with potential revolt is just to kill all of the peasants in the city you are going to capture before you capture it, but a lot of people don't know how to do that. Your potential attack options are Capture, Siege, Plunder, Burn, Steal Food, Bombard, or Liberate.

Capture will kill a huge number of peasants if you attack with certain land count and OP relative to the defender's DP and land count, but then you have the issue of the the revolting city that still has some number of peasants. Burn and Destroy kills all of the peasants, but you destroy the city as well. The other attack options kill minimal peasants upon a successful attack. You can starve the peasants to death with a siege, but that's a very slow process.

For whatever reason failed sieges are actually the best way to kill MU/Peasants without capturing a city. You lose significantly more units in a failed siege, but if you do it right the defender also takes more damage than they would on a successful attack.

Revolt is a non-issue for Halfling, (not due to Halfling morale, cities can revolt above 50% morale, but because you can train the angry peasants into 20 gold farmers then release them) so let's say you are an Orc and you run into an undefended city that has a lot of peasants. You know it's going to be low morale when you capture it but you dont have the gold to train the peasants into MU or you don't need hundreds of thousands of MU. Your best option would be to split your units up so you have a few small armies of Nazgul and just keep siege-attacking the city over and over again at 80%~ for a few ticks. When you succeed on an 80% siege you will take minimal damage and cause minimal damage, but one or two failed sieges at 80% will completely decimate the peasant population in your target city.

I have a lot of assumptions about how revolting works in greater detail but I avoid posting stuff that I'm somewhat unsure of or haven't tested at all. If I had to throw it out there here are some observations that I have made, but be warned that nothing below is confirmed and some amount of the following are probably incorrect assumptions:

You can tell when a city has the 'revoltable' status based on whether or not the peasants will move, I'm pretty sure that this is a safe assumption to make.

I've seen cities that have over 65% morale revolt, so I believe that morale is a % modifier in revolt chance. 

I suspect that each troop stationed within a home acts as exactly -1 peasant in whatever formula dictates revolt.

I am completely certain that peasant count is the largest influencing factor in revolt chance. Cities with 'a lot' of angry peasants have a very high chance of revolting and cities that have 'very few' angry peasants never revolt even if they are revoltable. I have done 0 testing to see whether 'a lot' of peasants is relative to your total peasant count or if it's land based, it might not be relative to anything (unlikely given how other stuff in VU works) and it might even be relative to the size of the city. I feel as though cities with less than 5k~ peasants have a very low chance of revolting, and I know that cities with hundreds of thousands of peasants will endlessly revolt on the tick change even with high morale.