Stability
The stability of a country is a small integer (ranging from -3 to +3) which quantifies how stable it is politically and economically. High stability has economic benefits. Many diplomatic actions and random events reduce stability. At the lowest stability, a country cannot declare war.
Seeing Stability
Your country's stability is shown on the status bar, just to the right of the date, next to a little flag icon.
You can see another country's stability by clicking on its capital. The country screen shows this information.
Effects of Stability
A country's current stability level has the following effects:
- At +3, all monthly investment into stability is directed into treasury instead. Automatic investments into stability are lost.
- At +3, there is a bonus +20% addition to the province tax multiplier.
- At +2, there is a bonus +10% addition to the province tax multiplier.
- The stability level adds or subtracts from a country's yearly number of merchants generated.
- High stability makes it much more likely to successfully place merchants (5% increased probablility per stability level means 10% more likely for success if current probability is only 50%).
- High stability makes it much more likely for merchants to be "sticky" (that is to resist being bumped by other countries' merchants).
- High stability seems to make diploannexation, diplovassalization, and alliance more likely. Probably other diplomatic actions benefit.
- At +1 stability or higher, a country cannot get a civil war.
- At -1 stability or lower, it cannot break vassalage with its suzerain as a voluntary diplomatic action.
- At -3 stability, it cannot declare war.
- At -3 stability, it cannot impose war taxes.
- At -3 stability, if a country gets a stabhit, it gets a rebellion check instead.
- At -3 stability, a human player cannot reject a favorable peace offer.*
Lowering Stability
There are a lot of ways in which a country's stability may be dropped. There are many random events which drop stability. Some countries also have scripted events which drop stability.
Stability is also lowered by an amount whenever a country does any of the following actions:
- Declaration of war without a casus belli: -2
- DoW against a country with good relations: if >+100, -1; if >+150, -2
- DoW against country with the same state religion: -1. This stabhit does not apply to pagans and is no longer active after 1600.
- DoW against country with which you've got a truce: -5
- Break royal marriage: -1. This includes automatically breaking RMs when entering a war via your own DoW or an alliance member's call.
- Break a vassalization with suzerain or vassal: -3.
- Cancel military access you have through another country: -1
- Revoke military access that another country has through your country: -1.
- Initiate a trade embargo, unless at war with the target country: -1.
- Reject a favorable peace (or allow the peace offer to expire), when warscore is a high loss at -50 or worse: -1.*
- Claim the throne of another country: -1
[*] A favorable peace is an offer that provides a difference of at least 11 warscore in the losing nation's favor.
Raising Stability
There are a fair number of random events which raise stability, although in many cases this is an option which costs money. Many countries have scripted events which raise stability.
After a government collapse, stability returns to +3.
The main means for raising stability is via investment into stability. When the total amount invested by a country reaches a certain amount, called its "stability cost", its stability will increase by one point.
There are two sources of automatic investment: twice the monarch's Administrative rating is invested each month, and each Fine Arts Academy invests 5d per month. There is also a source of automatic disinvestment: a country's base war exhaustion level is subtracted from its stability investment each month. In extreme cases (bad monarch, high WE), the automatic investment rate can be negative. If this is the case, money may be deducted from any amount accumulated toward stability investment. Once total stability investment reaches zero, a minimum of zero total investment applies; total stability investment cannot be negative nor can a country lose stability in this situation.
The spending sliders may also be used to invest monthly income into stability.
Stability Cost
A country's stability cost is computed based on its owned provinces. The primary factor is the religion there: cities with the state religion have low stability costs; other religions tend to be quite expensive.
Stability cost =
Base Cost (sum of costs for each city, colony and trading post)
x DP multiplier
x Badboy multiplier
x FAA multiplier
x Vassal multiplier
x HRE multiplier
x Inflation
The base cost and multipliers are defined below, other than inflation.
Base Stability Cost
Here is how to determine the base stability cost of each owned province.
City Base Costs
For each city, the base stability cost is the sum of two addends:
- The match between the city's religion and the country's state religion:
State Religion City Religion Cost -------------- ------------- ---- Christian Same Christian 25d Christian Other Christian 50d Christian Non Christian 100d Non Christian Same religion 25d Non Christian Others 60d
- A bonus or malus based only on the country's state religion:
Protestant +3d Reformed +3d CRC -6d Catholic -6d Orthodox -8d Sunni -6d Shiite -6d Paganism +5d Confucian -10d Buddhism -5d Hinduism +3d
For example, a Catholic country has a stability cost of 19 ducats for each Catholic city, and 94d for each non-Christian city. The best stability cost in the game is for Confucian cities owned by a Confucian country: just 15d per city. The worst stability cost is suffered by a Protestant or Reformed country, owning a non-Christian city: 103d.
Colony and TP base costs
The base stability cost for colonies and trading posts are each fixed:
Colony 5 Trading post 2
Example
England, 1617. State religion is Protestant. Has 18 cities:
- 7 are Protestant (same religion),
- 9 are Catholic or Reformed (other Christian),
- 2 are Pagan (non Christian)
Also has 4 colonies, and 3 trading posts
Base costs = 28*7 + 53*9 + 103*2 + 4*5 + 3*2 = 905
Multipliers to Net Base Costs
The following multipliers are applied to the sum of the base costs for all provinces.
DP multiplier
Sum of the effects of the positions of the Innovativeness and Serfdom domestic policy sliders. The percentage changes are added together; thus, the range of the DP multiplier is from 0.25 (-75%) at innovative 0 and serfdom 10, up to 1.75 (+75%) with innovative 10 and serfdom 0.
Badboy multiplier
A penalty is added per point of BB, that depends on BB as a percentage of max BB.
BB state Multiplier -------- ---------- 0 <= BB <= 0.5*BBmax min(1+BB*0.02, 4) 0.5*BBmax < BB <= BBmax min(1+BB*0.04, 4) BBmax < BB 4
FAA multiplier
1.00 (-0.01 per fine arts academy owned). The multiplier is no less than 0.50.
Vassal multiplier
This multiplier varies with the country's centralization, and the number of vassals the country has which are on the same continent as the country. Their size, religion, income, etc. make no difference.
Each vassal generates the following discount percentage in stability costs:
Centralization 1st 2nd and each additional
vassal vassal
0 8 4
1 7.2 3.6
2 6.4 3.2
3 5.6 2.8
4 4.8 2.4
5 4 2
6 3.2 1.6
7 2.4 1.2
8 1.6 0.8
9 0.8 0.4
10 0 0
The maximum reduction is capped at 20%. Thus, with full decentralization a country will receive a -20% on stability costs with 4 vassals (8% for the first vassal plus 3*4% for the remaining three vassals).
HRE multiplier
The emperor of the Holy Roman Empire gets a bonus of 1% for each supportive elector. This effect is capped de-facto by the number of electors.
Examples of Stability Cost Computation
Here are some examples of stability prices for countries as they are in 1419. These costs may be relatively easily checked by simply starting the scenario and mousing over the stabilily slider.
Country Spain Ottoman Empire Timurud Empire
----------- ------------ ----------------
State Religion Catholic Sunni Sunni
Province religions
Catholic 7 133 0 0 0 0
Orthodox 0 0 6 324 0 0
Sunni 2 188 1 19 14 266
Shi'ite 0 0 0 0 9 486
Confucianism 0 0 0 0 0 0
Buddhism 0 0 0 0 0 0
Colonies 1 5 0 0 3 15
--- --- ---
Base Stability Cost 326 343 767
Multipliers:
DP multiplier
Innovativeness 2 -5% 5 +0% 2 -15%
Serfdom 7 -20% 5 +0% 7 -20%
x 0.75 x 1.0 x 0.65
BB multiplier
BBmax 35 37 39
BB 0 x 1.0 0 x 1.0 30 x 2.20
FAA multiplier 0 x 1.0 0 x 1.0 0 x 1.0
Vassal multiplier
#Vassals 0 0 1
Centralization x x 1.0 x x 1.0 1 x 0.928
Inflation 0 x 1.0 0 x 1.0 10 x 1.10
=== === =====
Stability cost 244.5 343 1119.6
