unrest with more cities

Imo, unrest needs a great deal of fine tuning.

A player shouldn't be penalized by choosing the strategy of building many cities in order to develop his empire.

Granted, a thematic arguement can be made that larger empires do have more management, corruption, and thus unrest issues since the buracracy isn't able to function as efficantly. However, if we move to this approach, than there should be government types to choose from to start with.

In addition, we conquering an enemy city, that city should not immediately impact the unrest of your empire. There should be a gradual change as time progresses and the conquered city adjusts to living under the rule of a new leader. Then and only then should the unrest penalty apply.

During this time of adjustment however, the conquered city should be going through a period of increased unrest, for the very same reason as mentioned above: They are adjusting to new rule.

Lastly, especially on the larger maps, it should not be uncommon for an empire to reach 20 cities without being completely crushed by unrest penalty. Maybe the percent needs to be dynamic dependant on map size?

Anyways, those are some of my thoughts...

Government types!

Excellent that's what's missing, bring in Government types!

That is funny, as a player that prefers small kingdoms, I was thinking that unrest was a complete non-issue and that it should be higher. As it is now, I can just set my taxes to zero and completely ignore it.

Perhaps different government types that fit the individual player's playstyle is the way to go.

i think the best way to handle huge empires long term is to build some fortresses on high food tiles and get them to level 4/5 as fast as you can. you can speed that it up by building a few outposts with consulates for added growth. the prison upgrade at level 4 reduces unrest empire wide by 10% and if you make it to level 5, the onyx throne reduces empire unrest by 30%.

another option is making your core cities immune to unrest effects (fortress and conclave both have level up traits that make their production resp. research independent of unrest rate). your core empire can continue researching and pumping out troops, and all the new cities you conquered are basically unproductive puppets that contribute very little.

not sure about the government thing. i think the whole unrest mechanic was changed to keep runaway civs in check, so there would be little point in the new mechanic if you introduce another mechanic that allows you to bypass the first one.

I'm pretty happy with the way unrest works. 

I did notice and post that another way to handle unrest if you are of race type = Men (i.e. Altar) is to pump out Henchmen Governors. Even this has costs though (Fame) and is not free.

I think the added unrest for more cities is a good balance change personally, I never liked the city spam strategy, it seems to be a bad fit with the game design. I do think though that perhaps the modifier should scale with map size, so it stays balanced on huge maps while also not being almost completely irrelevant on tiny maps.