Unrest

[ithuriel2]

Would like clear idea of the effects of unrest; how to reduce unrest aside from tying up too many units staying in a province with unrest.
I had two provinces ceded to me via treaty and they started with 9 levels of unrest. Surely this is excessive ? It took 9 turns before I could utilise the resources or build units.

[ericbabe]

Unrest decreases with time.  There is no way to expedite this.

Unrest prevents you from utilizing the resources in a province and prevents units from being produced there.  This is partly meant to model the costs required to establish suzerainty over the new territory -- the investiture of new aristocrats and so forth.  9 months is near the high end of the unrest range for a transfer of ownership, so it is excessive at least in the sense that it is above the average for the range of unrest.

Do you think it's excessive from a game play perspective, or from a historical perspective?  Historically, I think there are examples of territorial exchanges that took around a year for effective governance to be effected in the new territory, though obviously this is rather a subjective thing to measure.  From a game play perspective, it might very well be excessive in a short game, but I think in medium length games captured provinces are still quite worth the effort.