City unrest death spiral needs a solution

[Krytor]

I know I'm not the first to mention this but I've got 444 hours and play mainly on hard so hopefully I kinda know what I'm doing.

Here's the situation:
Game starts in the middle of no mans land, enemy nomads (and sometimes beasts) start out in visible range turn 1. So you push them out trying to get at least a few tiles between them and your city. I personally go with Secret Service council first so I can send out efficient spies turn 2.

Turn 2: They are coming from every direction. You have JUST enough militia to surround your city. It's gonna be a lot of turns before you can get any regular troops online.

Turns 3+: City danger rises. Bad events happen, the skill checks require rolls you can't possibly make. Here comes the unrest. There goes your worker happiness. Workers quit working. Production of everything drops to something like 25% of their normal values.

Sure you can toss money at your workers but you are still caught in the Unrest death cycle. Their happiness is gonna continue to drop. You can keep playing, the wanderers and minor factions won't kill you but you are not progressing out of that stage. The game is effectively over.

Doesn't happen every game. And when it happens to a city mid game when you have many cities it's not a big deal since you can lean on the others while you fix up the problematic city. But if it happens on the first few turns the player should just restart.

It would be nice if some solution existed to break the cycle. Even if the solution only happened when the player is on a single city. Here's an idea: A rebellion event that, when you kill the rebels, resets your worker/population happiness to 50 and removes the fear/unrest/danger. Only fires if the city is obviously FUBAR. Give the player a reason to not give up when they are given an impossible start.

[varangy]

I agree, some game starts are impossible because of this spiral.