One of the first major problems you’ll encounter in Civilization 7 is your towns, cities, or capital is revolting. These revolts can ruin your civilization in just a few turns since you’ll lose settlements out of nowhere.
You get warned that there is an ongoing revolt, but dealing with them isn’t always straightforward since you might have a lot on your plate. Here’s the best way to prevent revolts, and if they are already happening, here’s how you can fix them in Civilization 7.
How to Prevent Revolts in Civilization 7
To prevent revolts, you must keep all your settlements happy. They will revolt only if they disagree with your decisions and the Happiness of the settlement plummets to negative numbers.
When this happens, you’ll eventually get a warning that “X” town, city, or capital is revolting, and you have a “Y” number of turns before the settlement leaves your nation. So, the only way to prevent revolts is to increase Happiness, making your whole population happy.
However, even if you construct buildings that contribute to Happiness, two major factors will usually drop your Happiness and cause a revolt. Firstly, if you have an ongoing war against someone, everyone will feel distressed and uneasy, and Happiness goes way down.
This is temporary and depends on how fast the war is resolved. If it lasts too long, your settlements might revolt and defer to someone else.
Related: Complete Controls Guide for Civilization 7 – All Shortcut and Keybinds
What to Do When Settlements Revolt in Civilization 7?
This is tricky because it depends on your situation. Two common situations cause a revolt: annexing a city and war.
When you win a battle and take over a city, that city starts as extremely unhappy, with a few broken buildings. It takes a while to fix things, and the population will threaten a revolt soon. I am not even sure if this is intended (successfully capturing a city and then an immediate revolt happens), but it does make sense that it happens.
The best way to deal with it is to repair everything that is broken. Use your remaining gold to construct buildings that produce Food (so it can grow and expand) or Happiness. Try to end the war as soon as possible. If you cannot take over the city, you can always raze it instead of conquering it. If you are taking over the city and cannot handle it, you can also offer it back by negotiating with one of the leaders.
If you are losing your own cities due to war, you should look at all the ways to increase Happiness. Usually, having an ongoing celebration event will drastically boost your Happiness, but only temporarily. You can take this time to recover and try to build toward ending the war.
There are also some situations where you get into massive trouble because of a crisis. These are annoying, and you must make a series of bad choices to mitigate the crisis (Crisis Policies). Ensure you are always keeping track of your remaining resources and production so you know what to give up when a crisis arises.
Published: Feb 9, 2025 10:25 PM UTC