Patron – Crime Wave Achievement Guide

A short guide to earning the “Crime Wave” achievement quickly and without losing control of your settlement.

Summary

This is a quick and easy guide to earning the “Crime Wave” achievement without losing control of your settlement and/or residents leaving. My advice is to hold off on trying to get this achievement until you’ve researched the entire tech tree and have a town with a stable economy (so you don’t have to worry with managing anything else the citizens may be unhappy about).

Note that the achievement requires you to “overcome” 10 riots – it triggered for me just after the tenth riot started, so you don’t necessarily have to completely pacify the residents every time they riot for the achievement to register. This guide, however, does approach it from the angle of causing riots and then solving the issue in rapid succession in order to get the achievement quickly.

Crime Wave Achievement

The easiest way to manage your riots for this achievement is to approach it through taxes. In order to make the riots happen quickly, you’ll want to provoke the residents by class, one at a time. Follow the instructions below in order to get the ball rolling.

First, clear any decrees you might have enacted at the town hall. Then, enact the decrees that increase the taxes on the peasants/laborers, including on their residences (property taxes). You can tell if this is happening when the overview gives you a summary of decreased happiness and increased coin from the peasants/laborers class, specifically.

All you have to do then is wait, letting the selected class’s happiness decrease regarding taxes until the riot triggers. Once that happens, immediately clear the tax decrees on the peasants/laborers and replace them with a tax cut while simultaneously enacting more decrees that put heavy taxes on the merchants.

Repeat this cycle of taxes/tax breaks with both the merchants and the gentry, and then go back to the laborers, etc. until the achievement triggers.

Below, you can see my final round of gentry-to-laborer cycle of taxes and cuts/rebates, plus the concentrated unhappiness in the taxes row.

This screen shows taxes only on the gentry.

Once they get unhappy enough, this little scene should be playing out at your town hall.

Give them a wealth rebate to pacify them…

…before raising taxes on the peasantry.

This is how your happiness table should look while you are doing this, generally speaking.