Originally Posted by
Swarbs
You can recruit the troops across the whole province from only one building. So in Aquitania, for example, you can still recruit legions and auxilia from Avaricum where you have the military colony, even if Burdigala is set to independent.
The region integration mechanic is a bit confusing, but basically the higher it is the higher the gap between your income and maintenance.
If you have a region with income of 7,000 and expenses of 5,000, like you have in Avaricum, then with full integration (i.e. State L5), you will have profit of 2,000. If you have integration of -50% (i.e. Independent L3) you will lose 50% of income and 50% of expenses. So you will have 3,500 income and 2,500 expenses, and thus only 1,000 profit.
It works the other way round where income is lower than expenses. So Burdigala, with income around 5,500 and expenses 6,500 has a net cost of 1,000 under full integration. Under -50% integration, this cost would fall to -500.
It's not always a huge amount, and may not be worth spending huge amounts to switch building chain, but it's something to bear in mind when building in future. When planning a province I try to put all my buildings with high costs and no revenue (sanitation, libraries, military workshop, roads etc) in one settlement, usually the capital unless it has a valuable resource slot, and set that to Independent for lowest integration and cost. Then put all the money producing buildings (farms, forum, industry) in the other regions and set those to State for maximum integration and profit.
As a result, all my regions give a nice profit, even after expenses, and I hardly even go into negative income even when on campaign and in winter. That's in spite of being around 55 years behind your game, and probably less than half your size with my regions much less developed as a result.