WRE - what's your settlment "build?"

Attila's got a far, far broader range of buildings to choose from as the WRE, and while the change is welcome it's also quite daunting, especially with the need to have all your provinces in a food surplus to prevent you losing out 25% wealth from your buildings.

With that in mind, what's your take on how to set up provinces? Obviously we want food, but that necessitates getting public order and sanitation buffs to counterract the down-sides of farming. From what I've found it seems town waterworks, not city waterworks, are probably best in this regard, since they give good province-wide bonuses with a minor cost in maintenance and don't eat up money quite like the city ones.

That's just about as far as I've cared to think/plan things out for now. I've done a quick write up of what buildings can be got in towns vs cities and what they ultimately serve to do (ie + Public Order - Food etc) but haven't actually tried to think what the best way to make money and keep people happy is. How have you guys gone about organising your provinces to maximise income, food output and public order?

It would seem that a little data collection and a lot of number crunching are the answers here.

Things to consider:

1) Taking advantage of the specialist agriculture across the map seems to outweigh any one stream of regular building. Olives, wine, etc.

2) The fertility of the regions in question. With the Romans for example, the benefits of field agriculture and its big food boost to my mind outweigh the potential income from the other forms of agriculture, especially at the beginning of the game when food is a dicier problem than income. (Don't get me wrong: they are both in a tough situation, but a food shortage affects troops, income, and growth.)

3) After prioritizing field agriculture in the most fertile regions to get the most food bang for your buck ... that is where basefood "b" + additional food from fertility "a" is > for fields than for other forms of agriculture, take advantage of that first. Once food levels are stable (or you can calculate that they will become stable), you can shift priorities

... This sequence is based on my personal preferences, of course, but I always find a shortage of money, however uncomfortable, easier to deal with and mitigate than a shortage of food or even a low level of sanitation ... That said:

4) I might then focus on one of three other things: sanitation buildings, religious buildings, or alternative agriculture. Sanitation seems the obvious choice to me, as disease is a real and present danger to income and growth around the map, and the solution-buildings can offer boosts to both (and public order to boot!). It's tough to say whether I'd prefer to build sani in towns or capitals, as I have not crunched the numbers on which is more efficient, but for my own mental health I tend to build them in capitals, reserving towns for agriculture, and later industry. (It may not work out better this way, but with a formula I can tell at a glance how much work I have put into each area - I always know where to look and what I'm looking for.

5) Religious buildings are tougher. I really want to like them, in the sense that churches convert population and provide public order bonuses, and hermitages offer that and a research bonus. But... with the upkeep costs, and the relatively stable public order (not overall, just from religious tension) around the empire at the start, I would reserve religious buildings for a later stage. 1% or 2% bonuses to research rates don't affect much in the early game, but start to matter greatly when stacked and applied to technologies with longer lead-times. If you need a public order boost, AND sanitation isn't a problem, AND you have foreign priests running around converting your people to another faith... perhaps a church or two.

6) Alternative agriculture is another interesting prospect. If, like me, you were shocked by the declining fertility across all your provinces as the game progressed (a challenging mechanic built into the campaign game that I like/that was challenging/that made me think in new and different ways - hooray!), then maybe you'll get where I'm coming from with this point. I stacked almost all my agriculture in the most fertile regions on the map early. Sure, you say, that's easy. What I also did was avoid building them in the less fertile regions starting from my second playthrough. If I really needed a boost to food, like right Now, perhaps I built a few fields elsewhere, but initially places like Egypt, southern Gaul, Italy, the eastern (orientalis) islands, etc were my main focus. I found that doubling fields (usually the best for food) with whatever other form of agriculture was best for that region on income (cattle, sheep - whatever gave the best return) worked well for me.

Stacking the farming buildings like that also gives the added bonus of being able to focus your sanitation buildings. You can build just enough of them elsewhere to stabilize the population and stave off disease, but them upgrade them in your super-farm regions for efficiency's sake.

All that said, these are not hard rules for me, but they tend to be the ways in which I organize a playthrough. Notice, they also leave troops and armies out of the mix altogether, which is silly - it's total war, but it demonstrates the economic-side of how I approach the game.

(NB. similar principles eventually guide my approach to industry, too. Figure out where your industry-specialty regions are, stack industrial income and bonus buildings there, while building enough sanitation and public order buildings there to handle their negatives, and largely ignore industry everywhere else. Maximize your resources.)

You may have been asking for the numbers behind a recommended build-pattern, and not for a rant or an invitation into my brain, but c'est la vie.

As far the the Western Roman Empire part, just ignore Eastern province recommendations, and the pattern holds.

;)

That's exactly what I was after - not a specific "lvl 3 barracks + lvl 4 forum is best," just an idea of how to structure things.

When you say that you focus on farming in fertile regions, does that mean that you avoid it in the infertile ones? IIRC a province being in a food shortage results in a loss of 25% wealth, so surely it's best to keep food built everywhere? (may have misunderstood you there)

Oh, it's important to have enough food and sanitation to keep people from rioting and provide the minimum stats in each place. The main question is about where to put your resources to maximize their potential.

You never have enough money, so how do you use it, right? In the case of farms, I start by building additional first tier food generation in the most fertile regions (to keep the faction-wide food shortage problem from kicking in), then move on to "just enough" in other regions to keep their own individual province negatives from dragging down income, then to building second-tier, third tier and above food production in the most fertile regions to maximize income from agriculture.

I focus farms in the fertile lands, but I try to make most provinces food positive where possible (the -25% to wealth is important), I pretty much always go aqueducts and capital building for the sanitation and faithless public order boost respectively. For ports almost always use trade ports where possible, unless you need food, military ports are going to be useless for the enemies you fight and trade ports make insane income. Focus on getting trade resources where possible. Most of my towns consist of level 3 cities with a capital, trade port, wine market, aqueduct, maybe a church but generally not, maybe a auditorium if public order continues to be an issue after the +13 from the capital building. Hmm food markets are great and become better towards the end of the campaign as fertility drops.
One last tip, spam forums where possible, the public order plus the cash is always worth the low cost of the building. It's best to do that when you start and need cash fast.

Personally I'm not a fan of churches or religion in the game so I just tend to skip it, the maintenance combined with the very low public order penalties from religion means its often just better to build forums or capital buildings. Those make money and give more order. Moving to Paganism at some point seems the most effective way to go overall, basically ignore Christianity and it's techs. It's better to use the pagan buildings and keep the end game technologies open. Compare auditoriums to churchs and you get the idea, +7 public order and 300 talents plus +2 religion, much better than the churches. Also you need those Aqueducts open for the end game, losing the ability to make them will severely limit your cities.

The one thing about "religion" that interests me is very late game. (or I presume it is, since I have achieved the objectives before researching the necessary technology, so I'm not really sure.)

The Pentarchy locations seem to crop up in places that were/are significant in the Christian narrative - and therefore became important seats of power and influence in the Greek and Roman sides of the religion. Each gives access to a unique type of city church at the top tier. Anyone know what would happen if the player controlled all five and maxed out all cathedrals in each location? Perhaps some sort of major conversion bonus across the entire faction? If that were true, and the benefits ended up being worth their construction, you could approach religious centers (especially as the ERE) like region-specific industries. That is, they could be seen as "fertile regions" for conversion and for religious building construction.

Food for thought.

The bonuses still aren't worth the upkeep I would imagine, especially considering you need to lose your most powerful buildings in order to research them. But it's an interesting idea for sure, might be quite a cool personal objective to try and fulfill.

To say something about food production is very situational and depend on fertility, number of ports and weather you want gold or food from the province. Farms (Wheat, Cattle and Sheep) can only be built in the Town regions, while Fishing buildings can be built in all three, granted there is a port. You also have resources and minor buildings to amplify the results. There are some golden rules when it comes to food production:

Wheat Mills: Highest scaling food. Worst income. Pick if you have fertility 3 or higher.


Sheep Barn: Highest Income. Worst food production.


Cattle Farm: Highest base food. Poor income. Pick if you have fertility 2 or lower.

Food Emporium: Synergies with Sheep and Cattle farm due to (+ 15% wealth from animal husbandry in the province). Poor food production.

Fishing Port: High base income. Poor food production.

TL;DR

If you want food, focus on Wheat in high fertility provinces OR Cattle in low fertility provinces. If you have 2x tier IV Cattle buildings in a province with fertility 2 you will receive 240 food. Tier IV Fish buildings give you 90 food, regardless of fertility, and can be built in all 3 regions granted there are ports. As a good example of an area fit for Fishing ports is Scandinavia. 2x tier IV Wheat buildings give you 352 food in a province with 4 fertility. The maximum potential for food production is arguably in Narbonensis (France), Venetia (Italy) or Osroene (Iraq) where the local resources will give you an additional 170 food at tier IV.

If you want income, then focus on Sheep and Cattle. Once you have 2 of each of those buildings, go ahead and build a Food Emporium in your City. As an example of a province with fertility of of 4 you will receive = 6923 from animal husbandry and 400 from commerce from those 5 combined buildings. 546 food to boot as well isn't so bad.

~Wille

As the campaign moves on fertility drops to 1 in every region on the map, at that point you should just make cattle farms everywhere. Also relying on fertility based income is a bad idea because it eventually vanishes as the fertility drops. At my stage in the campaign cattle make very little income.

Just one fertility drop or does it go further? How far does it go?

​~Wille

By 445 everything sits at 0 or 1 fertility, at that point its all considered infertile with only the best regions being considered poor. Its a bit annoying because by then your forced to only using cattle farms, wheat makes considerably less food and so do sheep. Obviously income from farms drops considerably due to the fertility loss, by that point you need to making cash through none fertility related buildings. Personally I think it might have been better for them to make fertility have a larger range so that fertile places even towards the end were appealing, by this point everywhere is bad so there's no point in migrating.

"Everything" where exactly?

Mesopotamia is still quite fertile. So is Egypt, and other historically fertile regions. Yes, there is snow in Autumn, Winter and Spring in the north, and you ought to live off fish there. But in the south, I've seen different things. I'm not as far as you yet, but I doubt that it'll end up like that in the south. Please elaborate.