Is this an easy way to make money or am I missing something?

**recentiy03** · August 01, 2010, 10:14 AM

Apparently when you put peasants in the build queue it not only raises public order but also increases the income a city generates each turn...it doesn't matter if unit being built that turn isn't a peasant, the order/income still goes up...because of that you can build 1 or 2 military units and then fill up the rest of the queue with peasants and then when it builds the 1-2 military units you can just cancel the peasants and build more military units...therefore you can double a cities worth without ever actually building a peasant...

**Turtle Hammer** · August 01, 2010, 10:25 AM

I've done that before. I think of it as the people causing unrest get a draft order in the mail and stop clowning around. I also sometimes let a larger settlement build a stack of peasants to transplant population to smaller settlements by disbanding the peasants wherever the people are needed. It's only useful if you have the money to rapidly upgrade and sufficient public order to handle the migration though. But for settlements like Cherenosus or Kydonia it's a good way to get potentially awesome strategic and financial places big, and do it fast.

**recentiy03** · August 01, 2010, 10:57 AM

I don't get what you're saying about disbanding peasants...how do I use peasants to increase a cities population? I am playing as Seculid and the entire western portion of my empire is less than 2K people, if Macedonia attacks I am f'ed...I am focussing on Egypt but was just getting around to putting my first general out west so they get some slaves, you're saying I can somehow use peasants to boost a population? How?

**ninjabanana** · August 01, 2010, 11:01 AM

Put them in the city you want the extra population to go to, and disband them.

Just like training a unit reduces population (for example, you train a unit that has 120 men in it, the city in which it was trained loses 120 population), disbanding a unit causes the men in the unit to settle in the city, increasing it's population.

**recentiy03** · August 01, 2010, 11:08 AM

Ahh, true! I was wondeing why a town randomly grew when I turned some military guys into peasants for more money...that was why!

**Genius of the Restoration** · August 01, 2010, 06:29 PM

Originally Posted by recentiy03

Apparently when you put peasants in the build queue it not only raises public order but also increases the income a city generates each turn...it doesn't matter if unit being built that turn isn't a peasant, the order/income still goes up...because of that you can build 1 or 2 military units and then fill up the rest of the queue with peasants and then when it builds the 1-2 military units you can just cancel the peasants and build more military units...therefore you can double a cities worth without ever actually building a peasant...

There is an interesting mechanic in the game that makes this worthwhile sometimes. What you're basically doing is lowering the population of the settlement by creating a queue. This in turn means that the settlement pays less of your faction's upkeep for generals and army, which makes it look like the settlement's income is increasing when actually a lot of this is just being spread to other settlements. When you lower the size of one settlement the other settlements have to fill the gap, so if you do it with all your settlements, it makes no difference. It may look like you're gaining money when you do it for each settlement, but each time you do, the other's go down and overall you get less income due to taxation losses from the smaller population.

The interesting mechanic that can make this worthwhile is when your population is just over the peak areas where taxation income is at higher rate. Here is an old graph that shows what I mean:

This is from an older version of Rome though, and I think the current change is somewhere near 11,000, can't remember though. You can test this yourself if you've got the time, but I think that answers your question.