Sylvania's Economy

[AllianceDeath]

I'm interested in how to keep your economy half way decent as Sylvania, considering it's King's Purse is down right horrible compared to any other faction, and it's Merchants rarely break 1k per turn.

Any tricks?

[Argatil]

At the beginnig just turtle because a lot of faction will attack you and after try to cap other territory

[Himster]

The secret to any southern faction is to get Averheim, that should be your first priority, second priority and third priority. To do this safely you need to wait, defend your home territories with the two stacks you start off with for about 20 turns, slowly expanding (don't go any further than the distance it takes for an army to travel in one turn), then when you have four stacks and the crusade against you has been depleted/failed, take two of those four stacks and make a dash for Averheim then money problems will be a thing of the past.

[Cyricist]

I'm trying a campaign as Sylvania now, as I was discussing it with some other guys in the other thread, recently. I'm at turn 21. I only accepted trying this campaign if I got Necrarchs or Blood Dragons on Turn 1, so I restarted it a few times, (took like 6 tries before I got lucky), and got Walach & the Blood Dragons.

This time, I got very lucky. Very lucky indeed. Not only did I start with Blood Dragons, but Stirland got distracted by Beastmen spawning in to attack them on turn 2. Then, Ostermark besieged Mordheim instead of one of my cities. I waited for them to press the siege on Mordheim, which they lost, but they took the garrison down to about half. Then I besieged it and took the city. That was around turn 12.

At my lowest, I was -31,000 gold in debt. I'm still not out of the red on turn 21, but I'm getting close. I discovered something horrible, too. If you are in debt, and don't have at least 1 gold, you can't hire the 0 gold costing free mercenaries. Because technically, you don't have "0 gold". You have less than that.

So anyway. My point is this: I didn't concern myself with my economy at first. I just concerned myself with surviving. Once I weathered the storm, which I'll say right now, requires almost as much luck as skill, then I was able to grab Mordheim. Mordheim is a giant goldmine of a city. Once I took Mordheim, I spent the next 6 turns or so having Walach and his Blood Dragons sneak across Empire lands, to get to Blood Keep. As long as you stay in the trees at the end of every turn, and no one is directly next to you, they won't know you're there. I only had to fight one small army because they were on a bridge. Now I've got Mannfred + Marcos defending Castle Drakenhof, Mordheim and the other two towns, and Walach defending Blood Keep.

And on Turn 20, they called a crusade against Castle Drakenhof. So we'll see how it goes. I'm up to -883 gold. Next turn, I'll be in the positive. And that's probably when the first crusading army will show up.