Building strategies

At the behest of Silver Rusher, I'm opening this thread for:

"researching popular (and effective) building strategies, and also popular opinions on what should/shouldn't be built etc."

SR: Is this dealing with the order of construction in cities, or strategies like building a few basics in some provinces and teching out others, or all of it together?

Unlike in MTW, in Rome it is not always to your advantage to place lots of buildings in the que, as the cost is deducted immediately.

Regarding the farm buildings, it depends on what you want to use the city for. In a military city, upgrade fast, as this makes the city grow more. The troops you recruit can keep the population down, reducing squalor. In an economic city, you have to be carful not to let the population out of control.

On temples:

Destroy enemy temples on conquest. You might have to lower taxes but the culture penalty goes away.

Then, immediately build a shrine to what ever god you like.

Then as soon as you can, upgrade the shrine to a temple dedicated to that god.

This way, you can create priests dedicated to that god that will join your general's retinue.

Roman priests are very effective at boosting your general's stats. For example, a Priest of Jupiter gives your general +1 command, management and influence.

Shrines won't allow priests to join your retinue.

So, my advice on the build order should be:

1. Shrine

2. Temple (however, the city must be a level 2 city with the relevant government buildings)

Temples produce priests very often (about every 5-6 tunrs I think) so get your generals to move around adding them to their retinues so new ones can be produced.

Build all three types of temples available, therefore some of your generals can have three priests in their retinue. This makes them very efficient characters both in the city and on the field.

After building temples, I recommend build roads. Roads not only boost trade, but they increase troop movement. This is the key to winning. Moving legions around quickly is what made the Roman Empire so great (historical, not RTW).

Thanks for the info! It shall all be used in my settlement management guide (under construction)

@therother: I want to know both really. Anything to do with building in settlements is fine in here.

There is no maintenance cost for buildings, so if you can afford it, there is no reason to not eventually have every possible structure in every city (aside from stuff that adds pop growth for squalor control reasons). Given the time needed to build the buildings, it's best in the early going to specialize in military cities. Build infantry structures in one city, cavalry in another, and missile structures in a third

Settlements with more (or more expensive) buildings appear to be more expensive to bribe. Couple an agressive building programme with a live-in high-influence diplomat, and you can make your cities far less likely to fall to bribes.

I learned that it is always good to classify cities at the beginning, and build the most effective buildings suiting their purpose, maximizing your yield in the shortest possible time.

(1) Military Center

Required: 1-2 in early games, then slowly increase

Population: as high as possible.

To build: If for infantry - only barrack, if for cavalry - only stable. Advanced troop type is the first priority. Then, appropriate temples that gives unit bonuses, and blacksmith, armourer, etc.

Governer: Anybody who has a high influence to reduce the need of large garrison is great. However, some might pick up some anger traits if the temple worship violent Gods (like Mars of the Brutii).

Popular sites: Carthage city, Rome, or former capitals of your enemy.

(2) Capital

Required: 1. Actually capitals are also often used to train units, while they can be shipped to military centers to upgrade their valour, weapon, armor, etc.

Population: > 6000

To build: Focus on academy-type building for the young family members to grow up with. Then just go for economics.

Governer: Similar as (1).


(3) Profitable cities

Required: anything not (1) & (2)

Population: no restriction, but preferrably < 6000 for low garrison

To build: trades, roades, etc. Start from the buildings that can be finished fast. Always build the health buildings & farm last or ignore farm when the city growth rate is high (like > 4%).


~:)

Note: Enslavement + extermination is such a useful tools to manipulate town population. You can quickly boost a city to 24,000 to finish the advanced government building, then let it revolt and exterminate it back to 6000. Now the city growth rate is just about the same as the unit production cost (in large unit size). You don't need so many garrison - and you will be able to build the best unit by contructing appropriate barrcks/stables. ~:) If you don't want to be so cruel you can settle for 12,000 and don't let it revolt. But you will need an influential governer and perhaps an arena.

Early marian reforms:

This strategy sacrifices one city (in a fairly cheesy way) to get the marian reforms (as romans) as early as possible..

The construction and settings basically work out like this:
0) set taxes to the lowest possible level
1) build growth temple (if julii), or happyness temple otherwise
2) build the highest possible level of farms
3) build marketplaces to the highest possible level
4) build sanitation to the highest possible level
5) upgrade your governors palace when all growth items have been built (not before)
7) build barracks when you have time and denarii to spare

This results in a very high squalor, extremely high population city, allowing you to get to the marian reforms WAY before anybody else would.

Do remember that the scipii and brutii can conquer a high population city rather early on (carthage with its grain for scipii, athens with its high pop & tech for the brutii)

Of course, you might end up having your marian city revolt due to squalor / pop issues, but that's okay, decimate the place when you re-conquer it.

Please note, i didnt do this myself, since it's a wee bit cheesy for my tastes ;) I like to have my marian reforms later in the game..

Some things to consider when you are planning to build:

* You can specialize a miltary province by just focusing on Smiths. Combine them with weapon/armor bonus temples (Vulcan, Artemis, etc.)

* Money. If you're short for cash, build the following in this order:
port/shipwright/dockyard
roads/paved roads/highways
trade temples
traders
farms

* When building farms, make sure you don't go over 8% total growth rate. Since you can get (as yet) unpredictable grain imports (of 3%) and don't forget the level 5 trader bonus (of 1%), you can quickly grow too large.

* Health buildings (public order) solve the problem (squalor) they create, while giving you more population and tax income. There is therefore no reason not to build them.

Variant to priority building is to make 1 or 2 cities upgrade the blacksmith/armorer route, but not the troop buidlings , that way you can moove your troops there and upgrade them .

Similarly you can do this for the appropriate temples.


So I aim for for ( @15 cities)

max population centers 10 , 5 feeding cities(large unit size train peasants and send them off to max pop centers)


1-3 infantry bases
1-2 cavalry
1-2 missile

1-2 blacksmith/armourer specialist cities
1-2 temples specialist cities.

rest of max pop centers to make money, feeder cities also.

Academies are a great investment.

-They cost 1600 Dn

-They create lots of traits and cronies for you governors and generals, especially those retinues that are economic or social based

-These retinues are with you for the rest of the game so long as you hand them over to younger generals/governors when the original guys are getting old

-For 1600 Dn, your investment will be easily paid off as you will be generating lots more income with the extra management and influence points


Personally, I would build an academy before I'd build a forum (they are on the same tech tree level).

Be careful when building walls. I built stone walls in Patavium, but then the population grew too much and I had to desert the city. A massive rebel army took over control. Then I had to retake the city, but with alot more difficulty and after many losses. I crucified everyone afterwards!

An extra note on Academies:

You can get swamped by retinues, it is important to be selective and critical:

Security is not important at all, the AI hardly ever tries to assassinate you (i never experienced it, except for agents getting killed sometimes).

Have 1 governor stack all the unit training discount retinues, get rid of all duplicates. The maximum bonus you can get is about 60-70%, meaning you will build praetorian cohorts, sacred band cavalry, spartan hoplites, etc. in 1 turn instead of two.

Any retinue that provides only 1 step to one type of bonus (+1 management, OR +1 security, but not +2 influence), deserves to die. Give them to the old geezers. (exception: unit training reduction cost, see above).

This is because there are loads of retinues that provide two bonuses: Librarian, Orator, Satirist, etc. I dont care if you're Calimachus of Cyrene, +1 management will not cut it in the long run.

The only way to prevent getting swamped is moving governors out to more remote areas (has no influence on getting bad traits) and move them back when the ludus magna or level 5 academy has been built.

I like keeping a few of the temples intact for a time. Milk them for any useful bonuses before you trash them. If you keep them up a few turns it is possible to pick up ancilaries unavailable to your factions.


My next game as Bruti has a goal to capture an intact Parthanon of Neptune so I can crank out the good ships.

I definately keep any foreign temple when I can. I really like the temples of Abnoba when playing the Julii, as it can give me +3 missile troops very early on.

Apart from retinue, temples can also give your governors some nice traits if they stay long enough.

Otherwise, the building queue is very different every game, as so many factors are involved.
Roads are good if they allow for quick transport to the front. Towards backwaters I don't care so much.
Ports are definately the best buildings at hand, simply for the cash they generate.
Clusters of cities will provide for the training of units: each city its own specialty. Often only one has an armourer.
With captured cities I seldom raze any building: whatever militairy buildings they have will determine what to build next.

Since I beleive that slavery does not add to your population growth, I have started to build more farms etc.

This is something I did extensively as Parthia since the cities near the Med I conquered are relatively close to each other. If you have the denarii to spare, move a governor with construction costs discount retinues or traits around then queue up everything you can and want to in the city he's currently in.

Also, a quick way of building population is building population temples and replacing them later on with other temples.

if you move that builder govener out will they still build in the reduced time and cost? Wow that would be handy for making a traveling Architect.

I usually end up specializing a few troop production centers, and focus on economic upgrades everywhere else. A typical build sequence for a given city tends to look like this:

1. Religious temples, to quell the unrest when initially conquered :yes:
2. Income: port, market, academy (to reduce corruption), farm (even poor harvests produce revenue, and larger populations mean more tax revenue), then sewers/aqueducts/etc (as the population increases)
3. Happiness/Order buildings, since this lets me set higher tax rates (a happy populace is a profitable one) :rtwyes:
4. Garrison: basic infantry training buildings, especially in the largest cities (recruiting can help hold down the population growth/unrest, and they often need a larger garrison anyway)